>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Samsung Developer's Conference 2017, brought you by Samsung. (electronic music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of the Samsung Developer Conference, here in San Francisco at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE media, co-host of theCUBE. I'm here with Gregarious Narain, who's the co-founder of Before Alpha, an old friend of mine who introduced me to pod-casting back in 2004, right when the MP3 was put into the RSS feed. The early days of blogging, the early days of social. You're one of the most prolific social engineers I know. You've been there from day one. Great to see you. >> Yeah, you too, man. Long time. >> What a wave it's been. >> I know. >> Web 2.0, you were at the front end of creating with-- >> Fortunately they didn't make a 3.0. [Both Chuckle] >> Thank God, because Web 2.0 bursted. But those were the days, I mean, just think back, okay, Web 1.0 post-bubble burst, Web 2.0 you were part of a crew of folks. We were all small community at the time, really kind of rubbing nickels together trying to make things happen. You know, back then TechCrunch was formed, PodTech was formed, you had your venture going on, and we all were, before social media existed, we were doing stuff. Scoble was brought down from Microsoft with my start-up, PodTech. But, we were all kind of trying to figure out this new infrastructure. And then the bubbling burst a little bit, but it ended up turning out to be true that social infrastructure was created. Facepost we saw pre-Facebook was obsolete; MySpace. But the social graph, okay, that extended out from RSS with enabled blogging created some great innovations. We're seeing the value of interest graphs develop. >> Yeah. >> And a term that I coined, called the Value-Graph is now extending on top of the interest graph. Some term that we call in theCUBE which is a new form of collaboration is happening. You're riding this new wave, you've got your new firm. You're leading companies through transformation. What's your take of the Samsungs of the world, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. You got a lot of these old tech guards. >> Yeah. >> Trying to be consumer companies and infrastructure companies, B-to-B means B-to-C. But B-to-B is 'boring to boring'. >> Yeah. >> We don't want B-to-B anymore, we want the new. >> Gregarious: That's right. >> Everything to everything. >> Gregarious: Yeah. >> Exciting to exciting. >> I think, you know, you nailed a lot of the points, I think, that are really interesting, because, you know, innovation is really about sort of like, blending cultural change and technological change together, right? And forming new things. And it usually is a succession of small iterations, And some moon shots, right? And I think like what Samsung's doing that's really interesting is that they bring all that stuff online in real time. Like, we don't wait, you know, ten years to hear about what the next innovation is. It's popping out before you even warm up your other phone, right? I think, you know, in the States, we're almost at a little bit of a disadvantage in seeing the breadth of Samsung, because like such of their footprint is actually significantly bigger. It's not nearly as adopted here, but I think as, you know, this, the theme today was the intelligence of things, really. I think it was a really powerful idea really. >> And they're onstage with Google, you see the relationship with Google, shining forward, I see a lot of big applause there, Google, also Android, not Apple, no iOS. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But this speaks to the consumer company of Samsung Hardware, even their IOT they are under the hood. >> Right. >> Geeky stuff, they put extra security modules in there, for device security, because now the hardware stacks are merging with software stacks. >> That's right, yeah. So, this is the challenge, because you know how hard it is to do database work. >> Yeah. >> We got a lot of unstructured data. >> Gregarious: Yeah. >> Data is now a real-time dynamic, self-driving cars. You can't have latency less than nanoseconds. >> Gregarious: Yeah, that's right. >> And so, databases just don't cooperate that way. >> Gregarious: Yeah. >> So a new architecture is being developed. What's your vision and thoughts about how companies are re-imagining? What are you seeing out there? I know it's early innings, but what are your thoughts? >> Well I think, you know, we went through this software as a service generation, right? Where, sort of software was at the center, right? Social was at the edge. Now the human is moving to the center, and I would say, with that, they're clutching to their devices, right? And so, there is a piece of hardware with every person basically, that's invoked. And I think hardware is becoming as extensible as software ultimately. And I think it is also being deconstructed, right? And I think a log of that Web 2.0 sort of aura was really the deconstruction, or the breakdown of sort of large monolithic services, down into smaller, discreet services that are addressable and serviceable. We're seeing that happen out on the hardware side as well. Things as really just micro-devices, you know, that embody all the pieces. >> If you look at the trend lines, right now we're kind of going back, but connecting the dots forward, there's a massive tsunami going on in opensource development. Linux Foundation was just down in L.A., talking about a exponential growth in new software shift, and a new class of developers coming in. Containerization in Cooper Netis' points to microservices, a whole other level of developer goodness at the top of the stack, freeing up the infrastructure configuration for the cloud, or 'dev ops' as we call it. >> Yeah. >> This is the phenomenon, this is the big wig. This isn't about developers being the guys writing, punching out code, this is front lines stuff. And certainly AR shows and devices from Samsung show. >> Well, and I think the interesting thing is that, with these hardware building blocks too, though, it's allowing software developers to articulate hardware without actually learning the hardware bits and pieces, right? So I think it's like, much idea obstraction, like, you don't have to know how byte code was generated now to work on the web, you sort of, don't necessarily know hardware is put together to be able to actually command an army of hardware pieces. >> How familiar with Samsung's cloud and data strategy, one of the things I see missing in the keynotes today, and clearly missing in the show, so this is kind of a critical analysis of Samsung, is I don't see a lot of the cloud. I see Smart Cloud, Samsung Cloud sprinkled around. I don't see a lot of cloud specifics. And they're not being specific around how the data is being used. >> Yeah. >> Like Alibaba there in China last week, data, data, data, refueling data, data acquisition, data usage, using data as a development tool, I'm not seeing that here. >> Well, I- >> Am I missing it, or...? >> I don't know, well I think at some of the pavilions around there are deeper dives in that, but I might argue that this is almost an intentional thing, right, like in some ways, because we're consumerizing more and more of these pieces. You know, AI scares the crap out of a lot of people. Right? Like and so do I really want to go deeper? >> You mean in a creepy way, or just like a surveillance way? >> I think all ways, right? Like, people are, you know, much like with personalization, you want to all wait until it's too good, right? And you know, I think this is a challenge. >> John: Like what else do they know about? >> Yeah, exactly, right? And so, how much of weeds are necessary? I think like at a developer-centric event like this, yes, like there definitely should be deeper dives, but likely not on that, I mean- >> So, from a messaging standpoint, probably best not to put data out there? It brings up questions. >> Yeah, all this stuff, this is Blendo, right? It all becomes consumer now, right? Like, so the more you put out there, the more you sort of alienate, potentially, adoption. >> So one of the things that we see, obviously, with theCUBE covers hundreds of events in the Enterprise and emerging tech area, but as we get more to the consumers with Samsung, Alibaba, Amazon, and so on, the consumerization trend is definitely here. That changes how businesses do business. IT, information technology, or called IT departments are no longer a department, it's now a fabric of how companies work because you have on-premise hardware, you buy your servers, but now you're operating on a cloud model. >> Yeah. >> You're using public Cloud with it; Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Samsung, whatever, do people care, if it works? >> Yeah. >> So this new phenomenon is shaping how companies are architecting their innovation strategies. >> Yeah. >> You guys are doing a lot of this at your Before Alpha venture. >> Gregarious: Yeah. >> What are you guys doing, is it early days? Are you just basically like, crawl, walk, run stage? Give us an update on the customer. >> Yeah, we look at innovation from like four points of view. As I mentioned earlier, that technological versus cultural, and really, you know, it goes back to the hardest start-ups, right, it's like when large companies see start-ups, they're like, we love what these guys are doing, and the real question they should ask is, "why do these guys exist?" Right? And usually, it's like either one thing, right? Like our norms or our beliefs have changed on the cultural side, or there's a new model of efficacy, or efficiency that's possible, right, inside of your business. So, we will get a perspective change, like am I in the right business, right? Is Samsung in the hardware business, or are they in the intelligence business? Right, like sort of question their positing now, right? What's the persona then, if we're in the intelligence business, 'cause suddenly it's not just the people who buy hardware bits and pieces, it's all the people who consume intelligence. What are the processes we use to build that stuff, how do we surface it, and of course, what are the products? What are the things that land in people' hands? >> Yeah, and I think one of the things I would add to that, is that the element of how they use compute power, because we look at internet of things, which is a message here, it's not too sexy, mainstream doesn't get IOT, but AI can service itself, self-driving cars essentially, you know, machine learning meets IOT which you could call AI. People can grop that and understand the self-driving car, but, you know, airplane connected to the internet, or machines on a factory line, that brings up the role of the data, so the compute power is critical. You don't want to move data around the network, so it's interesting how companies will buy their compute. Do they rent it? Do they send it around like a virtual machine? >> Yeah. >> So these are like legacy infrastructure things that are really high impact to architecture. >> Yeah, well you know, and also when you think about you know, fractional compute, and the whole timeshare model for compute, it is also another area where you have to really readjust, and reconfigure the way your entire system works, to be able to take advantage of it. >> Yeah, and one of the things we're seeing, when it comes to Intel transforming from being a chip company to a supplier of equipment to basically a compute company. >> Yeah. >> We're seeing things that- >> It's that perspective change, right? >> Well, yeah, I mean you got to look at computers now, with Cloud, unlimited potential resources. >> Exactly. You can spin up a zillion virtual machines on the cloud, to do an edge analysis, whether it's a car or something else that's a luxury we didn't have back in the days when you were doing your first venture, did we? >> Yeah, no. >> Whole new world. Final thoughts, what are you working on now? What's the coolest thing you're doing? Give us an update on what's happening for you in the next year or so. >> Ah, the coolest thing, I think, the most exciting work is when we work with companies who sort of understand that either the future is upon them, or that they need to get ahead of it, right? And so, like I say when we're working with customers who do have perspective change, it's like really reinventing their universe, I think that's really, really powerful. It's better, you know, when it's proactive, as opposed to like, great, someone just sat on our head, but you know, sometimes you get there how you get there. So we're doing a lot of work I think looking at like, the technology of the future, but more importantly, how it will impact consumers today, and you know, really the evolution of your own customer base. >> Co-founder of Before Alpha, he's the 'Lead Alpha.' Gregarious, great to have you on theCUBE. Final thought, you've seen many waves, you've worked as a CTO, you've worked on start-ups, you worked with database, you worked social technology, now you're working kind of helping customers put together the future. What's the big learnings that you've seen over the past ten years that you're putting into place now, from a practical perspective to bring to your customers? >> Yeah, you know, I think everyone asks me, 'what's the secret to innovation?' That's the number one question I probably get. I have a list but the one thing I put at the top of the list is permission, right, which is that organizations tend to fail at this because people don't feel like they have permission to do it, they don't have permission to fail, they don't have permission to not work on something else that's taking up fifty percent of their calendar, right? And I think, you know, you see Samsung's innovative culture right, like for other brands, companies, corporations to be successful, if they don't enable, give that permission to their employees, they're never going to make it. >> Certainly with Cloud, you can try something new, and iterate, we see the lean start-up culture, kind of growing and artistry kind of coming in mainstream. Thoughts on artistry and art in technology coming together? >> I think it was a natural, peanut butter and jelly kind of moment from the beginning. Right, you talk to any engineer, any developer, they view what they do as art, right? And the expression of that, it takes any number of forms. >> And the great news is at the front lines, as they get more consumer tech, with like Samsung and Apple, you see guys out in the front lines really adding value, changing the scope of what's possible. >> It's the creator movement, right? Like they were having here is a big theme at this event as well. >> Right, creator moment, building the good apps, great technology, just theCUBE, creating great content here on the ground, at the edge of the network, here at the Samsung Developer Conference in Moscone West in San Fransisco. I'm John Furrier, be back with more after a short break. (electronic music)

(digital music) >> And we're back live in New York. It's theCUBE. It's not SNL, it's better than SNL. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here with about 10,000 to 12,000 folks. (John chuckles) There is a ton of energy here. There's a ton of interest in what's going on. But one of the things that we know that AWS is really well-known for is its massive ecosystem. And one of its ecosystem partners is joining us. Please welcome Domenic Ravita, the VP of Product Marketing from SingleStore. Dominic, great to have you on the program. >> Well, thank you. Glad to be here. >> It's a nice opening, wasn't it? (Lisa and John laughing) >> I love SNL. Who doesn't? >> Right? I know. So some big news came out today. >> Yes. >> Funding. Good number. Talk to us a little bit about that before we dig in to SingleStore and what you guys are doing with AWS. >> Right, yeah. Thank you. We announced this morning our latest round, 116 million. We're really grateful to our customers and our investors and the partners and employees and making SingleStore a success to go on this journey of, really, to fulfill our mission to unify and simplify modern, real time data. >> So talk to us about SingleStore. Give us the value prop, the key differentiators, 'cause obviously customers have choice. Help us understand where you're nailing it. >> SingleStore is all about, what we like to say, the moments that matter. When you have an analytical question about what's happening in the moment, SingleStore is your best way to solve that cost-effectively. So that is for, in the case of Thorn, where they're helping to protect and save children from online trafficking or in the case of True Digital, which early in the pandemic, was a company in Southeast Asia that used anonymized phone pings to identify real time population density changes and movements across Thailand to have a proactive response. So really real time data in the moment can help to save lives quite literally. But also it does things that are just good commercially that gives you an advantage like what we do with Uber to help real time pricing and things like this. >> It's interesting this data intensity happening right now. We were talking earlier on theCUBE with another guest and we said, "Why is it happening now?" The big data has been around since the dupe days. That was hard to work with, then data lakes kicked in. But we seem to be, in the past year, everyone's now aware like, "Wow, I got a lot of data." Is it the pandemic? Now we're seeing customers understand the consequences. So how do you look at that? Because is it just timing, evolution? Are they now getting it or is the technology better? Is machine learning better? What's the forces driving the massive data growth acceleration in terms of implementing and getting stuff out, done? (chuckles) >> We think it's the confluence of a lot of those things you mentioned there. First of all, we just celebrate the 15-year anniversary of the iPhone, so that is like wallpaper now. It's just faded into our daily lives. We don't even think of that as a separate thing. So there's an expectation that we all have instant information and not just for the consumer interactions, for the business interactions. That permeates everything. I think COVID with the pandemic forced everyone, every business to try to move to digital first and so that put pressure on the digital service economy to mature even faster and to be digital first. That is what drives what we call data intensity. And more generally, the economic phenomenon is the data intensive era. It's a continuous competition and game for customers. In every moment in every location, in every dimension, the more data hat you have, the better value prop you can give. And so SingleStore is uniquely positioned to and focused on solving this problem of data intensity by bringing and unifying data together. >> What's the big customer success story? Can you share any examples that highlight that? What are some cool things that are happening that can illustrate this new, I won't say bit that's been flipped, that's been happening for a while, but can you share some cutting edge customer successes? >> It's happening across a lot of industries. So I would say first in financial services, FinTech. FinTech is always at the leading edge of these kind of technology adaptions for speeds and things like that. So we have a customer named IEX Cloud and they're focused on providing real time financial data as an API. So it's a data product, API-first. They're providing a lot of historical information on instruments and that sort of thing, as well as real time trending information. So they have customers like Seeking Alpha, for instance, who are providing real time updates on massive, massive data sets. They looked at lots of different ways to do this and there's the traditional, transactionals, LTP database and then maybe if you want to scale an API like theirs, you might have a separate end-memory cache and then yet another database for analytics. And so we bring all that together and simplify that and the benefit of simplification, but it's also this unification and lower latency. Another example is GE who basically uses us to bring together lots of financial information to provide quicker close to the end-of-month process across many different systems. >> So we think about special purpose databases, you mentioned one of the customers having those. We were in the keynote this morning where AWS is like, "We have the broadest set of special purpose databases," but you're saying the industry can't afford them anymore. Why and would it make SingleStore unique in terms of what you deliver? >> It goes back to this data intensity, in that the new business models that are coming out now are all about giving you this instant context and that's all data-driven and it's digital and it's also analytical. And so the reason that's you can't afford to do this, otherwise, is data's getting so big. Moving that data gets expensive, 'cause in the cloud you pay for every byte you store, every byte you process, every byte you move. So data movement is a cost in dollars and cents. It's a cost in time. It's also a cost in skill sets. So when you have many different specialized data sets or data-based technologies, you need skilled people to manage those. So that's why we think the industry needs to be simplified and then that's why you're seeing this unification trend across the database industry and other parts of the stack happening. With AWS, I mean, they've been a great partner of ours for years since we launched our first cloud database product and their perspective is a little bit different. They're offering choice of the specialty, 'cause many people build this way. But if you're going after real time data, you need to bring it. They also offer a SingleStore as a service on AWS. We offer it that way. It's in the AWS Marketplace. So it's easily consumable that way. >> Access to real time data is no longer a nice-to-have for any company, it's table stakes. We saw that especially in the last 20 months or so with companies that needed to pivot so quickly. What is it about SingleStore that delivers, that you talked about moments that matter? Talk about the access to real time data. How that's a differentiator as well? >> I think businesses need to be where their customers are and in the moments their customers are interacting. So that is the real time business-driver. As far as technology wise, it's not easy to do this. And you think about what makes a database fast? A major way of what makes it fast is how you store the data. And so since 2014, when we first released this, what Gartner called at the time, hybrid transaction/analytical processing or HTAP, where we brought transactional data and analytical data together. Fast forward five years to 2019, we released this innovation called Universal Storage, which does that in a single unified table type. Why that matters is because, I would say, basically cost efficiency and better speed. Again, because you pay for the storage and you pay for the movement. If you're not duplicating that data, moving it across different stores, you're going to have a better experience. >> One of the things you guys pioneered is unifying workloads. You mentioned some of the things you've done. Others are now doing it. Snowflake, Google and others. What does that mean for you guys? I mean, 'cause are they copying you? Are they trying to meet the functionality? >> I think. >> I mean, unification. I mean, people want to just store things and make it, get all the table stakes, check boxes, compliance, security and just keep coding and keep building. >> We think it's actually great 'cause they're validating what we've been seeing in the market for years. And obviously, they see that it's needed by customers. And so we welcome them to the party in terms of bringing these unified workloads together. >> Is it easy or hard? >> It's a difficult thing. We started this in 2014. And we've now have lots of production workloads on this. So we know where all the production edge cases are and that capability is also a building block towards a broader, expansive set of capabilities that we've moved onto that next phase and tomorrow actually we have an event called, The Real Time Data Revolution, excuse me, where we're announcing what's in that new product of ours. >> Is that a physical event or virtual? >> It's a virtual event. >> So we'll get the URL on the show notes, or if you know, just go to the new site. >> Absolutely. SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution, you'll find it. >> Can you tease us with the top three takeaways from Revolution tomorrow? >> So like I said, what makes a database fast? It's the storage and we completed that functionality three years ago with Universal Storage. What we're now doing for this next phase of the evolution is making enterprise features available and Workspaces is one of the foundational capabilities there. What SingleStore Workspaces does is it allows you to have this isolation of compute between your different workloads. So that's often a concern to new users to SingleStore. How can I combine transactions and analytics together? That seems like something that might be not a good thing. Well, there are multiple ways we've been doing that with resource governance, workload management. Workspaces offers another management capability and it's also flexible in that you can scale those workloads independently, or if you have a multi-tenant application, you can segment your application, your customer tenant workloads by each workspace. Another capability we're releasing is called Wasm, which is W-A-S-M, Web Assembly. This is something that's really growing in the open source community and SingleStore's contributing to that open source scene, CF project with WASI and Wasm. Where it's been mentioned mostly in the last few years has been in the browser as a more efficient way to run code in the browser. We're adapting that technology to allow you to run any language of your choice in the database and why that's important, again, it's for data movement. As data gets large in petabyte sizes, you can't move it in and out of Pandas in Python. >> Great innovation. That's real valuable. >> So we call this Code Engine with Wasm and- >> What do you call it? >> Code Engine Powered by Wasm. >> Wow. Wow. And that's open source? >> We contribute to the Wasm open source community. >> But you guys have a service that you- >> Yes. It's our implementation and our database. But Wasm allows you to have code that's portable, so any sort of runtime, which is... At release- >> You move the code, not the data. >> Exactly. >> With the compute. (chuckles) >> That's right, bring the compute to the data is what we say. >> You mentioned a whole bunch of great customer examples, GE, Uber, Thorn, you talked about IEX Cloud. When you're in customer conversations, are you dealing mostly with customers that are looking to you to help replace an existing database that was struggling from a performance perspective? Or are you working with startups who are looking to build a product on SingleStore? Is it both? >> It is a mix of both. I would say among SaaS scale up companies, their API, for instance, is their product or their SaaS application is their product. So quite literally, we're the data engine and the database powering their scale to be able to sign that next big customer or to at least sleep at night to know that it's not going to crash if they sign that next big costumer. So in those cases, we're mainly replacing a lot of databases like MySQL, Postgre, where they're typically starting, but more and more we're finding, it's free to start with SingleStore. You can run it in production for free. And in our developer community, we see a lot of customers running in that way. We have a really interesting community member who has a Minecraft server analytics that he's building based on that SingleStore free tier. In the enterprise, it's different, because there are many incumbent databases there. So it typically is a case where there is a, maybe a new product offering, they're maybe delivering a FinTech API or a new SaaS digital offering, again, to better participate in this digital service economy and they're looking for a better price performance for that real time experience in the app. That's typically the starting point, but there are replacements of traditional incumbent databases as well. >> How has the customer conversation evolved the last couple of years? As we talked about, one of the things we learned in the pandemic was access to real time data and those moments that matter isn't a nice-to-have anymore for businesses. There was that force march to digital. We saw the survivors, we're seeing the thrivers, but want to get your perspective on that. From the customers, how has the conversation evolved or elevated, escalated within an organization as every company has to be a data company? >> It really depends on their business strategy, how they are adapting or how they have adapted to this new digital first orientation and what does that mean for them in the direct interaction with their customers and partners. Often, what it means is they realize that they need to take advantage of using more data in the customer and partner interaction and when they come to those new ideas for new product introductions, they find that it's complicated and expensive to build in the old way. And if you're going to have these real time interactions, interactive applications, APIs, with all this context, you're going to have to find a better, more cost-effective approach to get that to market faster, but also not to have a big sprawling data-based technology infrastructure. We find that in those situations, we're replacing four or five different database technologies. A specialized database for key value, a specialized database for search- >> Because there's no unification before? Is that one of the reasons? >> I think it's an awareness thing. I think technology awareness takes a little bit of time, that there's a new way to do things. I think the old saying about, "Don't pave cow paths when the car..." You could build a straight road and pave it. You don't have to pave along the cow path. I think that's the natural course of technology adaption and so as more- >> And the- pandemic, too, highlighted a lot of the things, like, "Do we really need that?" (chuckles) "Who's going to service that?" >> That's right. >> So it's an awakening moment there where it's like, "Hey, let's look at what's working." >> That's right. >> Double down on it. >> Absolutely. >> What are you excited about new round of funding? We talked about, obviously, probably investments in key growth areas, but what excites you about being part of SingleStore and being a partner of AWS? >> SingleStore is super exciting. I've been in this industry a long time as an engineer and an engineering leader. At the time, we were MemSQL, came into SingleStore. And just that unification and simplification, the systems that I had built as a system engineer and helped architect did the job. They could get the speed and scale you needed to do track and trace kinds of use cases in real time, but it was a big trade off you had to make in terms of the complexity, the skill sets you needed and the cost and just hard to maintain. What excites me most about SingleStore is that it really feels like the iPhone moment for databases because it's not something you asked for, but once your friend has it and shows it to you, why would you have three different devices in your pocket with a flip phone, a calculator? (Lisa and Domenic chuckles) Remember these days? >> Yes. >> And a Blackberry pager. (all chuckling) You just suddenly- >> Or a computer. That's in there. >> That's right. So you just suddenly started using iPhone and that is sort of the moment. It feels like we're at it in the database market where there's a growing awareness and those announcements you mentioned show that others are seeing the same. >> And your point earlier about the iPhone throwing off a lot of data. So now you have data explosions at levels that unprecedented, we've never seen before and the fact that you want to have that iPhone moment, too, as a database. >> Absolutely. >> Great stuff. >> The other part of your question, what excites us about AWS. AWS has been a great partner since the beginning. I mean, when we first released our database, it was the cloud database. It was on AWS by customer demand. That's where our customers were. That's where they were building other applications. And now we have integrations with other native services like AWS Glue and we're in the Marketplace. We've expanded, that said we are a multi-cloud system. We are available in any cloud of your choice and on premise and in hybrid. So we're multi-cloud, hybrid and SaaS distribution. >> Got it. All right. >> Got it. So the event is tomorrow, Revolution. Where can folks go to register? What time does it start? >> 1:00 PM Eastern and- >> 1:00 PM. Eastern. >> Just Google SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution and you'll find it. Love for everyone to join us. >> All right. We look forward to it. Domenic, thank you so much for joining us, talking about SingleStore, the value prop, the differentiators, the validation that's happening in the market and what you guys are doing with AWS. We appreciate it. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Domenic Ravita and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from New York at AWS Summit 22. John and I are going to be back after a short break, so come back. (digital pulsing music)

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with dev net in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube, but in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that. Creativity. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net senior vice president in general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe presenting accelerating automation with damnit brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX all that great stuff. Many Wade Lee, who's the director, senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first. We don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net creative, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years where virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you've had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are >>Coming online is, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. Uh, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for start a, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business stay alive. And to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>Now one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and, you know, have you guys got some acquisitions, you about thousand eyes? Um, um, you've got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game in security Cooper and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place and now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, um, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they have to build in and what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first, everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>Cause you know, you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. Well, you've >>Been falling, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people rumblings are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>We got dev net created right around the corner, virtual unfortunate won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. >>Thanks. Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard, uh, Susie is about people and one of the things that's close to your heart and you've been driving is, uh, as senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network, automation, developer, which Susie mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite data that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on a dev net site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dump space as well, and are helping people with that service or what it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. Okay. >>I ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned a observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we need it? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, um, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Eric and Mandy. If you guys can wrap up this accelerate automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, I'm only can imagine the enablement that's gonna create. Can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with dev net and tee up dev net create Mandy, we'll start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every Devin event over the past years, you know, damnit is bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that the people's skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the Duveneck community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping >>That customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. >>Can I add one, add one more thing? Yeah. I was just gonna say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>Yeah. That's what I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that. By saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. Happy to be here. >>Okay. I'm Jennifer with the cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment virtual tour face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching. >>Welcome back. And Jeffrey, >>The cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev data van, it's called accelerating automation with dev net and the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is, is not going away. They've been doing this since the middle of March or all the way to October. And so we're excited to have our next guest is Thomas Shively. He's the vice president of product marketing and data center networking for the intent based networking group at Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. Exactly, >>Exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls in their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16 hit and everybody had to go home. >>Wow, good point. Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network >>Much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more operative as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it, 2000 East to West, as we say on the data center. Right. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >>Right. You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning, can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends and the way I look at this trans as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while then. So in a sense, we, we, we prep was, or no, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little block, a little, little, uh, abrupt before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if he didn't, if he didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we sold our match. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. Yeah, >>I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of, of trends, right? The other great, uh, trend as public cloud, um, and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focused on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might have played some compliance reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your sinks. And so I sing in the end, what a, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed. But the logic context section, which we see in the last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is where a lot of my discussions I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of. >>Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. And I said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? >>Right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools, uh, and that's a whole range, right? And this is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speeds, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use NoMo tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further and saying, I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pleasing, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration with relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right? And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see a given. I, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about. The cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all of these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throat to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer. You, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just sit. I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they want to actually structure the operation. Right? One of the nice things around this or automation plus, uh, tool integration, cloning to, and integration is you actually opened this up, not a soul automation train, not just to the network operations personnel, right. You also open it up and can use this for the second ops person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, is literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional, you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I got to hand over the sec ups team, and they can directly call these these KPIs, right? Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>That's interesting, you know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously change software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those. None of those is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes to saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI decent, a controller or our multicell orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. Uh, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she formed Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is emotion where in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying, Neil, all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little plugin. I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetApps person or dev ops person or SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right. And it's simplest thing that like sent books and why moments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code Coda there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly. And that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation we're in and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning, that's the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily. Right, >>Right. That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right. Democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and can make the changes and then opening up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the, it says application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happening with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get projects started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lands, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right. This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right. And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to, uh, adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's not just automation. I say, we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private, private networks into which of private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing, what a business looks at, right. They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment. What's a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this. Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. It's really democratisation. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in, in, in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting is we, we started on the Cisco data center side. We started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on these, on these products, uh, they have all the capabilities they are, they can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them point. >>Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and in social media, right. What what's driving your digital transformation is that the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. I highly recommend everybody roll up his sleeves and you know, the best races you can have. >>And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, you know, like say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. I look forward to that as well. All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? >>I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, or along with our partner, DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's know, North of 70% >>Plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our, our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable as sort of the, of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my, you know, dog's name is the password, you know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all of the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively. And I make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if, when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, that there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I, I see that with an asterisk because, um, if, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant Tessa mill component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? Let's say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there in that, in that data set. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation, and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on the outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in, in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about what computers are gonna run on, or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so what, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right? There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to, you know, security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical do, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines, if the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if, if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code while we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company likes companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatize is the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick doc. I don't care, but they sort of laid out this pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy mean beyond GDPR and California consumer privacy act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and Mose. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He needs to be walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me, >>Really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is, is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or are you >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, try not try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming a, this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there? And what are you? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters. Isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass players go over there. Like what happened to the band? That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So things thanks for inviting me and I miss you, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says kidney, thanks so much for coming to the Q. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>After the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual. We're not face to face the cubes been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's, who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is beast vice president of product. Uh, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area it's converged in multiple theaters and technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you, but first thousand eyes is recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important, the new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, it's really been an exciting six months for the entire team and customers, >>You know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the Cova dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, the home of the conference book talk track we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandoned from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home. VPNs are passe. Maybe it's SD when maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed this at scale. What's your view on this? And what is thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a early, simple, uh, connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say, functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the it organization newly chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, to be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, as you get into some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data at the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. First off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right inside, you know, data, um, alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen. You have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, to allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as our employees, >>Classic policy based activity, taking it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it, people are like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CTPs infrastructure across, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you've got the cloud. How has your technology helped the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, a great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and where in the past you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need, enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, what, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. They're having to work collaboratively with a different ISP. If they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question, we think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it. Teams. Um, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them just got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a war situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment at time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to, uh, be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same se land-based rollout, where you're looking to say benchmark, and you can confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ESPs within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch, give you that competence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights. The classic financial model ROI got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation and who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things, but as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products, it means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the deal that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you've said, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need with the level of automation, you'll be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And, you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking for. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>And ultimately, I think, you know, when you're looking at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a fraud perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure that's running upon, but the network it's connected to, and then ultimately the user in the sense of that user and by leveraging that thousand eyes and being able to then integrate thousand into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developer's looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. We've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks Joe Vaccaro, vice president of product here, but thousand nine is now part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. You really have to automate you human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got a Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. >>Good to see Kuhn. >>Thank you for having me >>Joining him as Eric nip. He is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was cool. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think that the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them as the women, the flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah. W we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic that just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a serve as an elastic is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>And then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the, you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CIC pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as, and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. You know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. We like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security change from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no, I'm so, wow. The kudos that you, you found that book I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis in the primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices, that's digitally connected devices. >>Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about parameters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guys up or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data and the context, what data is being accessed. And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because of the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We at Dave runs it on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days at Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd and, and I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, con really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, because five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they've been able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to, you know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have a host Sarah that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing, you know, partners and customers employing programmability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that can provide, >>Um, bringing on board those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT in the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you, uh, clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an you're an a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, not itself was a, was a, a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean, obviously he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, we were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several years, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to me, programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that is automated, or if that decision requires some type of manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough, like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I don't want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for anybody that can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to it and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, who achieved it when incentive was secondary, they just wanted to have the bragging rights, like yeah, I beat Eric. Right? >>Right. Absolutely. No, it's a, it's it, you know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well, but I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media means, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So I, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are a bubble, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and do their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I, and I believe the status, this, and I'll probably get number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a, in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kind of gotten out of the fog of, of, of war for our fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that our customers, that people are happier working from home, people are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent and some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay in there in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to, to travel and, and check into a hotel and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part time as, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium, our, our local general manager has a virtual effort. TIF every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four, five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really, really grown and, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really about the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, uh, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of, of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. Uh, we're seeing really people dive into that and customers, um, co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology >>Can provide, but also how it impacts people. Has it been discussed and redefines process? >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it is, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and it's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the end, the, it lexicon as being that critical or that poor critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with them in another program, ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? And I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>All right. Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for, for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and, and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, mob bell must be happy because the old mother's day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power, that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners. And he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's businesses transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want to way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along the step in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. >>Right. That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that's the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. A new Cisco has pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional form. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. >>You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in this definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, in, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to bring it all together. It's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now, everything is cloud native. We have the ability to, to better, to better adjust, to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something ups to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. >>Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. Right. >>Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other side, >>Cloud multicloud >>Public cloud, you know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective in helping customers work through this, cause still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses, how are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. >>But you know, aside from, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of, uh, operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry, and the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. In that thing. You used to know what that was. Now you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. >>You really need to understand what's going on. And the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path there, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of that. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're on, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about in a dev net, really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some, you know, non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a, as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the doublet that gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they've built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology case that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes that the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here from around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with Devin brought to you by Cisco. >>When I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net, with Cisco, and we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos, where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into, you know, IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called street from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with Devon it in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube that in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. >>It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that creativity. So today you're going to hear from a number of experts. For example, TK key Anini is a distinguished engineer and a security pro. He's going to join us, his colleagues, Thomas Scheiber and Joe Vaccaro. They're going to help us understand how to apply automation to your data center networks, cloud, and security journeys. Cisco's Eric nip and Coon Jacobs will also be here with a look into Cisco's marketplace shifts. We'll also hear from dev net partners. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe. It's the cube presenting >>Decelerating automation with damnit >>Brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX, all that great stuff. Any Wade Lee, who's the director, a senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first, then we don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net, create all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme, accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X, a AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as well, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the covert hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business to stay alive and to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, uh, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and you know, you guys got some acquisitions youth about thousand eyes. Um, um, you got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game and security, Kubernetes, all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation of the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they had to build it. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home, how many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>I know you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. >>Well, you've been following, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got dev net created right around the corner of virtual unfortunate. Won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie is about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network automation, which Susie >>Mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your, what's your role? >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We committed very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite date that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the dev net site. And then my team also looks after community, such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dev net space as well, and are helping people with that servicer. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. >>So you mentioned, uh, observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we needed? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me all days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up, um, this accelerated automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, um, only can imagine the enablement that's gonna name, uh, create, can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with, at and T up dev net create Mandy we'll start. Yeah. >>Yes. I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, that's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the dev community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with creative this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. >>So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much, God, man, you can add, add one more thing. >>I'm just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is it it's happening in three regions and um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. Yeah. >>I was just gonna close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Yeah. >>The cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment say virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching Jeffrey here with the cube. Uh, we have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev net event. It's really accelerating with automation and programmability in the new normal, and we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So we're excited to have our next guest he's Thomas Sheba. He is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. >>Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light moment, which was, >>You know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you've got the kids home, you've got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >>Well, good point, Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls to zoom calls, but you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it was 2000, he still West, as we say on the data center. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. Right. >>You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. Can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends in the way I look at this trends as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your, your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we, we, we prep was, are normal, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little plot, a little, little, uh, Bret before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw her March. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. >>Yeah, I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend as public cloud, um, and cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might've played some clients reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your things. And so I think in the end, what, uh, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed, but the logic context section, which we see in the, um, last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions, I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focusing and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's a good point. And it said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which has in most of the infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just a foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? Right? >>And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. Uh, and that's a whole range, right? This is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use normal tools that they have in a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for it further and saying, I want to integrate this with like some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pieces saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration was relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see, uh, giving us, I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer or you, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just to say, sit, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they to actually structure the operation. Right. One of the nice things around this or automation plus a tool integration to an integration is you actually opened us up, not a sole automation train, not just to the network operations personnel. Right. You also open it up and can use this for the SecOps person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional process you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I gotta hand over the sec ups team and they can directly call, uh, these, these API is right, or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>Interesting. You know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And, and I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those, none of this is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it's just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes from saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI dcnm controller or our multi-site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she from Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is the emotion we're in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little clock. And I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at those, whether you're a net ops person or a dev ops person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly, then that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation where, and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily, right? >>That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and it can make the changes and then opening it up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the it's as application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of change the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I, to operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's just automation. I think we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing. What, what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment was a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this, Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>It's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting because we, we started on a Cisco data center. So we started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on, on these products, >>They have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them >>Good times for you, because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and social media, right? What what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. And I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeves, you know, the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah. And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So I say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. >>Okay. I look forward to that as well. >>All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>TK Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred. >>Uh, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side, a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what is that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, uh, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business? Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. Right? >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, or our survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the datasets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help, you know, simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical. What are you doing? You're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines is the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threat model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything has code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as, um, human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a communities, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>That's a good point. When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to the text-based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time, and I'm this old curmudgeon in the back of the room. Um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems it'd be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you putting on? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high-performance businesses. >>No, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all you can talk later is go over here. All your bass players go over there. I'm like, what happened to the band? >>That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says doing my part to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the cube. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>Come back to the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual will not face to face the cubes. Been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is BC vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multicloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area. It's converging multiple theaters in technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you. But first thousand nine was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talk programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers, you know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, home of the conference book talk track, we'll get to in a second, but exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe, maybe it's way. And maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running along for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was early simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. When you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level of level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you have to then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, I was getting to some of these high scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're gonna look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. You're first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right aside, you know, data alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the, of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen with our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as their employees, >>Classic policy based activities. And you take it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I gotta ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams are really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their safety VPN infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device and the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and we're in the past, you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need nibbling, that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization, but it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. >>They're having to work collaboratively with the different ISP that they're appearing with with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it, teams, um, and see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talked about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your balance, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same SC land-based rollout, where you're looking to seek benchmark and confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ISP within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights, the classic financial model ROI, you get baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you'd look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only processing gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>You know, ultimately I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network gets connected to, and then ultimately the user and the stance of that user, if I leveraging a thousand eyes and being able to then integrate that into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on today. >>I appreciate it. Thanks for having me >>Vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. >>You really have to automate your human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got >>Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Kuhn, >>Thank you for having me >>And joining him as Eric nappy is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute, because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was Coon. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them is when a flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic, the just overall the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers. Um, and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic, uh, is, is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>Yeah. And then, and then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the S you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CICB pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. Um, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, uh, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's, it's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. Uh, you know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book, and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book and, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no I'm so, wow. Cocoon is that you, you found that book on the I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So, uh, I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the I, you know, it's estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis. >>And primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guise of, or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data in the context, what data is being accessed. >>And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable, undercurrent, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave runs and on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, can really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, cause five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data, just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they'd be able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, uh, bringing on board, uh, those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>Right. >>Right. So Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT and the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an engineer and a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So of itself was a, was a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean obviously if you look back to the very early days of our vision, right, it was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, you were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to meet programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that decision is automated, or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody that can get there before me, maybe there's a little incentive tied to the incentive. Although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, uh, who achieved it when incentive was secondary. They just wanted to have the bragging rights, like, yeah, I beat Eric, right. >>You know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why, you know, you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media meme, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all, all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are. Uh, but, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I believe the stat is this, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I, you know, leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kinda gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that are customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent in some estimates, put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to >>Stay in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part-time right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally going to work from home, unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration, uh, that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events space where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and, and check into a hotel and, and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part-time as, as Eric also explain, but a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team, or, you know, even here in Belgium, our local general manager has a virtual effort, TIF every Friday, obviously skip the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four or five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but it has really, really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really >>About the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes the relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to us. We've seen really people dive into that and customers co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and redefines process >>That the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it's, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and there's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place in the end, the it lexicon as being that critical or that critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one, another program ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. Right. >>Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, my bell must be happy because the old mother's problem is finally solved. And when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the dub net certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just >>Like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what, what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. >>You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was a, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, >>Right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not >>Scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to, to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud multicloud, public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. >>And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, because still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like, what did he still look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. >>And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to, to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right. You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. >>It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit, cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the dev that specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with their vertical and working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes. If the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion, that's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. It happens happy to be here >>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco. What I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net with Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event, hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at dev net create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open for demos where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called straight from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite, um, advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

(soft music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting, Accelerating Automation with DevNet, brought to you by Cisco. >> And welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco DevNet event. It's really Accelerating with Automation and Programmability in the new normal. And we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So, we're excited to have our next guest. He's Thomas Scheibe, he is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco, Thomas, great to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and truly run it in normal as everybody can see on our background. >> Exactly, so, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep, and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the network, you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >> Well, (laughs) good point, hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. And then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise yes. What I do see actually is that as I said network becomes much more operas as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about agility and flexibility, these days we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, north to south and east to west, as we see in the data center. >> Right. >> And touches as for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >> Right, you know, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was (chuckles) some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office or are used to getting at school. >> Yeah, and I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. We clearly talking about some of these trends and the way I look at this trend as being distributed data centers and having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so, in a sense we prep was our normal we're prepping for. But as I said, resiliency just became so much more important. And, you know, one of the things I actually do a little preview for a blog I put out end of August around resiliency. If you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw it in March this is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. And I think this is the new normal for some time being. >> Yeah, I think so. So, let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend is public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. There's all types of variants on that theme, you had in that blog post about resiliency in data center cloud networking, data center cloud. You know, some people think, wait, it's kind of an either or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling both inner data center resiliency within multi data center resiliency within the same enterprise as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So, I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >> Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not counterintuitive because in the end, what I'm focusing on and the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. And that's really, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multicloud. In the end, what it is is really the ability to have the flexibility, to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reason. You might played some compliance reasons depending on which customer segment you're after. If you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your syncs. And so I think in the end what an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like a cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move syncs as needed. But the logic context section which we see in the last couple of months accelerating is really this whole theme around digital transformation, which goes hand in hand than was the requirement on the IT side really do. And IT operations transformation, right? How IT operates. And I think that's really exciting to see, and this was excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions I was customized. What does it actually mean with respect to the IT organization? And what are the operational changes there's a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly accelerated going through? >> Right, and automation is in the title of the event. So, automation is an increasingly important thing, you know, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data. Either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera. And a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those you know, kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. >> Yeah, that's a good point. And I said, TechLine, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from CloudReady, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud-native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? It's like the CloudReady is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that our customers have, network infrastructure or the Nexus 9000, they're all CloudReady, right? And what this really means, you have APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled. And that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability, right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools and that's the whole range, right? This is where the IT operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these APIs and use normal tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further saying, "I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools." Some go even further and saying, "This is like the cloud-native (indistinct), "Oh, I want to use, let's say, Red Hat Ansible, or I want to use (indistinct) Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I managed my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability plus the integration was relevant cloud-native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating in that motion. Which really then drives us how they run their IT operations. >> Right. >> And so that's a pretty exciting area to see. given as I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It's just not doing the operational change the process change is to actually get there. >> Right, and it's funny, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud-native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API, you know, pulling data from all these technical applications. So, hey, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within very small units of time. So, that you don't lose that customer. You complete that transaction. They check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these things that are now created with cloud-native applications that just couldn't really do before. >> Now, you're absolutely right. And this is like, just as I said, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers. How they want to actually structure the operation, right? One of the nice things around this whole automation plus cloud network tool integration is you actually opened us up not a sole automation training, not just to the network operations personnel, right? You also open it up and can use those for the SecOps person or for the DevOps person or for the CloudOps engineering team, right? Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process? Do you want to have a more traditional process, you have to request, a network operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hands it back over. Or do you say, "Hey, maybe some of these security things, "I can hand over the SecOps team and they can "directly call these APIs, right?" Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the DevOps or the application team actually says, "Hey, I going to write a whole infrastructure as code "kind of a script or template, and I just execute, right?" And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles in our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it literally unleashes a lot of flexibility. How they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the IT operations processes. >> That's interesting, you know, 'cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right? Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of DevOps versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, NetworkOps or, NetOps, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have kind of a fast changing dynamic kind of point of view versus a stick it in, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So, I wonder if you can, you can share how, kind of that DevOps attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is has impacted things at Cisco in the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >> Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? It's none of these is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. And yeah, we do have EU Network Operations Teams come to you saying, "Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute, "so, we might use this for Alpha Seven. "We want to use the same for networking." And so we made available all these integrations with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI and dc network controller or our multi site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. The other one as I mentioned that how she formed Tarco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. And so that is the motion we're in for over a year now. And another blog actually is out there we just posted saying, Yeah, all set what you can do. And then a parallel to this, right? Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training. And, you know, a little plucking I know probably part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. And the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetOps person or a DevOps person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. There's a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level, right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, you know, without stress try things out, snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous time people spend to learn. Quite frankly then, that's another side product of the suggestion when people say, "Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing." So, these tools are used very heavily. >> Right. That's awesome 'cause you know, we've had Susie Leon a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team, right? Really built this DevNet thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right? Democratization is the access tool, taking it out of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work. And it can make the changes in an opening up to a software defined world where now it's application centric point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of changed the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >> Yeah, I mean, again, I typically look at this more from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility, I want flexibility and I want resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner what they're looking for. And then that translates into an IT operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. And that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this, right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? You need to give sync services to the app developer and the platform team and the security team, right? To your point so the network can act at the same speed. But you also give tools to the network operations teams because they need to adjust then, they have the ability to react to some of these requirements, right? And it's not just automation, I said we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just for backup and recovery, and how do I extend into public clouds, right? And in the end that's a network connectivity problem, and we have solved as, we have meters available, we have integrations into AWS. We have integrations into Ajua to actually make this very easy from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So, from an app developer perspective, now it looks like it's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here, some of it might sit here. But it's really looking the same. And that's really in the end I said what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need you to have something separate for this deployment or separate for that deployment. What they want is I need you to deploy something. I need to do this resilience. And the resilient way and an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools available that we support, but they're all open. They're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right? That everybody's using. So, you're not getting into this, "Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right? It's really democratization, I actually liked your term. >> Yeah, it's a great term and it's really interesting, especially with the APIs and the way everything is so tied together. That everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. And it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers in respond to, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So, it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure to really support kind of this app first point of view, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be. And enable this hyper fast development, hyper fast change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. So, super important stuff. >> Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's kind of interesting because we started on the Cisco data center. It's where we started this probably six or seven years ago. When we named the application-centric, clearly a lot of these concepts evolved. But in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, this is what I want to do. And I need a service thinking on the networking side to expose services that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. And as I said, automation is a key foundation that we put in place. And our customers most of our customers at this point are on these products. They have all the capabilities there are. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them at this point. >> Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes in social media, right? What's driving your digital transformation is the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question. So, I don't think the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So, (indistinct) keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >> Yeah, I know, thanks for having me and again, yeah, if you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started? Cisco definitely is the place to go. It's, you know, fantastic, fantastic environment. And I highly recommend everybody, roll up the sleeves and you know, the best reasons you can have. >> Yeah, and we know once the physical events come back, we've been to DevNet Create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, really engaged community, sharing lots of information. It's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, like Susie and the team have really built a great thing and we're happy to continue to cover it and eventually we'll be back face to face. >> Okay, (chuckles) look forward to that as well. >> All right, thanks. He's Thomas and I'm Jeff you're watching continuing coverage of CiscoDevNet Accelerating With Automation and Programmability. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In June of this year, Snowflake filed a confidential document suggesting that it would do an IPO. Now of course, everybody knows about it, found out about it and it had a $20 billion valuation. So, many in the community and the investment community and so forth are excited about this IPO. It could be the hottest one of the year, and we're getting a number of questions from investors and practitioners and the entire Wiki bond, ETR and CUBE community. So, welcome everybody. This is Dave Vellante. This is "CUBE Insights" powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to unpack five critical questions around Snowflake's IPO or pending IPO. And with me to discuss that is Erik Bradley. He's the Chief Engagement Strategists at ETR and he's also the Managing Director of VENN. Erik, thanks for coming on and great to see you as always. >> Great to see you too. Always enjoy being on the show. Thank you. >> Now for those of you don't know Erik, VENN is a roundtable that he hosts and he brings in CIOs, IT practitioners, CSOs, data experts and they have an open and frank conversation, but it's private to ETR clients. But they know who the individual is, what their role is, what their title is, et cetera and it's a kind of an ask me anything. And I participated in one of them this past week. Outstanding. And we're going to share with you some of that. But let's bring up the agenda slide if we can here. And these are really some of the questions that we're getting from investors and others in the community. There's really five areas that we want to address. The first is what's happening in this enterprise data warehouse marketplace? The second thing is kind of a one area. What about the legacy EDW players like Oracle and Teradata and Netezza? The third question we get a lot is can Snowflake compete with the big cloud players? Amazon, Google, Microsoft. I mean they're right there in the heart, in the thick of things there. And then what about that multi-cloud strategy? Is that viable? How much of a differentiator is that? And then we get a lot of questions on the TAM. Meaning the total available market. How big is that market? Does it justify the valuation for Snowflake? Now, Erik, you've been doing this now. You've run a couple VENNs, you've been following this, you've done some other work that you've done with Eagle Alpha. What's your, just your initial sort of takeaway from all this work that you've been doing. >> Yeah, sure. So my first take on Snowflake was about two and a half years ago. I actually hosted them for one of my VENN interviews and my initial thought was impressed. So impressed. They were talking at the time about their ability to kind of make ease of use of a multi-cloud strategy. At the time although I was impressed, I did not expect the growth and the hyper growth that we have seen now. But, looking at the company in its current iteration, I understand where the hype is coming from. I mean, it's 12 and a half billion private valuation in the last round. The least confidential IPO (laughs) anyone's ever seen (Dave laughs) with a 15 to $20 billion valuation coming out, which is more than Teradata, Margo and Cloudera combined. It's a great question. So obviously the success to this point is warranted, but we need to see what they're going to be able to do next. So I think the agenda you laid out is a great one and I'm looking forward to getting into some of those details. >> So let's start with what's happening in the marketplace and let's pull up a slide that I very much love to use. It's the classic X-Y. On the vertical axis here we show net score. And remember folks, net score is an indicator of spending momentum. ETR every quarter does like a clockwork survey where they're asking people, "Essentially are you spending more or less?" They subtract the less from the more and comes up with a net score. It's more complicated than, but like NPS, it's a very simple and reliable methodology. That's the vertical axis. And the horizontal axis is what's called market share. Market share is the pervasiveness within the data set. So it's calculated by the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the number of mentions within that sector. And what we're showing here is the EDW sector. And we've pulled out a few companies that I want to talk about. So the big three, obviously Microsoft, AWS and Google. And you can see Microsoft has a huge presence far to the right. AWS, very, very strong. A lot of Redshift in there. And then they're pretty high on the vertical axis. And then Google, not as much share, but very solid in that. Close to 60% net score. And then you can see above all of them from a vertical standpoint is Snowflake with a 77.5% net score. You can see them in the upper right there in the green. One of the highest Erik in the entire data set. So, let's start with some sort of initial comments on the big guys and Snowflakes. Your thoughts? >> Sure. Just first of all to comment on the data, what we're showing there is just the data warehousing sector, but Snowflake's actual net score is that high amongst the entire universe that we follow. Their data strength is unprecedented and we have forward-looking spending intention. So this bodes very well for them. Now, what you did say very accurately is there's a difference between their spending intentions on a net revenue level compared to AWS, Microsoft. There no one's saying that this is an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to actual revenue. So we have to be very cognizant of that. There is domination (laughs) quite frankly from AWS and from Azure. And Snowflake is a necessary component for them not only to help facilitate a multi-cloud, but look what's happening right now in the US Congress, right? We have these tech leaders being grilled on their actual dominance. And one of the main concerns they have is the amount of data that they're collecting. So I think the environment is right to have another player like this. I think Snowflake really has a lot of longevity and our data is supporting that. And the commentary that we hear from our end users, the people that take the survey are supporting that as well. >> Okay, and then let's stay on this X-Y slide for a moment. I want to just pull out a couple of other comments here, because one of the questions we're asking is Whither, the legacy EDW players. So we've got in here, IBM, Oracle, you can see Teradata and then Hortonworks and MapR. We're going to talk a little bit about Hortonworks 'cause it's now Cloudera. We're going to talk a little bit about Hadoop and some of the data lakes. So you can see there they don't have nearly the net score momentum. Oracle obviously has a huge install base and is investing quite frankly in R&D and do an Exadata and it has its own cloud. So, it's got a lock on it's customers and if it keeps investing and adding value, it's not going away. IBM with Netezza, there's really been some questions around their commitment to that base. And I know that a lot of the folks in the VENNs that we've talked to Erik have said, "Well, we're replacing Netezza." Frank Slootman has been very vocal about going after Teradata. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the Hadoop space. But, can you summarize for us your thoughts in your research and the commentary from your community, what's going on with the legacy guys? Are these guys cooked? Can they hang on? What's your take? >> Sure. We focus on this quite a bit actually. So, I'm going to talk about it from the data perspective first, and then we'll go into some of the commentary and the panel. You even joined one yesterday. You know that it was touched upon. But, first on the data side, what we're noticing and capturing is a widening bifurcation between these cloud native and the legacy on-prem. It is undeniable. There is nothing that you can really refute. The data is concrete and it is getting worse. That gap is getting wider and wider and wider. Now, the one thing I will say is, nobody's going to rip out their legacy applications tomorrow. It takes years and years. So when you look at Teradata, right? Their market cap's only 2 billion, 2.3 billion. How much revenue growth do they need to stay where they are? Not much, right? No one's expecting them to grow 20%, which is what you're seeing on the left side of that screen. So when you look at the legacy versus the cloud native, there is very clear direction of what's happening. The one thing I would note from the data perspective is if you switched from net score or adoptions and you went to flat spending, you suddenly see Oracle and Teradata move over to that left a little bit, because again what I'm trying to say is I don't think they're going to catch up. No, but also don't think they're going away tomorrow. That these have large install bases, they have relationships. Now to kind of get into what you were saying about each particular one, IBM, they shut down Netezza. They shut it down and then they brought it back to life. How does that make you feel if you're the head of data architecture or you're DevOps and you're trying to build an application for a large company? I'm not going back to that. There's absolutely no way. Teradata on the other hand is known to be incredibly stable. They are known to just not fail. If you need to kind of re-architect or you do a migration, they work. Teradata also has a lot of compliance built in. So if you're a financials, if you have a regulated business or industry, there's still some data sets that you're not going to move up to the cloud. Whether it's a PII compliance or financial reasons, some of that stuff is still going to live on-prem. So Teradata is still has a very good niche. And from what we're hearing from our panels, then this is a direct quote if you don't mind me looking off screen for one second. But this is a great one. Basically said, "Teradata is the only one from the legacy camp who is putting up a fight and not giving up." Basically from a CIO perspective, the rest of them aren't an option anymore. But Teradata is still fighting and that's great to hear. They have their own data as a service offering and listen, they're a small market cap compared to these other companies we're talking about. But, to summarize, the data is very clear. There is a widening bifurcation between the two camps. I do not think legacy will catch up. I think all net new workloads are moving to data as a service, moving to cloud native, moving to hosted, but there are still going to be some existing legacy on-prem applications that will be supported with these older databases. And of those, Oracle and Teradata are still viable options. >> I totally agree with you and my colleague David Floyd is actually quite high on Teradata Vantage because he really does believe that a key component, we're going to talk about the TAM in a minute, but a key component of the TAM he believes must include the on-premises workloads. And Frank Slootman has been very clear, "We're not doing on-prem, we're not doing this halfway house." And so that's an opportunity for companies like Teradata, certainly Oracle I would put it in that camp is putting up a fight. Vertica is another one. They're very small, but another one that's sort of battling it out from the old NPP world. But that's great. Let's go into some of the specifics. Let's bring up here some of the specific commentary that we've curated here from the roundtables. I'm going to go through these and then ask you to comment. The first one is just, I mean, people are obviously very excited about Snowflake. It's easy to use, the whole thing zero to Snowflake in 90 minutes, but Snowflake is synonymous with cloud-native data warehousing. There are no equals. We heard that a lot from your VENN panelist. >> We certainly did. There was even more euphoria around Snowflake than I expected when we started hosting these series of data warehousing panels. And this particular gentleman that said that happens to be the global head of data architecture for a fortune 100 financials company. And you mentioned earlier that we did a report alongside Eagle Alpha. And we noticed that among fortune 100 companies that are also using the big three public cloud companies, Snowflake is growing market share faster than anyone else. They are positioned in a way where even if you're aligned with Azure, even if you're aligned with AWS, if you're a large company, they are gaining share right now. So that particular gentleman's comments was very interesting. He also made a comment that said, "Snowflake is the person who championed the idea that data warehousing is not dead yet. Use that old monthly Python line and you're not dead yet." And back in the day where the Hadoop came along and the data lakes turned into a data swamp and everyone said, "We don't need warehousing anymore." Well, that turned out to be a head fake, right? Hadoop was an interesting technology, but it's a complex technology. And it ended up not really working the way people want it. I think Snowflake came in at that point at an opportune time and said, "No, data warehousing isn't dead. We just have to separate the compute from the storage layer and look at what I can do. That increases flexibility, security. It gives you that ability to run across multi-cloud." So honestly the commentary has been nothing but positive. We can get into some of the commentary about people thinking that there's competition catching up to what they do, but there is no doubt that right now Snowflake is the name when it comes to data as a service. >> The other thing we heard a lot was ETL is going to get completely disrupted, you sort of embedded ETL. You heard one panelist say, "Well, it's interesting to see that guys like Informatica are talking about how fast they can run inside a Snowflake." But Snowflake is making that easy. That data prep is sort of part of the package. And so that does not bode well for ETL vendors. >> It does not, right? So ETL is a legacy of on-prem databases and even when Hadoop came along, it still needed that extra layer to kind of work with the data. But this is really, really disrupting them. Now the Snowflake's credit, they partner well. All the ETL players are partnered with Snowflake, they're trying to play nice with them, but the writings on the wall as more and more of this application and workloads move to the cloud, you don't need the ETL layer. Now, obviously that's going to affect their talent and Informatica the most. We had a recent comment that said, this was a CIO who basically said, "The most telling thing about the ETL players right now is every time you speak to them, all they talk about is how they work in a Snowflake architecture." That's their only metric that they talk about right now. And he said, "That's very telling." That he basically used it as it's their existential identity to be part of Snowflake. If they're not, they don't exist anymore. So it was interesting to have sort of a philosophical comment brought up in one of my roundtables. But that's how important playing nice and finding a niche within this new data as a service is for ETL, but to be quite honest, they might be going the same way of, "Okay, let's figure out our niche on these still the on-prem workloads that are still there." I think over time we might see them maybe as an M&A possibility, whether it's Snowflake or one of these new up and comers, kind of bring them in and sort of take some of the technology that's useful and layer it in. But as a large market cap, solo existing niche, I just don't know how long ETL is for this world. >> Now, yeah. I mean, you're right that if it wasn't for the marketing, they're not fighting fashion. But >> No. >> really there're some challenges there. Now, there were some contrarians in the panel and they signaled some potential icebergs ahead. And I guarantee you're going to see this in Snowflake's Red Herring when we actually get it. Like we're going to see all the risks. One of the comments, I'll mention the two and then we can talk about it. "Their engineering advantage will fade over time." Essentially we're saying that people are going to copycat and we've seen that. And the other point is, "Hey, we might see some similar things that happened to Hadoop." The public cloud players giving away these offerings at zero cost. Essentially marginal cost of adding another service is near zero. So the cloud players will use their heft to compete. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, first of all one of the reasons I love doing panels, right? Because we had three gentlemen on this panel that all had nothing but wonderful things to say. But you always get one. And this particular person is a CTO of a well known online public travel agency. We'll put it that way. And he said, "I'm going to be the contrarian here. I have seven different technologies from private companies that do the same thing that I'm evaluating." So that's the pressure from behind, right? The technology, they're going to catch up. Right now Snowflake has the best engineering which interestingly enough they took a lot of that engineering from IBM and Teradata if you actually go back and look at it, which was brought up in our panel as well. He said, "However, the engineering will catch up. They always do." Now from the other side they're getting squeezed because the big cloud players just say, "Hey, we can do this too. I can bundle it with all the other services I'm giving you and I can squeeze your pay. Pretty much give it a waive at the cost." So I do think that there is a very valid concern. When you come out with a $20 billion IPO evaluation, you need to warrant that. And when you see competitive pressures from both sides, from private emerging technologies and from the more dominant public cloud players, you're going to get squeezed there a little bit. And if pricing gets squeezed, it's going to be very, very important for Snowflake to continue to innovate. That comment you brought up about possibly being the next Cloudera was certainly the best sound bite that I got. And I'm going to use it as Clickbait in future articles, because I think everyone who starts looking to buy a Snowflake stock and they see that, they're going to need to take a look. But I would take that with a grain of salt. I don't think that's happening anytime soon, but what that particular CTO was referring to was if you don't innovate, the technology itself will become commoditized. And he believes that this technology will become commoditized. So therefore Snowflake has to continue to innovate. They have to find other layers to bring in. Whether that's through their massive war chest of cash they're about to have and M&A, whether that's them buying analytics company, whether that's them buying an ETL layer, finding a way to provide more value as they move forward is going to be very important for them to justify this valuation going forward. >> And I want to comment on that. The Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapRs, Hadoop, et cetera. I mean, there are dramatic differences obviously. I mean, that whole space was so hard, very difficult to stand up. You needed science project guys and lab coats to do it. It was very services intensive. As well companies like Cloudera had to fund all these open source projects and it really squeezed their R&D. I think Snowflake is much more focused and you mentioned some of the background of their engineers, of course Oracle guys as well. However, you will see Amazon's going to trot out a ton of customers using their RA3 managed storage and their flash. I think it's the DC two piece. They have a ton of action in the marketplace because it's just so easy. It's interesting one of the comments, you asked this yesterday, was with regard to separating compute from storage, which of course it's Snowflakes they basically invented it, it was one of their climbs to fame. The comment was what AWS has done to separate compute from storage for Redshift is largely a bolt on. Which I thought that was an interesting comment. I've had some other comments. My friend George Gilbert said, "Hey, despite claims to the contrary, AWS still hasn't separated storage from compute. What they have is really primitive." We got to dig into that some more, but you're seeing some data points that suggest there's copycatting going on. May not be as functional, but at the same time, Erik, like I was saying good enough is maybe good enough in this space. >> Yeah, and especially with the enterprise, right? You see what Microsoft has done. Their technology is not as good as all the niche players, but it's good enough and I already have a Microsoft license. So, (laughs) you know why am I going to move off of it. But I want to get back to the comment you mentioned too about that particular gentleman who made that comment about RedShift, their separation is really more of a bolt on than a true offering. It's interesting because I know who these people are behind the scenes and he has a very strong relationship with AWS. So it was interesting to me that in the panel yesterday he said he switched from Redshift to Snowflake because of that and some other functionality issues. So there is no doubt from the end users that are buying this. And he's again a fortune 100 financial organization. Not the same one we mentioned. That's a different one. But again, a fortune 100 well known financials organization. He switched from AWS to Snowflake. So there is no doubt that right now they have the technological lead. And when you look at our ETR data platform, we have that adoption reasoning slide that you show. When you look at the number one reason that people are adopting Snowflake is their feature set of technological lead. They have that lead now. They have to maintain it. Now, another thing to bring up on this to think about is when you have large data sets like this, and as we're moving forward, you need to have machine learning capabilities layered into it, right? So they need to make sure that they're playing nicely with that. And now you could go open source with the Apache suite, but Google is doing so well with BigQuery and so well with their machine learning aspects. And although they don't speak enterprise well, they don't sell to the enterprise well, that's changing. I think they're somebody to really keep an eye on because their machine learning capabilities that are layered into the BigQuery are impressive. Now, of course, Microsoft Azure has Databricks. They're layering that in, but this is an area where I think you're going to see maybe what's next. You have to have machine learning capabilities out of the box if you're going to do data as a service. Right now Snowflake doesn't really have that. Some of the other ones do. So I had one of my guest panelist basically say to me, because of that, they ended up going with Google BigQuery because he was able to run a machine learning algorithm within hours of getting set up. Within hours. And he said that that kind of capability out of the box is what people are going to have to use going forward. So that's another thing we should dive into a little bit more. >> Let's get into that right now. Let's bring up the next slide which shows net score. Remember this is spending momentum across the major cloud players and plus Snowflake. So you've got Snowflake on the left, Google, AWS and Microsoft. And it's showing three survey timeframes last October, April 20, which is right in the middle of the pandemic. And then the most recent survey which has just taken place this month in July. And you can see Snowflake very, very high scores. Actually improving from the last October survey. Google, lower net scores, but still very strong. Want to come back to that and pick up on your comments. AWS dipping a little bit. I think what's happening here, we saw this yesterday with AWS's results. 30% growth. Awesome. Slight miss on the revenue side for AWS, but look, I mean massive. And they're so exposed to so many industries. So some of their industries have been pretty hard hit. Microsoft pretty interesting. A little softness there. But one of the things I wanted to pick up on Erik, when you're talking about Google and BigQuery and it's ML out of the box was what we heard from a lot of the VENN participants. There's no question about it that Google technically I would say is one of Snowflake's biggest competitors because it's cloud native. Remember >> Yep. >> AWS did a license one time. License deal with PowerShell and had a sort of refactor the thing to be cloud native. And of course we know what's happening with Microsoft. They basically were on-prem and then they put stuff in the cloud and then all the updates happen in the cloud. And then they pushed to on-prem. But they have that what Frank Slootman calls that halfway house, but BigQuery no question technically is very, very solid. But again, you see Snowflake right now anyway outpacing these guys in terms of momentum. >> Snowflake is out outpacing everyone (laughs) across our entire survey universe. It really is impressive to see. And one of the things that they have going for them is they can connect all three. It's that multi-cloud ability, right? That portability that they bring to you is such an important piece for today's modern CIO as data architects. They don't want vendor lock-in. They are afraid of vendor lock-in. And this ability to make their data portable and to do that with ease and the flexibility that they offer is a huge advantage right now. However, I think you're a hundred percent right. Google has been so focused on the engineering side and never really focusing on the enterprise sales side. That is why they're playing catch up. I think they can catch up. They're bringing in some really important enterprise salespeople with experience. They're starting to learn how to talk to enterprise, how to sell, how to support. And nobody can really doubt their engineering. How many open sources have they given us, right? They invented Kubernetes and the entire container space. No one's really going to compete with them on that side if they learn how to sell it and support it. Yeah, right now they're behind. They're a distant third. Don't get me wrong. From a pure hosted ability, AWS is number one. Microsoft is yours. Sometimes it looks like it's number one, but you have to recognize that a lot of that is because of simply they're hosted 365. It's a SAS app. It's not a true cloud type of infrastructure as a service. But Google is a distant third, but their technology is really, really great. And their ability to catch up is there. And like you said, in the panels we were hearing a lot about their machine learning capability is right out of the box. And that's where this is going. What's the point of having this huge data if you're not going to be supporting it on new application architecture. And all of those applications require machine learning. >> Awesome. So we're. And I totally agree with what you're saying about Google. They just don't have it figured out how to sell the enterprise yet. And a hundred percent AWS has the best cloud. I mean, hands down. But a very, very competitive market as we heard yesterday in front of Congress. Now we're on the point about, can Snowflake compete with the big cloud players? I want to show one more data point. So let's bring up, this is the same chart as we showed before, but it's new adoptions. And this is really telling. >> Yeah. >> You can see Snowflake with 34% in the yellow, new adoptions, down yes from previous surveys, but still significantly higher than the other players. Interesting to see Google showing momentum on new adoptions, AWS down on new adoptions. And again, exposed to a lot of industries that have been hard hit. And Microsoft actually quite low on new adoption. So this is very impressive for Snowflake. And I want to talk about the multi-cloud strategy now Erik. This came up a lot. The VENN participants who are sort of fans of Snowflake said three things: It was really the flexibility, the security which is really interesting to me. And a lot of that had to do with the flexibility. The ability to easily set up roles and not have to waste a lot of time wrangling. And then the third was multi-cloud. And that was really something that came through heavily in the VENN. Didn't it? >> It really did. And again, I think it just comes down to, I don't think you can ever overstate how afraid these guys are of vendor lock-in. They can't have it. They don't want it. And it's best practice to make sure your sensitive information is being kind of spread out a little bit. We all know that people don't trust Bezos. So if you're in certain industries, you're not going to use AWS at all, right? So yeah, this ability to have your data portability through multi-cloud is the number one reason I think people start looking at Snowflake. And to go to your point about the adoptions, it's very telling and it bodes well for them going forward. Most of the things that we're seeing right now are net new workloads. So let's go again back to the legacy side that we were talking about, the Teradatas, IBMs, Oracles. They still have the monolithic applications and the data that needs to support that, right? Like an old ERP type of thing. But anyone who's now building a new application, bringing something new to market, it's all net new workloads. There is no net new workload that is going to go to SAP or IBM. It's not going to happen. The net new workloads are going to the cloud. And that's why when you switch from net score to adoption, you see Snowflake really stand out because this is about new adoption for net new workloads. And that's really where they're driving everything. So I would just say that as this continues, as data as a service continues, I think Snowflake's only going to gain more and more share for all the reasons you stated. Now get back to your comment about security. I was shocked by that. I really was. I did not expect these guys to say, "Oh, no. Snowflake enterprise security not a concern." So two panels ago, a gentleman from a fortune 100 financials said, "Listen, it's very difficult to get us to sign off on something for security. Snowflake is past it, it is enterprise ready, and we are going full steam ahead." Once they got that go ahead, there was no turning back. We gave it to our DevOps guys, we gave it to everyone and said, "Run with it." So, when a company that's big, I believe their fortune rank is 28. (laughs) So when a company that big says, "Yeah, you've got the green light. That we were okay with the internal compliance aspect, we're okay with the security aspect, this gives us multi-cloud portability, this gives us flexibility, ease of use." Honestly there's a really long runway ahead for Snowflake. >> Yeah, so the big question I have around the multi-cloud piece and I totally and I've been on record saying, "Look, if you're going looking for an agnostic multi-cloud, you're probably not going to go with the cloud vendor." (laughs) But I've also said that I think multi-cloud to date anyway has largely been a symptom as opposed to a strategy, but that's changing. But to your point about lock-in and also I think people are maybe looking at doing things across clouds, but I think that certainly it expands Snowflake's TAM and we're going to talk about that because they support multiple clouds and they're going to be the best at that. That's a mandate for them. The question I have is how much of complex joining are you going to be doing across clouds? And is that something that is just going to be too latency intensive? Is that really Snowflake's expertise? You're really trying to build that data layer. You're probably going to maybe use some kind of Postgres database for that. >> Right. >> I don't know. I need to dig into that, but that would be an opportunity from a TAM standpoint. I just don't know how real that is. >> Yeah, unfortunately I'm going to just be honest with this one. I don't think I have great expertise there and I wouldn't want to lead anyone a wrong direction. But from what I've heard from some of my VENN interview subjects, this is happening. So the data portability needs to be agnostic to the cloud. I do think that when you're saying, are there going to be real complex kind of workloads and applications? Yes, the answer is yes. And I think a lot of that has to do with some of the container architecture as well, right? If I can just pull data from one spot, spin it up for as long as I need and then just get rid of that container, that ethereal layer of compute. It doesn't matter where the cloud lies. It really doesn't. I do think that multi-cloud is the way of the future. I know that the container workloads right now in the enterprise are still very small. I've heard people say like, "Yeah, I'm kicking the tires. We got 5%." That's going to grow. And if Snowflake can make themselves an integral part of that, then yes. I think that's one of those things where, I remember the guy said, "Snowflake has to continue to innovate. They have to find a way to grow this TAM." This is an area where they can do so. I think you're right about that, but as far as my expertise, on this one I'm going to be honest with you and say, I don't want to answer incorrectly. So you and I need to dig in a little bit on this one. >> Yeah, as it relates to question four, what's the viability of Snowflake's multi-cloud strategy? I'll say unquestionably supporting multiple clouds, very viable. Whether or not portability across clouds, multi-cloud joins, et cetera, TBD. So we'll keep digging into that. The last thing I want to focus on here is the last question, does Snowflake's TAM justify its $20 billion valuation? And you think about the data pipeline. You go from data acquisition to data prep. I mean, that really is where Snowflake shines. And then of course there's analysis. You've got to bring in EMI or AI and ML tools. That's not Snowflake's strength. And then you're obviously preparing that, serving that up to the business, visualization. So there's potential adjacencies that they could get into that they may or may not decide to. But so we put together this next chart which is kind of the TAM expansion opportunity. And I just want to briefly go through it. We published this stuff so you can go and look at all the fine print, but it's kind of starts with the data lake disruption. You called it data swamp before. The Hadoop no schema on, right? Basically the ROI of Hadoop became reduction of investment as my friend Abby Meadow would say. But so they're kind of disrupting that data lake which really was a failure. And then really going after that enterprise data warehouse which is kind of I have it here as a 10 billion. It's actually bigger than that. It's probably more like a $20 billion market. I'll update this slide. And then really what Snowflake is trying to do is be data as a service. A data layer across data stores, across clouds, really make it easy to ingest and prepare data and then serve the business with insights. And then ultimately this huge TAM around automated decision making, real-time analytics, automated business processes. I mean, that is potentially an enormous market. We got a couple of hundred billion. I mean, just huge. Your thoughts on their TAM? >> I agree. I'm not worried about their TAM and one of the reasons why as I mentioned before, they are coming out with a whole lot of cash. (laughs) This is going to be a red hot IPO. They are going to have a lot of money to spend. And look at their management team. Who is leading the way? A very successful, wise, intelligent, acquisitive type of CEO. I think there is going to be M&A activity, and I believe that M&A activity is going to be 100% for the mindset of growing their TAM. The entire world is moving to data as a service. So let's take as a backdrop. I'm going to go back to the panel we did yesterday. The first question we asked was, there was an understanding or a theory that when the virus pandemic hit, people wouldn't be taking on any sort of net new architecture. They're like, "Okay, I have Teradata, I have IBM. Let's just make sure the lights are on. Let's stick with it." Every single person I've asked, they're just now eight different experts, said to us, "Oh, no. Oh, no, no." There is the virus pandemic, the shift from work from home. Everything we're seeing right now has only accelerated and advanced our data as a service strategy in the cloud. We are building for scale, adopting cloud for data initiatives. So, across the board they have a great backdrop. So that's going to only continue, right? This is very new. We're in the early innings of this. So for their TAM, that's great because that's the core of what they do. Now on top of it you mentioned the type of things about, yeah, right now they don't have great machine learning. That could easily be acquired and built in. Right now they don't have an analytics layer. I for one would love to see these guys talk to Alteryx. Alteryx is red hot. We're seeing great data and great feedback on them. If they could do that business intelligence, that analytics layer on top of it, the entire suite as a service, I mean, come on. (laughs) Their TAM is expanding in my opinion. >> Yeah, your point about their leadership is right on. And I interviewed Frank Slootman right in the heart of the pandemic >> So impressed. >> and he said, "I'm investing in engineering almost sight unseen. More circumspect around sales." But I will caution people. That a lot of people I think see what Slootman did with ServiceNow. And he came into ServiceNow. I have to tell you. It was they didn't have their unit economics right, they didn't have their sales model and marketing model. He cleaned that up. Took it from 120 million to 1.2 billion and really did an amazing job. People are looking for a repeat here. This is a totally different situation. ServiceNow drove a truck through BMCs install base and with IT help desk and then created this brilliant TAM expansion. Let's learn and expand model. This is much different here. And Slootman also told me that he's a situational CEO. He doesn't have a playbook. And so that's what is most impressive and interesting about this. He's now up against the biggest competitors in the world: AWS, Google and Microsoft and dozens of other smaller startups that have raised a lot of money. Look at the company like Yellowbrick. They've raised I don't know $180 million. They've got a great team. Google, IBM, et cetera. So it's going to be really, really fun to watch. I'm super excited, Erik, but I'll tell you the data right now suggest they've got a great tailwind and if they can continue to execute, this is going to be really fun to watch. >> Yeah, certainly. I mean, when you come out and you are as impressive as Snowflake is, you get a target on your back. There's no doubt about it, right? So we said that they basically created the data as a service. That's going to invite competition. There's no doubt about it. And Yellowbrick is one that came up in the panel yesterday about one of our CIOs were doing a proof of concept with them. We had about seven others mentioned as well that are startups that are in this space. However, none of them despite their great valuation and their great funding are going to have the kind of money and the market lead that Slootman is going to have which Snowflake has as this comes out. And what we're seeing in Congress right now with some antitrust scrutiny around the large data that's being collected by AWS as your Google, I'm not going to bet against this guy either. Right now I think he's got a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of additional layers and because he can basically develop this as a suite service, I think there's a lot of great opportunity ahead for this company. >> Yeah, and I guarantee that he understands well that customer acquisition cost and the lifetime value of the customer, the retention rates. Those are all things that he and Mike Scarpelli, his CFO learned at ServiceNow. Not learned, perfected. (Erik laughs) Well Erik, really great conversation, awesome data. It's always a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much, my friend. I really appreciate it. >> I appreciate talking to you too. We'll do it again soon. And stay safe everyone out there. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody this episode of "CUBE Insights" powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE, covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polymax. >> Hello, welcome back to our live coverage of this exclusive Cube coverage in the Bahamas for PolyCon 18. It's cryptocurrency, it's token economics, its de-centralized world, it's all about the future of the Internet, Dave. I'm with Dave Vellante here, our next guest is Margaux Avedisian, EVP of Transform Group, and partner and co-founder of Cool Pool Fund. Great to have you on. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So you're on the Women's Panel. I saw you up there: Women in Crypto one of our big focus areas this year, as well as Crypto for Good. So super excited to have a conversation with you, but first take a step back. Introduce yourself, what are you workin' on? What's cool? What's gettin' you excited in the space, in life? What is the crypto thing? What does it mean to you? >> Sure, so I lived in San Francisco in 2011, so I had a bunch of nerd friends, and you know, I heard about this crazy crypto currency called Bitcoin. I had free office space for my startup, so that meant free electricity, so I was like, oh, let's start mining, 'cause we have free electricity. You know, we're not really raisin' money with this thing. (laughter) And I ended up not doing that. I thought that'd be a jerk thing, but I'd be retired by now, so kind of regretting that decision. So 2012, I met the people who were re-launching the first American bitcoin exchange, Trade Hill. I ended up joining that, and at that time, I used to say, oh, I'm the leading woman in bitcoin, but I was also the only woman in bitcoin. (laughter) And then after that, I ended up co-founding another bitcoin exchange called Alpha Coin, which pivoted still around, and then I co-founded another exchange called Magnetico, pivoted also still around, and then I joined Transform Group as EVP, and we're the leading PR firm in the bitcoin and blockchain ICO space. So we've done most of the big ICOs. We did Ethereum, Auger, Made Safe, Gollum, Nosis, Quantum, Unicoin, Wax, Bancor, et cetera. We've done over 70, 60 at this point, so I have a lot of experience seeing ICOs, how they've kind of changed and evolved. Then I started a pre-ICO syndicate, so getting in before the public sale, getting a super discount, which then turned into a fund, because people were like, can I just give you money? This is really complicated, like I don't know what I'm doing, so I was like forced. My hand was forced. (chuckling) >> Yeah, I'll take your cash. Just send it to me. No contract. >> Well no no no, actually the space, you really have to have a team of lawyers. It, you know, they're not too big to fail. >> Just take the cash and say you were hacked, and then disappear, right? >> Yeah you know, that's getting a little more difficult to do that. It looks like they're tracking now. >> Margaux wouldn't steal electricity. (laughter) She's not going to do that. >> That's actually true. >> Of course, I'm being facetious. I'm a comedian, for crying out loud. I'm trying to get her on a roll, here. Okay, funniest story in crypto for you right now that you've seen, could be back in history in time. >> Yeah. >> What's the funniest thing you've seen? Or the most outrageous thing? >> Is this PG? Or like, what can I? >> It's Internet, it's unrated. It's NC-17 or unrated. >> Alright, you mean the time when one of the crypto, hedge fund people took a ton of liquid acid and then I had to take care of him, and he ended up eating all of my birth control pills, and I had to take him to the hospital because I thought he was going to die. (laughter) So that was pretty crazy. >> Anchor: OD'd on birth control pills. That's a first. >> That would be a first. >> 'Cause the only person that was awake at the time that I could ask who was a chemist and who was an EMT said his body temperature, but when I took him to the hospital, the nurses, I thought he was going to die, and then the nurses are all like, well, he's not going to get his period. (laughter) >> That's for sure. >> I'm like, is he going to die? They're like, bring him back if he's spotting. (laughter) I'm like, so he's okay? He's alright? And so, yeah, it was fun, they were like, we're more worried about the acid. So, yeah that's I guess maybe up there in the top five. >> So you've seen 60, 70, you've seen a lot. You've got a good observation space. Tell us what that's like, I mean, public relations for me is hard, like messaging, I don't have that gene, as you know, John. So, how have you been able to shape it. Do you get a lot of 'em and just go oh no, these guys really need tons of help, or take us through some of the examples, maybe not specifically but just generally how you would approach that problem. >> Sure, so first of all, we don't just take anyone. We do vetting and it has to have a story we can sell. Luckily at our firm, we have a lot of people, including the founder Michael Turpin and myself, who have a background in this space, so we understand really what they're saying. And our job, really, is to break it down so regular people understand what the heck we're talking about and why it's important. So I think a lot of, part of the problem with people not getting into crypto currency is that they get too hung up on the technical details. You know, I don't know how my television turns on. I don't know how my debit card works. There's so many things we do without knowing the technical backgrounds of it, and we don't get hung up on that. And for some reason, this industry, people get really hung up on the technology instead of understanding the uses and the purpose of it, and so that's what we really do. We talk about what is the purpose of this? How is this important? How is this changing an industry? And relating it, maybe, to news that's going on right then. So it's really just making it understandable to regular people. >> Yeah, some of the women in crypto conversation, women in tech >> Sure. >> Dave and I have a passion for this because we have a lot of women friends that are either executives and or in good positions, and we interview them, like they were a guy. So we never really got into that whole thing. Turns out we got a big library of women in tech, and it's been so politicized and it's so important. And certainly we agree that, you got to do all that, but if we're even having the conversation, that makes it a problem. So at what point, then, do we need to do kind of keep the vibe going to saying, okay, let's focus on positive, and what's your just view of how to make it engaging, 'cause women make up 50% of the population. >> Yeah. >> And so, what do we do? >> First, I want to say, there are actually some badass women in crypto. Two of the biggest ICOs had female founders. They're Bancor and Tezos. I would say more than you would expect, but they're not as loud and brash as I am, so it might be harder for you to see them. Conferences definitely need to be putting more women on these panels. >> This conference here has a lot of representation, by far, really strong. >> Yeah, well, to be honest, like putting me on a Women in Blockchain panel. I love talking to women, and it's inspiring them, and telling them you can do it, 'cause part of the thing is, nobody's a blockchain expert, alright? There's no such thing because it's just changing so fast. There's too much information out there. And I think sometimes women get hung up on needing to know everything before they do something, and I like to say, you know, probably 80% of the men here have no idea what they're talking about. So, you don't have to >> John: I mean, always be learning in this space. This is an evolution. >> Yeah, and in doing, when I first got into this space and started the first American bitcoin exchange, I didn't even know what an exchange was, you know? But I met one of the co-founders of YouTube, who was into bitcoin, who had a fund, and I ended up leveraging that to get into this, and I learned as I went, and what's so exciting right now about blockchain is that it's really integrated in pretty much every industry you can imagine. I mean, people are doing ICOs in health care, in fashion, in anything you can think of. So if you have experience and skills in one industry, you can then leverage that in another. So if you're a woman in finance, guess what? If you join someone's ICO, and they have someone from a traditional finance world, you're lending credibility, and that's valuable. And that kind of experience, and we need to bring more mature industries into blockchain. >> This is what I think, I mean, you've heard me say this, like never before, you could see, because it's digital, because it's data, as blockchain is, people can traverse industries like never before. >> Yeah. >> It used to be, if you're in health care, you're in health care for life, that's it. >> Yeah. >> But some of the digital skills that people are learning are applicable to other industries. Do you feel like, I think you just said it, that that will promote more woman involvement. You're saying it's disproportionately high here. I don't know. >> I thought it was a little interesting that they put me on a Women in Blockchain panel instead of putting me on a panel that I could talk about my experience, since I have a lot. >> Dave: That's my point. >> Instead of that. >> Winning Women, or whatever, I mean. >> Well, I wouldn't segregate all the women into one panel. I would want to put them on other panels, I mean. >> Yeah, I mean you want to put them on panels where there are pros, and they can do the job independently. >> Exactly. >> Just being a player. >> Alright, Margaux. >> A lot of women say that though. They say, let's not make this about women in tech or you know Lara Logan, and that crew, Naomi Tutu. It all depends >> And so their social justice gene >> but I'm curious how do you feel about that? It was shining a light on whether it's women in tech or women in crypto, does that, is that offensive to you? Do you welcome that? Some welcome it, others? >> I think it's weird because I've been in this industry for so long, and now I think it's good that it's becoming a topic, but it was never anything that I even paid attention to. In fact, I'd rather focus on the positives, 'cause being a woman in this industry is great because, guess what, I can just say whatever I want. I can get away with saying things and calling out the elephant in the room where most men can't. But it's, I think part of the problem is these guys here want to hire women, but how do they find them? And I just had someone come up to me from Zedd saying, we want to hire a female CMO, like how do we find that? And the jobs are out there, it's about being able to get these women who want to do this and connecting them to opportunities. bUt on the other hand, women really need to be more assertive and be like hey, I don't know anything about blockchain, but I want to learn. So I'm going to go to a conference instead of being like I don't know anything, and I'm scared, so I don't want to go to a conference, you know? Like I said, most men don't know what they're talking about here. >> Well I mean, everyone's learning. We're trying to figure it out. Margaux, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. >> We're looking for the stand-up comedian act. We'll get that on our next episode Thanks for comin' on. >> Yeah! And check out my videos, too, if you want. >> Alright, what's your YouTube address? >> It's youtube.com/margauxwithanx. Thank you. >> Alright, we'll put it on the blog. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(bright orchestral music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE Conversations here in Palo Alto Studios. For theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media inc. My next guest is Bruce Arthur, who's the Vice President of engineering at Banter.ai. Good friend, we've known each other for years, VP of engineering, developer, formerly at Apple. >> Yes. >> Worked on all the big products; the iPad-- had the the tin foil on your windows back in the day during Steve Jobs' awesome run there. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's good to be here. >> Yeah, great, you've got a ton of experience and I want to get your perspective as a developer, VP of engineering, entrepreneur, you're doing a startup around AI. Let's have a little banter. >> Sure. >> Banter.ai is a little bit a chat bot, but the rage is DevOps. Software really models change, infrastructure as code, cloud computing. Really a renaissance of software development going on right now. >> It is, it's changing a lot. >> What's your view on this? >> Well, so, years and years ago you would work really hard on your software. You would package it up in a box and you'd send it over the wall and you hope it works. And that seems very quaint now because now you write your software, you deploy it the first day, and you change it six times that day, and you're A/B-testing it, you're driving it forward, it's so much more interactive. It does require a different skillset. It also doesn't, how do I say this carefully? It used to be very easy to be craft, to have high craft and make a very polished product, but you didn't know if it was going to work. Today you know if it's going to work, but you often don't get to making sure it's high quality, high craft, high value. >> John: So, the iteration >> Exactly, the iteration runs so fast, which is highly valuable, but you sort of just a little bit of you miss the is this really something I am proud of and I can really work with it because you know, now the product definition can change so quickly, which is awesome but it is a big change. >> And that artisan crafting thing is interesting, but now some are saying that the UX side is interesting because, if you get the back end working, and you're iterating, you can still bring that artisan flavor back. We heard that cloud computing vendors like Amazon, and I was just in China for Alibaba, they're trying to bring this whole design artisan culture back. Your thoughts on the whole artisan craft in software, because now you have two stages, you have deploy, iterate, and then ultimately polish. >> Right, so, I think it's interesting, it used to be, engineering is so expensive and time-consuming. You have to design it upfront and you make one version of it and you're done. That has changed now that engineering has gotten easier. You have better tools, we have better things, you can make six versions and that used to be, so back in the day at Apple, you would make six versions, five of which Steve would hate and throw out, and eventually they would get better and better and better and then you would have something you're proud of. Now those are just exposed. Now everybody sees those, it's a very different process. So you, I think, the idea that you. Engineering used to be this scarce resource. It's becoming easier now to have many versions and have more engineers working on stuff, so now it is much more can I have three design teams, can they compete, can they make all good ideas, and then who's going to be the editor? Who evaluates them and decides I like this from this one, I like that, and now let's put this together to make the right product. >> So, at Apple, you mentioned Steve would reject, well, that's well-documented. >> Sure. >> It's publicly out there that he would like, really look at the design-side. Was it Waterfall-based, was it Agile, Scrum, did you guys, was it like, do you lay it all out in front of him and he points at it? What were some of the work flows like with Steve Jobs? >> So, when he was really excited about something he would want to meet with them every week. He'd want to see progress every week. He'd give lots of feedback every week, there'd be new ideas. It was very Steve-focused. I think the more constructive side of it was the design teams were always thinking about What can we build, how do we put it in front of him, and I remember there was a great quote from a designer that said. It's not that Steve designs great things, it's that you show him three things, and if you throw him three bad things, he'll pick the least bad. If you show him three great things, he'll pick the most great, But it's not, it was more about the, you've got to iterate in the process, you've got to try ideas, you take ideas from different people and some of them, like, they sound like a great idea. When we talk, it sounds really good. You build it, and you're like, that's just not, that's just not right. So, you want, how do I say this? You don't want to lock yourself in up front. You want to imagine them, you want to build them, you want to try 'em. >> And that's, I mean, I've gotten to know the family over the years, too, through some of the Palo Alto interactions, and that's the kind of misperception of Steve Jobs, was that he was the guy. He enabled people, he had that ethos that-- >> He was the editor, it's an old school journalism metaphor, which is, he had ideas, he wanted, but he also, he ran the team. He wanted to have people bring their ideas and come in. And then he decided, this is good, this is not. That's better, you can do better, let's try this. Or, sometimes, this whole thing stinks. It's just not going anywhere. So, like, it was much more of that. Now it's applied to software, and he was a marketing genius, about sort of knowing what people were going to go for, but there was a little bit of a myth for it, that there's one man designing everything. That is a very saleable marketing story. >> The mythical man. (laughs) >> Well, it's powerful, but no, there's a lot of people, and getting the best work of all those people. >> I mean, he's said on some of the great videos I've watched on YouTube over the years, Hire the best people, only work with the best, and they'll bring good stuff to the table. Now, I want to bring that kind of metaphor, one step further for this great learning lesson, again it's all well-documented on YouTube. Plenty of Steve videos there, but now when you go to DevOps, you mention the whole quality thing and you got to ship fast, iterate, you know there's a lot of moving fast break stuff as Zuckerberg would say, of Facebook, although he's edited his tune to say move fast and be reliable. (laughing) Welcome to the enterprise, welcome to software and operations. This is now a scale game at the enterprise side 'cause, you know, you start seeing open source software grow so much now, where a lot of the intellectual property might be only 10% of software. >> Right. >> You might be using other pieces. You're packaging it so that when you get it to the market, how do bring that culture? How do you get that innovation of, Okay, I'm iterating fast, how do I maintain the quality. What are some of your thoughts on that? Because you've got machine learning out there, you've got these cool things happening. >> Yup. So, you want, how do I say this? You just, you really need to leave time to schedule it. It needs to be in your list. There's a lot of figuring out what are we going to build and you have to try things, iterate things, see if they resonate with consumers. See if they resonate with people who want to pay. See if they resonate with investors. You have to figure than out fast, but then you have to know that, okay, this is a good prototype. Now I have to make it work better because the first version wouldn't scale well, now it has to scale, now it has to work right for people, now you have to have a review of: here's the bugs, here's the things that are not working. Why does this chatbot stop responding sometimes? What is causing that? Now, the great story is, with good DevOps, you actually have a system that's very good at finding and tracking those problems. In the old world, so the old world with the shrink-wrap software, you'd throw it over the fence. If it misbehaves, you will never know. Today you know. You've got alerts, you've got pagers going off, you've got logs, >> It's instrumented big-time. >> Yeah, exactly, you can find that stuff. So, since you can actually make, you can make very high-quality software because you have so much more data about what's going on with it, it's nice. And actually, chatbot software has this fascinating little side effect, with, because it's all chats and it's all text, there are no irreproducible bugs. You can go back and look at exactly what happened. I have a recording, I know exactly what happened, I know exactly what came in, I know what came out, and then I know that this failure happened. So, it's very reproducible, sort of, it's nice you can, it doesn't always work this way, but it's very easy to track down problems. >> It's event-based, it's really easy to manage. >> Exactly, and it's just text. You can just read it. It's not like I have to debug hacks, it's just these things were said and this thing died. >> No core dumps. (laughs) >> No, there's nothing that requires sophisticated analysis, well the code is one thing, but like, the sequence of events is very human-readable, very understandable. >> Alright, so let's talk about the younger generation. So, we've been around the block, you and I. We've talked, certainly many times around town, about the shifts, and we love these new waves. A lot of great waves coming in, we've seen many waves. What's going on, in your mind, with the younger generation? Because this is a, some exciting things happening. Decentralized internet. >> Bruce: Yup. >> There's blockchain, getting all the attention. Outside of the hype, Alpha VCs, Alpha engineers, Alpha entrepreneurs are really honing in on blockchain because they see the potential. >> Sure. >> Early people are seeing it. Then you've got cloud, obviously unlimited compute potentially, the new, you know, kind of agile market. All these young guys, they never shipped, actually never loaded Linux on a server. (laughing) So, like, what are you seeing for the younger guys? And what do you see as someone who's experienced, looking down at the next, you know, 20 year run we see. >> So, I think what I see that's most exciting is that we now have people solving very non-technical problems with technology. I think it used to be, you could build a computer, you could write code, but then, like, your space was limited to the computer in front of you. Like, I can do input and outputs. I can put things on the screen, I can make a video game, but it's in this box. Now everyone's thinking of much bigger, Solving bigger problems. >> John: Yeah, healthcare, we're seeing verticals. >> Yeah, healthcare's a massive one. You can, operation things, shipping products. I mean, who would've thought Amazon was going to be delivering things, basically. I mean, they're using technology to solve the physical delivery of objects. That is, the space of what people are tackling is massive. It' no longer just about silicon and programming, it's sort of, any problem out there, there's someone trying to apply technology, which is awesome and I think that's because these people these youngsters, they're digital natives. >> Yeah. >> They've come to expect that, of course video conferencing works, of course all these other items work. That I just need to figure out how to solve problems with them, and I'm hopeful we're going to see more human-sized problems solved. I think, you know, we have, technology has maybe exacerbated a few things and dislocated, cost a lot of people jobs. Disconnected some people from other sort of stabilizing forces, >> Fake news. (laughs) >> Fake news, you know, we need-- >> John: It's consequences, side effects. >> I hope we get people solving those problems because fake news should now be hard to solve. They'll figure it out, I think, but, like, the idea is, we need to, technology does have a bit of a responsibility to solve, fix some of the crap that it broke. Actually, there's things that need, old structures, journalism is an old profession. >> Yeah. >> And it used to actually have all these wonderful benefits, but when the classified business went down the tubes, it took all that stuff down. >> Yeah. >> And there needs to be a venue for that. There needs to be new outlets for people to sort of do research, look things up, and hold people to account. >> Yeah, and hopefully some of our tools we'll be >> I hope so. >> pulling out at Silicon Angle you'll be seeing some new stuff. Let's talk about, like just in general, some of the fashionable coolness around engineering. Machine learning, AI obviously tops the list. Something that's not as sexy, or as innovative things. >> Sure. >> Because you have machines and industrial manufacturing plant equipment to people's devices. Obviously you worked at Apple, so you understand that piece, with the watch and everything. >> Yup, >> So you've got, that's an internet, we're things, people are things too. So, machines and people are at the edge of the network. So, you've got this new kind of concept. What gets you excited? Talk about how you feel about those trends. >> So, there's a ton going on there. I think what's amazing is the idea that all these sensors and switches and all the remote pieces can start to have smarts on them. I think the downside of that is some of the early IoT stuff, you know, has a whole open SSL stack in it. And, you know, that can be out of date, and when you have security problems with that now your light switch has access to your tax returns and that's not really what you want. So, I think there's definitely, there's a world coming, I think, at a technical level, we need to make operating systems and tools and networking protocols that aren't general purpose because general purpose tools are hackable. >> John: Yeah. >> I need to have a sensor and a switch that know how to talk to each other, and that's it. They can't rewrite code, they can't rewrite their firmware, they can't, like, I want to be able to know that, you have a nice office here, if somebody came in and tried to hack your switches, would you ever know? And the answer's like, you'd have no idea, but when you have things that are on your network and that serve you, if they're a general, if they're a little general purpose computing device, they're a mess. Like, you know, a switch is simple. A microphone, a microphone is simple. There's an output from it, it needs, I think we, >> So differentiated software for device. >> Well, let's get back to old school. You studied operating systems back in the day. >> Yeah. >> A process can do whatever the hell it wants. It can read from memory, it can write to disk, it can talk to all these buses. It's a very, it can do, it's very general purpose. I don't want that in my switch. I want my switch to be sort of, much more of these old little micro-controller. >> Bounded. >> Yeah, it's in a little box. I mean, so the phone and the Mac have something called Sandbox, which sort of says, you get a smaller view of the world. You get a little piece of the disk, you can't see everything else, and those are parts of it, but I think you need even more. You need, sort of, this really, I don't want a general purpose thing, I want a very specific thing that says I'm allowed to do this and I'm allowed to talk to that server; I don't have access to the internet. I've got access to that server. >> You mentioned operating systems. I mean, obviously I grew up in the computer science genre of the '80s and you did as well. That was a revolution around Unix. >> Yes. >> And then Berkeley, BSD, and all that stuff that happened around the systems world, operating systems, was really the pioneers in computing at that time. It's interesting with cloud, it's almost a throwback now to systems thinking. >> Bruce: It's true, yeah. >> You know, people looking at, and you're discussing it. >> Bruce: Yeah, Yeah. >> It's a systems problem. >> Yeah, it is. >> It's just not in a box. >> Right, and I think we witnessed the, let's get everyone a general purpose computer and see what they can do. And that was amazing, but now you're like I don't want everything to be a general I want very specific, I want very little thing, dedicated things that do this really well. I don't want my thermostat actually tracking when I'm in the house. You know, I want it to know, eh, maybe there's someone in the house, but I don't want it to know it's me. I don't want it reporting to Google what's going on. I want it to track my temperature and manage that. >> Our Wikibon team calls the term Unigrid, I call it hypergrid because essentially it's grid computer; there's no differentiation between on-premise and cloud. >> Right. >> It's one pool of resource of compute and things processes. >> It is, although I think, and that's interesting, you want that, but again you want it, how do I say this? I get a little nervous when all of my data goes to some cloud that I can't control. Like, I would love if, I'll put it this way. If I have a camera in my house, and imagine I put security cameras up, I want that to sort of see what's going on, I don't want it to publish the video to anywhere that's out of my control. If it publishes a summary that says, oh, like, someone came to your door, I'm like, okay, that's a good, reasonable thing to know and I would want to get that. So, Palo Alto recently added, there's traffic cameras that are looking at traffic, and they record video, but everyone's very nervous about that fact. They don't want to be recorded on video. So, the camera, this is actually really good, the camera only reports number of cars, number of bikes, number of pedestrians, just raw numbers. So you're pushing the processing down to the end and you only get these very anonymous statistics out of it and that's the right model. I've got a device, it can do a lot of sophisticated processing, but it gives nice summary data that is very public, I don't think anyone's really >> There's a privacy issue there that they've factored into the design? >> Yes, exactly. It's privacy and it's also the appropriateness of the data, you don't want, yeah, people don't want a camera watching them when they go by, but they're happy and they're like, oh, yeah, that street has a big increase in traffic, And there's a lot of, there were accidents here and there's people running red lights. That's valuable knowledge, not the fact that it's you in your Tesla and you almost hit me. No. (laughs) >> Yeah, or he's speeding, slow down. >> Exactly, yeah, or actually if you recorded speeders the fact that there's a lot of speeding is very interesting. Who's doing it, okay, people get upset if that's recorded. >> Yeah, I'm glad that Palo Alto is solving their traffic problem, Palo Alto problems, as we say. In general, security's been a huge issue. We were talking before we came on, about just the security nightmare. >> Bruce: Yes. >> A lot of companies are out there scratching their heads. There's so much of digital transformation happening, that's the buzzword in the industry. What does that mean from your standpoint? Because engineers are now moving to the front lines. Developers, engineering, because now there's a visibility to not just the software, it's an end goal. They call it outcome. Do you talk to customers a lot around, through your entrepreneurial venture, around trying to back requirements into product and yet deliver value? Do you get any insight from the field of kind of problems, you know, businesses are generally tryna solve with tech? >> So, that's interesting, I think when we try to start tech companies, we usually have ideas and then we go test that premise on customers. Perhaps I'm not as adaptable as I should be. We're not actually going to customers and asking them what they want. We're asking them if this is the kind of thing that would solve their problems. And usually they're happy to talk to us. The tough one, then, is then are they going to become paying customers, there's talking and there's paying, and they're different lines. >> I mean, certainly is validation. >> Exactly, that's when you really know that they care. It is, it's a tough question. I think there's always, there's a category of entrepreneur that's always very knowledgable about a small number of customers and they solve their problems, and those people are successful and they're often, They often are more services-based, but they're solving problems because they know people. They know a lot of people, they know what their paying point are. >> Alright, so here's the real question I want to know is, have you been back to Apple in the new building? >> Have I been to, I have not been in the spaceship. (laughing) I have not been in the spaceship yet. I actually understand that in order to have the event there, they actually had to stop work on the rest of the building because the construction process makes everything so dirty; and they did not want everyone to see dirty windows, so they actually halted the construction, they scrubbed down the trees, they had the event, and now it's, but now it's back. >> Now it's back to, >> So, I'll get there at some point. >> Bruce Arthur it the Vice President of Banter.ai, entrepreneur, formerly of Apple, good friend, Final question for you, just what are you excited about these days and as you look out at the tooling and the computer science and the societal impact that is seen with cloud and all these technologies, and open source, what do you, what are you excited about? >> I'm most excited, I think we actually have now enough computing resources and enough tools at hand that we can actually go back and tackle some harder computer science problems. I think there's things that used to be so big that you're like, well, that's just not, That's too much data, we could never solve that. That's too much, that would take, you know, that would take a hundred computers a hundred years to figure out. Those are problems now that are becoming very tractable, and I think it's been the rise of, yeah, it starts with Google, but some other companies that sort of really made these very large problems are now tractable, and they're now solvable. >> And open source, your opinion on open source these days? >> Open source is great. >> Who doesn't love more code? (laughs) >> Well, I should back this up, Open source is the fastest way to share and to make progress. There are times where you need what's called proprietary, but in other words valuable, when you need valuable engineers to work on something and, you know, not knowing the providence or where something comes from is a little sticky, I think there's going to be space for both. I think open source is big, but there's going to be-- >> If you have a core competency, you really want to code it. >> Exactly, you want to write that up and you-- >> You can still participate in the communities. >> Right, and I think open source is also, it's awesome when it's following. If there's something else in front, it follows very fast, it does a very good job. It's very thorough, sometimes it doesn't know where to go and it sort of meanders, and that's when other people have advantages. >> Collective intelligence. >> Exactly. >> Bruce, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it, good to see you. This is a Cube Conversation here in the Palo Alto studio, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

>> Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube! Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Summit, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of IBM's Chief Data Strategy Summit, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We have a big panel today, these are our social influencers. Starting at the top, we have Christopher Penn, VP Marketing of Shift Communications, then Tripp Braden, Executive Coach and Growth Strategist at Strategic Performance Partners, Mike Tamir, Chief Data Science Officer at TACT, Bob Hayes, President of Business Over Broadway. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So we're talking about data as a way to engage customers, a way to engage employees. What business functions would you say stand to benefit the most from using data? >> I'll take a whack at that. I don't know if it's the biggest function, but I think the customer experience and customer success. How do you use data to help predict what customers will do, and how do you then use that information to kind of personalize that experience for them and drive up recommendations, retention, upselling, things like that. >> So it's really the customer experience that you're focusing on? >> Yes, and I just released a study. I found that analytical-leading companies tend to use analytics to understand their customers more than say analytical laggards. So those kind of companies who can actually get value from data, they focus their efforts around improving customer loyalty by just gaining a deeper understanding about their customers. >> Chris, you want to jump in here with- >> I was just going to say, as many of us said, we have three things we really care about as business people, right? We want to save money, save time, or make money. So any function that meets those qualifications, is a functional benefit from data. >> I think there's also another interesting dimension to this, when you start to look at the leadership team in the company, now having the ability to anticipate the future. I mean now, we are no longer just looking at static data. We are now looking at anticipatory capability and seeing around corners, so that the person comes to the team, they're bringing something completely different than the team has had in the past. This whole competency of being able to anticipate the future and then take from that, where you take your organization in the future. >> So follow up on that, Tripp, does data now finally trump gut feel? Remember the HBR article of 10, 15 years ago, can't beat gut feel? Is that, we hit a new era now? >> Well, I think we're moving into an era where we have both. I think it's no longer an either or, we have intuition or we have data. Now we have both. The organizations who can leverage both at the same time and develop that capability and earn the trust of the other members by doing that. I see the Chief Data Officer really being a catalyst for organizational change. >> So Dr. Tamir I wonder if I could ask you a question? Maybe the whole panel, but so we've all followed the big data trend and the meme, AI, deep learning, machine learning, same wine, new bottle, or is there something substantive behind it? >> So certainly our capabilities are growing, our capabilities in machine learning, and I think that's part of why now there's this new branding of AI. AI is not what your mother might have thought AI is. It's not robots and cylons and that sort of thing that are going to be able to think intelligently. They just did intelligence tests on the different, like Siri and Alexa, quote AIs from different companies, and they scored horribly. They scored much worse than my, much worse than my very intelligent seven-year old. And that's not a comment on the deficiencies in Alexa or in Siri. It's a comment on these are not actually artificial intelligences. These are just tools that apply machine learning strategically. >> So you are all thinking about data and how it is going to change the future and one of the things you said, Tripp, is that we can now see the future. Talk to me about some of the most exciting things that you're seeing that companies do that are anticipating what customers want. >> Okay, so for example, in the customer success space, a lot of Sass businesses have a monthly subscription, so they're very worried about customer churn. So companies are now leveraging all the user behavior to understand which customers are likely to leave next month, and if they know that, they can reach out to them with maybe some retention campaigns, or even use that data to find out who's most likely to buy more from you in the next month, and then market to those in effective ways. So don't just do a blast for everybody, focus on particular customers, their needs, and try to service them or market to them in a way that resonates with them that increases retention, upselling, and recommendations. >> So they've already seen certain behaviors that show a customer is maybe not going to re-up? >> Exactly, so you just, you throw this data in a machine learning, right. You find the predictors of your outcome that interest you, and then using that information, you say oh, maybe predictors A, B, and C, are the ones that actually drive loyalty behaviors, then you can use that information to segment your customers and market to them appropriately. It's pretty cool stuff. >> February 18th, 2018. >> Okay. >> So we did a study recently just for fun of when people search for the term "Outlook, out of office." Yeah, and you really only search for that term for one reason, you're going on vacation, and you want to figure out how to turn the feature on. So we did a five-year data poll of people, of the search times for that and then inverted it, so when do people search least for that term. That's when they're in the office, and it's the week of February 18th, 2018, will be that time when people like, yep, I'm at the office, I got to work. And knowing that, prediction and data give us specificity, like yeah, we know the first quarter is busy, we know between memorial Day and Labor Day is not as busy in the B to B world. But as a marketer, we need to put specificity, data and predictive analytics gives us specificity. We know what week to send our email campaigns, what week to turn our ad budgets all the way to full, and so on and so forth. If someone's looking for The Cube, when will they be doing that, you know, going forward? That's the power of this stuff, is that specificity. >> They know what we're going to search for before we search for it. (laughter) >> I'd like to know where I'm going to be next week. Why that date? >> That's the date that people least search for the term, "Outlook, out of office." >> Okay. >> So, they're not looking for that feature, which logically means they're in the office. >> Or they're on vacation. (laughter) Right, I'm just saying. >> That brings up a good point on not just, what you're predicting for interactions right now, but also anticipating the trends. So Bob brought up a good point about figuring out when people are churning. There's a flip side to that, which is how do you get your customers to be more engaged? And now we have really an explosion in reinforcement learning in particular, which is a tool for figuring out, not just how to interact with you right now as a one off, statically. But how do I interact with you over time, this week, next week, the week after that? And using reinforcement learning, you can actually do that. This is the the sort-of technique that they used to beat Alpha-Go or to beat humans with Alpha-Go. Machine-learning algorithms, supervised learning, works well when you get that immediate feedback, but if you're playing a game, you don't get that feedback that you're going to win 300 turns from now, right now. You have to create more advanced value functions and ways of anticipating where things are going, this move, so that you see things are on track for winning in 20, 30, 40 moves, down the road. And it's the same thing when you're dealing with customer engagement. You want to, you can make a decision, I'm going to give this customer a coupon that's going to make them spend 50 cents more today, or you can make decisions algorithmically that are going to give them a 50 cent discount this week, next week, and the week after that, that are going to make them become a coffee drinker for life, or customer for life. >> It's about finding those customers for life. >> IBM uses the term cognitive business. We go to these conferences, everybody talks about digital transformation. At the end of the day it's all about how you use data. So my question is, if you think about the bell curve of organizations that you work with, how do they, what's the shape of that curve, part one. And then part two is, where do you see IBM on that curve? >> Well I think a lot of my clients make a living predicting the future, they're insurance companies and financial services. That's where the CDO currently resides and they get a lot of benefit. But one of things we're all talking about, but talking around, is that human element. So now, how do we take the human element and incorporate this into the structure of how we make our decisions? And how do we take this information, and how do we learn to trust that? The one thing I hear from most of the executives I talk to, when they talk about how data is being used in their organizations is the lack of trust. Now, when you have that, and you start to look at the trends that we're dealing with, and we call them data points verses calling them people, now you have a problem, because people become very, almost analytically challenged, right? So how do we get people to start saying, okay, let's look at this from the point of view of, it's not an either or solution in the world we live in today. Cognitive organizations are not going to happen tomorrow morning, even the most progressive organizations are probably five years away from really deploying them completely. But the organizations who take a little bit of an edge, so five, ten percent edge out of there, they now have a really, a different advantage in their markets. And that's what we're talking about, hyper-critical thinking skills. I mean, when you start to say, how do I think like Warren Buffet, how do I start to look and make these kinds of decisions analytically? How do I recreate an artificial intelligence when machine-learning practice, and program that's going to provide that solution for people. And that's where I think organizations that are forward-leaning now are looking and saying, how do I get my people to use these capabilities and ultimately trust the data that they're told. >> So I forget who said it, but it was early on in the big data movement, somebody said that we're further away from a single version of the truth than ever, and it's just going to get worse. So as a data scientist, what say you? >> I'm not familiar with the truth quote, but I think it's very relevant, well very relevant to where we are today. There's almost an arms race of, you hear all the time about automating, putting out fake news, putting out misinformation, and how that can be done using all the technology that we have at our disposal for disbursing that information. The only way that that's going to get solved is also with algorithmic solutions with creating algorithms that are going to be able to detect, is this news, is this something that is trying to attack my emotions and convince me just based on fear, or is this an article that's trying to present actual facts to me and you can do that with machine-learning algorithms. Now we have the technology to do that, algorithmically. >> Better algos than like and share. >> From a technological perspective, to your question about where IBM is, IBM has a ton of stuff that I call AI as a service, essentially where if you're a developer on Bluemix, for example, you can plug in to the different components of Watson at literally pennies per usage, to say I want to do sentiment analysis, I want to do tone analysis, I want personality insights, about this piece, who wrote this piece of content. And to Dr. Tamir's point, this is stuff that, we need these tools to do things like, fingerprint this piece of text. Did the supposed author actually write this? You can tell that, so of all the four magi, we call it, the Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, getting on board, and adding that five or ten percent edge that Tripp was talking about, is easiest with IBM Bluemix. >> Great. >> Well, one of the other parts of this is you start to talk about what we're doing and you start to look at the players that are doing this. They are all organizations that I would not call classical technology organizations. They were 10 years ago, look at a Microsoft. But you look at the leadership of Microsoft today, and they're much more about figuring out what the formula is for success for business, and that's the other place I think we're seeing a transformation occurring, and the early adopters, is they have gone through the first generation, and the pain, you know, of having to have these kinds of things, and now they're moving to that second generation, where they're looking for the gain. And they're looking for people who can bring them capability and have the conversation, and discuss them in ways that they can see the landscape. I mean part of this is if you get caught in the bits and bites, you miss the landscape that you should be seeing in the market, and that's why I think there's a tremendous opportunity for us to really look at multiple markets of the same data. I mean, imagine looking and here's what I see, everyone in this group would have a different opinion in what they're seeing, but now we have the ability to see it five different ways and share that with our executive team and what we're seeing, so we can make better decisions. >> I wonder if we could have a frank conversation, an honest conversation about the data and the data ownership. You heard IBM this morning, saying hey we're going to protect your data, but I'd love you guys, as independents to weigh in. You got this data, you guys are involved with your clients, building models, the data trains the model. I got to believe that that model gets used at a lot of different places, within an industry, like insurance or across retail, whatever it is. So I'm afraid that my data is, my IP is going to seep across the industry. Should I not be worried about that? I wonder if you guys could weigh in. >> Well if you work with a particular vendor, sometimes vendors have a stipulation that we will not share your models with other clients, so you just got to stick to that. But in terms of science, I mean you build a model, right? You want to generalize that to other businesses. >> Right! >> (drowned out by others talking) So maybe if you could work somehow with your existing clients, say here, this is what we want to do, we just want to elevate the waters for everybody, right? So everybody wins when all boats rise, right? So if you can kind of convince your clients that we just want to help the world be better, and function better, make employees happier, customers happier, let's take that approach and just use models in a, that may be generalized to other situations and use them. If if you don't, then you just don't. >> Right, that's your choice. >> It's a choice, it's a choice you have to make. >> As long as you're transparent about it. >> I'm not super worried, I mean, you, Dave, Tripp, and I are all dressed similarly, right? We have the model of shirt and tie so, if I put on your clothes, we wouldn't, but if I were to put on your clothes, it would not be, even though it's the same model, it's just not going to be the same outcome. It's going to look really bad, right, so. Yes, companies can share the models and the general flows and stuff, but there's so much, if a company's doing machine learning well, there's so much feature engineering that's unique to that company that trying to apply that somewhere else, is just going to blow up. >> Yeah, but we could switch ties, like Tripp has got a really cool tie, I'd be using that tie on July 4th. >> This is turning into a different kind of panel (laughter) Chris, Tripp, Mike, and Bob, thanks so much for joining us. This has been a really fun and interesting panel. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> Thanks you guys. >> We will have more from the IBM Summit in Boston just after this. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE's CUBE coverage of HPE Discover 2017. This is our seventh year of covering HPE Discover Now. HPE Discover in its second year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. We've got two great guests, two doctors, PhD's in the house here. So Eng Lim Goh, VP and SGI CTO, PhD, and Tuomas Sandholm, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University of Computer Science and also runs the marketplace lab over there, welcome to theCube guys, doctors. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So the patient is on the table, it's called machine learning, AI, cloud computing. We're living in a really amazing place. I call it open bar and open source. There's so many new things being contributed to open source, so much new hardware coming on with HPE that there's a lot of innovation happening. So want to get your thoughts first on how you guys are looking at this big trend where all this new software is coming in and these new capabilities, what's the vibe, how do you look at this. You must be, Carnegie Mellon, oh this is an amazing time, thoughts. >> Yeah, it is an amazing time and I'm seeing it both on the academic side and the startup side that you know, you don't have to invest into your own custom hardware. We are using HPE with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in academia, using cloud in the startups. So it really makes entry both for academic research and startups easier, and also the high end on the academic research, you don't have to worry about maintaining and staying up to speed with all of the latest hardware and networking and all that. You know it kind of. >> Focus on your research. >> Focus on the research, focus on the algorithms, focus on the AI, and the rest is taken care of. >> John: Eng talk about the supercomputer world that's now there, if you look at the abundant computer intelligent edge we're seeing genome sequencing done in minutes, the prices are dropping. I mean high performance computing used to be this magical, special thing, that you had to get a lot of money to pay for or access to. Democratization is pretty amazing can I just hear your thoughts on what you see happening. >> Yes, Yes democratization in the traditional HPC approach the goal is to prediction and forecasts. Whether the engine will stay productive, or financial forecasts, whether you should buy or sell or hold, let's use the weather as an example. In traditional HPC for the last 30 years what we do to predict tomorrows weather, what we do first is to write all the equations that models the weather. Measure today's weather and feed that in and then we apply supercomputing power in the hopes that it will predict tomorrows weather faster than tomorrow is coming. So that has been the traditional approach, but things have changed. Two big things changed in the last few years. We got these scientists that think perhaps there is a new way of doing it. Instead of calculating your prediction can you not use data intensive method to do an educated guess at your prediction and this is what you do. Instead of feeding today's weather information into the machine learning system they feed 30 years everyday, 10 thousand days. Everyday they feed the data in, the machine learning system guess at whether it will rain tomorrow. If it gets it wrong, it's okay, it just goes back to the weights that control the inputs and adjust them. Then you take the next day and feed it in again after 10 thousand tries, what started out as a wild guess becomes an educated guess, and this is how the new way of doing data intensive computing is starting to emerge using machine learning. >> Democratization is a theme I threw that out because I think it truly is happening. But let's get specific now, I mean a lot of science has been, well is climate change real, I mean this is something that is in the news. We see that in today's news cycle around climate change things of that as you mentioned weather. So there's other things, there's other financial models there's other in healthcare, in disease and there's new ways to get at things that were kind of hocus pocus maybe some science, some modeling, forecasting. What are you seeing that's right low hanging fruit right now that's going to impact lives? What key things will HPC impact besides weather? Is healthcare there, where is everyone getting excited? >> I think health and safety immediately right. Health and safety, you mentioned gene sequencing, drug designs, and you also mentioned in gene sequencing and drug design there is also safety in designing of automobiles and aircrafts. These methods have been traditionally using simulation, but more and more now they are thinking while these engines for example, are flying can you collect more data so you can predict when this engine will fail. And also predict say, when will the aircraft lands what sort of maintenance you should be applying on the engine without having to spend some time on the ground, which is unproductive time, that time on the ground diagnosing the problems. You start to see application of data intensive methods increased in order to improve safety and health. >> I think that's good and I agree with that. You could also kind of look at some of the technology perspective as to what kind of AI is going to be next and if you look back over the last five to seven years, deep learning has become a very hot part of machine learning and machine learning is part of AI. So that's really lifted that up. But what's next there is not just classification or prediction, but decision making on top of that. So we'll see AI move up the chain to actual decision making on top of just the basic machine learning. So optimization, things like that. Another category is what we call strategic reasoning. Traditionally in games like chess, or checkers and now Go, people have fallen to AI and now we did this in January in poker as well, after 14 years of research. So now we can actually take real strategic reasoning under imperfect information settings and apply it to various settings like business strategy optimization, automated negotiation, certain areas of finance, cyber security, and so forth. >> Go ahead. >> I'd like to interject, so we are very on it and impressed right. If we look back years ago IBM beat the worlds top chess player right. And that was an expert system and more recently Google Alpha Go beat even a more complex game, Go, and beat humans in that. But what the Professor has done recently is develop an even more complex game in a sense that it is incomplete information, it is poker. You don't know the other party's cards, unlike in the board game you would know right. This is very much real life in business negotiation in auctions, you don't quite know what the other party' thinking. So I believe now you are looking at ways I hope right, that poker playing AI software that can handle incomplete information, not knowing the other parties but still able to play expertly and apply that in business. >> I want to double down on that, I know Dave's got a question but I want to just follow this thread through. So the AI, in this case augmented intelligence, not so much artificial, because you're augmenting without the perfect information. It's interesting because one of the debates in the big data world has been, well the streaming of all this data is so high-velocity and so high-volume that we don't know what we're missing. Everyone's been trying to get at the perfect information in the streaming of the data. And this is where the machine learning if I get your point here, can do this meta reasoning or this reasoning on top of it to try to use that and say, hey let's not try to solve the worlds problems and boil the ocean over and understand it all, let's use that as a variable for AI. Did I get that right? >> Kind of, kind of I would say, in that it's not just a technical barrier to getting the big data, it's also kind of a strategic barrier. Companies, even if I could tell you all of my strategic information, I wouldn't want to. So you have to worry not just about not having all the information but are there other guys explicitly hiding information, misrepresenting and vice versa, you doing strategic action as well. Unlike in games like Go or chess, where it's perfect information, you need totally different kinds of algorithms to deal with these imperfect information games, like negotiation or strategic pricing where you have to think about the opponents responses. >> It's your hairy window. >> In advance. >> John: Knowing what you don't know. >> To your point about huge amounts of data we are talking about looking for a needle in a haystack. But when the data gets so big and the needles get so many you end up with a haystack of needles. So you need some augmentation to help you to deal with it. Because the humans would be inundated with the needles themselves. >> So is HPE sort of enabling AI or is AI driving HPC. >> I think it's both. >> Both, yeah. >> Eng: Yeah, that's right, both together. In fact AI is driving HPC because it is a new way of using that supercomputing power. Not just doing computer intensive calculation, but also doing it data intensive AI, machine learning. Then we are also driving AI because our customers are now asking the same questions, how do I transition from a computer intensive approach to a data intensive one also. This is where we come in. >> What are your thoughts on how this affects society, individuals, particularly students coming in. You mentioned Gary Kasparov losing to the IBM supercomputer. But he didn't stop there, he said I'm going to beat the supercomputer, and he got supercomputers and humans together and now holds a contest every year. So everybody talks about the impact of machines replacing humans and that's always happened. But what do you guys see, where's the future of work, of creativity for young people and the future of the economy. What does this all mean? >> You want to go first or second? >> You go ahead first. (Eng and Tuomas laughing) >> They love the fighting. >> This is a fun topic, yeah. There's a lot of worry about AI of course. But I think of AI as a tool, much like a hammer or a saw So It's going to make human lives better and it's already making human lives better. A lot of people don't even understand all the things that already have AI that are helping them out. There's this worry that there's going to be a super species that's AI that's going to take over humans. I don't think so, I don't think there's any demand for a super species of AI. Like a hammer and a saw, a hammer and a saw is better than a hammersaw, so I actually think of AI as better being separate tools for separate applications and that is very important for mankind and also nations and the world in the future. One example is our work on kidney exchange. We run the nationwide kidney exchange for the United Network for Organ Sharing, which saves hundreds of lives. This is an example not only that saves lives and makes better decisions than humans can. >> In terms of kidney candidates, timing, is all of that. >> That's a long story, but basically, when you have willing but incompatible live donors, incompatible with the patient they can swap their donors. Pair A gives to pair B gives to pair C gives to pair A for example. And we also co-invented this idea of chains where an altruist donor creates a while chain through our network and then the question of which combination of cycles and chains is the best solution. >> John: And no manual involvement, your machines take over the heavy lifting? >> It's hard because when the number of possible solutions is bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. So you have to have optimization AI actually make the decisions. So now our AI makes twice a week, these decisions for the country or 66% of the transplant centers in the country, twice a week. >> Dr. Goh would you would you add anything to the societal impact of AI? >> Yes, absolutely on the cross point on the saw and hammer. That's why these AI systems today are very specific. That's why some call them artificial specific intelligence, not general intelligence. Now whether a hundred years from now you take a hundred of these specific intelligence and combine them, whether you get an emergent property of general intelligence, that's something else. But for now, what they do is to help the analyst, the human, the decision maker and more and more you will see that as you train these models it's hard to make a lot of correct decisions. But ultimately there's a difference between a correct decision and, I believe, a right decision. Therefore, there always needs to be a human supervisor there to ultimately make the right decision. Of course, he will listen to the machine learning algorithm suggesting the correct answer, but ultimately the human values have to be applied to decide whether society accepts this decision. >> All models are wrong, some are useful. >> So on this thing there's a two benefits of AI. One is a this saves time, saves effort, which is a labor savings, automation. The other is better decision making. We're seeing the better decision making now become more of an important part instead of just labor savings or what have you. We're seeing that in the kidney exchange and now with strategic reasoning, now for the first time we can do better strategic reasoning than the best humans in imperfect information settings. Now it becomes almost a competitive need. You have to have, what I call, strategic augmentation as a business to be competitive. >> I want to get your final thoughts before we end the segment, this is more of a sharing component. A lot of young folks are coming in to computer science and or related sciences and they don't need to be a computer science major per se, but they have all the benefits of this goodness we're talking about here. Your advice, if both of you could share you opinion and thoughts in reaction to the trend where, the question we get all the time is what should young people be thinking about if they're going to be modeling and simulating a lot of new data scientists are coming in some are more practitioner oriented, some are more hard core. As this evolution of simulations and modeling that we're talking about have scale here changes, what should they know, what should be the best practice be for learning, applying, thoughts. >> For me you know the key thing is be comfortable about using tools. And for that I think the young chaps of the world as they come out of school they are very comfortable with that. So I think I'm actually less worried. It will be a new set of tools these intelligent tools, leverage them. If you look at the entire world as a single system what we need to do is to move our leveraging of tools up to a level where we become an even more productive society rather than worrying, of course we must be worried and then adapt to it, about jobs going to AI. Rather we should move ourselves up to leverage AI to be an even more productive world and then hopefully they will distribute that wealth to the entire human race, becomes more comfortable given the AI. >> Tuomas your thoughts? >> I think that people should be ready to actually for the unknown so you've got to be flexible in your education get the basics right because those basics don't change. You know, math, science, get that stuff solid and then be ready to, instead of thinking about I'm going to be this in my career, you should think about I'm going to be this first and then maybe something else I don't know even. >> John: Don't memorize the test you don't know you're going to take yet, be more adaptive. >> Yes, creativity is very important and adaptability and people should start thinking about that at a young age. >> Doctor thank you so much for sharing your input. What a great world we live in right now. A lot of opportunities a lot of challenges that are opportunities to solve with high performance computing, AI and whatnot. Thanks so much for sharing. This is theCUBE bringing you all the best coverage from HPE Discover. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. Three days of wall to wall live coverage. We'll be right back. >> Thanks for having us.

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Jay Jamison, he is the Vice President for Strategy Software Defined and Cloud Division at HPE. Thanks so much for joining us Jay. >> Oh thanks for having me. >> So I was just in your keynote session and you talked about making hybrid IT simpler. You talked about the imperative that you heard from customers to bring solutions not silos. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about the specific feedback you were hearing from customers that really made you want to tighten your focus? >> Yeah, I think that, so, first off thanks for having me, and I would say that, absolutely, customers have been very clear at the excitement and the opportunity that they see ahead of them in terms of digital transformation and moving to cloud and taking advantage of all these new capabilities and technologies that seem to be showing up all the time. Whether it's containers, whether it's Kubernetes, whether it's internet of things, all that stuff's super exciting, but at the same time customers are saying, "You know, look, I've got thousands of applications "in a traditional estate, or a virtualized estate "that aren't going to be moving to anything "like a cloud any time soon. "And what I need is a way to start thinking about "how do I manage that whole estate "so that I can get my existing footprint optimized, "I can keep that running smoothly, "make sure it's secure, make sure it's reliable, "make sure it's low cost? "While I want to continue to reduce budget "where possible there and I want to start spinning up "more of my new efforts and more of my new investment "onto these new things so that I can be more responsive "to the business that I'm trying to run. "I can get new products and services out to my customers, "I can engage partners and my existing customer base "in ways that they want to be engaged. "I can enter new businesses." And so that challenge of how do I manage that hybrid estate, whether it's a mix of on-prem or off-prem, whether it's a mix of traditional and virtualized applications and workloads with new cloud native or containerized, or even server-less now, those kinds of things, that is really what I see as the problem of hybrid IT today. And our customers tell us that, "Geez, it's complicated "and getting more so each and every day." And that presents a tremendous opportunity for HPE, and partners like Red Hat, to be able to come forward and say, "Look, we can start helping you with solutions "that start bringing together a comprehensive approach "to trying to solve for making that entire estate simpler, "make it more solution oriented, "and less a set of different silos and people "that are all kind of sort of stuck "in whatever technology stack they might be running with." >> Jay, very interesting point. One of the messages we heard from Red Hat is that application spectrum you talked about. I've got most enterprises hundreds if not thousands of applications. They have the new ones that they're modernizing and building but even the old ones we need to at least re-platform them. The term, we used to call it lift and shift, re-platform seems to be the cool new way to kind of talk about it. But, you know, really modernizing the platform that I'm on, being more software driven, being ready to take that, if I'm breaking it down, and componentizing, containerizing it, starting to build micro services, but how are you working with Red Hat? How does HPE cloud offerings and infrastructure pieces playing in that re-platforming and then moving up the spectrum? >> Yeah, so I think really across the board, I think there are a couple of pieces. I think first of all you're absolutely right that customers will say, "Look, I have "an existing estate of applications and workloads "that I absolutely have to use." So for example I often think about if you think about a mobile application that you might use a lot from a mainstream customer. Like think of your, like getting your flight reservation on your mobile phone. Of course there are parts of that mobile application that are going to be very modern. Like I can order an Uber from the mobile app that I use on my airline often, and that's, of course, very modern, I'm using APIs, I'm using all this nice stuff to plug in what Uber offers that airline vendor to be able to say, "You can have that transaction "flow through a partner flow." But things like what time's the flight taking off, whether it's delayed, those are existing systems that aren't newfangled if you will. And so what customers are telling me is, "Look, I've got a corpus of data, "a corpus of application logic "that I absolutely need to be able to access "and use and deliver in new ways." And so in many senses I think that resonates very strongly, this notion of, re-platforming it's going on and it's a reality of, again, how do I make this mix of data application tools that may exist, and the desires I have to do new stuff. How do I bring it together in a way that lands effectively for a customer so that they have a delightful experience? Now what we're doing with Red Hat I think is really exciting in terms of providing opportunities for, in manners, where together we're sort of taking the best of both worlds. So a great example that I talked about in my keynote is saying, "Look, we're trying to take", we're working very closely with Red Hat, and specifically their Ansible team, to say, "Look, what customers, what users of Ansible love "is building playbooks that enable them "to automate infrastructure using Ansible playbooks", that's what's it all about. And what Ansible has been great with those playbooks is setting up and running and automating virtual machines, well what we're doing, because HPE tends to have infrastructure and great infrastructure management tools that say, "Look, down at the hardware level "we want to make it easier and more fungible "for IT shops to be able "to manage that physical infrastructure." And so what we've done is we've partnered up with Ansible to say, "Look, we want your users of Ansible "to just have their playbooks and we will "connect our OneView APIs", which is our infrastructure management software that sits on top of hardware. Say, "It connects, and so when your users "build an Ansible playbook that wants "to change how the infrastructure works "we'll take care of it all in OneView. "It's not something that your users have "to change or learn anything new "it's just all of a sudden Ansible gets more powerful "because it's connecting to HPE hardware and providing "a richer more flexible infrastructure experience." And so that's some of the stuff that we're doing now to make our hardware more flexible and more modern in the context of an Ansible developer, or Ansible user, but over time that's going to get even better. So the stuff, the things that we're doing with Synergy, which is our new brand that is focused on building hardware infrastructure that has composability, which basically says, "Look". It looks like hardware device but from an operators point of view it's very fungible, you can refactor and make your blend of compute, or storage, or networking, kind of shift on the fly. So a very cloud-like experience with on-premises infrastructure. And what we're doing is we want to work with great technologies that are very cloud-centric such as OpenShift from Red Hat to say, "Look, we want to be able to enable customers "to using APIs spin up bear metal instances of OpenShift." Very powerful in terms of time to value message for a cloud native customer that says, "Look, I need to run cloud native applications, "I want to have containers but I want to do it on-premise" This solution will be something that we think is a really powerful message for, particularly our Red Hat OpenShift style customer looking to build applications. >> Jay, and I'm familiar with the Synergy platform and composable infrastructure, like the ideas, you can break that down into smaller components. What we hear all the time is, "I need to build distributed architectures", and, as they talked in the keynote, predicting and forecasting where that's going to go is tough. So big challenge customers always have is like, "I buy these boxes and three years "into it I'm only using 40% of it." The utilization inside of data centers is horrible. Even with server virtualization it helped a little bit but not as much as what you see server founders in clouds and the like. So where are we with the rollout with Synergy? Do you have any proof points of customers that are saying, "Oh, I'm getting better utilization, "my OP-X is much better"? >> Yeah, what I would say is, so first of all I would strongly agree with you in the sense that if you talk to most mainstream enterprise customers today about their data center utilization rates it's often very poor. And I think one of the big draws that customers have when they look at public cloud opportunities is they'll say, "Well a nice thing about a public cloud is "I feel as though I'm getting much higher utilization rates "because of the way the payment structures work and so on." Now that may not always be true, you'll have, at times people will say, "Well these things are sitting dormant." But that's the instinct, right? >> We had server sprawl, we have VM sprawl, and now we have cloud sprawl. >> Now you have cloud sprawl, exactly right. >> And server less will fix it all too right? >> Exactly right, but you absolutely have the challenge of under-utilized data centers. And so it's imperative for HPE, and I think really the industry, to say, "Look, the solutions that we're putting forward, "whenever we talk about hybrid cloud solutions, "or hybrid IT solutions, or private cloud solutions or whatever to me it comes down to look, am I able to show you in concrete terms how am I increasing the utilization of your data center and how am I helping you lower your costs? And Synergy will, over time, become a great solution and platform in that manner because, for a couple of reasons. One, you've described, the fungibility and the composability of resources makes that something that is very much simpler from a technology standpoint. But then at the same time when you couple it with pay as you go style business models, that HPE makes available to its customers through our financial services, you start to then say, "Look, you're not "just sort of writing us a big check in CAPEX "and waiting three years and then being disappointed." "What you're doing is you're going to start getting the notion "that says, "Look this is going to show up, "you'll have a small amount of POD, "you're paying as you use." And we're able to then work together to forecast when will capacity requirements get to a place where you absolutely need to add more capability and refresh that hardware, or extend that hardware, excuse me. On the customer adoption, it's a new platform, and it's just coming out and we're getting great early adoption, and I think particularly from users that were in the beta. We had very satisfied beta users and we're starting to see, I think, really strong early adoption of the product. We actually had someone at our most recent Discover talk where I was talking with them later and they were, I think it was Hudson Alpha, which is a biotech researching style institute that often tries many of our things. And what they were saying that I thought was really interesting point which I'd not heard of in the context of, "Hey, what does composability do and how does "this drive up utilization rates and many of these things?" One of the things that he was saying that I thought was really interesting is he was starting to use Synergy to deliver what he called spot instant style on-premise infrastructure where someone could run a workload for a period of time and then if someone else needed the infrastructure more badly and he had a way to sort of basically just blast away the old thing and put in the new thing there. And he said, "This is great because during the day "there's a certain set of workloads we have to do. "At night there are a different set of workloads "I want to do and Synergy gives me the capability "to do all of that very simply." And so I think that those kinds of capabilities, while still early, will be very powerful value propositions for customers that are looking to solve the problem you're describing of, "How do I get out of a data center "that's under 20% utilized? "I need to get more efficiency here in order "to lower the cost and be responsive "to what my customers need." >> Jay before you were at HPE you worked as a venture capitalist at Blue Run Ventures, in particular looking at opportunities in mobile and consumer internet enterprise software. If you could put on your investor hat here and talk a little bit about the cloud market and the cloud industry, what excites you and what gives you pause in terms of where you see the market heading and where companies are putting their money? >> Oh that's a really good question. I think that, well I would say that putting an investor hat on, I think that particularly in the enterprise space, I think it's a really exciting time, particularly for, and not to be super self serving for what HPE is doing, but I think there is a set of problems that are out there that are big and broad where there will be large companies that get created. One area that we're very interested in at HPE that I think is an area of investor interest, whether it's HPE making the investment or whether it's venture capitalists or what have you. It's really in the notion of what I describe as hybrid management. And what that basically means is, "Look, I'm a user that's going to have some VMware. "I'm going to have some cloud stuff running on AWS, "I'm going to have a desire to use Kubernetes, "and containers and so on." "Help me get one pane of glass that gives "me a way to think about seeing "those different applications, understanding how they're running. "I want one way to do things like firmware updates "for the stuff that needs firmware updates. "I want one way to do application firewalls, "I want one way to do this." And I think that's going to be a very interesting and sticky market to go off an win. So if I were in the investment space that would be an area that I would be looking at very deeply. Another area that I think is going to be really interesting and important, we talk a lot about AI and machine learning in the context of everything in the world of enterprise, seems to have this label of, "Hey, we're using AI and machine learning." But I think what you really have to get back to is what about artificial intelligence and machine learning is actually going to help you solve a problem? How is it going to make your business actually better? And I think that often we're, I think right now at a place where we're a little bit too over our skis in terms of saying, "Look, these are really interesting technologies, "AI's going to do everything and drive out cars "and basically make us little house pets in the corners "'cause they're doing so much in our lives." But I think that there tends to be, one customer was saying to me, "You know what's really interesting is "dozens of startups will come and tell me "about how AI's going to solve "a hundred problems I didn't know I have. "What I'd really like someone to come "and talk to me about is about, "I want them to talk to me about "one of the problems I know I have. "'Cause I've got a hundred problems "I know I've got that I want solutions to." And so I think a big opportunity is really to try and figure out how do these new technologies particularly in that space and around big data and so on, how do those become things that are really truly impactful to making a mainstream business that may have a hybrid estate, how does it make them more effective? And that can have an impact in terms of how to make their IT ops more efficient, how to predict outages, how to be more secure, all that sort of stuff, all the way to "How do I do a better job delighting my customers "and predicting where the next new markets are going to be?" So those are some of the areas that I'd be most interested in as an investor and really as an operator and a strategist at HPE. >> And yet you remain a little skeptical of what you're hearing about the AI and machine learning in terms of where it really truly is at right now and the opportunities that? >> Yeah, what I would says is, I think it's if it's, the technology's really exciting and developing very very quickly. That I have no question about. What I often have questions about and I hear customers questioning is is this a technology in search of a solution or is it just kind of, we're saying, "Hey this is a really cool new thing "that it can go solve everything "but I haven't thought specifically about how "to actually solve this specific problem "that exists at hand." And that's the challenge. It's ultimately, I think of it, to dig in a little deeper, it's really a product management question or problem of "Hey, do I really understand what problem "my customer's trying to solve "and am I using this tactic to do a great job?" As a quick example machine learning, those kinds of things are great for what computers do well. One thing a computer does really well is the same repetitive task thousands and thousands of times. So things like email marketing automation, or thinking about how you use a business development manager to reach, do outbound selling. That you can have a computer do a lot that imitates a human being to say, "Hey I'm going to send you an email "and try and sell you something "and get you interested in a call." I don't need to have a human being do a lot of that stuff. That to me is really straight down the fairway, really clear business problem that AI and machine learning can do a great job, bots, all that sort of stuff, can do a great job starting to have an impact on. But to think it's just going to do everything out of the box is something that you have to think about. Okay where does this tool and technology really provide the value that customers are going to see. >> Jay. We've had HPE on theCUBE lots of time. You were at Discover in London, so I think we're pretty close to where you cloud strategy is but I look at next week's Open Stack Summit, some in the industry was like, "Oh, HPE pulled out completely of Open Stack." You've got HPE Discover coming up in Vegas, soon after that, and we'll have theCUBE there also. I know John and Dave are really looking forward to it. Give our audience a little bit of an update as to where HPE is and isn't when it comes to Open Stack, specifically and just kind of cloud positioning in general. >> Yeah, right, so what I would say is I think that it's a really good question because I think there's been a lot of transition and I think that customers are still, and the market, are still trying to figure out, "Okay, what and where does, is HPE playing?" And I think that what I was talking about today in the keynote and what I think represents where we're going and what we are doing is we're really focused in on this notion of saying, "Look we want to build a set of solutions that make a customer's hybrid estate simpler" and that hybrid estate, as I describe it, cuts across proprietary virtualization technologies like VMware of like Hyper view with Microsoft, it's going to cut across openstack, it's going to cut across doctor, it's going to cut across public clouds, et cetera. And I would say that where HPE is most focused, short of, when we look at how do we help customers get better leverage and value across that whole mix of estate, what we would talk about is, we think we're moving a little bit more up stack into this sort of notion of saying we want to invest and be really great at managing across that estate, so when I was talking about areas that I'd be interested in as an adventure investor, you know, it wouldn't surprise you that HPE were really, we talked a little bit about this concept of new stack and it really is this notion of saying, we want to be great at managing a hybrid estate across public and private, across proprietary and open source. So what that generally means, what that means then, as it pertains to, okay, what are we doing with openstack what are we doing with respect to cloud founder in this case or redhat, open ship, it means we're a lot more partner centric, because our assertion is that we believe the customers love a mix of, it's not going to be an all openstack world within a data center, we think it's going to be a mix openstack's going to be part of the estate, we also think doctor is going to be part of the estate, we think VMware is going to be part of the estate, we think that's where things are going, and so if you've seen us do in terms of the work we're doing with, whether it's red hat, at some levels, whether it's SUSA, whether it's even VMware, whether it's Microsoft, whether it's doctor, we've done, worked in partnership with all of them, and I think you'll see that partner centric approach continue. We certainly are interested in helping support customers that are existing and we'll move forward with respect to openstack with cloud founder in terms of what we're doing there, but I think that, increasingly over time, there's going to be a deep alliance on partners as we look at those infrastructures, service paz layers, because we look at that and say, there's a tremendous amount of world class talent, that's off building off those distributions in the openstack communities and other big opensource communities and those areas where we can most likely partner and have those take advantage of things like our infrastructure management layer of one view, can be very well leveraged within our new stack product and project that we're working on and so on, so that's really where we're heading and how we're approaching it. >> Jay Jameson, thank you so much for joining us, it's been great. >> It's been a pleasure thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and we will return with more of theCUBE after this.