(upbeat music) >> From Washington D.C. it's theCUBE. Covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest off the keynote stage this morning Bailey Szeto who is the Vice President of Customer and Seller Experience IT at Cisco. Thanks for coming and joining us. >> My pleasure. >> All right so Bailey, I've actually, you know I've watched, and partnered, and worked with Cisco my entire career but you actually changed my view of something about Cisco in your keynote this morning. And that's, you know, you said that 99% of Cisco's 50 billion dollars plus is transacted online so I should be thinking of you more as like Amazon.com you know, than as, you know the networking giant I've know my entire career. >> Well You know it's certainly true that most of our revenue comes through our online presence but it's perhaps in a different manner than what you're thinking right? So obviously we do do some business direct and we might have some stragglers selling, buying something with a credit card, but that's not the bulk of our business. The bulk of our business is through primarily partners, resellers and when I say online I meant B to B transactions. >> No no. I totally understand Bailey and what I love is you're in Cisco IT. >> That's right. >> And therefore we're not going to talk about a lot of the networking pieces. We're going to talk about what runs Cisco's business and you have the pieces and you know client success and support and all those run, and even, I didn't even realize the employee engagement all runs through you know Cisco.com >> That's right. >> And I love you did a nice little video. Gave all of those that have been in the industry. You kind of go through and look at the history of like oh okay there's the HTML stuff I used to code. >> That's right, that's right. >> Back in the 90s through all of the updates and yeah we definitely-- >> I was just expecting the little triangle with the guy like shoveling dirt under construction. You know the shovel right? >> Yeah the 404 not found. >> That's right, that's right. >> I know if I go to Cisco.com/go/product name that usually was a short cut to get me to some of the things I care about but for those people who weren't here for the key note or who might not know as much give us a little bit about you know your purview and kind of the scale and scope of what you do. >> Yeah so at Cisco I'm in Cisco IT. But I'm responsible for supporting all of the revenue generation portions of the company. So that's specifically marketing and what they do, sales and what sales does. Cisco services is a very big part of our company so I support the services organization. And most recently Cisco's been on a journey to really kind of move from a once and done hardware sales motion to a full reoccurring revenue type of stream. So we've stood up the whole customer success motion. And so I run the IT portions of that as well. And last but not least you heard me mention that 85% of our revenue actually comes through our partners. So I support all the systems that are partners interact with as well. >> Yeah it's interesting so we've done theCUBE at Cisco Live the last two years. >> Sure. >> And there's a observation I made a year ago when I started going to that show. And it was you know, if I'm a networking person but this applies to you know most people in IT, I used to manage stuff I could touch and go, I understand where it is and how I touch it and everything. Now a lot of what I have to deal with is outside of my purview and therefore I need to get into that environment kind of pair that with you know companies like yourself that are inquisitive. And so you have lots of change going on and lots of things that are in your environment there so we know change is the only constant in our industry. >> Without a doubt. >> So maybe give us a little bit of those dynamics and how that impact what's happening in your world. >> Yeah so I mean we talked a bit about my responsibilities and one of this is Cisco.com It's probably one of the more important platforms that I'm responsible for from an IT perspective. But I also mentioned that Cisco's a very, we grow through acquisitions a lot. It's one of our basic business strategies. And so every time we buy a company it's a big rush to kind of take that acquired company and integrate their online presence into Cisco.com right? So once a company is acquired we don't want people to think of it as a separate company both from a kind of marketing perspective but more importantly we're actually integrating that product into our Cisco ecosystem as well. So just having to move all that technology into Cisco.com is certainly a big job. But I think you are maybe asking this from a different perspective as well which is to say okay you know new technology is being introduced all the time and while it makes sense from a company portfolio perspective I think as a former IT person you're going to agree with me it makes our jobs a little bit more difficult. It's both a blessing and a curse right? From the perspective it's a blessing in that we get this great new technology to incorporate and use in our running of the business but it also adds a lot of complexity and so it's pretty important that we have both the systems and processes to be able to manage all that complexity in our infrastructure really. >> All right so infrastructure monitoring. >> Yes. >> Something you spent a lot of time talking about. I guess I'll set it up when I talked to my friends in the networking space these days or a lot of it, the joke is if you say single pane of glass they are going to spell it P-A-I-N because we understand that there's not one tool to rule them all. >> Right. >> Yes that I might have a primary piece but in the virtualization world I had to plug in to V Center and you know Cisco has you know you laid out a broad portfolio of various tools up and down and across the stack from you know security down to physical and upper layer and plus all the acquisitions. So can you lay out a little bit as to you know where ScienceLogic fits and there's a number of Cisco's tooling that that integrates in with. >> Yeah so when I talked about our journey with ScienceLogic you know Cisco of course has a number of tool and capabilities to take care of the pieces that we are known for. For example Application Dynamics is a great company that we bought and provides great insight into application health. But obviously in a network perspective right we have Cloud Management software, security software that type of thing and so I think what we realized in Cisco IT what my team realized is that it really isn't about a single system to rule them all it's about trying to find multiple platforms that can work together and really share data so as to drive richer insights. And so I think maybe the industry has been on a bit of a wrong path think it's you know it's not Lord of The Rings, one ring to rule them all or whatever right? It's about being able to use multiple applications but having the right data insides move around as needed so that depending on your lens or your role in IT whether you're a network guy or an application guy that you're going to use the tool that's more most natural to yourself but pulling in the right amount of data from those other parts to be able to get the right insight. >> Yeah I saw your closing slide mirrored the theme we've seen at the show of superheroes. So the super power everybody needs in IT today is how do I leverage my data and we understand that it probably takes more like the Avengers to be able to put those together because data is everywhere. >> Yeah the funny thing is that that wasn't actually a set theme. I think we must all have Avengers on our mind because everyone independently came up with the super hero concept. >> Yeah no spoilers on End Game either way though. >> That's right, that's right. >> Excellent so you know can you just bring us inside of some of that ScienceLogic journey? My understanding you're probably the largest enterprised employment of it so you know we always love to talk about scale and what that means and how it's been in your viewpoint. >> Yeah you know we actually before ScienceLogic we actually had our own system that Cisco IT wrote right and so you know as IT professionals we always think we can do it better than anyone else but we've reached a point where just so much technology and so much complexity came to the market that we really wanted to find a solution that would really kind of enable us to grow into the future with all the things that are happening right whether you're talking about Virtualization with Containers or you know Cloud native applications or Multicloud, these are all technology trends that have made our jobs in IT incredibly complex. And so we started to look for what could we replace our home grown monitoring platform with and ultimately we decided that ScienceLogic was the best fit for us. And since we've deployed it we as with most things we tend to stretch the scale especially with our vendors and so I think we are the largest ScienceLogic enterprise customer at this point. But we are seeing incredible benefits in terms of being able to connect ScienceLogic's Infrastructure Monitoring with our own Application Dynamics and really marry the two for those insightful bits that we get from both. >> All right so one of the big themed discussion here is that journey toward AI Ops. >> Yes. >> While we speak actually I've got a team in Mountainview that is at the DevNet Create Show which Cisco helped organize. >> Sure. >> We're doing two days of interviews there and DevSecOps is probably one of the key topics their going to be talking about. In your keynote this morning I heard IT Ops in a discussion there so bring us inside a little bit organizationally you know what you're seeing you know your viewpoint on these various trends that are you know helping to modernize you know transform operations. >> Yeah I think from a operations organization standpoint you're going to see the applications team and the infrastructure team work even closer together. Maybe one of the things that didn't really make super clear in my keynote this morning is I actually work on kind of the app side of the house right? I'm the direct interface to the business. And as such I actually don't interface with ScienceLogic directly but I'm a strong partner with my infrastructure team who are I think they are all sitting over there that do run ScienceLogic right and so in today's world you really can't just say oh this is infa problem they are going to deal with it. Because of that really big mix of well is it an infrastructure problem, is it an application health problem? And a lot of times it's both. And so organizationally it might be two separate organizations but the need to work together is you know even greater today than ever before. >> You're preaching to the choir. I mean when we launched Virtualization and then later when Containers came around there was the nirvana that oh I'm going to have some unit of infrastructure where the application people just don't need to worry about it. >> Right. >> You know serverless from it's name seems to imply that but we understand that eventually you know there's networking, there's storage, there's compute all underneath these kind of things. >> That's right. >> It's just repackaging so you know the applications important you know I'm long time infrastructure guy. >> That's right >> But, the number one rule is the reason we are here is to run that application and make sure your data you know gets where it needs to be otherwise you know we're not here just to power things. >> That's right. And I just realized I probably would get in trouble if I said it's actually the application, infrastructure, and of course the network all has to work together. >> Yeah well that's a given. Can you just we talked a little bit about App Dynamics you know when I think about Cisco you know broad portfolio, you know the SD-WAN, the ACI how do some of those fit into this discussion are there tie ins with what ScienceLogic is doing? >> It absolutely does. So as I talked about it when we talked about that collection of super heroes it's not a single super hero it's not a duo either it's really a big team. It's The Avengers right? And so when you think about Cisco's portfolio we have a lot of additional components needed to provide that modern operating IT operating platform right? So we talked about a lot about Application Dynamics we talked about ScienceLogic but what Cisco brings to the mix is things like ACI, Tetration, Policy Enforcement, Multicloud Management. So all those things again have to work together like The Avengers do to provide that modern platform. >> Yeah you mentioned multicloud and I know in your keynote you talked about AWS and GCP. >> That's right. >> How's Cloud changing things in your world? >> It absolutely is again it's I'll go back to the it's both a blessing and a curse right? The blessing is enormous capability that we get from the Cloud, enormous flexibility. As and example using Cisco.com as an example we host a lot of you know a lot of public information about our products and websites and data sheets and that type of thing on Cisco.com. And then a couple years ago we decided we're going to refresh the engagement of Cisco.com We wanted to make it much more personalized. We wanted to incorporate video. Those are all great things but the moment you try to throw video and guess what? Native video whether it be in English or French or Chinese or Japanese depending on where you are well that put an enormous strain on our infrastructure and if you had to travel if the packets had to travel from Japan to the United States to our data center that would slow things down. So we took advantage of Public Cloud to really kind of push out the content to the edges so that we could get localized content as close to the customer as possible. That's the great thing about it. But again the management of that increasing complexity right so both a blessing and a curse. AWS, GCP, we are using for doing a lot of video streaming work. And so again great capabilities from that platform as well. >> All right so we saw this week a lot of announcements of some of the integrations Service Now and App Dynamics were two of the ones that highlighted that I think impacted you. Anything from the announcements that is particularly excited you and I guess final on that is there anything roadmap wise that you know you'd be looking directionally for this phase to evolve towards? >> Yeah I think I was excited to see in fact that's one of the main reasons why we chose ScienceLogic in the first place was the quality and the amount of integrations that they have right? And so we're also a big Service Now customer and we see the benefits of automatically open cases in Service Now when ScienceLogic detects an issue as an example right? And I would say going forward we'll be looking to either have out of the box or if needed you know Cisco IT will build something even more integrations with the Cisco products. We already have App Dynamics but as I mentioned we have a lot of other components that are critical to the network and so we'll be looking for tighter integration and all this to drive really drive data together so that we can get to what I think what most people at this conference are hoping to achieve which is really driving towards automation and AI Ops right? So that's really the desire for I think for everyone attending this conference. It's certainly our desire in Cisco IT. And you know I'm looking forward to working with ScienceLogic to building out that roadmap. >> You know so I guess final question for you you talked about that automation, where are you when it comes to we look at you know things like machine learning and automation which if you listen to the analyst that spoke this morning is like you want to make sure you separate those things. >> That's right. >> We understand you know any of us that have done process and operations is you know you can automate a really bad process and it's not a good thing. >> That's right, that's right. >> So where are you on that journey? What do you see? You know what are the barriers that keep us from kind of the nirvana where you know oh geez I can actually just seal off the data center and let everything run? >> Right I think it's funny you mentioned Cisco Live so actually I present on a topic of AI at Cisco Live as well. So what this other speaker talked about really hit home with me understanding what is AI really. Because I think there's a general perception in the press that it's like this magical fairy dust you can just sprinkle on everything and it like makes everything perfect right? AI is really good at pattern recognition but you still need to put some check points and really have human beings kind of check the work of AI right? And so you know we actually have seen data center outages not Cisco but in the press when AI runs amok right? And so I think the first step of automation that's a given. We want to do that but that involves a lot of human beings kind of looking at the data and deciding okay these sequence of events can be cured by this set of automation. AI Ops is a something that's a whole different thing if you followed the definition of AI to say okay let the computer do it all on its own. I don't think we're there yet. I think we have a ways to go. And I certainly wouldn't trust want to trust our you know multi billion dollar business to AI Ops at this point in time. >> Well Bailey there's an event we did a couple years ago with a couple professors from MIT that are really forward looking on this and they say it's racing with the machines because people plus machines will always do better >> Yes. >> Than people alone or machines alone and hopefully that keeps some of us that are a little bit worried about the Skynets of the world taking over from getting a little bit too paranoid all of a sudden. >> I totally agree with that statement. In fact the quote that jumps in my head is "Better together". And I'll close with ScienceLogic App Dynamics better together. People AI better together. >> All right well Bailey since you ended on a perfect quote there thank you so much for joining and I hope to see you at Cisco Live San Diego. >> Fantastic, my pleasure. >> All right and thank you so much for watching theCUBE as always, I'm Stu Miniman here at ScienceLogic 2019 in Washington D.C. (upbeat music)