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Stephen Orban

SVP, Product Ecosystem & Partnerships

Databricks

play_circle_outline NRF Retail Week and technology transformation

play_circle_outline Google Cloud's role in ISV ecosystem and marketplace

play_circle_outline Google Cloud's marketplace and customer spending commitments

play_circle_outline Joint efforts in co-building, co-marketing, and co-selling with ISVs

play_circle_outline Marketplace growth and success across various segments like retail, healthcare, and tech

play_circle_outline Fast growth in revenue and interest from customers and ISVs in Google Cloud marketplace.

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Stephen Orban, Google Cloud

Stephen Orban

SVP, Product Ecosystem & Partnerships Databricks

In New York City, John Furrier and Dave Vellante at the New York Stock Exchange cover NRF, a showcase of tech transforming retail. Google Cloud's Stephen Orban discusses ISV ecosystem in retail and healthcare, highlighting innovative solutions like Zebra's computer vision devices in Target stores and Shopify's AI capabilities. Marketplace offers a range of ISV solutions for customers' digital transformation needs, fostering partnerships and co-building, co-marketing, and co-selling strategies. With a focus on intentional integration and seamless user experien... Read more

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What is the role of the speaker in looking after the ISV ecosystem in the marketplace business? add

What is the role of managing the ISV ecosystem in the marketplace business in relation to providing solutions for customers moving to the cloud? add

What are the two ways for customers to retire their commitments for spending on Google Cloud services? add

What are the unique and amazing things that can be built together combining Zebra's handheld devices, retail customer relationships, retail agents, and Google's technology, and how can we effectively market this solution to customers such as Target? add

What is the speaker expressing gratitude for in terms of their current position and relationships with customers and ISVs in various industries? add

What are some reasons why customers and ISVs are interested in using Google's marketplace? add

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Stephen Orban, Google Cloud

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>> Hello everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are here in New York City for our CUBE Studios east here at the New York Stock Exchange Floor. I'm John Furrier, your host here with Dave Vellante here all week as part of our media week coverage of NRF. This is the big Retail Week. This is the show that's transforming retail and technology is at the center stage of all the conversations. Of course, cloud and AI is making it happen. Stephen Orban is here, CUBE alumni, vice president of migrations, ISVs vendors and marketplace at Google Cloud. You've probably seen Stephen on theCUBE many times as part of our Marvels program. Stephen, great to see you in your home game for you. Soon to be home game for us.

Stephen Orban

>> Home turf here in New York. John, thanks for having me as always, and what an awesome setup you have here at the New York Stock Exchange. It's great to be here with you again.

>> Yeah, we're excited to really open up New York as a... to use an old school networking term, point of presence, super POP, because with Silicon Valley and Wall Street, we're connecting tech and money, tech and business tech and stocks, technologies and politics. It's in all the action in society. You guys know that. You're powering the marketplace. You see all the company's powering on Google Cloud, but it's really now we're going next generation around what trusted community means, because organic content is about relationships. And as we've talked in the Marvel series many times with Google Cloud, the relationships between companies and your customers is more integration and something that's a consistent theme. On the human side, people want to know, "Who's in my networks?" And we have a series of networks and it's got to be trusted. So I think we're going to see a lot more content from theCUBE. I think we'll do about a 50X increase in video editorial to share as much knowledge to the audience as possible to get people learning, meeting people, progressing to discovery and learning and just connecting and getting the best data possible.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, that's amazing. Congratulations, and I'm humbled to be a part of it. And as much as AI and tech has started to automate everything that we do in our lives, there's still nothing to take the place of a good solid relationship and a network, as you say.

>> The humanization, the content. Stephen, I'm really excited you came in. I know you had a super busy schedule, NRF's going on this week, and it reminds me of the industry. You got retail and healthcare, both heavy IoT devices. And reminds me... In theCUBE we keep an eye on NRF. We've never gone there before because it's been more of a retail show around retail. There's been some tech in there, omnichannel, some marketing analytics. But like five years ago when Dave Vellante and I saw a super computing show, which used to be high performance computing, that was super cool, but we didn't really cover that HPC market. So I flew in five years ago and I started sniffing around. I saw Google Cloud, I saw AWS, I saw NVIDIA having these sidebars, and I'm like, "Just follow the alpha Geeks." I'm like, "they're not on the floor. I know that guy. He does deep learning. What's he doing? He's at an NVIDIA presentation." Packed house, clearly a recruiting vehicle. And I called Dave up and I said, "This is an AI show. We're going to see the confluence of supercomputing and AI." And now obviously we're seeing a supercomputing revolution happen. And reminds me of the personal computer revolution. What followed right after the eighties was the nineties, which was the networking revolution. So networking and computing together, it's now happening on an accelerated basis. Retail is going to completely transform from where it is today. We're in a different place now. You are powering a lot of companies here, I just interviewed one of them here on theCUBE. But also you're seeing the ISV ecosystem. So you're seeing the developer pressure from the market that's in a frenzy and the AI infrastructure is expanding very rapidly. So you have this confluence of just so much dynamic growth, and we see trillions of dollars of spend in flight because data growth and AI growth is happening much faster than our budgets are increasing. The money's got to come from somewhere, so it's going to the cloud.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, that's right.

>> And you're running the marketplace, so you see the money. You see the money, and you see the talent. What's the impact of retail and give us a scope of the magnitude of the change.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, that's right. I think it's a sharp observation, by the way. NRF, while it is still a retail-centered conference, is just as much a tech conference as any of the conferences that Google Cloud or any one of the big tech companies would put on today. Just the amount of innovation that you can see being showcased on the floor. I had a chance to walk around and meet with nine or 10 of our partners yesterday, some of which I think we'll probably talk about over the course of the next 15 or 20 minutes or so. And the transformation, it's in flight, it's happening. So look, my role looking after the ISV ecosystem in the marketplace business is really to make sure that our customers have the best choice of solutions as they start to move to the cloud. Google Cloud, we provide a lot of amazing technology from compute, network, infrastructure, storage, and now AI, which I think we'll talk about also, but we're never going to be able to satisfy every single one of our customer needs. So we build a robust ISV ecosystem of the software companies who are building the components or the parts that our customers need to use. Now, if you look in retail as a perfect example, it's a segment that Google Cloud has done really well in. Retailers tend to trust Google Cloud above some of the other cloud providers out there, largely because we're completely complimentary as opposed to competitive like some of the other cloud providers. And look, if-

>> Like AWS, Amazon?

Stephen Orban

>> Sure, sure. And I think you talked to Zebra Technologies as an example of one of the software companies that we're working with. I'll go through a list of a few, Commercetools, Shopify, Zebra, Manhattan Associates, Zeotap, Quantum Metric. But if you look at just some of the innovation that somebody like a Zebra is doing, and I think you had a chance to talk to Tom yesterday.

>> That's right. He came on today. Tom is the CTO of Zebra.

Stephen Orban

>> That's today. Yeah, Tom.

>> Amazing.

Stephen Orban

>> Amazing. So they have some tech on their floor and they're partnered with us as well as Target as the customer. And they had a Target rep who was there demonstrating it. They basically have a device that it's a handheld device with a computer on it of course, and a camera. And the Target rep, they could be one, two days in the job. They can take this device and scan a shelf that's sitting in a Target store, and the computer vision that's running on the device, again in partnership with Google will tell that rep, that associate in the Target store, what is misplaced, what is missing from the shelves, what they need to rearrange in order to make sure that the storefront is looking as it should. And if there is things that are low in stock, it gives the associate an opportunity to order a backup and then all of that can be fulfilled on the device. And if a customer came over and said they wanted to know where something was or what the price of something is, because it's missing, they can do that all on the device. And they're partnering with us to power all that computer vision and the generative AI behind the scenes. It's amazing. And that's just one of many other innovations that I'm sure we'll get into here.

>> We had Commercetools on. So that was a great get as well from us to get that content. Again, you mentioned those three all came on. The thing that gets me, and I want to get your thoughts on this because what I love about Zebra's CTO, Tom came on. I asked him about Google Cloud and he said the business transformation is so important for their business because their pre-existing position in the market is they have that edge device. They do have scanning technologies. They're in almost every industry you can imagine. I think they're in all the industries. They do a lot of analyzing, monitoring, and accelerating a value for what's in the digital side. So Google brought to the table a major piece of the puzzle because now they've focused all their developer efforts on what they do.

Stephen Orban

>> That's right.

>> And now again, this comes back down to something that we've been saying on theCUBE, and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think this is now a new thing that's not yet been taught in business schools, which is we're at a first time ever cloud impact economies and businesses. So the value chains. Remember the old days, "Don't outsource your core competency." Well, that kind of depends now, because when you're at scale, you can do things at scale that some people can't. So you guys operate at scale, they're at scale from a deployment standpoint. So they bring you guys in to run a lot of the heavy lifting AI backend scale to power their scale. So they shift all their resources to their competency. But there's still core competency of scale that they're working with you on, so they're not outsourcing to Google, they're integrating in.

Stephen Orban

>> No, it's really-

>> This is a historic moment because now you're going to see managed services that are operating at scale. Again, this is something that's going to be new. What's your thoughts on this? I'm trying to piece this together.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, so it's really a true partnership. It's not really that they're outsourcing a core competency to us. It's really something we're working on in partnership together. And if you just take AI as an example, I think the cloud is becoming much more well-understood than it was 10 years ago, and customers largely recognize that a move to a cloud is inevitable. They're going to have to do it in order to stay competitive because everybody in the industry is just gaining from the economies of scale that they get from moving and the lower total cost of ownership, you're able to move much faster, et cetera. But in artificial intelligence, the way we at Google think about the stack, it's a multi-layer cake. At the lowest level, we have the chips. So we have our own chips, we partner with NVIDIA and Intel to offer GPUs and compute to customers. And then of course we have our own TPUs, the tensor processing units that our customers can make use of. But not every customer is going to make use of just chips to create their artificial intelligence. So we have a capability we call our Vertex platform, which basically gives a customer all the tools that they need to start to develop and adapt models and LLMs that either we're providing or that they can get from our partners. And we've got more than 130 models that are available in our model garden. So customers can choose from Gemini, some of our world-class models, or from our partners like Anthropic, Mistral, Cohere, we have a partnership with Hugging Face with their models-

>> Yeah, pick and choose.

Stephen Orban

>> Pick and choose. We're just supplying choice to the customer. And then we have a number of higher level AI-powered capabilities. Let's just take our contact center AI or CCAI where we offer contact center APIs for whether it be retailers or other customers who want to modernize their contact center and have AI capabilities so that they can get a single view of their customer and maybe have the contact center reps be told what the next best thing may be to show their customer. So look, when we think about these partnerships with a Zebra or Commercetools who you also spoke to, it's really about helping them navigate that different layer cake and seeing what it is, the value add that they're bringing to their industry. We're never going to be experts in the retail industry, understanding how to optimize supply chain and omnichannel experiences and building e-commerce websites. So we have partners like Shopify, who you could also see at NRF on the floor. And Shopify is built on Google Cloud, they power... I forget the number, but it's billions and billions of transactions every day and month on their platform. And they're starting to take advantage now of our generative AI capabilities to help business owners who are creating storefronts to basically just give commands, "I want to give a 10% discount on this particular SKU in this particular region." And the Shopify tool will show that customer that small business or that medium-sized business where they need to make the changes in the Shopify portal to actually push that out to their customer. So I don't view it as outsourcing. I view it more as a partnership.

>> Yeah, and again, the Marvel series we do on theCUBE... Check it out on SiliconANGLE, of course the YouTube channel. You point this out, and I want to get into this because I think, like I said, the personal computer revolution, networking, the decade after, things are happening so fast now we are living in a super computing democratization era. You guys basically are... Now I'm oversimplifying, but Google is a supercomputer, meaning the scale of Google, and everyone knows not everyone can be Google. So you can bring that now to them. They have the ability to actually run their business. So the business transformation is the key message, because think about what it would take to offer a discount in a region. Say it's snowing in Chicago and I want to give a discount. I sell a very seasonal weather that when it's snowing, sales go up, or maybe I charge more. This ability to be that agile on the business front would've taken, "Okay, send a ticket in, update the SKUs, go in and apply some policy through a database." Now we're talking about just voice activated instantly happening. So the operational efficiencies, not just at scale operations, business logic, this is where the holy grail is.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, that's right. So actually if you think about that layer cake I just outlined before, I almost look at marketplace as the top of that pyramid. That's the distribution channel. So we have all of these wonderful cloud and AI capabilities that our ISV partners, some of whom we just discussed, can take advantage of it. And then when they want to actually sell it to our customers, they can list it on our marketplace. And look, as our last publicly quarterly earnings, we disclosed we have more than $85 billion of commitment from our collective customer base to spend on GCP.

>> In marketplace?

Stephen Orban

>> No. So it's-

>> In general? Okay, got it. All right.

Stephen Orban

>> In total to spend on Google Cloud. Then they have two ways to retire that commitment. They can of course consume Google Cloud services or they can buy from ISVs that are listed on our marketplace. So our ISV partners, like let's say a Quantum Metric or a Zeotap or a Zebra, can take advantage of that tailwind by making their solutions available in our marketplace, and then our sales team who's out talking to customers and asking them, "What's your next problem? What else can we help you with?" Have not just the inventory of hundreds of Google Cloud services, but they now have thousands of solutions available in our marketplace from all of these partners so we can bring in the right solution at the right time.

>> It's funny, I'm smiling because you mentioned Quantum Metric, and I interviewed them yesterday. Talking to the founder there-

Stephen Orban

>> Mario, right?

>> Yeah, Mario. Yeah, I felt I was in the cloud show. We were talking cloud native. He's technical, but you're starting to see the DNA of the successful leaders in these verticals. And I want to ask you, in the ISV landscape in marketplace, are you seeing that same similar pattern? And first of all, he's technical, he's done multiple startups before. Again, very impressive. But he asked the why question, why customers are doing things as intent. So again, the technical lens that he's bringing to the table is significant to impact brick-and-mortar and digital, make that first party connection. What other ISVs, what other areas in retail and other verticals, is this a similar pattern? What's going on in the marketplace with the ISVs? Are they leaning more towards the Quantum Metrics of the world? Are you seeing more neophytes coming in?

Stephen Orban

>> It's a good mix, I would say. I'd say that the common thread, if I had to pick one across all industries and even all technology segments. So when I think about the ISV ecosystem, we have teams of people who focus on security, on data and analytics, on AI, on horizontal tools like your ERP or your finance systems, your productivity, all the different verticals, databases, observability, etc. And we have experts on our teams who faced off with the ISVs and those different segments or pillars or categories to really make sure we're working and have the category leading ISVs available in our marketplace. But there's a thread, I would say. It's in three phases for the ISVs who do it really well: they co-build, they co-market and they co-sell with us. And the, "Co," in that build, market, and sell is very intentional. It's something we do together. It's not something we're doing on behalf of them or that they're doing on behalf of us. So in the co-build, it's really about, that's the technical part. What are the amazing, unique things that we can build together that a customer couldn't find anywhere else? So the combination of Zebra's handheld devices, relationship with retail customers in the stores, working with those retail agents, plus the technology that Google's bringing around the computer vision and the generative AI, that's a unique solution that would be very hard to replicate or get somewhere else. How do we market that together? How do we get customers like Target, who is at NRF talking about this and shouting that from the rooftop so everybody knows that these sorts of capabilities are available. And then in the co-sell, it's we're really just aligning our sales teams. And every time we have a customer who's interested in what we're doing together, we get our sales teams together, we talk about that customer, what do we need to do to help them solve their problem and really do that hand-in-hand. So the ISVs like a Quantum Metric, and Mario, who you mentioned has been really leaning in on the marketplace and has been very successful with us over the past 18, 24 months in that regard are really firing on all cylinders across all three.

>> Yeah, I'm a big fan of marketplace. I think the consumption of technology, again, as this becomes technology, digital first-party citizen, the business transformation is going to render itself so that the brick-and-mortars and digital now become one. When you had the pandemic, you had that separation to e-commerce, now we're back into real life. You're seeing that bridge together. So given what's going on in retail, obviously IOT is huge, devices, you've got healthcare. What is going on in the marketplace relative to some the revenue targets, the success on your business that you're running? Is it the classic tech vertical... So Palo Alto Networks, by the way, is still here show too. Again, another successful marketplace player on the Marvel series with us. What's the performance look like in the marketplace? Give an overview of how well you're doing. Is it growing? What verticals are growing, which ones you hope for coming up in the-

Stephen Orban

>> I feel very, very fortunate to be in the position that I'm in because we're up and to the right in pretty much any segment that you could imagine with the marketplace. We just have a very fortunate position where a lot of customers are trusting us with large amounts of their budgets to do what they will normally refer to as a digital transformation. And as I mentioned before, it's very difficult... it's impossible for us to fulfill all of their needs and all of their technology challenges with just our own first party capabilities. So we build this ecosystem of ISVs and make them available in the marketplace. And whether you look at retail or healthcare and life sciences or financial services or tech itself, we actually have a lot of ISVs that I work with as a partner, who also use other ISVs to build their business, of course. Commercetools is a perfect example. They are a big MongoDB customer. And so MongoDB is a database ISV that we work very closely with, and Commercetools builds a lot of their solution on MongoDB. So we have a nice three-way relationship going on there. So I would say just across every segment-

>> So ecosystem's huge for you then? Ecosystem, cohesiveness, synergies, big part of what you do. Besides fulfillment, you got the co-marketing, co-building.

Stephen Orban

>> Oh, yeah. Yeah, the fulfillment it's an important part, and customers appreciate the fact that they can consolidate invoices and that instead of 50 bills, if they've taken 50 offers from marketplace, it's consolidated on one, it's simpler. They have all of their contracts that are in one system. I don't know, you've been in the game a long time. You've probably worked at companies where, "Where's the contract for this deal we did five years ago?"

>> Yeah, reporting's so crazy.

Stephen Orban

>> It's in somebody's filing cabinet somewhere else. So there's a lot of simplification around that, but fulfillment is really a small part-

>> I'm sure you guys got some good AI for that.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. And look, when we're working with a customer and when they have an agreement coming up with us, we'll start to look at over the course of the next one, two, three years, as we project out what their Google Cloud spend is going to look like, we're also encouraging them to look at what does their vendor population look like? How is that going to change? How do they want to maybe modernize some of those vendors who haven't yet made the leap to the cloud? Here is some of the vendors that we have on the marketplace that are going to help you get to the cloud faster, help you achieve your AI transformation faster, and we'll really start to contemplate that much more ahead of time. And of course, customers really appreciate that because able to then lean in and get to the cloud faster.

>> Yeah. I want to first of all, thank you for coming to the studio here, busy schedule that you have. I want to really bring up this intentional integration. You mentioned it earlier. I think this is something that we're seeing here at NRF, as in every other vertical where the ecosystems used to be API. So, "Hey, we're connected to an API." The intention around integration has been a big part of your focus at Google Cloud. It's been one of the successful pieces of how you guys have been working. Talk about the importance as people have these connected ecosystem partners. You mentioned Mongo. Yeah, you have to let the best solutions evolve. People are building stuff with you. Talk about this integration layer, why it's so important, because now it's not just from a security standpoint, data is important too. No one wants a black box. So intentionally integrating, making that a piece of the fabric.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, so look, APIs is still a big part of how we do that. A lot of our ISV partners will use our APIs either to use our GCP, Google Cloud services, or to integrate with the marketplace. That's all API driven. But again, that's just the beginning.

>> That's a connection.

Stephen Orban

>> If you take Palo Alto, for example, I think you talked to Munish and I, whatever it was, two months ago on the Marketplace Marvel series, and they've got dozens of bespoke integrations. And so when a customer is looking for a firewall, let's say, or do data production with what they're doing on Google Cloud, they can either find it in the marketplace or they can find it directly throughout their Google Cloud experience. And that is just an integrated experience where from the customer's perspective, the user experience is as seamless as though it was a Google Cloud service. And we're looking at doing more and more of those integrations and finding that what is really going to be unique. It's very simple to just say, "We're going to have the same capability that you could get on any cloud." And that's fine. We need to have that, but in order for us to be really, really, really successful and to do something meaningful together, it's really identifying what those unique integrations are. I know Zebra's an example of that.

>> Zebra's great, yeah.

Stephen Orban

>> Manhattan Associates is another big-time player in the retail industry. They do logistics, supply chain management, customer chatbots for their retail customers to customers-

>> What I love about this market, Stephen is that it's platforms connecting to platforms together. There's certainly tools out there. You've got obviously unique situations, picks and shovels for certain things, but platforms are connecting with each other. Data's a big part of it. I guess my final question for you would be here at NRF, what has been your focus? So you had the marketplace, you got to check in with the relationships, but when you go look at the NRF, what's been your agenda? What's been your focus?

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, I think for me, my intent number one was just to learn and to just see the innovation that's happening across the ecosystem and really try to create some cross-pollination around that. What can the financial services industry learn from the retail industry, for example? Retail as an example, has a lot of customer service needs, because you have customers who are calling in, wondering where their items are, how come they got shipped the wrong thing, lots of different... And-

>> There's payments involved.

Stephen Orban

>> Payments. How do I change my payments? How do I change my billing address, et cetera? And a lot of this is now being automated by generative AI. So taking those learnings and then how do we then put that in a financial services where the customer who's doing digital banking might want the same kind of experience? So for me, learning was a big part of it. And then of course, just understanding who are the ISVs that are really leaning in and moving the needle, and who is going to be the next big winners for our retail customers so that we can make sure that we're highlighting the right solution from the right software vendor to the right customer at the right time.

>> And there's breakout moment's coming because as we talked about Zebra Technologies, the people that are in market with stuff, it's not like, "Hey, retail, let's go apply gen AI." There are already incumbents with technology that the AI forcing function that's here, just like the pandemic changed retail and every other industry, that was a forcing function. Behavior had to be changed. Now, that was a black swan event, but now we have gen AI, I won't say it's a black swan, it's an inflection point. It's a generational shift. Trillions of dollars, a shift to edge, data center, cloud, connected ecosystems. It's here. So the money's got to come from somewhere, so there'll be winners and losers.

Stephen Orban

>> It's here. The inflection point is here. And I will tell you, having walked the NRF floor yesterday and seen the dozens of companies who are using it in real ways to transform the customer experience for retailers, if you are in retail or any other industry for that matter, and you're not taking advantage of it, I'd be careful.

>> All right, final point. Just give a quick plug on some of the things you're working on. Stats, can you share any metrics, revenue, number of customers? You smile. No revenue? Okay.

Stephen Orban

>> Not going to share revenue, but I will say we're-

>> Give us a taste of the... Because I've heard things like you guys are one of the fastest growing areas on revenue in Google Cloud. You don't have to deny or admit that, but just give us a taste or scope of kind of the magnitude of the growth you're going through within your group.

Stephen Orban

>> Yeah, I will say the growth is so fast, it's hard to keep up with. And we have many, many, many customers who are interested in using the marketplace, both to consolidate the spending procurement, but also because they want Google's take on the solutions that they should be using. They want help getting to the cloud faster, and frankly, more ISVs who want to get into the marketplace and get going want our expertise. So I'm grateful for the opportunity to come here and talk about it because it helps maybe show some of the things that our partners-

>> Well, Gemini Pro has got some great reviews. You've got Vertex you mentioned, now it's got BigQuery, all the I call big iron stuff in the cloud. Again, it's great resource. Again, it's an economic engine we're seeing as a historic point in the computer industry. I call it Gen II cloud, that's my words. People would debate that. But you start to see the benefits of scale impact, and then the ecosystem lifts with it. So it's not about competing with the ecosystem. I think that question's gone. I think that got vaporized as an objection maybe a couple of years ago. But certainly there is no competition. It's a great opportunity. Everyone can transform their business and move fast.

Stephen Orban

>> All boats lift with the rising tide.

>> Great to have you on, Stephen.

Stephen Orban

>> Thanks, John. Thanks for having me.

>> Stephen Orban, who runs the marketplace at Google Cloud, vice President migrations, ISVs, but really the front end of how people consuming technology, buying it, integrating it, but also the connected ecosystem. A really important part of this next wave of AI is how do you leverage large-scale connect with the best partners to build the best solutions? Again, business transformation is the theme here at Retail Week. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante here as your CUBE hosts. Thanks for watching.