>> Live from San Francisco,
it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next '19.
Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hi everyone, welcome back to the third day
of live coverage of theCUBE here in
San Francisco for Google Cloud Next 2019.
I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE,
my co-host Stu Miniman, Stu, good to see you
this morning.
>> Great to see you, John.
>> Got a very special guest here, George Kurian,
the CEO of NetApp, not to be confused with
Thomas Kurian, his twin brother, who's the
CEO of Google Cloud, George, it's great to see you.
>> Good morning.
>> Thanks for stopping by.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> So, when you've been walking through the hallways,
you getting like, a lot of looks and some selfies, um,
people want to take a selfie with you,
thinking you're Thomas, the famous?
>> Quite a few, quite a few.
>> So what's it like?
>> Oh, it's exciting to see all of the
innovation here and the real commitment that
Google's made to building out an enterprise platform.
We've been working with them for many years, and, uh,
we're excited at all of the potential new
opportunities that creates, alongside
Google's customers and ours.
>> Yeah, George, it's got to be interesting,
it's almost a little bit of a mirror image,
is Google is looking to get deeper into the
enterprise, and of course we've been documenting
NetApp for many years now, has moved beyond just being
an enterprise company, you've been moving to the cloud,
maybe, just go back, tell us a little bit- some of the
lessons you've learned, and, you know, what you're seeing
happen, dynamics in the space.
>> I think customers, Thomas said, you know, many of the
core tenets that we see which is customers want to
operate in a hybrid, multi-cloud world.
They want to have cloud technology integrated into
their data centers and conversely their applications
be portable with a common programming model.
I think it's come a long way.
You know, I think our technologies now available
natively in the Google Cloud, I think the programming
model with microservices and containers, and with
Kubernetes as an orchestration layer, truly allows,
you know, this kind of hybrid world to operate,
and I think our opportunity there is to help
our customers use data properly across all of these
landscapes, understand where it is, you know,
orchestrate new applications as well as traditional,
uh, so that they can progress the business.
And so it's, you know I tell you coming to these
conferences over the last three to five years,
you can see the pace of change really start to accelerate.
I'm interested in what you guys think about.
>> Well, one of the things we've been commenting on
theCUBE in our opening segments is kind of looking at how
the transformation of Google Cloud from Google large-scale,
they know data, they know tech, into becoming an enterprise,
so, a lot of window dressing around the event, you know,
digital transformation, all the right words,
but they got the technology.
And, you know, one of the things I'd love to get
your perspective of because it's not- it's no secret
that the Kurian brothers, yourself
and your brother, Thomas, are, have great tech chops,
also have tons of enterprise experiences,
you specifically have been involved in a lot of ecosystems.
That's been a big topic here.
Can Google really get an ecosystem up and running,
I mean, they participated in the CNCF with Cloud Native,
but, as an organization, this is something that
you're very familiar with, uh, at NetApp,
you've been in many ecosystems, you've seen the formula.
How, how, how should that evolve, because it's changing,
the service's base, I think you're part of
the Console Google Cloud from what I've been reporting here.
What's the ecosystem formula for, for this new cloud world?
>> You know, I'll tell you that, uh, enterprises expect
their providers to work together,
that's always been the expectation,
and, uh, we've had to coexist with even
our competitors for a long period of time.
I think the core ideas there are
to keep the customer at the center of the discussion
and figure out how to best solve their problems,
regardless of whether it is having
to coexist with someone else, right?
I think what's been interesting to me is,
Linux has really become sort of the core underpinning
of the cloud, and Linux was an open-source technology that,
in the early years, IBM backed and sponsored.
I think containers together with uh, you know,
what Google's doing to sponsor it,
has really become the opportunity
to create the next, kind of layer of,
you know, common development model,
programming model, common orchestration.
I think there's that promise,
I think, uh, it's got to be realized.
>> George, you, uh, you talked about, uh,
the change that we see in the industry, and, you know,
we know enterprise is not like,
oh, let's just redo everything we were doing,
whether I'm a five year old or a, you know,
hundred and fifty year old company,
I have things that I need to look at,
and, I mean, the applications are really tough.
It'd be wonderful if I just had a clean sheet of paper,
and I can make it all serverless or
containerize all my pieces there.
Um, the message I heard a lot this week is, you know,
meeting customers where they are.
It's not just, Google we know has great tech,
and smart people, maybe a little too smart sometimes,
but, you know, I'd love to hear your viewpoint is,
you know, those enterprise customers,
are they catching up to the pace of innovation faster
and making more change, or, you know,
is it still one of these things that we're going to measure
in decades as to how long it takes to move things.
>> I think it, you know, I see it in a couple of, uh, ways.
One is which industry are you in, and the impact of,
you know, transformation to your industry.
I think if you are in a highly digitally-oriented
industry, like media and entertainment,
you've got to transform quickly
because the whole industry's getting transformed, right?
I think conversely, if you're in an industry where
digitization helps your workforce be more productive,
I think you can take more time.
What we see also is, in the places that, uh, are common,
for example, in how you evolve your customer experience
and how you interact with customers,
we see virtually every company needing to transform, right?
So I see that, you know, this is a long transformation,
it's not going to happen overnight.
I think that customers will pragmatically choose to,
you know, either refactor existing applications
or bill Net New, on a case-by-case,
business-process by business-process basis.
And that's why we see hybrid, sort of
being the de facto operating model.
>> George, I want to get your thoughts on
multi-cloud and hybrid, obviously the modern application
renaissance and revolutions kind of happening,
whether you call it a renaissance or revolution,
applications are exploding. That's clear.
Multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud are key architectural shifts.
I'm writing a story right now about the
Department of Defense big contract that was awarded to,
or to, shorthand, Microsoft and AWS.
But, one of the things that have people arguing
is that it should be multi-cloud!
Now, the Department of Defense is an example,
and this is public sector, but also enterprises have
the same makeup, they have hundreds of cloud projects.
Hundreds! And the Department of Defense
is five hundred cloud projects.
So there's not one cloud, that's not Amazon.
So, this is a world where workloads and cloud selection
and the parts of the architecture
have to support multiple clouds.
Can you explain that, kind of, what that means to customers?
Because people get often confused coming from the old way.
I'm buying IBM, I'm buying Oracle, I'm buying Google Cloud,
and we're done. No, it's really not that case.
Can you, kind of, can you react to that?
>> Most enterprises that we speak to have hundreds
of applications, everything from, you know,
mainframe-based core business processing,
to highly digital, you know, mobile-based,
customer interaction applications.
I think they have, sort of, a portfolio approach
to manage those, where they say,
hey, some of those are going to stay on premise,
some of those are going to stay in a private cloud,
and then I've got this palette of, you know,
choices around whether I choose software as a service
or infrastructure or platform as a service.
And I think that when you look at a,
you know, a reasonably large company like ours,
we run about five hundred applications in the company.
There's no single palette, right?
You've got to have these inter-operate,
I think from a government standpoint
from how you integrate the data across these landscapes,
and from how you ensure compliance, security, and so on.
And I, so I think, you know whenever a company tries to
say that I can do everything, I think that's
a little bit facetious, to be honest.
>> And so, the reality is, multiple workloads,
multiple cloud projects will happen,
multiple vendors, but in a new way.
Workload driven, with the data,
obviously the data's critical,
storage is key. Um, Stu, you want to-
>> Yeah, so, you know, I think back to the
storage world, storage was always a fragmented marketplace,
and I had my application silos that I, that did this.
Now, what have we learned from multi-cloud, that would,
from multi-vendor, as we go into multi-cloud and,
how can we allow customers to really unlock that
value of data, because if it all stays fragmented in silos,
it's a lot harder to be able to actually leverage it,
use it, for all the, you know, AI, ML, or data, uh, value.
>> Absolutely, I think, you know, one of the long-term
theses we've had is that the world gradually moves from
system-centric or process-centric to a data-centric world
where the core asset that you're operating on
is not the value of an individual business process,
but the integration across your business processes, right?
And so, this is why we think in a hybrid world,
you need something like a data fabric to stitch together
all of these landscapes.
Those landscapes need to increasingly be stitched together
in real time because of the speed of decision making
or the use of, you know, real time analytics or
real time business deci-, you know, processing.
And so that's why we've integrated our technology
into multiple landscapes, right, both traditional,
but increasingly containerized or cloud-based,
cloud-native applications.
And I think that's again a multi-year journey.
I think IT has to transform, IT architectures has to
transform, and frankly businesses need to as well.
They need to think about data as
a property of the whole business,
rather than a for function or a department.
>> So just to click on that, double click on that
for a second because, what you're saying is,
a data fabric allows for multiple data
to move around the workloads.
So what you're saying is, if you want to take it-
well, I'm saying- want to take advantage of
machine learning and AI, the data has to be
addressable in real time.
Meaning, you don't have time to go fetch it from
a database that may or may not be available
at any given time, so making data addressable,
horizontally scalable, for whatever workload,
at any given time from retail to personalization,
or whatever, right?
>> Absolutely, right, so for example, if you look at the way
a, um, AI or an ML data pipeline works,
there's a period in the pipeline
which is about training and feature engineering
where you're trying to develop the model the right way.
And then you're going to let the model run,
but the model's going to be reacting to real time data input
and constantly making transformations
to how the business reacts.
I think that data input needs to be fed in from
all of the business processes that support the business,
right, rather than a, hey I'm going to create an artifact
that's, uh, static artifact that's trained once
and then you're going to run the business.
So that's why we think you've got to operate
the hybrid world as an integrated world at the data layer.
>> Yeah, George, one of the interest,
there's a study, uh, that Google put out
that they had acquired a group, DORA that looks at
high performing environments, uh, and you know,
what differentiates kind of, the, you know,
the leaders of the pack.
You talk to a lot of companies, and I'm sure you must,
you know, have some, you know, opinions on this.
Tell us, what, what is separating, you know,
the leaders in the end user space, as to, uh, you know,
from, from those that are, that are following.
>> I think that, uh, the leaders, you know, are,
have the capability to transform themselves,
and transformation, you know, people talk
about digital transformation.
I think the most important part of that is actually the
transformation part, and it's organizing people
to allow experimentation, learning from experimentation,
to celebrate failure, I think that's hard
for big companies to do, right?
Because you're set up to ensure that
you're managing the risk of not failing, on the other hand,
I think, in a world where there's a new game
being created, you got to be able to allow the organization
to try different things and it's okay to fail.
>> And the speed pressure, too, to go faster,
certainly with cloud, everything's accelerated
from time to market, time to value, technology development.
>> Absolutely. And I think that is also
one of the fundamental changes going on in the industry.
We were at the end of a paradigm where there were
horizontal slices of expertise, which is really the
ultimate optimization of an existing paradigm.
The new paradigm isn't exactly clear, so, you know,
to move faster, IT is creating
vertically integrated squads.
You look at, you know, Google's creation of
a site reliability engineer, it's really a way to
accelerate the creation of digital services
and optimize the infrastructure associated with it, so.
It's a time of change, I think, you know,
our view is you got to lean into it,
and, uh, you've got to trust the fact that
the skills and the cultural values that you've brought
are going to help you innovate into the future,
not necessarily just the products
and the ways that you've done them.
And so that's why we think culture is
a massively important part of these transformations.
>> We're here with George Kurian, CEO of NetApp,
not to be confused with Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google
who's also walking around the floor, show floor,
talking to customers.
George, thanks for coming on and sharing your insight,
you guys are awesome, the twins are super smart,
running two big companies, thanks for spending time.
Share us personal story, with George, I mean Thomas
hasn't come on yet, he's too busy, we'll get him later
on theCUBE, but share a story about him,
what's he like, who wins the arm wrestling matches,
share a- what's he like, tell a personal story.
>> I think he's shy, uh I think we're both really,
we realize how lucky we are, you know,
we grew up in places where people, you know,
some of us had sort of unmerited grace, you know,
the blessings of being born to
extraordinary, good families and parents,
and so we're always cognizant of that.
It's amazing that two guys in India, who had never
seen a computer till we left India to come to
the United States, now have the opportunity
to be a big part of the computer industry,
so we're just really grateful,
and God's been good to us.
>> Well congratulations, love the tech chops,
value and culture, big deal right now,
thanks for spending the time sharing the insights,
appreciate it. >> Thank you for
having me. >> George Kurian
here on theCUBE
with John Furrier, myself, and Stu Miniman,
more CUBE coverage after this short break.
(upbeat music)