[Music] everyone welcome to the special cube conversation here to talk about the big announcements big news big concepts and big trends happening Cisco live in Barcelona I'm John for your host of the cube we're here with Fabio Gauri senior director cloud solution marketing at Cisco I've been great to see you things are spending time to me to unpack all the exciting news in Barcelona great stuff thank you thank you for having me John so one of the things that's happening with Cisco we've covered certainly we've been reporting and reporting are other outlets as well and you guys have been transforming and continuing to innovate Cisco has transformed itself into the next level building on your successes we've been covering that and that's been all about the clouds been all about networking going you know software driven you know software powered network operations DevOps the whole thing is now infiltrating into into the new model but it's clear now there's no debate that on-premise data centers on-premise environments of IT service providers the entire old you know computing industry is connecting with the cloud that's been kind of validated and we've been staring at that for a couple of years and now everyone's starting to take action this is a key theme here in Barcelona for you guys and we heard you see you talking about it last year at Cisco live in North America that transition to cloud validated across the voice or Andy chassis the CEO of AWS actually announced an on-premise device hybrid cloud has been validated so public cloud and on-premise and now visibility into what kubernetes is enabled with multi cloud mm-hmm this is the new normal describe that impact in the marketplace what does it mean for customers what do they do what what is it what does this mean when now enterprises are seeing on-premise and cloud coming together absolutely well you know if you think about it you gotta start from the application so if you take a step back right we've been talking about digitization for so long but what does that ultimately mean right people need to build more and more applications to digitize their their business processes their customer experience and so on and so forth ultimately what we're seeing is that this applications are becoming exceptionally distributed right because they go what it makes sense whatever the data is whatever the user is you may have low latency needs you may have actually just you know the right needs to go all the way to the cloud in reality you have a mix of this kind of needs but workloads are distributed and people want to harness this multi cloud world and that's what we're seeing I love these chips it's kind of like people have been living on two sides of the street you know old way new way it's clear that the migration to this new model cloud is the new way and that's been validated again so you've got the old way in new way describe in your mind the old way and the new way from Cisco because if you look at the history of Cisco the dominance and the success I had and recently had an opportunity to be John Chambers at his house and he talked about that that dynamic of how Cisco is so dominant the culture and then going the next level the datacenter you guys have a great success networking edge this is New York or business yeah that's still relevant with the cloud in the new way so talk about what's changed all the way new way Francisco I'll give you a try so fundamentally if you if you if you remember where we're coming from we are coming from an era where we've been seeing infrastructure kind of dictating application requirements through the other way around as well but you had an application you will buy specific hardware networking and everything else including firewalls for a specific infrastructure right so that era actually is not going away is there because it's built an immense amount of legacy that you can not all of a sudden throw away however the new world is a world where you see applications fundamentally going pretty much across multiple type of domains not just to do the center domain anymore but here comes the cloud we have a lot of applications that are going to the edge if you have a branch office right you may want to take your application over there because it's simpler it's it's sometimes it's more economic you don't need to move all the data and still you can have those applications collaborating with your data center with your cloud so what you're now seeing is a completely from world where applications want the infrastructure to be programmable and easy accessible and still extremely secure that's interesting in the old way was you know the you dictate applications you can only do as much as the network and the infrastructure will let you to do yeah and then now as infrastructure becomes more abundant yeah data tsunamis have spent a lot of data's coming in so that's why the storage industry never docking it's always growing storage industries always growing servers as always need for compute but as is more abundance than that it almost as a limitless opportunity for applications so it's not a you know kill the old and bring in the new it's more of a foundational hold as now foundational it is literally next level thing so kubernetes service meshes these programmable policy-based abstractions are showing the way and that's a network construct policy is a network concert so the first time we're seeing is the coming together of the app market with infrastructure absolutely and if you think about it even a step before the apps people have when they build application they have a business intent right let's make an example you take healthcare application right you want in a hospital you want the doctors to be able to access you know the full extent of the data of a customer record for instance you may not want the nurses doing the same thing or for instance you don't want the nurses and the doctors to get access to the financial system of the hospital so this is actually a business intent that that given application will have to respect well the infrastructure can and has to cope with this kind of requirements by delivering the appropriate kind of segmentation right so that you'll be able to ensure that what the application wants to do the infrastructure delivers what has changed in the on premise and cloud world in your mind because to have that kind of coordination and you guys are have announced here it's some great announcements around seamless end-to-end as a theme we're seeing you're seeing hyper convergence anywhere are you seeing application centric infrastructure concepts everywhere but when you actually go into the hood and look at how complex it is it's almost magical in the sense that it's going on its I know it's hard work and people who know networking know it's hard what are the innovations what's enabling that what is the key driver that's making you guys connect an on-premise data complex data center environment that is now edges private networks hybrid private cloud IOT edge enterprise edge campuses the old stuff now with cloud what are the key linchpins well hey I'm gonna take on one of the the words that you use complexity people are looking for the opposite of complexity people are looking for simplicity easy to say more difficult to do but what sits between complexity and and and turning it into a more simple kind of architecture is automation so what you have to have is fundamentally an infrastructure that becomes automated programmable that takes the business intent or the application intent as an input and actually with a closed-loop system fundamentally monitors and gives you the assurance okay the implementation the assurance that actually what you want to do gets delivered by the infrastructure and this has to be literally annalistic and cross-domain kind of architecture what do I mean with cross-domain you're going out of the data center you're going out to the edge you're now going to the cloud this should be seen as a cohesive almost fluid environment where you can actually push your policy your security models right and transform in this highly fragmented the architecture into a set of domains or a multi domain architecture that you can control that you can automate as if it was all yours so to speak even though in the cloud for instance you're going into a domain that you don't control end-to-end so big concept here being discussed in Barcelona is multi domain you just get that explain that a little bit and then take that to where cloud integration comes in because the other thread that we're seeing here is multi cloud yeah so multi domain multi-cloud the same are they different what's the nuance points there yeah again the the critical point is let's think applications applications want to go and it's convenient to go into multiple domains right depending on what you want to do what you want to access to you wanna access clouds innovation from whatever they come from so that's why we have a multi cloud world the data center is still there is critically important you have a lot of applications databases that are still there and now we're seeing the big new shiny object which which is more and more super Robo remote office branch office applications where for instance IDC believes 30% of applications are going to be deployed into this kind of environments so your problem is now connecting all of this together right and because the applications are going anywhere are the designer strategy is that the data center needs to follow the applications and support them wherever they go so it's a data center anywhere kind of kind of strategy the data center has to flex and provide that yes be ready for anything basically from from applications what you're getting at and all the all the plumbing and all the all the intelligence underneath it have to be reactive to what the application wants absolutely a vocation doesn't have to get into the provisioning or any kind of policy because that's the infrastructure as code DevOps the point is that that kind of absolutely the application has an intent right there's also application policy etcetera but it needs to be translated into infrastructure policy where we've been talking about it a minute ago when we were doing the the healthcare kind of example right well we've been super excited in collaborating with you guys on kubernetes we have a special section on silicon angle called the kubernetes special report that's evolving into multi cloud special reports the folks watching Silicon angle comm check out the multi classify syrup or that should be up and yeah by now it was the COO Bernays but ton of interest was seeing startups coming out of the kubernetes you're seeing a cloud native world CN CF and Linux foundation promoting tons of great ecosystem development pulling together those developers want more infrastructure and so that and they wouldn't want to deal with it right so this is where you the cloud strategy has been paying off for you guys you guys have had done deals with Google as your AWS s ap Red Hat among others you guys are well poised for this talk about cloud Center that's a big piece of the story here yeah cloud Center suite a new capabilities talk about the impact of cloud and cloud Center yeah so let me let me let me take us the buck if you want and tell you a little bit more about what we're announcing here right because it's a pretty big announcement I mentioned at the center anywhere what does it mean right well of course our data center portfolio is sent around two big components the first one is networking right particular application center came first structure a CI based on the Nexus 9 K kind of architecture and the second one is our computing portfolio particularly you know the hyper-converged infrastructure cisco hyper flex that's of course you know an extremely efficient way of condensing you know what you need to make it very flexible in your application implementation where we have two major news here right in this two areas and the third is absolutely what you were asking for which is Cloud Center so with a CI and it's interesting because they're going into two if you want different directions when it comes to the small T cloud domain AC I was already visualized in the previous releases sorry application centric infrastructure is fundamentally cisco in ten base networking for the data center okay it gives you program ability of the infrastructure it gives you segmentation gives you security and a high degree of automation capabilities exactly okay continue and so in the previous in the previous if you want developments releases of ACI what we've been doing was to aggressively visualize a CI right so that you will have constructs like virtual poles and virtual leaves to rescale your data center implementation to the edge now where we're going with this new announcement is exactly on the other side which is we're standing ACI to the cloud to usher in AWS so that the construct that you have typically on Prem under your control such as tenants EP G's and things of this nature will be translated into the equivalent construct in AWS whether it's VP C's or security groups and the likes the two things end up fundamentally corresponding so now we have one construct that extends from the edge to the data center to the cloud that's a pretty big deal and what does that mean to the customer just give an example it means a high degree of automation security and control on the resources right so that you can impose one policy it propagates all across the board one way of monitoring you know the data center flows and discovering for instance if you have if you have any kind of security threat monitoring application performance thanks to the inter so this fully checks this hybrid cloud box this ship I say yes is one a hybrid deployment this checks the box saying I can operate and say whatever cloud and on-premise in the datacenter with a CI both places without changing any code is it seamless what's the what's that well with a CI is gonna come with a specific software this is all software that's that's the beauty of it right it's it's in line with the transformation the company that you were referring to it's all software and it goes into AWS and uses of course all the api's to connect 2d to the AWS resources that you were you're you're acquiring from AWS right so that's one big bucket of news the second bucket o news is hyper flex that's actually heading to the edge because what we're seeing is more and more applications that have components of the application itself or even entire applications that are going into remote office branch offices and the reason are many right it could be cost reason it could be did a gravity reason it could be just low latency reason right we all know that you know to go back and forth from the cloud that's not always convenient as well as if you lose the connectivity your branch is dead right so you have to you need to have business continue it in all of this and so it doesn't mean that you don't want the cloud you want a collaboration across this again fluid sort of infrastructure so I purflex come with a very efficient kind of kind of fun factor over there now it's either flex edge and its control Emilia this is that because you have many remote offices and branch offices is controlled from the cloud with cisco inter side which is of course our console and cloud system to manage all these hand points no just hyper flex but also UCS so when you think of this now you understand what do we mean with the dissenter anywhere because we're taking both our networking and our computing platforms anywhere the application needs them right and the third component which actually is where your questions started from is application lifecycle management in this kind of infrastructure becomes even more of a problem right it is extremely complicated now to have applications in multiple clouds and then in your data center and to the in India JH and in you know all these different kind of places so what we've done with cloud center which is our flagship club management and an orchestration system is two big things first we have expanded the functionalities by adding new modules especially the cause optimizer the helps operations team at Center suite now it's the cloud center suite and I'll explain you in a moment why we remove the branding slightly from cloud center to cloud center suite because we highly modularize the software and and make it and made it really much more easy to consume I'll go there in a moment but going back to what is new first of all is cost optimizer right that's that's brand new and it helps Operations team to right-size the workload to pick up the the best instances in the cloud are you using to actually minimize your investment or reach your your goal of performance and cost right that's one big thing the second one is that we're adding a very smart so called action Orchestrator which is a workflow manager that helps you automate in there tear connection of your cloud management system to all the other systems right some of these plugins and integrations come outer-box particularly with the higher level tiers of licensing such as with service now for instance or we give you already built-in integration with cisco inter side or UCS director which is the infrastructure manager for Cisco infrastructure but you can use the kind of platform and module to build your own integrations with the other systems that's very important because the cloud management system doesn't exist in isolation right it needs to integrate with all the other IT management solution that you have on Prem and that's one big thing the second big thing as you said before when you said about the suite is the fact that because we have written all of this new software and cuber Nerys right this is highly scalable highly portable so now we can give you different tiers of licenses you can start very small as small as around $50,000 right for subscription service and you can actually bite subscription on pram or that's big news you can buy Nate software-as-a-service so cloud center is now Asaf offering yes available when it's gonna be so all the subscription use the new software is going to be available literally a next month in a few days for now right in February and the SAS version is gonna be available in North America in March so right away for Europe of course due to the GDP our implementation our customers will have to wait until the summer but it's pretty immediate and you hear a bit of an extra work done yeah okay so bottom line me on the cloud Center suite what is the the purpose is it to be the high level management suite how is it connecting into other systems so if I have all these different management tools out there when Cisco and others is it connecting into am i connecting up and you just explain quickly you know the purpose of it yeah works so really the goal of Cloud Center is to do a salute three things the first one is a he wants to simplify cloud management and how it does it right one of the key patents that we acquire together we clicker right click a cloud center when we brought them in more than two years ago was the really unique way that they have to model applications right the way that people are managing cloud management and an organization is still extremely manual I mean many customers are still kind of doing scripting we have cases of customers that are scripting like 1200 lines of codes just to upload a piece of software onto the cloud we think the approach should be different right the approach should be you should be able to model that application your application model wants and then thanks to cloud API so we have 16 different API into a cloud integrations with AWS our Google you name it right I BM and the likes we realize of course on parameter private cloud once you model your application you can use any of these other clouds as a target for implementation okay that allows you to have a very very effective cloud management solution because don't risk to make mistakes you leave the tool so you said it's written in kubernetes absolutely we scraped all this now we program all this in Cuban Eddie's so you may tell us hey you're walking the talk absolutely doing that and that's very in that sow actually we can do it on Prem in a Cuban IT infrastructure by the way if you need one we have the Cisco cloud center platform a hyper flex underneath to do it or you can buy from the cloud because we're uploading a little dot to the cloud you guys have done a good job at kubernetes just as a side note you guys done the work it's doing the cloud integrations and I think wasn't she about kubernetes unlike other trends I've seen in some of these open-source projects some hype comes up and then it kind of drops off or it gets hyped up and it's too hard to roll out or use it cost too much and so people actually using kubernetes for not just standing it up they're actually pulling it for a purpose so congratulations on that I think it's a real good thank you for thank you know we're a big believer in to this so simplifying really multiplayer management is one big thing reducing time to value is another big thing because with the integrations and the ability you know to integrate with the other tools you can put it in production very very quickly and then it's incredibly easy to consume you can start small and grow up so I did a little checklist here I want to just run this by you and then I'm going to ask you a question around what all this means to your to your customer base because I'm sure the world's changing we've done a lot of kind of you know surveys and interaction with a lot of network guys to kind of spiel out how the markets going get your reaction so interesting thing you guys have a this builder model very similar to Amazon you know toolkits for cloud builders you guys are really investing heavily and it's a security you got stealthWatch tetration analytics you've got app dynamics and tetration as well datacenter hyper flex UCS Nexus check cloud apps WebEx I know what else is in there there's also cloud apps cloud native apps which you're connecting into management cloud center container platform and IOT kinetic and networking the edge Meraki cloud service route or bunch of other things so you guys are building quite the portfolio on here right so given that you guys have that security to network and kind of end-to-end with the application centric infrastructure are kind of expanding and intent based networking combined cloud seems to be kind of the end-to-end is the theme it really is it's it's again end to end and across multiple domains because that's the thing that doesn't come across with end to end is the fact that you need to cross different domains that are exceptionally different from from each other and so having consistent policies and a single security model having one mean of networking and securing all this in a containerized world which which is where we're progressively going that's everything and you know it's not me saying it but if you look at the CN CF surveys they'll tell you the securing and working containers is one of the toughest things so I got to ask you that the tough question totally makes sense you got my buy-in on it I totally believed in the vision making it work okay making it smart and making it at scale are the three kind of things I'm looking at give us your take on how you guys are looking at those three kind of you know checkpoints you got to get this up and running so one make it work you know end-to-end mobile domains yeah make it intelligent that's data smarter you know automation kicks in and I'll see scaling it up but you know with all the checkbox security everything else so take us through the strategy yeah and what you guys are thinking there and and the impact with that in mind so the person on the other side your customer the buyer and customer Sisko to manage it that's that's a big sea change yeah and the benefits are pretty lucrative on the other side if you can pull this up yeah yeah upon three big aspects so first of all we mean we've been talking about architectures but architectures doesn't mean that you shouldn't have Best of Breed products right it starts from there those are the atomic components of any strategy right you gotta have best of the products now these products need to integrate into an architecture that solves true business problems such as the intent base you know architecture that we've been talking about the third aspect is actually how you help customers to be successful and I will love to call out our partner strategy right which for I would say for as long as 30 years has been Cisco's critical differentiator and I think this is an enormous asset especially when you look at the number one problem in IT out there which is not kubernetes and it's no cloud is actually lack of talent people don't have the skillset and talents so relying on an ecosystem that helps you expanding what you need because you don't have it inside its fundamental importance on you guys absolutely but this is a critical asset and you know we're doing a lot of investments also on the customer experience side of the house with our leader Maria Martinez the staking actually this customer experience so approach to the next level more and more it's about these architectures also being cloud a touch so you heard me talking about inter-site it doesn't come by chance right the more you can rely on on this kind of architectures the more you can harvest analytics you can do cross correlation across multiple networks and domains and figure out what is going wrong that's something that providers of pinpoint products just cannot even dream of delivering as final question for first of all thanks for spending the time and chatting and he was going to be rolling out a lot of content we're gonna be following what's going on with on your end to really like Cisco's vibe you guys are very transparent and collaborating appreciate being there working with you guys final question if someone's watching this I'm a Cisco customer you know we've been talking about the network I which I've talked to a couple you know and surveying some some enterprises where you know the network's they've done the heavy lifting that's been part of the computing industry you know networking compute they've been running the show and really have moved the needle campus networking the list goes on and on but now that foundation set we're going to a whole nother level it's almost like a sea change on the personality side persona of the people who've built it out and now have to build the next generation yeah and my relevant am I gonna be the mainframe guy am I gonna be leading the charge or may be left behind there's a lot of cognitive dissidence around decisions so that go here should I go there architectures so there's a lot of psychology and also decision-making that's gonna be determined by your core audience mm-hmm that person out there is your target audience they're thinking about these things because they want to do well and they don't wanna be left behind what do you say to that audience about Cisco now the opportunity for them personally their ability to one grow their skill gaps or have an impact to being a key change agent for this next generation what do you say that that person out there about the Cisco and the opportunity for them it's it's a very big question I would split a question in two parts first of all is what is your advice to IT professionals right how can they not just survive but thrive and be the heroes of this this transition and it's pretty simple actually you have to understand what your business wants we've been talking about how do you close this gap between of infrastructure and application but in other terms is covering the gap between what you do and what the business wants you've got to understand that right so that's number one second part of the question is okay considering this is cisco the right partner for me and the answer of course from cisco standpoint is approximately yes because our entire company strategy is wrapped around this concept of intent-based architecture where our goal is to map the business intent into the infrastructure underneath and that's exactly your core business mr. IT professional right so I see this as a as a marriage in heaven right in terms of where I see really the talent need for IT going right in IT professionals and where the company is going right if we if we're right and I think we are this is gonna be a great ride and not a threatening one I think everything's lining up you're getting clear visibility into what the role of cloud is the scale PC and personal links are just undeniable and that the role of technologists now are super important there's no jobs really going away they're shifting this is this is the reality this is kind of what the exciting opportunity it is but but again it's about bringing IT very close to the business in the end I believe it's just it's just gonna be continuity between what we call today line of business and IT it's just a company that wants to win in the marketplace right wants to get faster efficient usual kind of you know terminology but you know does this gap is gonna go away Fabio thank you for taking the time to share this conversation I'm John furry this is a cube conversation here at Barcelona live go live Europe back to the cube coverage go to the cube dotnet to check out all the live coverage and cube interviews in Barcelona I'm here with Fabio Korey senior director cloud solutions marking Cisco I'm John for the cube thanks for watching [Music] you