>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back. And Buddy Jeffrey here with the Cube coming from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco Definite event is called Accelerating Automation with definite in the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is not going away. We've been doing this since the middle of March. We're all the way to October. And so we're excited of our next guest. He's Thomas Shy V. 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. And truly running in normal, as everybody can see in our background. >>Exactly. Exactly so. But 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 air 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. A. I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before on. Then the only other differences I'm really more on. Ravix calls and zoom called, but you know otherwise? Yes. Um what? What I do see, actually, is that, as I said, network becomes much more operates 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, what do I need to have in place with respect to network? To get my things from left to right and, you know, just 2000 east or west, as we say in the data center Right on. That just is for most of my customers, 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 the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly. Eyes is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some some excitement in 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 that 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 were used to getting at the office or used to getting at school. >>Yeah, and I mean to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. We're clearly talking about some of these thes trends in the way I look at this. Trans is being distributed data centers and having the ability to move your workloads and your access for users to wherever you wanna be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we practice or knowing what we're prepping for. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important. And, you know, one of things. I actually do a little clock, a little little prep you for block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put 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. Uh, 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, um, and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. There's all types of variants on that theme. Yeah, you had in that block post about resiliency and data center cloud networking data center cloud. You know, some people think Wait, it's it's kind of an either or either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I got Public Cloud. And then, as I said, Hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both in 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 the market is changing. How you guys air reacting and really putting the things in place t to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, I know. It's actually to me. It's really not counterintuitive, because in the end, what what I'm focusing on and the company's focus on is what our customers want to do and need to do on. That's really, um, would you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi cloud, Uh, in in the end, what? What? This is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want him to be, and they have different reasons why you want to place them right. You might have placed them for security reason. You might have placed for clients. Reason depending on which customer segment you're after. If you're in the United States or in Europe, in Asia there are a lot of different reasons we're gonna put your things. And so I think in the end, what on enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility and resiliency. And 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 sings as needed. But the larger context action which we see in the last couple of months accelerating, is really this whole seem around digital transformation, which goes hand in hand. Then, was the requirement on the Teesside really do? And I t operations transformation, Right? How I t operates on. I think that's really exciting to see. And this is actually where a lot off my discussions I was customers. What does it actually mean with respect to the I t organization? And what are the operational changes? There's a lot of our customers they're going through, quite frankly, accelerated 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 the on the security or the way the networks moving or, as you said, shifting workloads around based on dynamic situations. Whether that's business security, etcetera, you too suffer to find networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in and adding mawr automation, You know, to more and more processes to free up those those, um, kind of limited resource is 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 >>automation. Yeah, that's a good point. And they said the Tekla and a half, you know, sometimes in my mind is really going from cloud ready, which I think most of infrastructures today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on. This right is like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last 5 to 6 years. All the infrastructure that our customers have network infrastructure or the Nexus 9000. They're all cloud ready right now, what this really means. You have a P ice everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these a p i a neighborhood. 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? And right? And this is the integration was a lot off automation tools on. That's the whole range, right? This is where the I t operation transformation kicks in. Different customers a different speed, right? Some just You know, I used these AP ice and use normal tools that they have in the network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further and saying, I want to integrate this with extensive Deb equals some go even further and saying this is like the cloud native people saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say, redhead answerable. I want to use how she called terra form 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, is how they run their I t operations. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see given. As I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There is 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 operation change the process, changes to actually get there >>right. And it's funny we we recently covered, you know, pager duty. And they highlight which you just talked about. The cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now were so interdependent on all these different a p. I s, 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 Mawr. 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 s so that you don't lose that customer. You complete that transaction, they check out of the 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 this, this is like I just said, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot off abilities for our customers how they want to actually structure the operation, right? One of the nice things around this whole automation, plus, uh, true integration closer to integration is you actually open this up. Now, this whole automation trained not just to the network operations person, right? You also open it up and can use this for the sake cups person or for the death of a person or for the cloud tops engineering team. Right? Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally it's an A p I interface, and you can now decide what is your process? Do you wanna have? On what? Traditional process. You have a request number. Corporation teams executes request using these tools and enhance it back over. Or you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I'm gonna hand over the second team and it can directly call these days a p I s right or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the death of So 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 off different user roles in our customer base. What they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting, right, because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they wanna. We built the I T operations processes. >>That's interesting, you know, because the you know, the Dev ops 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, netapp. You know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world toe have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic 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 that 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? Is none of this. 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 this just customer driven feedback. Uh, yeah, we we do have even network operations teams comes to saying, Hey, we use answerable heavily on the computer side. We might use this for for seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations with the variety of state. Whether these are the switches, whether it's our A, C and D C and controller or our Martha said orchestration capabilities, all of these has answerable integration away. All right, The other one is you mentioned how she from Cherepkov telephone. We have integrations available and they see the request for these tools to use that on DSO. That is emotion. We're in for over a year now. And another block, actually, that's out there. We're just supposed to saying you all set what you can do on then in parallel to this, right? Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on on definite and enablement and training on, you know, a little pluck. And I know probably part of the segment. The whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty off this is right. If you look at this, whether your naps person or a deaf person or seconds person, it doesn't really matter. There is 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, dry things out. Snippets of code A there you could 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 the tremendous, uh uh, time people spend to learn, quite frankly. And that's another side product off. You know, the situation wherein people sit home and say, Okay, online learning is the thing. So thes, thes thes tools. They're used very heavily, right? >>So that's awesome. Because, you know, we've We've had Suzy we on a number of times. And I know he and Mandy and the team, right, really built this definite thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right? Democratization to the access tool, taking it out of of just a mahogany row with again really limited number of people that know how to make it work and and could make changes in opening up to a software defined world where now that you know It's his application centric point of view where the people that are building the APS to go create competitive advantage now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help him out of these environments. Really interesting. I wonder, 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 the 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 I took a look at this more from a from a customer. Answer, right? It's the transformation process, and it always starts is I want agility. I want flexibility. Anyone resiliency, right. This is where we talked to a business owner what they're looking for and then it translates into into a night operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map them. How you actually do this on that? Just tries. Then what truths 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 sing services to the app developer and, uh, the platform team and the security team right to your point so the network can act at the same speed. But you also give to to the network operations teams because they need thio adjust. And they have the ability to react thio to some of these requirements. Right? And it's not just automation. I think we we focused on that. But there's also to your point, the need how to extend between data sent us, you know, just just for backup and recovery. And how do I extend into public clouds? Right. Uh, in the end, that's ah, that's the network connectivity problem. And we have soft us. We have made us available. We have integrations into, uh, W s. We have integrations into azure to actually make this very easy from a from a network perspective to extend your private domains private networks into virtual private networks on on these public cloud. So from an app developer perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here, someone might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the end. I think what what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say I need to have something separate for this deployment was separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. E need to do this resilient in the resilient way in an enjoyable way. Give me the tools. And so that's really where we focus, Um, 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. Uh, they're all standard tools. The ones I mentioned right that everybody is using. So you're not getting into this. Oh, this is specific to Cisco. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually like the term. Yeah, >>it's It's a great terminate, and it's it's really interesting, especially with with the A p i s and the way everything is so tight together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customers demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and workloads, and one of those things are moving, but they don't really wanna manage that. They just wanna, you know, deliver business, benefit to their customers and respond. Thio, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, etcetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this at first point of view versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and and enable this hyper fast development, hyper fast change and 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 the Cisco Data Center side we started. It's probably six or seven years ago, uh, when we when we named the applications 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 used Teoh. This is what I want to do, and I need a service thinking on the networking side to explosives that can be consumed, and so that clearly is playing out and said Automation Issa Kiki Foundation that we put in place in our customers. Most of our customers this point on these on these products? Uh, they have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them points. >>Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes in in in social Media, right? What's driving your digital transformation? Is that the CEO, the CMO or cove it? And we all know the answer to the question, so I don't think the pace of change is going to slow down any time soon. So for keeping the network up and enabling us all the get done, what we have to get done and and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes >>Yeah, I know. Thanks. Thanks for having me. And again. Yeah, if you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started? Cisco Definite. It's the place to go. It's, you know, fantastic fantastic environment, and I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeve and you know the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah, and we know once the physical events come back, we've been toe definite, create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, really engaged community. Sharing lots of information is kind of. That's still kind of that early vibe. You know where everyone is is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, you know, like this using the team were really built a great thing. And we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back face to face. Okay, >>look forward to that as well. >>All right, Thanks. He's Thomason. Jeff, you're watching Continuing coverage of Cisco. Definite accelerating with automation and program ability. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.