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RETO MEIER: Hi, everyone.
Thanks for joining us on the "Next Live Show."
I'm Reto Meier.
STEPHANIE WONG: And I'm Stephanie Wong.
If you can't be here in person this week,
we've got you covered.
To make sure you catch everything,
we have six livestream channels, including
this one, the "Next Live Show."
Let's kick things off with insights
on this morning's keynote from Google Cloud leaders
Aparna Sinha, group product manager Kubernetes, and Quentin
Hardy, head of Editorial.
Great to see you both.
APARNA SINHA: Thanks for having us.
STEPHANIE WONG: Quentin, we were just here together
nine months ago talking about the state of cloud computing,
and that wasn't very long ago.
What have you seen that's changed?
QUENTIN HARDY: That's cloud time for you.
Nine months equals a year.
And two things stick out.
One, obviously, new leadership.
We have a new leader at Google Cloud.
And the first keynote is very telling.
He's focused on customer-ready, enterprise-ready products
and services, and a wealth of them,
and customer testimonials backing that up,
which is fun to see.
The other thing is the products--
a wealth of products.
A year's worth of products in nine months.
I'd like to just cite one of them, the Cloud Services
Platform, which is now called Anthos.
Last summer, when it was launched, it was prospective.
It was going to be in alpha and then beta very rapidly.
It's ready in nine months with more features, and products,
and services within it than we could imagine
having done this quickly.
Yay to your team.
And what this allows is for you to create, deploy, update, run,
check, secure all these applications on-prem,
in Google Cloud, on all the clouds-- wherever you want.
Just take the asset and make it grow
and make it live better in a system that is open,
and secure, and aimed at customer needs.
RETO MEIER: Now, Aparna, you've been closely involved
in the creation of the Cloud Services Platform,
or Anthos, now.
Based on what TK has already shared,
it already does a lot, right?
But it's going to do even more.
So what will that look like, and why should that
matter to our customers?
APARNA SINHA: Yeah.
Well, you know, great computing platforms
don't just add features or reduce cost.
Great computing platforms actually
change the game entirely.
They give customers capabilities that they've not had before.
And that's what Anthos is.
Anthos can be used, even if you're not in the cloud.
So it can be used in your on-prem data center
to give you a cloud-like environment, cloud-like agility
and speed, but also cloud-like control and centralized risk
management.
And it gives both your operators and your developers
a level of visibility, operational visibility,
as well as ease of use for the developer that
is hard to find anywhere else.
And then if you do decide that you're
going to use a public cloud, Anthos
gives you what no one else gives you, which is choice.
And it allows you to write once and deploy your services
anywhere.
And that's what really accelerates your business
success.
QUENTIN HARDY: The reason we like
open systems-- yes, it's a better way
to make more secure software.
It's better choice.
You get more velocity.
These are all great advantages.
There's an element of self-interest here too, though.
By leaving it up to the customer,
by giving them that freedom and choice,
it compels us to stay competitive.
We have to listen more closely.
We have to respond more quickly.
And if you have locked-in customers,
it's kind of a recipe for mediocrity.
APARNA SINHA: You know, I think one of the things
that a lot of customers like about the cloud
is that they don't have to worry about all of the things.
They can focus on the things that
are important to them and things that
add value to their business.
So for example, developers and engineers
can focus on differentiated capabilities that are unique.
And the cloud takes care of all the rest.
But why only in the cloud?
You know, this is something that you
ought to be able to do on-prem as well.
And that's what Anthos does.
It dissolves the layers that are underneath the differentiating
pieces.
And those are managed by cloud, by Google Cloud.
Or they're managed automatically.
And that way, you know, your business
can focus on accelerating itself.
STEPHANIE WONG: Right.
It seems like it's picking the workloads that
make sense for our customers.
Quentin, you mentioned before we started
that modernizing and migrating was another big keynote
takeaway.
How does Google Cloud's integration with
and migration of enterprise systems help our customers?
QUENTIN HARDY: Exactly what Aparna was just saying,
why can't it do more?
And in this case, why can't your data do more?
Why can't all that hard work that people
established over decades--
learning their customers, learning their market,
learning their products-- be taken to the cloud
or be empowered inside on-prem systems and get new life,
get new power, find new insights with ML and AI,
or by employing other cloud services,
just refreshing all that, and taking that legacy,
and using that as an insight to move into the future?
STEPHANIE WONG: Speaking of this focus on our users,
Quentin, what do you think are some
of the most compelling examples of learnings
that come with working with our customers?
QUENTIN HARDY: You know what's easy to do in tech?
Deliver a lot of complexity.
And some companies love complexity
because it's kind of like lock-in.
If you can get somebody to learn all that complexity,
they'll never learn anything else.
They'll be afraid.
You know what's hard?
Simplicity.
Simplicity on the back end for the provider
is really tough, because you've got
to consider a lot of use cases.
You've got to build in a way that's
going to work for a lot of different interests,
and people, and locations.
That requires a lot of careful thought.
And you've got to have a kind of empathy for what
the customer wants to do.
What does the customer want to do?
The customer wants to do the things it's good at.
The customer-- he or she wants to proceed
with the things they've learned in the market,
with the products they're passionate about.
That might not actually be container management.
That's something we're passionate about.
That's something we do.
And in some ways, this is economics 101.
Let everybody focus on their comparative advantage.
We are freeing up customers.
We are giving them that simplicity
so they can get stuff out of the way
and just work on the problems to serve their customers.
RETO MEIER: Aparna, Quentin's been talking
a lot about business folks.
But what does this mean for the operators
and the developers who are going to be using this technology?
APARNA SINHA: Yeah.
Well, like I said, it's a game changer
for the operators and the developers.
I would say there are three kind of big changes.
Number one is the right ones deploy anywhere.
For developers, it means that you
can focus on the things that add differentiation
to your business.
For the CIO, it means, actually, that you can really
concentrate your talent.
You don't fragment your talent across multiple different code
bases, across multiple different types of tools.
And if you think about it, you know,
every customer I've talked to always says, the talent
is the most scarce resource.
Particularly, engineering talent is really hard to hire.
It's really hard to keep the talent motivated.
And I think the reason creators are
excited about Anthos is, again, for the same reasons, right?
Because they also get access to a multi-cloud platform.
They also get access to the benefits of something that's
at a level that they can differentiate their code
and don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure
pieces.
STEPHANIE WONG: Quentin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai
was an important part of the day 1 keynote as well.
What did his presence say about how
Google sees the cloud industry?
QUENTIN HARDY: Well, obviously, you
bring out the CEO of Google, he's putting the stamp on it
that this is big.
And you can't say that enough.
And this gets kind of to an abstract reality of where
we are right now in the world.
There are four major players, five.
You could go to six.
$5 to $10 billion in Capex each.
This is a very big stakes operation.
Because this is the infrastructure of the future.
As much as you think about airports, or highways,
or deep water ports, or telephones and telegraphs,
in their time, this is the infrastructure of the future
that we are building and our competitors are building.
We're building it with a certain spirit we've talked about today
we think will give the customers the most power,
give individuals of any size-- a small company, a large company,
freelancer, you name it--
greater energy, greater power, greater freedom
to realize what they want to do in the world.
STEPHANIE WONG: Thank you so much for joining us
again and sharing your insight.
QUENTIN HARDY: It's great to be here.
APARNA SINHA: Thank you.
Thanks for having us.
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