>> Live from Orlando, Florida, It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. We are here in Orlando, Florida, theCUBE for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman is my co-host, for the next three days, our next segment is the Meraki team, we have Joe Hainline, who is with WWT's product manager, and Courtney Batiste, who is the Meraki solutions architect, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us.>> Great to be here. >> So, we got the engineering, we got the application,we got the use cases, Meraki's really reallypicking up a lot of steam, it's very cloud-scale, very cloud-native, bringing the enterprise perspective to it, which is a really big challenge right now, around how do I getenterprise into the cloud. If you're a startup on the cloud, it's really easy, you justprovision some servers, you're up and running. If you wanna really do the hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, it's really complicated, Meraki's been doing really really well. What is the big takeaway, why should people careabout Meraki's success, and what does it mean to them? >> So, I think it'simportant to understand, why's Meraki been leading the way? We started out cloud-based, and that's what was important, and that's what's been leading for the past couple of years, and we look forward to pushing ourselves above and beyond that. So we also work with partners such as WWT that also embrace the samephilosophy and technology. And you can see that basedon the things that WWT has done up to this day. >> What's some things youguys have done, with Meraki? >> Yeah, I mean, what we love about Meraki for enterprise is beingable to leverage APIs, to be able to do thingsthat scale, and quickly, so we've done some of thelargest Meraki deployments, I would say, to date, in North America. You know, hundreds of Meraki networks, hundreds of site locations a night, with, leveraging some of theAPIs that Meraki's built, obviously, and someplatform innovations that we've done on top of that. >> Expand on that, giveus some color on that, so what does that mean, hundreds of sites, I mean, is it just offices,is it full networks, what's the density of it, could you just kind ofunpack that a little bit? >> Yeah, so we had a customerthat we were deploying, retail locations, so, 10 to15 Meraki devices per site, and being able to dothat at scale, you know, be able to deploy those really, I think our max wasabout 200 on one night, that we cut over,leveraging APIs, so yeah. >> What's the big walkaway from Meraki, obviously simplicity'sone, but you're seeing IOT becoming a big thing, where you don't want to have to hire someone to go out and actually turn stuff on, these networks need tobe self-provisioned, self managed, selfhealing, that seems to be the trend that everyone wants, right? >> Right. >> So that's obviously,getting stuff up and running, but then actually having it operating, connecting to the network, it seems to be, to me, the hard part. Is that where the magic is, Courtney? Where's the secret sauce? I mean, where is it, in all of this? >> So, the beauty aboutMeraki is that you can use that infrastructure to build a solution. And that's the goal. I mean, we've been doingnetworking for years, and there's no doubt aboutwhere the future holds, we want you to know that there's different solutions that you can build on top of your Meraki infrastructure. Whether you're focusing on provisioning, or you're looking at doingany kind of scanning APIs, those are things thatare leading the future. We're also trying tohelp you find innovative ways to bring otherbusiness units into the IT business, so for instance,marketing is huge, they have huge budgets, they want to invest intheir IT infrastructure, and if we're able to givevalue by showing them what they could extract from the network, that's where the APIs are key, to tie in. >> So integration is really critical. >> Absolutely. >> Is that, you said, APIswere used to the critical vantage for you guys, how are you guys doing your API, are you just slingingyour APIs with Meraki's, are you connecting them,are you writing code integration, where is the touchpoint? >> Yeah, that's a greatquestion, I would say that the power that Worldwidebrings to the table especially after acquiring Asynchrony Labs three years ago now, which is a software development arm, of Worldwide Now, is being ableto take those conversations, those integration conversations, and say what's the business outcome you're trying to achieve? So, if a customer, or amarketing, or a line of business person says these are the things we're trying to accomplish, a lot of those are gonna beenabled by infrastructure. And enabled at scale,you know, for enterprise customers really only via APIs. But there's more to that conversation too, I mean, it might be, what'sthe marketing campaign we wanna do, or whatdigital innovation are we gonna try to do that'sgonna make us competitive in this space, where we can take ourbusiness innovation practice, and our practice aroundmobile and web development and tie it in to the business outcome we're creating for a customer, leveraging the Meraki infrastructure, leveraging the capabilitiesthat Meraki brings to the table, leveraging APIs around, you know, who's in your store, youknow, traffic analytics, things like that, and pullingthose all into a solution, whether it's a consumer-facing solution, or a back-end solutionfor sales associates that helps give them insightabout what's happening, it's kind of knowing the business outcome you're trying to achieve, and putting the right pieces in place. >> Joe, wonder if youexpand could a little bit on you know, the transformation that WWT is going through, and your customers, you know, we're here in the debut zone, you know, I've known WWT for years, and moving up the stack andAPIs, and things like that, isn't the traditionalposition that I think of WWT, longtime Cisco partner,done lots of great solutions over the years, but it wasat the infrastructure level, which, not to say that's a bad thing, so, talk a little bit aboutmore that those transformations, for you and your customers, and partnering with Cisco even further. >> Yeah, I think, so, likeI said, we got acquired, I'm part of Asynchrony Labs actually, originally, and we gotacquired by Worldwide three years ago, and I think it was a really smart move,'cause Jim Cavanaugh saw the spaces moving towards software, defined everything,basically, and being able to have that capability built in, I think it's really changedthe way we go to market. We can have conversations now, conversations that doinclude infrastructure, infrastructure is stillcore to our business, but conversations that can start at the marketing or line of business side, or the digital transformation space, or really whatever business outcome that a customer's hoping to achieve. We now have the abilityto have that conversation at any level. Everything from you know,our skills and expertise, traditionally at Worldwide, and deploying infrastructure at worldwide scale, and supply chain management, and just top-notch integration skills, and solution delivery, and now with Asynchrony,being able to apply our best-in-class you know, business innovation,digital transformation, mobile development, webdevelopment skills into that mix. We can really provide fully customized solutions delivered to a customer. >> Take us through what that means for the customer, and useit as a way to compare five years ago, let'sjust go back in time. Pretend it was five, roll back five years. No Meraki, what's the road look like? And then what's the roadlook like with Meraki? If you had to do this five years ago, what would you have to do? Get a project team, have an assessment with the customer, I mean,much different world. >> Yes. >> Take us through what,in your mind's eye, kind of what that road would look like. >> So as someone from Asynchrony on the software side, I can tell you what it looked like five years ago, before we were acquired by Worldwide, when we had conversations with some of our big retail customers for example, we would only be able to go so far in the conversation, we could do the app development, we could take a mobile appand bring it up to par, make sure it integrated well, with back-end systems, but when it came to what does it take to actually deploy a new customer experience at scale across four thousand retail locations? We would have to have partners, and now with Worldwide, wecan have that conversation, we can integrate throughour ATC Labs base, our Advanced Technology Center Labs, we can integrate our retail location in our lab, six months before we deploy it in the real world, and have it be exactly the same hardware and software that we're gonna deploy in the real world, so we can now have conversations where we're working with infrastructure, ahead of the game to make sure that there's a seamless rollout, rather than there being sort of a line of business versus IT conversation where line of business says, hey we have this new digital innovation, but it's not working, because the network isn't solid. >> It's a two step process in the old way. >> Yeah. >> Which long creates more risk, a lot of moving parts. >> Yeah, and now wehave someone seamlessly connecting those piecesacross the spectrum. >> And you do it up front. And then you just deploy. >> And we know what'sa good network strategy to make this scale at enterprise scale, and then what's a good digital strategy to say how are we gonnaintegrate with that, what beacon technology are we gonna use, what network APIs we're gonna connect to, what analytics do we want to achieve, through this transformation, to measure it's success, and have that builtinto the infrastructure, from the beginning, so. >> Tell what the DI management style, the intelligent dashboarding is big, the machine learning, they have a lot of that in their products, it's only gonna get better in talking to the lead executives of the group, for you on the front lines of customers, you want to have thatawareness of what's happening, the instrumentation, how is that working for you, good? >> Yeah, it's-- >> Is that working out,what's your view on that? >> I'd say that it'sbeen really good working with Meraki because of the APIs, but we've also openedup some new offerings around Meraki lately, from a managed service perspective, so, we now have, I would say, a digital transformation engine, called Branch of the Future, which is designed around not just managing Meraki at scale, but it does have that component, but really the whole ecosystem of what does it take to doa digital innovation, leveraging Meraki at enterprise scale, and it includes, like I mentioned already, our Advanced Technology Center Labs, it includes a managed service, it includes branch service capabilities, to be able to roll out, you know, hundreds of sites a night, at scale, but it also includes platform innovations, like Thelios, which is what I'm the Product Manager for, which is really a platform for digital innovation, that leverages Meraki APIs, leverages other technologies that are gonna be in a space like a retail space, pulls those together, to provide an analytics capability, to provide provisioning, to provide other commonlyneeded capabilities, and really just gives customers a way that they can engage with Worldwide, and, in a continuous mannerthat's gonna give them an engine for innovation, where they can make a network upgrade, for example, rather than taking four years and rolling something out slowly, that they're trying todo a transformation, and not getting thebenefits of that technology for four years, leveragingBranch of the Future, we can do that same thing in four months, and that big investment they've made in infrastructure, theycan actually get an ROI on that immediately, but it doesn't stop there, because then we can say, alright,what's working, what's not, based on the analytics we're taking, what's the next step, and build in that continual evolving of the offering for the customer. >> Four years to four months. >> Courtney, what are youhearing from customers, how are their needs evolving, you know, what's driving them from the business, and from some of the new technologies? >> Well, so they'relooking at what's next, what's the trends, what are customers wanting, what exactly are their guests' experience that they're wanting to have? So it varies based on the vertical. They want more intelligence, they want more out oftheir infrastructure, and that's where I feellike we've definitely filled that void, andcreating this partnership with WWT has been amazing to see what customers are taking from it. They see the advantages of more than just a regular infrastructure running, they're getting to the point of truly embracing intelligent networking. >> On the future of you guys with Meraki, you know, you're doingdeployments overnight, massive numbers, we hear, and it goes from Todd Nightingale, customers are giving hugs to each other, things that have never happened before are happening, and this is the cloud scale, and the CEO of Cisco is in Kenya, talking about a scale,is really the new normal. How are you guys, whatare some of the projects you're working on that you could share, that give an indicator ofsome of the cool things, and relevant things that are going on, what are some of theprojects you're working on, right now? >> Yeah, I'm not allowedto talk about specific customer names, but we can, some of the things that we're building are enhanced customer-centric views of network health, forexample, so building systems that show network healthfrom the perspective of the business, in simple ways, that customers can understand, not just at the IT level,but at the CEO level, or the marketing level, so a lot of customization,leveraging APIs, and leveraging platform technology. >> So you have othercustomers that are out there, that might be a Cisco customer, or new to Meraki, what's your takeaway,what would you say to them if they say, you know, what is this Meraki thing, what does this mean to me? What would your advice be to your peers, or someone watching, whatwould you say to them, to kind of sum it upinto a bumper sticker? >> Yeah, I would say that you need to have those APIs for scale, you need to have acloud-managed platform that can really scale to the solution you're trying to offer, especially if you'rean enterprise customer, and you need to have apartner that understands how to manage to the business outcome you're trying to achieve, not just managed at the technology level. You really need a conversation, you need to be able tocreate a conversation between your business stakeholders, and your IT stakeholders, and your marketing and other stakeholders, infrastructure stakeholders, and say, what are we trying toachieve as a business, and I think Worldwideis uniquely positioned to be able to help havethose conversations with customers throughour business innovation practice, through ourchief digital advisors, and chief technical advisors practice, and just start a deep and rich experience with being able to do this at scale. >> Courtney, same questionto you, say someone bumps into you, you know, a friend sees you on the street, hey Courtney, what's this Meraki thing about, what would you say to them? >> I would tell them it'sthe way of the future. I had to shift even mymindset when I joined the team, and it was a great shift, I finally was able to havethat work-life balance that we all dream of as network engineers, so that's what I would say to someone. They're able to gather somuch intelligence from it. >> Yeah, it's really awesome. This is cloud-scale,do it right it's magic, more time on your hands to have more fun and do other things, it's theCUBE, live coverage here, in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018,we'll be back with more, stay with us, day one iscontinuing of three days of wall-to-wall livecoverage, we'll be right back, stay with us, thanks for watching. (light music)