Tony Safoian [00:00:30] Welcome, everybody, to another exciting episode of Cloud N Clear. We’ve been on a very, very in-depth exploration of the – for Google Cloud and I have the best guest I could probably get to help explain the whole lay of the land. Please meet Anil Jain, managing director, Global Industry Solutions at Google Cloud. Hi, Anil.
Anil Jain [00:00:52] Hey, Tony. Good to be here. Good to see you.
Tony Safoian [00:00:55] Thanks for joining me. It’s actually on the heels of a major win that hit the Wall Street Journal, Univision. And I want to hear all about that because I know that – on your radar probably worked on it, I don’t know. I can’t wait to learn more. I just know that my friends in New York at Google did that deal and it made The Wall Street Journal. That’s all I know.
Anil Jain [00:01:19] Yeah. No, we’re all celebrating that one, it’s a pretty momentous partnership for all of us.
Tony Safoian [00:01:24] For sure. But before we get into all that, I always like to have the audience to have an opportunity to kind of learn about people’s careers and trajectory, about how they landed up where they are today. So take us all the way back as far as you want to go and sort of trace your career trajectory. I know it involves MIT, which I know only very, very smart people go to. But other than that – how it all unfolded, where you ended up today.
Anil Jain [00:01:53] Sure. I mean, I’ll try and keep it brief because it’s a long and meandering story. So we, my kids have heard it a couple of times and they never want to hear it again. So I’ll just keep it very short. You know, I’ve spent the latter half of my career in media and media technology, but interestingly enough, I didn’t start in media or in software. I’m actually a material scientist by training. I have degrees in ceramic engineering science, and material science, and technology and policy. And it’s for the latter two things that I went to MIT, because one thing that has held true this whole time is what I love is the intersection of technology and people-centric problems and business, right? And so to me, that’s the intersection where at which I thrive. And that’s been true kind of in every role I’ve had. And I’ve been in the semiconductor business. I’ve done a number of different software start ups. I ran technology commercialization for a very large IP portfolio for the university systems in Arizona, ran my own consulting firm, and then as part of that ended up joining one of my clients. Unicorn Media became part of the leadership team there. And we pioneered, we were one of the companies that pioneered server-side ad insertion or dynamic ad insertion, and we’d refer to it as kind of cloud-driven now, right? And then I got to sell that company to Brightcove, where I spent the next several years growing and building the global media business with a great team. And then Google called. And I’ve been here for coming on two and a half years now, leading the media and entertainment industry team.
Tony Safoian [00:03:38] The intersection you just – where a lot of people play well, I think if you have the skills to bring those things together, that is rare, that is rare talent. That is also where I think a lot of the magic happens.
Anil Jain [00:03:55] Yeah, I, you know, it’s where all the fun happens, I think, too. Because, you know, I, in my career, I’ve spent time in a lab doing research. I’ve been on the manufacturing floor. You know, I’ve been in kind of cubeville, right? But what I really love is, and to this day it’s the highlights of my job is working with customers as partners and solving interesting problems and understanding what they’re dealing with on a daily basis and how the entire media value chain is being disrupted. And so what does that mean in terms of how they have to rethink the way they’re working? And then similarly, internally, you know, where we sit as an industry solutions team is really at the nexus of kind of all of our product and engineering teams. Our field sales and service organizations are, you know, ecosystem of partners, both tech partners and partners like SADA and then also our cross PA or one Google relationships. And it’s the most exciting place for me to sit and for my team. And we have a lot of fun solving some really thorny problems and working with innovators, you know, within Google and outside of Google as well.
Tony Safoian [00:05:05] Yeah, I think what’s really interesting about the space is if you’re Google, I think A, you know, you have some interesting and valuable assets, as we saw and kind of talked about in the Univision deal which we’ll dive into later. But, and then you also have you know, you’re facing a dilemma where you’re starting from behind because, you know, famously Netflix was born on AWS and really pushed – what AWS could do for so many years, way before Google and Microsoft were sort of in the game. And so they have that anchor to always go back to.
Anil Jain [00:05:44] Sure.
Tony Safoian [00:05:44] Like what Netflix is doing. Hey, you know. That being said, we know that there’s certain aspects of what Google Cloud and GCP specifically – differentiated, but also at the very least is now, even in the most traditional customers. You know, everyone’s getting pressed to be multi-cloud, to have more than one cloud, whether it’s for risk reasons or commercial reasons, best of breed, sort of bespoke strategy. So how do you balance sort of like just the journey of coming from behind, but then having to educate the market on all the ways that they should be considering GCP?
Anil Jain [00:06:34] Yeah, so a lot of different aspects in that question, Tony. So let me kind of hit a few and then whatever I miss, we can go back to. And I’m happy to highlight. You know, first of all, obviously we have in the kind of hyper-scale cloud platform space, instead of great peers that certainly are the top of everyone’s list when we work around cloud and when our customers and partners think about who they need to operate with. And like I said before, I’ve been here just under two and a half years. And so I had a lot of experience with some of the other clouds as well. And I think the reality is, for Google Cloud, two and a half years ago we started kind of the next phase of our evolution, right? And as you’ve seen in the markets, we’re pretty ambitious and moving very fast under Thomas Kurian’s leadership and an incredible team that he has assembled globally, right? And so rather than kind of speaking about the competitive dynamics, I will just tell you that we know kind of what we’re going after and we have every aspiration and ambition to create value with our customers and with our partners and collaborate on kind of pushing the boundaries. I will tell you the thing that excites me about media. You know, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of kind of the blocking and tackling of cloud-enabling workflows, right? And I think that’s very, very important. But what I think every media organization is thinking about, whether it’s overtly part of their regular strategic process and planning or is kind of hovering below the surface, but top of mind subconsciously. And that is, you know, what’s the next horizon of audience experiences? Right? There’s a lot of boundaries that are blurring between different traditional or conventional segments of media and entertainment. And as these things come together, the reality is we, you know, one thing that anyone has in common is consumer audiences that have a litany of choices of how they want to spend their time, how they want to be entertained and informed. And I think all of us collectively need to think about what are we doing to enable the media and entertainment industry to actually prepare for and deliver those transformative audience experiences.
Tony Safoian [00:09:04] Yeah, I mean, nothing has accelerated that transformation as pandemic itself.
Anil Jain [00:09:08] Yeah.
Tony Safoian [00:09:08] Being stuck at home, challenges of like just production of new content, you saw the rise of international content. You know, I remember being stuck and watching Netflix or whatever with the kids or Disney plus or whatever. I was like, wow there’s a high degree of like Australian content now.
Anil Jain [00:09:38] Yeah.
Tony Safoian [00:09:38] Because, like basically all production capabilities have screeched to a halt. But like, there was still new content. So like the delivery modality definitely being challenged, the volume of content being challenged, and also where people – right? I mean, I think multiscreen had been a thing for a while, but not in this very high revenue band where it was like the theatrical piece is not being disrupted, right?
Anil Jain [00:10:07] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Tony Safoian [00:10:09] And so, that’s created a whole bunch of challenges and opportunities. And I think it was maybe Trolls, the second Trolls movie was one of –
Anil Jain [00:10:18] That’s right.
Tony Safoian [00:10:18] The first to be like, we have to skip the theater entirely. We’re going to sell – at a three dollar rental or whatever it was, but then somehow it made 150 million dollars or something like doing it that way.
Anil Jain [00:10:31] Yeah, yeah.
Tony Safoian [00:10:33] That’s like –
Anil Jain [00:10:34] Yeah, it’s… Yeah, I was just going to say that the reality is, you know, you’re right, the modality is changed. I think what’s happened is we haven’t gotten rid of modalities, we’ve expanded the number of different choices that people have. And if you’re a media company, you kind of have to figure out how to serve all of them. Right? And that’s part of the challenge, right? You have to have the agility and the flexibility to be responsive to these new things that arise, new consumption patterns, new content formats, new business models that people want to consume using, right? Whether it’s ad-supported or subscription-based or, you know, time-limited durations of like I’m going to subscribe for a couple of months and then I’m going to come back when you would intice me to come back, or I’m going to transact and do the direct to home, you know, online streaming premiere instead of, you know, in lieu of or in parallel to a theatrical release. All of that exists. And you commented on international, you know, years ago, I remember thinking about this and I was thinking, I was speaking at Digital Hollywood and I told this story. But, you know, the reality is I was you know, I tend to watch Netflix on my treadmill, right? On a tablet. And I was running out of things to watch that were, you know, that I could watch independently because otherwise there’s things we watch together as a family and you don’t want to go ahead, you know, all of those.
Tony Safoian [00:12:07] That’s so funny. And you know, I spend so much of my Peloton time, like I’ll turn off, you know, Alex or whoever the famous person is, I’ll like mute them and I’ll be like, this is when I’m watching my show.
Anil Jain [00:12:21] That’s right.
Tony Safoian [00:12:23] That nobody else should or is wanting to watch. I do the same thing on my Peloton, so funny.
Anil Jain [00:12:27] So but in doing that is, and this was years ago, right? This is, now it’s like exploding. I, you know, I like a lot of kind of historical medieval kind of genre. It’s one of the genres I really enjoy. And I came across this mini series. It’s what we used to call mini series, right? So like I think only like six parts or whatever it might have been at the time that had to do with the Knights Templar. And it was Swedish, right? And but it was Swedish and it also had English in it and there were subtitles and I enjoyed it immensely, you know, with the subtitles. And I will tell you that it has opened up an entire world because I grew up as a son of Indian immigrants enjoying a lot of multicultural Bollywood content, and a lot of US content. And so I’ve always been kind of inclined to have a wide range of content I can consume. But now it’s just increased 10 or 100 fold because it doesn’t matter, right? The quality, the production quality is there. The stories are universal. So there’s so much more. And again, this is changed the paradigm, right? On one hand it means there’s so much more content to compete against as audiences have fragmented. How do I now focus on delivering content that consumers will value, right? Because they have so much choice? But similarly, it’s an opportunity. So when you talk about all of these streaming platforms that have launched in the last 12 to 18 months, they are very much planning global expansion, right? How can we take every one of these, you know, these streaming platforms and roll them out to 200 countries around the world? And I think, you know, I think that creates some very interesting dynamics in the industry, but certainly a lot of challenges for media executives that are looking to build and run these businesses.
Tony Safoian [00:14:25] Yeah, and I think Netflix announced this year that they’ll spend 17 billion dollars or something on content? And you’re like, that’s more than Google spends on data centers. I think Google spends like ten billion on data centers a year. And then you’re also thinking like, what studio? Because Netflix is not even a traditional studio, right? – start that way. But what studios spend 17 billion dollars on content? Maybe Disney can afford to do that, but like, who else could really –
Anil Jain [00:14:55] Yeah, I mean. Yeah.
Tony Safoian [00:14:58] But then they’re competing immediately after that because of the sprawl of content that inevitably has been created because – coming back, too. In these new streaming platforms, like the entire, you know, all of MASH and all of Survivor on Paramount plus and all, like there’s just so much content.
Anil Jain [00:15:19] Yeah, no, absolutely. I think the competitive dynamics between media companies has really been highlighted, right? And it creates this tiering, if you will, right? Because very few, like you said, can actually spend that kind of money. But, you know, the data that is shown in those couple different sources, that they’ll be over 100 billion dollars in new content investment, new content investment over the next few years, right? And so there’s all this content being created plus, as you said, unlocking the value of content that’s buried in these archives, right? There’s so much out there. And yet people don’t get tired of consuming the content, right? And then we talk about gaming and we talk about social video. There’s so much content being created in different nontraditional or nonconventional forms of media that every media company has to think about, how do all these things kind of come together as part of a portfolio that they have to serve?
Tony Safoian [00:16:22] Yeah, I think part of what we’re trying to figure out, we as is like the whole industry and, you know, and like people who serve the industry like us, you and I, what are these new consumer habits that have been created? And also this new capability that enabled like, hey, I can see every episode of any show ever made, as long as I subscribe to that, you know, whatever plus service, how much – will carry forward, I think, in a post-pandemic world. And how does it translate to engagement of users, but also the wallet share, because you and I were laughing about this the other day, like cutting the cord has been a conversation for 20 years and… Because the promise of it partly was like cable’s really expensive. Cut the cord, right? And like – just Hulu and Netflix, you cut the cord, you know you could save, you know, 100 bucks a month or something, you know, Internet plus two 20 dollar services. But now, consumers now, because they’ve been stuck at home, are paying for all of it. They’re like, just like.
Anil Jain [00:17:44] Yeah, that’s right.
Tony Safoian [00:17:44] You have kids. You have – Disney Plus, and Discovery Plus, and Netflix, and Hulu, and YouTube TV, and HBO Max. But like, how long, right? How long is that going to go?
Anil Jain [00:18:03] Yeah, you know, it’s been the question that has been discussed. You went from the bundle that was kind of very limited in terms of your choice and flexibility to the skinny bundle to no bundle. And yet, in the end, what really matters ultimately is the value of content and how people value it, right? And so, you know, I think that, again, it feels like this is kind of the common theme when we talk about this inevitable journey to the cloud, whether it’s hybrid or multi-cloud is it’s all about flexibility. And that’s flexibility for the consumer and flexibility for the one providing the content and the service. And the reality is, yes, you may have six or seven, you know, OTT services you subscribe to, but you have the choice to actually size that however you want, right? And before, when you buy the bundle, right? You didn’t really have that much choice. Maybe there eventually were two or three options.
Tony Safoian [00:19:05] You only watch 12 channels and didn’t watch the other 400.
Anil Jain [00:19:08] That’s right.
Tony Safoian [00:19:08] Yeah, it was problematic. You know, as a consumer, you know what kind of throws the whole thing in the air? Live sports, man. Live sports, local live – breaks the whole thing, and it’s just so frustrating being in a big market like you are, like I am. I’m like, why can’t I get the Lakers unless I have the local cable channel? Like that doesn’t make sense. I’m willing to pay for it, but they have a 15 year deal with the local cable company and you can get live sports in your neighborhood.
Anil Jain [00:19:47] That’s right.
Tony Safoian [00:19:48] Because I don’t live there, but I can’t get the Lakers. So I think – the last to this OTT revolution, we just need to fix this whenever the Lakers new contract and the Dodgers contract –
Anil Jain [00:20:01] Right? I think that if you talk to any sports league or sports platform out there, they’re all thinking about, you know, to what extent do they fully dive into the direct-to-consumer model, all doing elements of it today? Right? I think everybody has to.
Tony Safoian [00:20:19] And all they – pass, and all that’s done.
Anil Jain [00:20:20] Exactly. Exactly. And like MLB pioneered this stuff early on for sports and for the industry many, many years ago. But it’s all about the economics, right? So if the rights deals are still in effect, if they have long durations, it’s a lot of value. In the end, they’re making the right business decisions for their shareholders and their constituents. And I think, you know, I don’t think the future is black and white. I think the reality is they you know, they end up again managing a portfolio, right? Where is it better for me to do a license deal? Because remember when all of these organizations, both sports leagues as well as studios, broadcasters, you know, streaming platforms that are kind of greenfield and net new, all of them still have the same challenge, which is now they have to have very strong relationships directly, one to one with their consumer audience. And that takes a lot of work, a lot of investment, a lot of data analytics, which is another area, of course, that we focus on at Google Cloud. But those relationships, managing them so that you can create affinity and long term engagement and mitigate churn and know when, you know, okay I know what Tony likes in terms of content and on what platform and in what model and in what format, how can I make a lot of decisions ahead of time to give him the optimal viewing experience? Right? Because we’re all creatures of habit and we all want convenience. So yes, I want choice, but we also know the paradox of choice. So eventually, can I settle on a number of services that I know, know me very well, and therefore I’m always going to have a great experience whenever I decide that it’s time to engage with that content.
Tony Safoian [00:22:07] There’s just so much process – Like, media and entertainment by nature, is extremely compute heavy, extremely storage heavy, network heavy, lots of opportunities for ML, you know, AI kind of capabilities.
Anil Jain [00:22:24] Sure.
Tony Safoian [00:22:26] Talking about indexing and cataloging or subtitling, you know, millions of hours of content, like it’s impossible to – and now soon it’s going to be dubbing, right? It’s going to be hopefully like, unlock many more audiences because the work required to even localize – But then, you know, relevancy is just like, you know, the birth of Google.com was celebrated by its ability to figure out relevancy in the most, you know, text fundamental type of search, which is text search. But.
Anil Jain [00:22:59] Right.
Tony Safoian [00:22:59] How do we even have these systems understand me by – and also understand the content that is available at a metadata level that’s not even like – want to go tag. Like, that’s the really cool potential of when I have 15 services, literally a million shows, when I turn on my Google TV or Apple TV or whatever. What is it going to recommend that I watch?
Anil Jain [00:23:31] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you’ve touched upon, again, a number of areas, right? From the personalization of content experiences which involve recommendations but also involves discovery, right?
Tony Safoian [00:23:43] Discovery is huge.
Anil Jain [00:23:43] And driving engagement. But you’ve also talked about kind of the intelligence about what’s in the content itself in terms of just kind of relying on human entered metadata, right? So both of those things are very relevant. And when we think about data and processing that data and then applying machine learning to it, it’s all different types of data. It’s content as data. It’s network performance and quality of service and quality experience data, and telemetry and instrumentation. It is user data, right? In terms of behavior patterns and, you know, data we have about what works from an experience and monetization standpoint. All of those things need to come together, which is why I think this is definitely an area for us that we lean into with a lot of our media organizations is very much focused on, can we think about a comprehensive, you know, data platform, right? Where you are taking a data lake approach and pulling together all these disparate sources and then providing that very high speed, highly performant data processing and analytics engines to actually extract useful insights that you can do something with. And then part of what we do from a solutions perspective is package that up in a way that reduces the time to deployment and time to value that an organization has to spend or wait, right? In order to actually derive that value. Because all of these things really affect both the top and bottom line in a very significant way. And so we’re seeing a lot of traction there with the industry. I think this is an industry wide story, but it’s certainly an area where Google shines. And I think what you and I talked about briefly when we had a chat a couple weeks ago, something that’s been fairly well publicized is the work that we’re doing with Fox Sports in an area called Intelligent Asset Management. And really what that fundamentally breaks down to is using our AI platform and capabilities, along with our abilities for video search. Of course, layer on top of storage and our infrastructure capabilities, is we’re working to actually co-innovate with Fox Sports, where they have, you know, they’re innovators, they’re forward thinking. You know, Brad Zager, Dustin Myers, their team. They really leaned in and said, this is what we want to solve. And it aligned very much with kind of where our strengths align, too. And so we’ve been working together to actually apply ML models, search capabilities to their large archive of sports content and footage, right?
Tony Safoian [00:26:38] Oh and there’s so much of it, right?
Anil Jain [00:26:39] And they have so much and they have people who, you know, who have been searching to, you know, how do we tell better stories? How do we find content that we know exists and package that in a way very quickly so as we can entertain and inform our viewers? And we know we have this content, but it’s not just readily available. So we’ll be demonstrating some things later this year as well. But that is an area where really I think one of those examples of applying AI/ML to media archives really shines, right? Because you can look at things that are not just conventional metadata, but even train models to understand actions. Like, when did a particular receiver complete a touchdown pass, you know, from this team at this location in history, right? And pull all that up in a matter of seconds. That’s kind of the excitement.
Tony Safoian [00:27:37] My wife worked at the production attorney at Access Hollywood, I don’t know 15, 20 years ago? And I remember when video logging and – like, type it in, watch it, make notes so that you have some hopes of searching for and finding it, you know, sometime in the future should you be looking for this content. And it’s just like the volume today and the details, is like impossible. But this is an area, and I want to kind of pick your brain –
Anil Jain [00:28:04] Sure.
Tony Safoian [00:28:06] Has some distinct advantages and capabilities, wouldn’t you say?
Anil Jain [00:28:12] Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know.
Tony Safoian [00:28:15] We know the photo –
Anil Jain [00:28:16] Of course.
Tony Safoian [00:28:17] Recognition because we use Google Photos. And I think even a bunch of my friends on IOS they’re huge Google Photos users just because, like, they can find stuff. And stuff that they didn’t even tell Google what was in the photo. Like a beach, like I’m at the beach and it just like finds all the pictures where you’re at the beach.
Anil Jain [00:28:41] Yeah, that’s right.
Tony Safoian [00:28:41] But then you like, take that to the video context and Google has some amazing APIs, literally industry-leading APIs just around that.
Anil Jain [00:28:51] Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you’re doing a great job of actually presenting the value. I will say this, that – and I end up in executive briefings with our customers, talking about this quite a lot. Because I think this is, you know, showing tangible value that, the photos example is certainly one, right? But Sundar Pichai said to the industry and the world that Google was an AI-first company, and he made that statement in 2017. Right? And if you think about all of Google’s high scale, very popular products that all of us use on a daily basis, you know, all of those have inherently AI and ML built in, right? To the underlying products to make them smarter and more useful for customers, right? Because it’s all about kind of respecting the time the user has invested in our products, right? So how do we make sure we continue to give you more value? That, the way I like to put it is, that same philosophy and kind of innovation and engineering and product expertise is kind of what we bring from a Google cloud perspective in a set of products. And so we have an entire AI/ML platform, you know, that provides these building blocks for things like video and vision and image intelligence. And there’s more of those services becoming available on a regular basis. And of course, from an industry perspective, we’re applying them to industry specific solutions across all of our verticals. And the beauty of it is, it doesn’t matter whether your organization has a deep bench of data scientists and ML experts or not. There is there is no –
Tony Safoian [00:30:43] Most organizations do not.
Anil Jain [00:30:44] Most organizations do not, or they’re very expensive, right? And very highly sought after. But we’ve got capabilities that you can delve into, even if your organization says, look, we have the product vision and we know what we want to do, but we’re not the data scientists or the ML experts, nor do we have the resource to go build it. But we can use the capabilities, both pre-train models that we have, as well as the tool sets that don’t require data scientists. But on the other side, if you do have that deep bench of capability, you actually can work deeply with our products as well. So, you know, that spectrum of capability is available. And obviously we like to have our customer success speak for itself as more and more of these capabilities are launched. But, yeah, this is definitely an area for us. AI and ML applied to solving real world problems in all of our key industries is very core to our strategy.
Tony Safoian [00:31:42] And by the way, in – the AI kind of disappears into the workflows or like disappears into the background, we’re seeing it in Google workspace.
Anil Jain [00:31:53] Yes, yes.
Tony Safoian [00:31:55] You know, we have a ton of M&E customers that are on Workspace. And you just love these features are sort of being born. And it’s doing a bunch of things that’s completely, you know, it’s invisible to you, which is the point. Like, it sort of just becomes part of the workflows. – Advantages there for Google, for sure. But the thing I really want to make sure that we spend a little time on is Univision, right?
Anil Jain [00:32:23] Sure.
Tony Safoian [00:32:25] It was a great win. And it read to me, like so many of these other mega wins for Google have been – or Activision Blizzard King, or Mayo Clinic or – the headline generating massive deals is, they’re not about storage compute, feed speeds, migrate your data center, you know, from A to B. They are so much more holistic, geared towards true industry transformation, business transformation, business model evolution. But also how they clearly and nowhere have I read it even as clearly as I did in this Wall Street Journal article. Phenomenal assets that Google brings to bear, which frankly no one else has as far as what was, you know, how it came around. But – I’d love to hear from your perspective about how that whole deal went down, why Google One, because it’s fascinating and it’s very hot off the press.
Anil Jain [00:33:36] Yeah, no, I mean, obviously, these are the Univision deal, plus the Grupo Globo announcement that we had a couple of weeks ago.
Tony Safoian [00:33:46] Yeah, that was Brazil, right?
Anil Jain [00:33:49] Brazil, yeah. So, Grupo Globo, great partner. You know, incredibly forward thinking, very large media conglomerate that has paid TV, has direct-to-consumer, has their own really modern studios. They do their own productions and they’re like in the Guinness World Book of Records for telenovela production. Right? And they have like amazing VFX and rendering capabilities. They’re a pretty phenomenal company. But the reason I mention this, right? Is obviously just sharing kind of what I can publicly. With both organizations you kind of, you stated this when you likened them to some of the other kind of transformative deals, in both of those cases if you kind of read what is published by Univision, by Grupo Globo, and by Google and Google Cloud, it is about transformation. These are what we actually refer to as transformation partnerships, not vendor relationships where we are, you know, selling a bag of infrastructure products, right? That’s not the goal. This is really about, and this is kind of the beauty of what TK and team have kind of brought from a leadership perspective is that it’s about customer empathy, really understanding, putting yourselves in the shoes of the customer and then building solutions and capabilities that address that transformation, right? Because that’s about creating and capturing value for everyone involved. So for Globo, for Univision, these are both transformation partnerships. The similarities, I’ll tell you, are that one, they require, you know, from the top down mandates and buy-ins that from a board-level, that this is the transformation, that journey that we need to be on for our future in order to thrive, right? In the future of media. And both of them did that. They are using kind of Google Cloud capabilities across all of their operations from things like data center migration and moving the media supply chain and workflows to the cloud, and using data analytics and AI/ML to transform consumer experiences. Those are kind of commonalities. But of course, there’s uniqueness in each deal. We are doing co-innovation with both of them, right? Where we aren’t just, again, taking something off the shelf and applying it, we’re really saying, OK how do we change the, what I talked about before, what’s that next generation media experience? The case of Globo I can talk about is, we’re working with cross Cloud and our Android TV team with people Grupo Globo to help them address what they refer to as kind of TV 2.5. And so this is really where you take over the top and over the air television experiences and combine them so that on your connected TVs you can get the beautiful linear experience, plus take advantage of kind of the Internet-delivered digital experiences, whether that’s additional features, additional services or even monetization. So that’s the kind of excitement that is happening. And, you know, something that I think gets everybody charged up at the executives at both sides of the partnership.
Tony Safoian [00:37:18] Yeah I – me the most, because when I look at those deals, I think like only Google could have put that together, right? In that particular way. And I also applaud and I’m sort of I’m so impressed by the people within those organizations that – You know Anil, you’ve sold and worked in organizations for a long time, like.
Anil Jain [00:37:47] Yeah.
Tony Safoian [00:37:48] It is not easy if you are the board of Univision or Grupo Globo or the CEO or the CIO or whatever to say like, we’re going in this direction that is a completely new path.
Anil Jain [00:38:03] No. Look this is, it’s really interesting because we’re talking about this, I keep using the phrase the shift to the direct to consumer paradigm, right? Well, that’s direct to consumer paradigm has been around for 20 plus years, right? I don’t know if you remember a technology called PointCast. So when I worked at my first job out of grad school, I used to have this kind of PointCast application that was doing media streaming and, God that was so long ago. But, you know, the notion has been there, as with much of technology innovation, right? It takes a long time to get to mass adoption. And what’s interesting in media specifically, and I can see this coming at it from a technology perspective, as opposed to being an operator of a media business, is that there’s been a lot of inertia, right? A lot of entrenched inertia preventing wholesale adoption, right? Until recently, because these are very large businesses that serve millions upon millions of consumers. And they have, as we talked about before, existing business models that they’re relying on, right? And so to do your duty to your customers, to do your duty to your fiduciaries, you know, it kind of handcuffs you to some extent in terms of how much you can invest in the future. And think about every media company that has a, every broadcaster, right? That has a linear business today. They have to continue to operate that business while they also move to direct to consumer. So that’s you know, that’s where the CFOs and the CTOs have the dialog around. The CTO says, look, I know where the future is headed and we have to invest in these capabilities. And the CFO says, yeah, I get it, but show me what the payback period is, because it’s a lot longer than I would want. Right?
Tony Safoian [00:39:56] We’re still printing money here, so why am I doing that? But I’m really empathetic because – CEOs are sellers, too. Being in the room were arguably much smaller deals. Somebody choose – the nonincumbent path. Like the easiest thing to do, the thing you don’t get fired for right away is just like buying more of the stuff you already have, or the newer version of stuff you already have. And I just like, it just I know what it takes to get those kind of deals done. I can only imagine it. The confidence, you know, executives have to have because this has to go well. And so I applaud you and that whole team. I think it was, you know, Clark and his team kind of got it over the line on the field. But man, I just know, I know the feeling of choosing what is the opposite of what anybody else would do in a lot of cases, which is like just stay on the same path. Like, if you want to be fired. That’s not like, yeah, we’re going to choose Google Cloud. Google Clouds like I’m going to go and completely transform this. Nobody’s ever done it before. And I just applaud, and I’m in awe of the decision makers that have the fortitude to do that. But I know, again, coming really from T.K. and Rob down to – a vertical strategy to your leadership, it’s like you got to kind of look at these people in eye and be like, we got you. We are going to –
Anil Jain [00:41:31] Yeah, yes. Exactly right.
Tony Safoian [00:41:33] Support you. We’ve got to figure out the commercials. We’re going to figure out the PSO strategy. We’re going to figure out, you know, because.
Anil Jain [00:41:38] The partner strategy. Absolutely. Look, I appreciate your words and your compliments. I will say the real visionaries here are actually the customers. Right? Because for them taking these bold steps, I mean, a lot of media leaders are visionary, right? And if you look across all the media, and this is not just in the US, right? Like globally, you know, all of these people are in tune with a very dynamic set of variables that they have to optimize against and they have to make, you know, take risks and make investments. And, you know, I think that the thing that is awesome, right? About where we are today is that an environment has been created where it is now a compelling event, right?
Tony Safoian [00:42:26] Right, sure.
Anil Jain [00:42:26] Like you have to do this, right? Because your competitors are doing it. And in fact, we know it works because every single media executive is a consumer themselves, right? So they have to do it. And I just think, you know, I say this to media customers all the time, is it takes the media company, it takes a hyper-scale cloud provider platform like Google, and it takes our partners. The three kind of groups have to work together in order to make this successful. If one group does not lean in or, you know, does not participate, it makes it a lot more challenging. And luckily, we have an entire ecosystem in the media industry that is moving in that direction.
Tony Safoian [00:43:05] Yeah. And, you know, taking the executives to the highest level, taking the board with you on this journey, on this multi-month journey, I think is just very, very, very wise and often required here. You know, I remember big decision – doesn’t get board-level attention or input often, right? But like, hey, we’re doing this thing completely new. It’s not the dollar value of these alone, it’s the fortitude to do something different, I think. And it helps to take those decision makers along the whole way, right?
Anil Jain [00:43:43] Yeah, it’s necessary. It’s necessary. But I think, you know, the excitement, Tony, that you feel that I feel about what’s happening here is, is we’re going to see a lot more of this and we’re just getting started. So we’re really excited. And, you know, hopefully everyone is paying attention because, and I think they are, you know, these kind of couple announcements we’ve had recently with Globo and Univision are landmark deals in the industry. But, you know, they build on top of the work we’re doing with Fox Sports, with Major League Baseball, and kind of a litany of media partners globally who I think are thankfully are very keen on working together. And we expect to do a lot more collaboration.
Tony Safoian [00:44:28] Totally. And Google makes the ideal partner for a lot of reasons, global network, latency, capabilities. Google doesn’t have a studio, all these reasons. But we’re really excited. You know, the vertical strategy is just really, I think, starting to – new for Google if you think about the industry strategy, starting to bear fruit and because now we have people at Google and your partners talking to – people like you who operated in their shoes, you know, I think makes a huge difference. And thank you so much for coming on the – great partner in M&E, we share a bunch of great logos together, and I know we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible. So we’re really bullish on the rest of ’21 and the years ahead.
Anil Jain [00:45:19] Yeah. Thank you. Likewise, thank you for your partnership. You know, there is no shortage of kind of on my LinkedIn feeds, seeing all the great things SADA is doing and doing with us. And so, in fact, I got to say, we’re so busy, there’s so much going on. I learn a lot about Google Cloud when I see things that your team has posted. So and I have a lot of colleagues and friends that are also at SADA that I love to work with. And so we’re excited and we’re very bullish as well.
Tony Safoian [00:45:48] Hey, we don’t mind being opinionated. All we do is Google Cloud, there’s a reason we’ve chosen this path. We – get to the narrative and inside guys, you know, together. But thank you so much, Anil. We have a great, great year ahead of us and – really get excited. There’s nothing that you and I love more than a win like the Univision one and the Grupo Globo one and hopefully a bunch more we’ll write together.
Anil Jain [00:46:14] Absolutely. I look forward to it, Tony. Thanks a lot.
Tony Safoian [00:46:16] Thank you.
