>> Narrator: Live from the Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE.
(bright music)
Covering Google Cloud Next 17.
>> Hi, and welcome to the second day of live coverage
here of theCUBE covering Google Next 2017.
We're at the heart of Silicon Valley here
at our 4,500 square foot new studio in Palo Alto.
We've got a team of reporters and analysts
up in San Francisco checking out everything
that's happening in Google.
I was up there for the day two keynote,
and happy to have with me is the first guest of the day,
friend of theCUBE, Marc Farley, Vulcancast,
guy that knows clouds, worked for one the big three
in the past and going to help me break down some of
what's going on in the marketplace.
Mark, it's great to see you.
>> Oh, it's really nice to be here, Stu,
thanks for asking me on.
>> Always happy to have you--
>> And what a lot of fun stuff to get into.
>> Oh my god, yeah, this is what we love.
We talked about, I wonder, Amazon Reinvent
is like the Superbowl of the industry there.
What's Google there if, you know--
>> Well, Google pulls a lot of resources for this.
And they can put on a very impressive show.
So if this is, if Invent is the Superbowl,
then maybe this, maybe Next is the college
championship game.
I hate to call it college, but it's got that kind of draw,
it's a big deal.
>> Is is that, I don't want to say, arena football,
it's the up and coming--
>> Oh, it's a lot better than that.
Google really does some spectacular things at events.
>> They're Google, come on, we all use Google,
we all know Google, 10,000 people showed up,
there's a lot of excitement.
So what's your take of the show so far
in Google's positioning in cloud?
>> It's nothing like the introduction of Glass.
And of course, Google Glass is a thing of the past,
but I don't know if you remember when they introduced that,
when they had the sky diver.
Sky divers diving out of an airplane
and then climbing up the outside of the building
and all that, it was really spectacular.
Nobody can ever reach that mark again,
probably not even the Academy Awards.
But you asked the second part of the question,
what's Google position with cloud,
I think that's going to be the big question moving forward.
They are obviously committed to doing it,
and they're bringing unique capabilities into cloud
that you don't see from either Amazon or Microsoft.
>> Yeah.
I mean, coming into it, there's certain things
that we've been hearing forever about Google,
and especially when you talk about Google in the enterprise.
Are they serious, is this just beta,
are they going to put the money in?
I thought Eric Schmidt did a real good job yesterday
in the close day keynote, he's like,
"Look, I've been telling Google to push hard
"in the enterprise for 17 years.
"Look, I signed a check for 30 billion dollars."
>> 30 billion!
>> Yeah, and I talked to some people,
they're a little skeptical, and they're like,
"Oh, you know, that's not like it all went to build
"the cloud, some of it's for their infrastructure,
"there's acquisitions, there's all these other things."
But I think it was infrastructure related.
Look, there shouldn't be a question that they're serious.
And Diane Greene said, in a Q&A she had with the press,
that thing about, we're going to tinker with something
and then kill it, I want to smash that perception
because there's certain things you can do
in the consumer side that you cannot get away with
on the enterprise side, and she knows that,
they're putting a lot of effort to transform
their support, transform the pricing,
dig in with partners and channels.
And some of it is, you know, they've gotten
the strategy together, they've gotten the pieces together,
we're moving things from beta to GA,
and they're making good progress.
I think they have addressed some of the misperceptions,
that being said, everybody usually, it's like,
"I've been hearing this for five years,
"it's probably going to take me a couple of years
"to really believe it."
>> Yeah, but you know, the things is,
for people that know Diane Greene
and have watched VMware over the years,
and then her being there at Google
is a real commitment.
And she's talking about commitment
when she talks about that business.
It's full pedal to the metal, this is a very serious,
the things that's interesting about it,
it's a lot more than infrastructure as a service.
>> Yeah.
>> The kinds of APIs and apps and everything
that they're bringing, this is a lot more
than just infrastructure, this is Google developed,
Google, if you will, proprietary technology
now that they're turning to the external world to use.
And there's some really sophisticated stuff in there.
>> Yes, so before we get into some of
the competitive landscape, some of the things
you were pretty impressed with, I think everybody was,
the keynote this morning definitely
went out much better, day one keynote, a little rocky.
Didn't hear, the biggest applauses were around
some of the International Women's Day,
which is great that they do that,
but it's nice when they're like,
"Oh, here's some cool new tech," or they're like,
oh, wow, this demo that they're doing,
some really cool things and products
that people want to get their hands on.
So what jumped out at you at the keynote this morning?
>> I'm trying to remember what it's called.
The stuff from around personal identifiable information.
>> Yeah, so that's what they call DLP
or it's the Data Loss Prevention API.
Thank goodness for my Evernote here,
which I believe runs on Google cloud,
keeping up to date, so I'm--
>> Data loss prevention shouldn't be so hard to remember.
>> And by the way, you said proprietary stuff.
One thing about Google is, that Data Loss Prevention,
it's an API, they want to make it easy to get in,
a lot of what they do is open source.
They feel that that's one of their differentiations,
is to be, we always used to say on the infrastructure side,
it's like everybody's pumping their chest.
Who's more open than everybody else?
Google.
Lots of cool stuff, everything from the TensorFlow
and Kubernetes that's coming out, where some of us are like,
"Okay, how will they actually make money on some of this,
"will it be services?"
But yeah, Data Loss Prevention API,
which was a really cool demo.
It's like, okay, here's a credit card,
the video kind of takes it and it redacts the number.
It can redact social security numbers,
it's got that kind of machine learning AI with the video
and all those things built in to try
to help security encrypt and protect what you're doing.
>> It's mind boggling.
You think about, they do the facial recognition,
but they're doing content recognition also.
And you could have a string of numbers there
that might not be a phone number,
it might not be a social security number,
and the question is, what DLP flagged that to,
who knows, it doesn't really matter.
What matters is that they can actually do this.
And as a storage person, you're getting involved,
and compliance and risk and mitigation,
all these kinds of things over the years.
And it's hard for software to go in and scan a lot of data
to just look for text.
Not images of numbers on a photograph, but just text
in a document, whether it's a Word file or something.
And you say, "Oh, it's not so hard,"
but when you try to do that at scale,
it's really hard at scale.
And that's the thing that I really wonder about DLP,
are they going to be able to do this at large scale?
And you have to think that that is part of the consideration
for them, because they are large scale.
And if they can do that, Stu, that is
going to be wildly impressive.
>> Marc, everything that Google does
tends to be built for scale, so you would think
they could do that.
And I'd think about all the breaches, it was usually,
"Oh, oops, we didn't realize we had this information,
"didn't know where it was," or things like that.
So if Google can help address that,
they're looking at some of those core security issues
they talked about, they've got
a second form factor authentication
with a little USB tab that can go into your computer,
end to end encryption if you've got Android
and Chrome devices, so a lot of good sounding things
on encryption and security.
>> One of the other things they announced,
I don't know if this was part of the same thinking,
but they talk about 64 core servers,
and they talk about, or VMs, I should say,
64 core VMs, and they're talking about
getting the latest and greatest from Intel.
What is it, Skylink, Sky--
>> Stu: Skylake.
>> Skylake, yeah, thanks.
>> They had Raejeanne actually up on stage,
Raejeanne Skillern, Cube alumn, know her well,
was happy to see her up on stage
showing off what they're doing.
Not only just the chipset, but Intel's digging in,
doing development on Kubernetes,
doing development on TensorFlow
to help with really performance.
And we've seen Intel do this, they did this
with virtualization with the extensions that they did,
they're doing it with containers.
Intel gets involved in these software pieces
and makes sure that the chipset's going to be optimized,
and great to see them working with Google on it.
>> My guess is they're going to be using a lot of cycles
for these security things also.
The security is really hard, it's front and center
in our lives these days, and just everything.
I think Google's making a really interesting play,
they take their own internal technology,
this security technology that they've been using,
and they know it's compute heavy.
The whole thing about DLP,
it's extremely compute heavy to do this stuff.
Okay, let's get the biggest, fastest technology we can
to make it work, and then maybe it can all seem seamless.
I'm really impressed with how they've figured out
to take the assets that they have
in different places, like from YouTube.
These other things that you would think,
is YouTube really an enterprise app?
No, but there's technology in YouTube
that you can use for enterprise cloud services.
Very smart, I give them a lot of credit
for looking broadly throughout their organization
which, in a lot of respects, traditionally
has been a consumer oriented experience,
and they're taking some of these technologies now
and making it available to enterprise.
It's really, really hard.
>> Absolutely.
They did a bunch of enhancements
on the G Suite product line.
It felt at times a little bit, it's like, okay, wait,
I've got the cloud and I've got the applications.
There are places that they come together,
places that data and security flow between them,
but it still feels like a couple of different parts,
and how they put together the portfolio,
but building a whole solution for the enterprise.
We see similar things from Microsoft,
not as much from Amazon.
I'm curious what your take is as to
how Google stacks up against Microsoft who, disclaimer,
you did work for one time on the infrastructure side.
>> Yeah, that's a whole interesting thing.
Google really wants to try to figure out
how to get enterprises that run on Microsoft technology
moving to Google cloud, and I think
it's going to be very tough for them.
Satya Nadella and Microsoft are very serious
about making a seamless experience
for end users and administrators and everybody along
managing the systems and using their systems.
Okay, can Google replicate that?
Maybe on the user side they can,
but certainly not on the administration side.
And there are hooks between the land-based technology
and the cloud-based technology
that Microsoft's been working on for years.
Question is, can Google come close to replicating
those kinds of things, and on Microsoft's side,
do customers get enough value,
is there enough magic there to make that automation
of a hybrid IT experience valuable to their customers.
I just have to think though that there's no way
Google's going to be able to beat Microsoft
at hybrid IT for Microsoft apps.
I just don't believe it.
>> Yeah, it's interesting.
I think one of the not so secret weapons
that Google has there is what they're doing with Kubernetes.
They've gotten Kubernetes in all the public clouds,
it's getting into a lot of on premises environment.
Everything from we were at the KubeCon conference
in Seattle a couple of months ago.
I hear DockerCon and OpenStacks Summit
are going to have strong Kubernetes discussions there,
and it's growing, it's got a lot of buzz,
and that kind of portability and mobility of workload
has been something that, especially as guys
that have storage background, we have a little bit
of skepticism because physics
and the size of data and that whole data gravity thing.
But that being said, if I can write applications
and have ways to be able to do similar things
across multiple environments, that gives Google
a way to spread their wings beyond
what they can do in their Google cloud.
So I'm curious what you think about
containers, Kubernetes, serverless type activity
that they're doing.
>> I think within the Google cloud, they'll be able
to leverage that technology pretty effectively.
I don't think it's going to be very effective, though,
in enterprise data centers.
I think the OpenStack stuff's been a really hard road,
and it's a long time coming, I don't know
if they'll ever get there.
So then you've got a company like Microsoft
that is working really hard on the same thing.
It's not clear to me what Microsoft's orchestrate
is going to be, but they're going to have one.
>> Are you bullish on Asure Stack
that's coming out later this year?
>> No, not really.
>> Okay.
>> I think Asure Stack's a step in the right direction,
and Microsoft absolutely has to have it,
not so much for Google, but for AWS, to compete with AWS.
I think it's a good idea, but it's such
a constrained system at this point.
It's going to take a while to see what it is.
You're going to have HPE and Lenovo and Cisco, all have,
and Dell, all having the same basic thing.
And so you ask yourself, what is the motivation
for any of these companies to really knock it
out of the park when Microsoft is nailing everybody's feet
to the floor on what the options are to offer this?
And I understand Microsoft wanting to play it safe
and saying, "We want to be able to support this thing,
"make sure that, when customers install it,
"they don't have problems with it."
And Microsoft always wants to foist the support burden
onto somebody else anyway, we've all been working
for Microsoft our whole lives.
>> It was the old Dilbert cartoon,
as soon as you open that software,
you're all of a sudden Microsoft's pool boy.
>> (laughs) I love that, yeah.
Asure Stack's going to be pretty constrained,
and they keep pushing it further out.
So what's the reality of this?
And Asure Pack right now is a zombie,
everybody's waiting for Asure Stack,
but Asure Stack keeps moving out
and Asure Stack's going to be small and constrained.
This stuff is hard.
There's a reason why it's taking everybody
a long time to get it out, there's a reason
why OpenStack hasn't had the adoption
that people first expected, there's going to be a reason
why I think Asure Stack does not have the adoption
that Microsoft hoped for either.
It's going to be an interesting thing to watch
over what will play out over the next five or six years.
>> Yeah, but for myself, I've seen this story
play out a few times on the infrastructure side.
I remember the original precursor, the Vblock
with Acadia and the go-to-market.
VMware, when they did the VSAN stuff,
the generation one of Evo really went nowhere,
and they had to go, a lot of times
it takes 18 to 24 months to sort out
some of those basic pricing, packaging, partnering,
positioning type things, and even though Asure Stack's
been coming for a while, I want to say TP3 is like here,
and we're talking about it, and it's going to GA this summer,
but it's once we really start getting
this customer environment, people start selling it,
that we're going to find out what it is and what it isn't.
>> It's interesting.
You know how important that technology is to Microsoft.
It's, in many respects, Satya's baby.
And it's so important to them, and at the same time,
it's not there, it's not coming, it's going to be constrained.
>> So Marc, unfortunately, you and I could talk all day
about stuff like this, and we've had many times,
at conferences, that we spend a long time.
I want to give you just the final word.
Wrap up the intro for today on what's happening
at Google Next and what's interesting you in the industry.
>> Well, I think the big thing here
is that Google is showing that they put their foot down
and they're not letting up.
They're serious about this business,
they made this commitment.
And we sort of talk and we give lip service, a little bit,
to the big three, we got Asure, we got Amazon,
and then there's Google.
I think every year it's Google does more,
and they're proving themselves
as a more capable cloud service provider.
They're showing the integration with HANA
is really interesting, SAP, I should say, not HANA but SAP.
They're going after big applications,
they've got big customers.
Every year that they do this, it's more of an arrival.
And I think, in two years time,
that idea of the big three
is actually going to be big three.
It's not going to be two plus one.
And that is going to accelerate more of the movement
into cloud faster than ever, because the options
that Google is offering are different than the others,
these are all different clouds with different strengths.
Of the three of them, Google, I have to say,
has the most, if you will, computer science behind it.
It's not that Microsoft doesn't have it,
but Google is going to have a lot more capability
and machine learning than I think
what you're going to see out of Amazon ever.
They are just going to take off and run with that,
and Microsoft is going to have to figure out
how they're going to try to catch up or how they're
going to parley what they have in machine learning.
It's not that they haven't made an investment in it,
but it's not like Google has made investment in it.
Google's been making investment in it over the years
to support their consumer applications on Google.
And now that stuff is coming, like I said before,
the stuff is coming into the enterprise.
I think there is a shift now, and we sort of wonder,
is machine learning going to happen,
when it's going to happen?
It's going to happen, and it's going to come from Google.
>> All right, well, great way to end
the opening segment here.
Thank you so much, Marc Farley, for joining us.
We've got a full day of coverage here
from our 4,500 square foot studio
in the heart of Silicon Valley.
You're watching theCUBE.
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