A face in the Cloud

Mark Neufurth Transcript

Joe - 00: 00:01: Hi and welcome to the Beyond the Screen podcast. I'm your host, Joe Nash, and today I'm joined by Mark Neufurth. Mark has been at IONOS for 25 years across numerous roles and as marketing strategist, provides market analysis using his considerable experience in enterprise cloud. Welcome, Mark. Thank you for joining me today.

Mark - 00: 00:38: Yeah. Good morning, Joe. Thank you very much for being here today.

Joe - 00: 00:41: I'm very excited to chat to you about our topic for today, to kind of set that up and to work us into the discussion. I want to talk a little bit about your history at IONOS to date. So obviously we covered in the intro that you've been at the company for a really long time. How did that start out?

Mark - 00: 00:54: So, first of all, I had another life before I joined an internet company for sure. Actually, I was working for a bank and then decided to start law at university. But of course, I failed actually, so I dropped out of university. And then I was a pariah here in Germany. It isn't well-liked to be someone not being able to achieve something and pass an exam. So nobody wanted me, actually. I wrote 60-plus applications back then in the 90s, then my neighbor told me, “okay, join 1&1”. They take nearly anyone. Of course, I thought he would be insulting me, actually. But then I wrote an application and got an interview invitation the other day and drove over and they interviewed me for 30 minutes and said, “Okay, when can you start?” I said “Next month.” And they thought, no tomorrow. And so I was in the internet, you imagine, in December 1997, no one knew anything about internet. Actually, though, it was quite a coincidence. I had no clue at all about computers, email or something else like that.

Joe - 00: 01:58: Yeah, absolutely. And that actually kind of leads me into my first question, which is, you've been working in the cloud or what would become the cloud? And it's the industry, we know it today for a really long time. How have you seen it change in that time?

Mark - 00: 02:11: As I said, 1&1 was investigating in offering internet access service back then. And of course, that's why I started actually doing consulting to potential customers who had known something about actually the internet, but just they didn't know the thing actually. So we were consulting internet access customers back then and trying to win them over as customers. And then by sheer coincidence as well, and it was just an ordinary average day, let's say that. And then people began to call us and ask curious things about PHP, CGI scripts, FTP, HTP and Reversing, what were they talking about? That's nothing to do with internet access, actually. No, it hadn't, actually. Three weeks after we were better off with information. Actually, we hadn’t known that our company had started a joint venture with a company called Partner in Carlton, which were offering web hosting.

Joe - 00: 03:07: I see, okay.

Mark - 00: 03:08: Another miracle. Web hosting. What's that? Okay. Of course, we knew there were internet pages, of course, the three Ws actually, but nothing else. And then we were investigating in that area as well. And since I'm curious by nature, I draw into the matter and got curious about internet and the things behind the scene. So anything about DNS and TCP, IP networking and everything which is behind web hosting, behind the surface of a web page? I became a specialist in consulting on web hosting to customers. They haven't a clue about it. So just in order to be someone spreading the gospel, to the people not still a believer.

Joe - 00: 03:48: Right, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. So when you were doing that; consulting to first customers, and as you said, spreading the gospel, how were you conveying the industry change at the time? Because obviously, as you said, this was new territory for you as the company on the forefront. How were you communicating that value to the customers?

Mark - 00: 04:06: First of all, that's in the DNA of 1&1 to make things easy for customers. People wanting to engage in something, but don't want to become a specialist by their own. So it is of course mandatory to offer things which are quite easy to approach and easy to get in. And that's something, first of all, the explanation I was doing as a consultant. But of course to offer actually means… UX interfaces, for instance, which are quite self-explanatory. That's something which worked well. And of course there was some kind of vanity back then as well. Our first marketing campaign was like your good name on the internet. My last name, actually, .de was something. Of course, I secured a domain name by myself. You could do it for a couple of euros or back then still the Deutsche marks. And though that was quite something that was very attractive and of course it was a gold rush back then. Imagine late 90s, early zero years; there was anyone wanting to go onto the internet and bringing their club, for instance, their hobbies onto a web page. So it was easy to sell, to be honest.

Joe - 00: 05:17: Yeah, absolutely. And do you think that ease that you described there, do you think that's changed with the transition to the cloud?

Mark - 00: 05:23: Yeah, of course, it was a client-server system. Of course, web hosting is something you have a server in the back end at a provider's data center and you slice it into hundreds, even thousands of partitions in order to put websites on it. And of course, you have the client which is normally a browser, which draws into this server partition and pulls back the content of the server, the website. So it's of course the predecessor for the cloud because server virtualization didn't come with the cloud. It was already in existence before the cloud, but of course, it was another type of virtualization. Typically 20 years ago, you virtualized a single server into several partitions. But the cloud invented that. You had a pool of servers which combined their computing power and then this combined power got virtualized and spread across users. And so that's something which is quite natural involvement. But thanks to Amazon, they had the clue to sell their stuff, which the servers which weren't used for Christmas bookselling, pooling their resources and virtualizing them and selling them by the virtual pieces.

Joe - 00: 06:31: Yeah, absolutely. And so that's a really good overview of how things have changed in terms of the technology. We spoke about how you consulted your customers in the 90s. How do you now approach that conversation with the hyper-scalers, like AWS, like Azure, et cetera? How do you approach explaining to them how they should sell up their businesses in this environment?

Mark - 00: 06:48: Yeah, 20 years ago we were selling web hosting to consumers and small businesses, let's say that small business owners, the small offices, home offices, SoHos called Solopreneurs, but rather small customers, let's say that. And of course, the cloud is something which was in the early years, something exclusively for corporations or bigger customers, let's say that. So you had to have a certain minimum size in order to have the need and explore and make use of the benefits of the cloud. There was just more scaling. Imagine when you had a known data center with all the fixed expenses on it and of course all these investment decisions to be made to acquire another 150 servers or to rent them just for operation and expense from a cloud provider. Of course, you think twice before you do the decision to invest and spend that much capital investment on it. So that was more pressure for bigger companies order to go to that cloud thing. So by the matter of this fact, one in one later on IONOS called as the rebranding resorted to offering their services to customers which are B2B customers as well. That means the medium enterprises and even, let's say lesser corporations.

Joe - 00: 08:02: Wonderful. Okay. And as that offering started to roll out to those kinds of customers, what do you think is important for them to keep in mind as they're considering their provider? Like, why would those kinds of customers choose IONOS over choosing one of the hyper-scalers?

Mark - 00: 08:17: First of all, the cloud is useful for any one of us privately as well as monitored from a company perspective. First of all, the cloud is behind everything. Anyone who's using a smartphone uses the cloud and operates the cloud any day, any second when turning to an app any app has a back end in the cloud. So without knowing people are in contact with the cloud any second let's say that any photo is being taken is put into the cloud anyway. So any individual has a connection to the cloud. Imagine that everything is getting digitized these days and of course, digitization means there are more and more workloads to be put on a computer and the cloud is the essential and obvious place to be for these kinds of workloads for the sake of flexibility, the sake of scalability and ease of accessibility. So the cloud is of course something which is quite mandatory for anyone thinking about being independent in software development or workload processing. So that's something any customer needs. Then of course there's a difference. As I said corporations have a bigger need in order to save expenses and have complex workloads. Imagine IoT Internet of Things machinery controlling via the cloud. It's a very complex thing. So the bigger corporations have of course even more necessity for the cloud but of course they have complex workloads and turn to rather complex cloud providers out there. And then we come in right into the matter. Amazon - as I said - AWS Amazon web services as they are called, offers I guess the most comprehensive catalog of offerings around cloud services. You have to differentiate between the so-called infrastructure as a service which is underneath the basis of all cloud then the platforms as a service which is quite something that makes the cloud usable and comfortably usable actually. And then of course the software as a services which are on the surface in order which is something that the end user actually uses on top of a cloud basis. So the whole complexity holds stack and nearly any imaginable service is being provided by Amazon or their counterparts. Maybe Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Engine. That's fine, very fine. Imagine you are a BMW or Volkswagen German auto manufacturing company or a big machinery manufacturer. Of course, you need this Siemens which is of course a big German corporation or maybe General Electric which is the American counterpart. They are relying on big cloud providers for the sake of having nearly any imaginable service. But and there's always a but in it. Not any customer is Siemens, General Electrics or Volkswagen and they of course the American so-called hyper-scalers. These three AWS, Azure and Google of course tend to offer their things primarily to these big corporate customers. They are of big reputation as well. So it's easy to overcome that when you have certain testimonials with a good brand name, a household brand name though that's the strategy behind it very well they need that. So of course the corporation needed an Amazon or Microsoft Google need these corporate customers. But underneath that just one step the so-called German Mitchelstanzo midmarket companies or even smaller companies and of course the public sector which has its special needs or individual customers or solopreneurs need different services. They don't need the full-fledged range of any imaginable service around cloud and of course, they can't digest complexity. And even if the cloud makes things easier at the first hint side, it's still a complex thing. Without knowing about networks, server-client systems and security of all this, you just get lost in the cloud. So it's good to have the right fitting provider for any need. And if you don't have these extremely complex needs you are better off with a smaller provider which you can turn to. Imagine when you are a customer in the middle of a night you got a problem of just we are a German customer, not that fluent in English and you have a problem but you need it and it's 04:00 in the morning. Yeah, you can open a ticket with a guy in India which pretends to speak German, making joke of course, but there are many people out there in India speaking German. But however, it's different. You just open a ticket and have to wait until the ticket is being handled with or you can turn to the phone and just phone someone speaking the vernacular you are used to. And so that's the approachability of a cloud provider is something which is very essential. You have to be at eye level with your customers when you're a small company as a customer of cloud and your cloud provider has let's say $250 billion revenue annually, of course there is a missed relationship between customer and provider and of course that means in the end the customer has to just click away the terms and conditions. He hasn't any choice actually. He can accept the terms and condition or he doesn't get customership with this cloud provider, take it or leave it. And of course, most companies which are customers of us just deal with us, negotiate with us, of course. And that's something that you can more easily handle as a smaller cloud provider. And it's of course still an open question when it comes to millions of customers. So we are serving several thousands of customers in the cloud and of course, we intend to offer cloud products which even scale more and we will be serving tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. But however, if you have a better accessibility, less complexity and of course good professional services around it, of course consulting the customer beforehand either individually or maybe by the perfect fitting tutorial which is quite appealing to a new customer, then, of course, you can make the cloud accessible and usable to anyone without special knowledge.

Joe - 00: 14:19: Covered a lot there and I want to follow up on some points. So we might be going back in time a little bit but I guess to dive into the first one. So earlier on in the conversation, you said obviously some of your customers were people who just wanted to get on the internet but didn't want to become specialists. And I think the distinction between infrastructure as a service and platform as a service is really key to that. When you've got these customers who obviously have heard about the cloud, have heard about the big hyper scalers and starting to size up their offerings, how do you set the reality of their capabilities in terms of hiring that expertise and bringing that in-house to build a team that could take them onto the cloud internally? How do you put that in perspective for them, what they're going to need to make that jump and therefore what provider they should be going forward?

Mark - 00: 15:02: There is of course a solution actually. So there is a gap between the knowledge customer side and of course, the range and complexity of the cloud offerings and this gap can be overcome by managed service providers. So by managed partners which are the man in the middle actually or the woman in the middle, let's say that this way. So the third person in the game which is capable of bringing a customer to the right cloud service and vice versa attracting the right customer to the right cloud. And so managed service partners, or service partners are essential for the flourishing of cloud services and can of course be of assistance for customers, for digitization. And we experience that in an ever-increasing level of, let's say, usage because managed service partners are for IONOS as well, very important for the success of business. And it means that we employ partners such as Tesla for more complex and bigger customers and other service partners for less complex customers. But however, who have the end relationship and get to the trust of a customer, that's something as well. Not only the technical capability for partners of essential, but the trust relationship to an end customer. Partner who has a trusted relationship with a customer for 30 years now. A system house. For instance, an IT system house which has been serving a customer for 30 years now and wants to help this customer in order to get into the cloud age, is of importance because this trusted relationship can translate into a cloud-based trust relationship. And the IT system house doesn't operate the It of the customer on their premise anymore. But instead of in the cloud with all the refactoring, that means the new building of software and the overhauling of existing software or just the re-coding, that means the complete rebuild up of software in the cloud. The system house as the partner can do it for the customer, but on a cloud premise instead of a customer's premise.

Joe - 00: 17:03: Great. And I think that point mentioned there about refactoring and rebuilding your software stack is a good opportunity to move into another topic that I know you're passionate about, which is the way in which you architect your cloud applications and how many services and what kind of services you use. What has been your experience with seeing customers start to make those decisions about the spread of services that they should be employing on the cloud?

Mark - 00: 17:26: Oh, that's a very interesting topic. Actually. When I started working in internet companies, there was still the waterfall project management process. You just build the software and give a release date and then of course, everyone is rushing to that date actually. And then they're shuffling out the things at the date, anything at all. But then they came, these agile guys back, well, 15 years ago or so, I guess it was, and then they said, okay, we have to be agile, let's put it out piece by piece. Anything which is ready just put it out. And then in the wake of this agility process, software developers invented these so-called microservices, which are very good and actually in order to slice down the software into many serviceable pieces and of course put them out, but fit them out with anything they need for survival out there, these software pieces. So microservices are great in order to have very agile software which can adapt to any new need over the course of days, even hours actually in extreme. That's of course great for, let's say, the applications for smartphones. That's the best example for it. They need these called microservices. However, you have to have people who know how to create microservices and of course, these are in short supply, you can imagine that. And if you put these microservices or microservices instigated software into containers, software containers, it gets even more wild. The software containers deliver the necessary infrastructure for a software piece, but they are roaming across the ocean of the internet, let's say that this way. And so you have to make sure that they don't get lost on the sea, let's say. And so then you need Kubernetes from orchestrating the software containers. So what sounds very flexible and agile gets complicated because where's the container, who's the software piece, what does the microservice, it got lost, it went down, it broke. So if you are capable of designing these systems, you are in a very good position since you've got a very flexible, let's say, software body. But if you are not, then it gets a bit more complicated. So in recent weeks only there has come up a discussion on the revival of the monolith, the software monolith, the good old thing which was put out by waterfall project management. And because anything is fashioned, any fashion comes again after a certain period of time. And so I'm curious how this discussion will evolve and spin out. Maybe it's better fitting to a human brain that you have everything under control and see it actually on your desk and not having spread it across thousands of containers across the world, across the room, across the building. I guess it's a psychology thing first of all. And then of course a problem of capability of handling the things.

Joe - 00: 20:16: Yes, very timely discussion at the time of recording. There was an article just yesterday from the Amazon Prime Video team saying they're moving back to monolith from a serverless architecture. That coming from an Amazon team as well who is obviously on AWS. It's a very hot and very timely discussion. I've mostly encountered monoliths myself. I think I've been fortunate to work at a number of companies why? I say fortunate, fortunate from a complexity management perspective to work at a number of companies that are like well-known holdouts on keeping to monoliths rather than going to microservices. You mentioned the capabilities there in terms of what the companies actually need to be able to manage that. Where is the transition point? When does a mid-sized company, like the kind of companies we were talking about earlier, when do they need to make that transition to that capability? Settling for a monolith, when should they make that decision?

Mark - 00: 21:10: There are more trigger points, let's say that more than one. First of all, of course, any software gets old over time and of course, many middle stand or mid-market customers, of course, have software It services which were invented maybe in the last century or the 70s actually most times even big mainframe machines working on and software produced in the course. This is still working and nobody wants to touch a working and running system without necessity. However, the people familiar with this kind of software or system maintenance get aged as well and just don't work anymore. They are pensionists by now. So you have a certain pressure in order to overcome this. And of course, as I said, this agility and flexibility. Imagine you offer things and renew these offerings every three or five years and then you got new customers which are used to renewals any week, any month, any year. You got in trouble because they don't want to wait for five years for a new piece of service actually or a new product. So you have to invent yourself, reinvent yourself in order that you are able to bring out something new in shorter intervals. Even if you produce a machinery which is worth 50 million apiece you have to fit it out with additions, with add-ons and push them out maybe every six months or so just in order to have the impression by the customer that this kind of machinery is living. And I get something for the money and I always get a new impulse for my money. And of course when younger people get older and get decision-makers to buy this expensive machinery they want it. They are used to it actually. They want it. So the mid-market customer with the systems built and designed in the have to reinvent sooner or later. They have to. The second thing is of course when they have their stuff on premise it's always something. Energy is expensive these days and if you scale things, you scale even the learning curve on saving energy and you can't do it on your own in your data center. So if you want to save energy and you want to overcome the risk of investing into your own data center stuff, the cloud is a better way to go. The third thing is, of course, security these days, you can imagine, not only since the Ukraine war started, even before there was tremendous pressure on our customers in the cloud as well, to undermine systems, to infringe with systems. And you can do it on your own, fight against these evil people out there, or you can join forces in a tribe, let's say the cloud tribe or the cloud flock. Yeah, of course, let's say flocking. That's good. Actually. Sheep come together in order to act as a flock, maybe even saved by a shepherd stock to protect them from the wolves. It's the same.

Joe - 00: 24:01: I like it.

Mark - 00: 24:02: You can be a sheep of your own in terms of security. It security. Or you can join the flock and a shepherd on your side.

Joe - 00: 24:09: Perfect. That's very apt on that point of saving energy. And obviously, one of the big dreams of the cloud and of Kubernetes and of service meshes and being able to manage your services in this way is the dream of the resources only being used exactly when they're needed. They pack themselves away and save you loads of money. How do you see that play out? Is that a dream that's often met for most mid-market companies who get into this space?

Mark - 00: 24:33: Yeah. Of course, there are two aspects as well. First of all, server parks in clouds, of course, consume energy, a tremendous amount of energy. However, since the cloud operators are doing this stuff any day and have to pay the bill, first of all, they are eager on saving energy, so they put enormous resources in exploring ways to save energy. That's, of course, sometimes hardware-based, most times even more than often software-based, with clever software, better networking, you can save energy. So the learning curve is spent any minute, actually, and it's getting better and better. And as a customer, and even as a mid-market customer, you can make use of this learning curve as a service. We save energy on behalf of our customers. Yeah. And that there will be something that will be in USP in the future to help our customers to achieve their sustainability goals. And they've got sustainability compliance, even in five years in the future, they have to fulfill compliance regulations which turn to sustainability as well, and we assist them in helping that. You can do it on your own as well. First of all, you may be even better in saving energy, but overall, on average, the cloud provider, by its fear profession and its motivation to save energy on behalf of the customer will do better on average. The second thing is of course the cloud can, when it's cleverly managed, save IT operation money. Of course it cost this thing as well. But is a difference whether you first of all buy these things or rent it. If you rent it only exactly the time you need it and have a management system behind it that you shut down your systems when you don't need it, then you save money at all. And it's even better if the provider doesn't have that complexity in pricing. Imagine if you have hundreds of services running in parallel with thousands of pricing points. It gets difficult to monitor and to shut down. You may be tempted to shut down one thing, but then the other breaks down without intention, so you let them run just for the sake of it's better to have them run than to shut them down. And then the bill, the resulting bill at the end of the month kicks you out from the chair. So that's better to have some providers, at least with lesser pricing points, only a couple of pricing points and not that many interwoven services. Since then, of course you can build wonderful things, miracles, palaces, you can build anything in the cloud, but of course then you have to pay for it and it's too complex.

Joe - 00: 27:06: Yeah, I think it's practically a meme at this point amongst individual developers who go to explore these very flexible cloud offerings that once you sign up for them, you will continue to get bills and you think you've cancelled all the services, but there's still something costing money somewhere. So I totally agree on that point. I also love learning curve as a service. That is probably the best as a service acronym I've ever heard.

Mark - 00: 27:27: Yeah, it gets even better. Joe. Imagine when you want to save money. Actually, you can save money as a mid-market customer or any customer. If you have a server in your basement, someone has to operate it, to patch it, to plug and whatever, but find these people. Imagine you're situated North of Newcastle in England. I guess people were young and capable turn to London for a career, but they are missed in the north of England and they don't have anyone operating your server and then the bad guys come and want to infiltrate your server. What do you do? Of course you put the server where people are doing server monitoring, operating, plugging and securing. Any day you externalize the problem to someone else and the operational cost managed services out of the cloud are a cost saver in itself. That's the point I want to stress.

Joe - 00: 28:17: Yeah, absolutely. And one point I want to pick up on because I think it's been a recurring theme in lots of the things that you've said is the importance of locality, of where your cloud provider is based. You mentioned it there in terms of talent, you've mentioned it in terms of support and the language you speak to support. Do you think it's useful and important to work with cloud providers that are in your region and understand your regional context?

Mark - 00: 28:37: First of all, you have to imagine that the cloud is the internationalizer at all. We are working here in our Berlin office here at IONOS with people who are coming from 50 plus nations. So the cloud is very international and our daily language is English. Even here in our Berlin office, I guess 90% of our meetings are being held in English and most break conversations at lunch break or so are being held in English as well, just in order not to exclude someone. So the English is the Lingua Franca, as you may say, for the cloud. And people come into the cloud and it doesn't depend on where they come from. However, even if they are working, maybe someone from India is working in Ireland for an American cloud provider serving Romanian customers. Even in this constellation, it is essential that, of course, the cloud provider from America, first of all oblies the laws in Ireland and of course has to adopt to customers in Romania. And I don't want to tell you a thing, but of course, not anyone in America is being familiar with things which are going on in Romania. And for instance, if you are doing an Hungarian marketing campaign, by sheer coincidence in Romania, it might rebuff your customers there, because there are frictions between these two countries. Actually, you have to be familiar with European complexity. I don't want to say a thing, but however, I guess that not any American cloud provider is familiar with all these complexities over here and these issues.

Joe - 00: 30:04: Yeah, and of course that goes both ways.

Mark - 00: 30:06: Many of these issues are not logic. Of course. That may be, however, but we are not talking about logic, but about customer philosophy and psychology. And you have to suit your customer, not the other way around. That's my conviction, actually. You have to suit your customers needs and not the other way around. And at the end of the day, imagine to come to a point, imagine that you are not agree with your cloud provider. Can you turn to a court? It's good to turn to a court within the jurisdiction you are used to if you don't have the right to do so. But you have to go to a district court in the United States, somewhere near Philadelphia. Who has ever done that, right? There's a cost risk in seeking legal help and assistance in the United States. We know it from any movie from Hollywood that there's a cost risk since American lawyers are very expensive and you are not familiar with the laws over there. So it's good to have a law jurisdiction which is your own. That means here in Europe. Continental Europe. Sorry, Great Britain. It's more or less the same, actually. Of course, in England it's another one. But it's good to have this peace of mind that you can turn to a court you are familiar with just in order something gets wrong in a business relationship. So that's good to have this legal regionality. Then of course it's the psychology in selling things. The good thing with the American cloud providers or with any technology coming from America is that it's meant to work globally and it's more often than not meant to work disruptively. That means bringing us into another age which is good. Without this American spirit in inventing things, the world wouldn't be where it is actually right now. So it's good to have this motivation from America or this kick in the butt, as you may say it. Sometimes in Europe we need these kind of motivation by America, first of all. But the other hand, we're still Europeans and that's for a reason. The Americans emigrated to America and it's good to have this kind of motivated people going over the Atlantic Ocean in order to seek their luck there. At the other hand, of course, we are the more thoughtful and the more people thinking twice about things and maybe seeming a bit reluctantly and more sleepy about things. But we consider and consider so and this reconsidering refines the American invention. Sure, let's say it this way. But on the other hand, America invents something and makes one size fits all. Even technology, which is of course only has a standard which is universally valid. However, even technology has to be adapted to local customs. Without that, if one size fits all and that's what might be good in California, mustn't be good in the Netherlands, essentially. So there is no clear relationship behind it. So that's something you have to have a local footprint and when it is for nothing else but law and law regulations. And that's one thing which I want to stress as well. In these times, in these political turmoil times we have here, it's good to have at least two ways where you source for things, logistics and even software has a logistic supply chain. Imagine you have a software which rests on a cloud server in Frankfurt, here in Germany. It's encapsulated. It runs in this data center on premise. But nearly any cloud service has a back end at the cloud provider's premise, home headquarters premise. That means in the United States, right? If there are no cables anymore crossing the Atlantic Ocean, no backend connection, without backend connection, no software functioning in Frankfurt, in the data center. That's something you have to consider in these times. Actually. Imagine the submarine just cut the cable. There are several hundreds of cable connections between Europe and America but you would be wondering how few of them are operated by the cloud providers itself. They are only a couple being operated by the cloud providers itself. And it's by sure, it's something for a strategic decision by someone meaning evil to mankind just to cut these cables essentially in order to cause trouble. And that's something you have to consider. So it's better to spread your risk and actually to spread technology across countries and not to have it as a single point of failure anywhere.

Joe - 00: 34:18: Yeah, and aside also from the physical threat as well, obviously you also have legislation.

Mark - 00: 34:23: You don't want to sit before any new US presidency election, you don't want to sit there and praise that the right decision is being made. I don't want to make it clear as you know what I mean, actually. So that's something you have to consider. I'm free to talk about it. You have to consider.

Joe - 00: 34:41: Yeah, no, absolutely. I totally agree. So we are coming up on time now and one of the things I think I appreciated from some of your writing that I've encountered is that you draw on a lot of varied philosophies from beyond the technology sphere in shaping, I think, your strategies and your advice. What do you think is the most underappreciated piece of conventional wisdom that you would share with business leaders who are thinking about heading into the cloud?

Mark - 00: 35:03: Don't follow fashion. Ten years ago actually was the cloud brand new over here in Germany. Even eight years ago it was still something which run into reluctance. Business decision-makers weren't sure what it's all about. They had where only the younger It people, younger developers which were fans of cloud, but they couldn't convince their superiors that it's something good. And of course, then all of a sudden in 2016 as there was such as a genie for out of the bottle, actually the cloud went fashionable. But then it couldn't go fast enough to these decision makers which were reluctant only one year ago. And then of course they took the most obvious thing that was the American cloud provider which was making the most marketing bus actually. And then of course, first of all reluctancy and then all of a sudden rush, gold rush mentality that is good for nothing actually. Either you are reluctant and do things one by one, one step after another, or you build a new business, then you can go with the fashion and can say okay, I bet it, I bet everything, I put every ask in one basket just in order to have an edge about my competition. And either or not, one day this one and the next day this one, it doesn't result in good things, actually.

Joe - 00: 36:21: Perfect. Yeah, I totally agree. Well, Mark, thank you so much for joining me. This has been wonderful.

Mark - 00: 36:25: Yeah. Thank you, Joe.