>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music plays) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of MWC '23, my name is Dave Vellante. Just left a meeting with the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins, to meet with Jeetu Patel, who's our Executive Vice President and General Manager of security and collaboration at Cisco. Good to see you. >> You never leave a meeting with Chuck Robbins to meet with Jeetu Patel. >> Well, I did. >> That's a bad idea. >> Walked right out. I said, hey, I got an interview to do, right? So, and I'm excited about this. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. >> So, I mean you run such an important part of the business. I mean, obviously the collaboration business but also security. So many changes going on in the security market. Maybe we could start there. I mean, there hasn't been a ton of security talk here Jeetu, because I think it's almost assumed. It was 45 minutes into the keynote yesterday before anybody even mentioned security. >> Huh. >> Right? And so, but it's the most important topic in the enterprise IT world. And obviously is important here. So why is it you think that it's not the first topic that people mention. >> You know, it's a complicated subject area and it's intimidating. And actually that's one of the things that the industry screwed up on. Where we need to simplify security so it actually gets to be relatable for every person on the planet. But, if you think about what's happening in security, it's not just important for business it's critical infrastructure that if you had a breach, you know lives are cost now. Because hospitals could go down, your water supply could go down, your electricity could go down. And so it's one of these things that we have to take pretty seriously. And, it's 51% of all breaches happen because of negligence, not because of malicious intent. >> It's that low. Interesting. I always- >> Someone else told me the same thing, that they though it'd be higher, yeah. >> I always say bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. >> Every single time. >> You can't beat it. But, you know, it's funny- >> Jeetu: Every single time. >> Back, the earlier part of last decade, you could see that security was becoming a board level issue. It became, it was on the agenda every quarter. And, I remember doing some research at the time, and I asked, I was interviewing Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary, and I asked him, yeah, but we're getting attacked but don't we have the best offense? Can't we have the best technology? He said, yeah but we have so much critical infrastructure the risks to United States are higher. So we have to be careful about how we use security as an offensive weapon, you know? And now you're seeing the future of war involves security and what's going on in Ukraine. It's a whole different ballgame. >> It is, and the scales always tip towards the adversary, not towards the defender, because you have to be right every single time. They have to be right once. >> Yeah. And, to the other point, about bad user behavior. It's going now beyond the board level, to it's everybody's responsibility. >> That's right. >> And everybody's sort of aware of it, everybody's been hacked. And, that's where it being such a complicated topic is problematic. >> It is, and it's actually, what got us this far will not get us to where we need to get to if we don't simplify security radically. You know? The experience has to be almost invisible. And what used to be the case was sophistication had to get to a certain level, for efficacy to go up. But now, that sophistication has turned to complexity. And there's an inverse relationship between complexity and efficacy. So the simpler you make security, the more effective it gets. And so I'll give you an example. We have this great kind of innovation we've done around passwordless, right? Everyone hates passwords. You shouldn't have passwords in 2023. But, when you get to passwordless security, not only do you reduce a whole lot of friction for the user, you actually make the system safer. And that's what you need to do, is you have to make it simpler while making it more effective. And, I think that's what the future is going to hold. >> Yeah, and CISOs tell me that they're, you know zero trust before the pandemic was like, yeah, yeah zero trust. And now it's like a mandate. >> Yeah. >> Every CISO you talk to says, yes we're implementing a zero trust architecture. And a big part of that is that, if they can confirm zero trust, they can get to market a lot faster with revenue generating or critical projects. And many projects as we know are being pushed back, >> Yeah. >> you know? 'Cause of the macro. But, projects that drive revenue and value they want to accelerate, and a zero trust confirmation allows people to rubber stamp it and go faster. >> And the whole concept of zero trust is least privileged access, right? But what we want to make sure that we get to is continuous assessment of least privileged access, not just a one time at login. >> Dave: 'Cause things change so frequently. >> So, for example, if you happen to be someone that's logged into the system and now you start doing some anomalous behavior that doesn't sound like Dave, we want to be able to intercept, not just do it at the time that you're authenticating Dave to come in. >> So you guys got a good business. I mentioned the macro before. >> Yeah. >> The big theme is consolidating redundant vendors. So a company with a portfolio like Cisco's obviously has an advantage there. You know, you guys had great earnings. Palo Alto is another company that can consolidate. Tom Gillis, great pickup. Guy's amazing, you know? >> Love Tom. >> Great respect. Just had a little webinar session with him, where he was geeking out with the analyst and so- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Learned a lot there. Now you guys have some news, at the event event with Mercedes? >> We do. >> Take us through that, and I want to get your take on hybrid work and what's happening there. But what's going on with Mercedes? >> Yeah so look, it all actually stems from the hybrid work story, which is the future is going to be hybrid, people are going to work in mixed mode. Sometimes you'll be in the office, sometimes at home, sometimes somewhere in the middle. One of the places that people are working more and more from is their cars. And connected cars are getting to be a reality. And in fact, cars sometimes become an extension of your home office. And many a times I have found myself in a parking lot, because I didn't have enough time to get home and I was in a parking lot taking a conference call. And so we've made that section easier, because we have now partnered with Mercedes. And they aren't the first partner, but they're a very important partner where we are going to have Webex available, through the connected car, natively in Mercedes. >> Ah, okay. So I could take a call, I can do it all the time. I find good service, pull over, got to take the meeting. >> Yeah. >> I don't want to be driving. I got to concentrate. >> That's right. >> You know, or sometimes, I'll have the picture on and it's not good. >> That's right. >> Okay, so it'll be through the console, and all through the internet? >> It'll be through the console. And many people ask me like, how's safety going to work over that? Because you don't want to do video calls while you're driving. Exactly right. So when you're driving, the video automatically turns off. And you'll have audio going on, just like a conference call. But the moment you stop and put it in park, you can have video turned on. >> Now, of course the whole hybrid work trend, we, seems like a long time ago but it doesn't, you know? And it's really changed the security dynamic as well, didn't it? >> It has, it has. >> I mean, immediately you had to go protect new endpoints. And those changes, I felt at the time, were permanent. And I think it's still the case, but there's an equilibrium now happening. People as they come back to the office, you see a number of companies are mandating back to work. Maybe the central offices, or the headquarters, were underfunded. So what's going on out there in terms of that balance? >> Well firstly, there's no unanimous consensus on the way that the future is going to be, except that it's going to be hybrid. And the reason I say that is some companies mandate two days a week, some companies mandate five days a week, some companies don't mandate at all. Some companies are completely remote. But whatever way you go, you want to make sure that regardless of where you're working from, people can have an inclusive experience. You know? And, when they have that experience, you want to be able to work from a managed device or an unmanaged device, from a corporate network or from a Starbucks, from on the road or stationary. And whenever you do any of those things, we want to make sure that security is always handled, and you don't have to worry about that. And so the way that we say it is the company that created the VPN, which is Cisco, is the one that's going to kill it. Because what we'll do is we'll make it simple enough so that you don't, you as a user, never have to worry about what connection you're going to use to dial in to what app. You will have one, seamless way to dial into any application, public application, private application, or directly to the internet. >> Yeah, I got a love, hate with my VPN. I mean, it's protecting me, but it's in the way a lot. >> It's going to be simple as ever. >> Do you have kids? >> I do, I have a 12 year old daughter. >> Okay, so not quite high school age yet. She will be shortly. >> No, but she's already, I'm not looking forward to high school days, because she has a very, very strong sense of debate and she wins 90% of the arguments. >> So when my kids were that age, I've got four kids, but the local high school banned Wikipedia, they can't use Wikipedia for research. Many colleges, I presume high schools as well, they're banning Chat GPT, can't use it. Now at the same time, I saw recently on Medium a Wharton school professor said he's mandating Chat GPT to teach his students how to prompt in progressively more sophisticated prompts, because the future is interacting with machines. You know, they say in five years we're all going to be interacting in some way, shape, or form with AI. Maybe we already are. What's the intersection between AI and security? >> So a couple very, very consequential things. So firstly on Chat GPT, the next generation skill is going to be to learn how to go out and have the right questions to ask, which is the prompt revolution that we see going on right now. But if you think about what's happening in security, and there's a few areas which are, firstly 3,500 hundred vendors in this space. On average, most companies have 50 to 70 vendors in security. Not a single vendor owns more than 10% of the market. You take out a couple vendors, no one owns more than 5%. Highly fractured market. That's a problem. Because it's untenable for companies to go out and manage 70 policy engines. And going out and making sure that there's no contention. So as you move forward, one of the things that Chat GPT will be really good for is it's fundamentally going to change user experiences, for how software gets built. Because rather than it being point and click, it's going to be I'm going to provide an instruction and it's going to tell me what to do in natural language. Imagine Dave, when you joined a company if someone said, hey give Dave all the permissions that he needs as a direct report to Chuck. And instantly you would get all of the permissions. And it would actually show up in a screen that says, do you approve? And if you hit approve, you're done. The interfaces of the future will get more natural language kind of dominated. The other area that you'll see is the sophistication of attacks and the surface area of attacks is increasing quite exponentially. And we no longer can handle this with human scale. You have to handle it in machine scale. So detecting breaches, making sure that you can effectively and quickly respond in real time to the breaches, and remediate those breaches, is all going to happen through AI and machine learning. >> So, I agree. I mean, just like Amazon turned the data center into an API, I think we're now going to be interfacing with technology through human language. >> That's right. >> I mean I think it's a really interesting point you're making. Now, from a security standpoint as well, I mean, the state of the art today in my email is be careful, this person's outside your organization. I'm like, yeah I know. So it's a good warning sign, but it's really not automated in any way. So two part question. One is, can AI help? You know, with the phishing, obviously it can, but the bad guys have AI too. >> Yeah. >> And they're probably going to be smarter than I am about using it. >> Yeah, and by the way, Talos is our kind of threat detection and response >> Yes. >> kind of engine. And, they had a great kind of piece that came out recently where they talked about this, where Chat GPT, there is going to be more sophistication of the folks that are the bad actors, the adversaries in using Chat GPT to have more sophisticated phishing attacks. But today it's not something that is fundamentally something that we can't handle just yet. But you still need to do the basic hygiene. That's more important. Over time, what you will see is attacks will get more bespoke. And in order, they'll get more sophisticated. And, you will need to have better mechanisms to know that this was actually not a human being writing that to you, but it was actually a machine pretending to be a human being writing something to you. And that you'll have to be more clever about it. >> Oh interesting. >> And so, you will see attacks get more bespoke and we'll have to get smarter and smarter about it. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you before we close is you're right on. I mean you take the top security vendors and they got a single digit market share. And it's like it's untenable for organizations, just far too many tools. We have a partner at ETR, they do quarterly survey research and one of the things they do is survey emerging technology companies. And when we look at in the security sector just the number of emerging technology companies that are focused on cybersecurity is as many as there are out there already. And so, there's got to be consolidation. Maybe that's through M & A. I mean, what do you think happens? Are company's going to go out of business? There's going to be a lot of M & A? You've seen a lot of companies go private. You know, the big PE companies are sucking up all these security companies and may be ready to spit 'em out and go back public. How do you see the landscape? You guys are obviously an inquisitive company. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think there will be a little bit of everything. But the biggest change that you'll see is a shift that's going to happen with an integrated platform, rather than point solution vendors. So what's going to happen is the market's going to consolidate towards very few, less than a half a dozen, integrated platforms. We believe Cisco is going to be one. Microsoft will be one. There'll be others over there. But these, this platform will essentially be able to provide a unified kind of policy engine across a multitude of different services to protect multiple different entities within the organization. And, what we found is that platform will also be something that'll provide, through APIs, the ability for third parties to be able to get their technology incorporated in, and their telemetry ingested. So we certainly intend to do that. We don't believe, we are not arrogant enough to think that every single new innovation will be built by us. When there's someone else who has built that, we want to make sure that we can ingest that telemetry as well, because the real enemy is not the competitor. The real enemy is the adversary. And we all have to get together, so that we can keep humanity safe. >> Do you think there's been enough collaboration in the industry? I mean- >> Jeetu: Not nearly enough. >> We've seen companies, security companies try to monetize private data before, instead of maybe sharing it with competitors. And so I think the industry can do better there. >> Well I think the industry can do better. And we have this concept called the security poverty line. And the security poverty line is the companies that fall below the security poverty line don't have either the influence or the resources or the know how to keep themselves safe. And when they go unsafe, everyone else that communicates with them also gets that exposure. So it is in our collective interest for all of us to make sure that we come together. And, even if Palo Alto might be a competitor of ours, we want to make sure that we invite them to say, let's make sure that we can actually exchange telemetry between our companies. And we'll continue to do that with as many companies that are out there, because actually that's better for the market, that's better for the world. >> The enemy of the enemy is my friend, kind of thing. >> That's right. >> Now, as it relates to, because you're right. I mean I, I see companies coming up, oh, we do IOT security. I'm like, okay, but what about cloud security? Do you that too? Oh no, that's somebody else. But, so that's another stove pipe. >> That's a huge, huge advantage of coming with someone like Cisco. Because we actually have the entire spectrum, and the broadest portfolio in the industry of anyone else. From the user, to the device, to the network, to the applications, we provide the entire end-to-end story for security, which then has the least amount of cracks that you can actually go out and penetrate through. The biggest challenges that happen in security is you've got way too many policy engines with way too much contention between the policies from these different systems. And eventually there's a collision course. Whereas with us, you've actually got a broad portfolio that operates as one platform. >> We were talking about the cloud guys earlier. You mentioned Microsoft. They're obviously a big competitor in the security space. >> Jeetu: But also a great partner. >> So that's right. To my opinion, the cloud has been awesome as a first line of defense if you will. But the shared responsibility model it's different for each cloud, right? So, do you feel that those guys are working together or will work together to actually improve? 'Cause I don't see that yet. >> Yeah so if you think about, this is where we feel like we have a structural advantage in this, because what does a company like Cisco become in the future? I think as the world goes multicloud and hybrid cloud, what'll end up happening is there needs to be a way, today all the CSPs provide everything from storage to computer network, to security, in their own stack. If we can abstract networking and security above them, so that we can acquire and steer any and all traffic with our service providers and steer it to any of those CSPs, and make sure that the security policy transcends those clouds, you would actually be able to have the public cloud economics without the public cloud lock-in. >> That's what we call super cloud Jeetu. It's securing the super cloud. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Really appreciate you coming on our editorial program. >> Such a pleasure. >> All right, great to see you again. >> Cheers. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We'll be back, right after this short break from MWC '23 live, in the Fira, in Barcelona. (bright music resumes) (music fades out)

>>Okay, welcome back. Everyone's cubes live coverage of eight of us reinforced 22. I'm John furrier, my host David Lon. We've got a great guest from Cisco, Eric Costin, technical marketing engineer, Cisco systems. Great to have you on. Thanks with >>The all right. Thanks for having, >>Of course we've doing a lot of Cisco laws, Cisco events, Barcelona us know a lot of folks over there. A lot of great momentum supply chain challenges, but you got the cloud with a lot of networking there too. A lot of security conversations, dev sec ops, the trend we're hearing here is operations security and operations. What are some of the business realities that you guys are looking at right now focused on from a Cisco perspective and a landscape perspective? >>Well, the transition to the cloud is accelerating and it's really changed the way we're doing business and what we do now, this combined with the more and more remote work by remote users and also the consumption of cloud-based tools to perform your business functions has dramatically changed the contour of the business environment. The traditional trust boundary has evaporated or at least transformed dramatically, but you still have those requirements for trust for micro segmentation. So what we've seen is a dramatic change in how we do business and what we do. And this is essential because the value proposition is enormous and companies are able to pursue more and more ambitious objectives. But from a security point of view, it's quite challenging because on one hand, what we call the attack surface has increased and the stakes are much higher. So you have more sophisticated malicious actors taking advantage of a broader security target in order to conduct your business in order to maintain business continuity and achieve your objectives. You need to protect this environment. And one, one of the, >>Sorry, just to, just to clarify, sure. You said the value proposition is enormous. You mean the value proposition of the cloud is enormous. Exactly. So the business is leaning in big time and there are security consequences to >>That precisely. And so, and one thing that we've seen happen in the industry is as these components of the business environment have change, the industry has sort of bolted on more and more security solutions. But the problem with that is that's led to enormous complexity in administering security for the company, which is very expensive to find people with those expertise. And also the complexity itself is a vulnerability. >>And, and that traditional trust boundary that you talked about, it hasn't been vaporized has it, it's still there. So are you connecting into that? Is there an interoperability challenge? Does that create more security issues or are people kind of redoing? We talk about security as a do over, how are customers approaching it? >>It is a challenge because although the concept of a trust boundary still exists, the nature of the hybrid multi-cloud environment makes it very difficult to define furthermore, the traditional solutions such as simply having a, a, a firewall and, and an on-premise network is now much more complex because the on-premise network has to connect to the cloud infrastructure and parts of the cloud infrastructure have to be exposed to the public. Other parts have to be protected. So it's not that the, the concept of trusted versus untrusted has gone away. It's just become fundamentally more complex. >>So Eric, I wanna get your thoughts on this higher level abstraction trend, because you're seeing the complexity being pushed to the customers and they want to buy cloud or cloud operations from partners platforms that take the heavy lifting from there, and best of breed products that handle the complexity. What's your reaction to that, that statement? Do you think that's happening or that will happen because either the complexity is gonna be solved by the customer, or they're gonna buy a platform or SA product. >>Now the, the it's it's unreasonable to expect the customers to constantly adapt to this changing environment. From the point of view of, of security, they have to be able to focus on their business objectives, which is to actually sell their products and pursue their ambitions. And it's a distraction that they really can't afford if they have to be focused on security. So the solutions have to take that challenge that distraction away from them, and that has to be integral to the solution. >>So you're saying that the, the vendors, the provi supplier has to deal the underlying complexities on behalf of the customer. >>Exactly. The vendor can't do this without a robust partnership with the cloud provider, working together, the both at the engineering level to develop the products together and in the implementation, as well as standing side by side with the customer, as they expand their business into the >>Cloud, this is super cloud it's super cloud. Right? Exactly. So give us the specifics. What are you doing? What's Cisco doing? How are you working with AWS? What solutions are you talking about? >>Well, Cisco has a wide variety, quite an expansive portfolio because there's a large number of components to the solution. This spans both the, the workload protection, as well as the infrastructure protection. And these are integrated and in partnership with AWS not only integrated together, but integrated into the cloud components. And this is what allows comprehensive protection across the hybrid cloud environment. >>So are we talking about solutions that are embedded into switches? We're talking about software layers, maybe give, describe, add a little color, paint, a picture of the portfolio. >>And, and it's really all of those things. So the most of the solutions historically could say evolved from solutions that were utilized in the physical infrastructure, in the firewalls, in the switches, in the routers. And some of these technologies are still basically confined to those, to those form factors. But some of the most important technologies we use such as snort three, which is a best of breed intrusion protection system that we have adopted is, is applicable as well to the virtual environment, so that we, we push into the cloud in a way that's seamless. So that if you're, if you've developed those policies for your on-prem solutions, you can extend them into the cloud effortlessly. Another example of something that adapts quite well to the cloud is security intelligence. Cisco has talus. Talus is the world's leading security intelligence operation. This is fundamental for addressing threats day zero attacks and Taos updates are products approximately once every hour with the new, with information about these emerging attacks, as well as informing the community as a whole of this. And now that that architecture is very easily extensible into the cloud because you can inform a virtual device just as easily as you can inform a physical device of an emergent threat, >>But technically, how do you do that integration? That's just through AWS primitives. How do you, how does Cisco work with AWS at an engineering level to make that happen? >>So, part of it is that we, we, we have taken certain of our products and we virtualized them. So you could say the, the, the simplest or more straightforward approach is to take our firewalls and, and our other products and simply make virtual machines out of them. But that's really not sort of the most exciting thing. The most exciting thing is that working with them, with integration, with their components and doing such things as having our management platforms, like our Cisco defense orchestrator, be able to discover the virtual environment and utilize that discovery to, to manipulate the security components of that environment. Yeah. >>Kurt, this is where I think you, you, onto something big here management is kind of like, oh yeah, we have software management software kind of always a thing. When you talk about large scale, multiple data point billions and billions of things happening a month. Quantum, we mentioned that in the keynote, we heard Kurt who's VP of platform. So about reasoning. This is kind of a whole nother level of technology. Next level reasoning, knowing things mentioned micro segmentation. So we're seeing a new era of not just policies, reasoning around the networks, around the software stuff that needs to be better than just machine learning, doing predictive and, you know, analysis. Can you share your reaction to that? Because I see this dots connecting at a whole nother level. >>Yes. Now, as we understand artificial intelligence machine learning, I think we appreciate that one of the key components there, we think about it as data science, as data management. But when you think about data, you suddenly recognize where's it coming from data requires visibility. And when we talk about the transition to the cloud and the dispersion of the workforce, visibility is one of the great challenges and visibility even prior to these transitions has been one of the primary focuses of Cisco systems. So as we transition to the cloud and we recognize the need to be able to interpret what we're seeing, we have expanded our capacity to visualize what's happening. And I think there's a, a significant contribution yeah. To the >>Dave and I were talking about this in context to our thesis about super cloud, how that's going evolving building on top of the hyperscalers CapEx investment, doing things, customer data control flows are a huge thing going across multiple geographies. It's global, you got regions, you got network, some trusted, some not. And you have now applications that are global. So you got data flows. >>Yes. >>I mean, data's gotta move across multiple environments. So that's a challenge >>And it has to move secure securely. And furthermore, there's a real challenge here with confidence, with confidence of the company that it's data flow is secure in this new environment that is frankly, can be a little bit uncomfortable. And also the customer and the partners of that business have to be confident that their intellectual property, that their security and identity is protected. >>Yeah. Dave and I were talking also, we're kind of old and seen some seen the movie before. Remember the old days of multi-vendor and OSI models and, you know, interoperability, we're kind of at a new inflection point where teamwork, not just ecosystem partners, companies working together to make sure things are secure. This is a whole nother data problem, opportunity. Amazon sees things that other people don't seek and contribute that back. How does this whole next level multi-vendor partnerships, the open source is a big part of the software piece of it. You got it's custom Silicon. You mentioned. How do you view that whole team oriented approach in security? >>Now this is absolutely essential. The community, the industry has to work together. Fortunately, it's in the DNA of Cisco to interate, I've sat next to competitors at customer sites working to solve the customer's problem. It's just how we function. So it's not just our partnerships, but it's our relationship with industry because industry has common purpose in solving these problems. We have to be confident in order to pursue our objectives. >>You see, you see this industry at a flash point right now, everyone has to partner. >>Exactly. >>Okay. How would you summarize that? We, we are out of time, but so give us your leadership about the >>Part of you, of business leadership. A business needs business continuity, its contributors have to be able to access resources to perform their job. And the customers and partners need confidence to deal with that business. You need the continuity, you demand flexibility to adapt to the changing environment and to take advantage of emerging opportunities. And you expect security. The security has to be resilient. It has to be robust. The security has to be simple to implement Cisco in partnership with AWS provides the security. You need to succeed. >>Eric, thanks coming for so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your insights and your experience and, and candid commentary and appreciate your time. Thank >>You. Thank you very much for the >>Opportunity. Okay. We're here. Live on the floor and expo hall at reinforce Avis reinforced 22 in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John ante. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.

>>The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid two thousands permanently changed the way we think about it at the heart of it. The cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs more than half of it, budgets were spent on people. And much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning management, recovery optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut costs, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to simplifying hybrid cloud made possible by Cisco today, we're going to explore hybrid cloud as an operating model for organizations or the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. >>No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure. And it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where it managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing the growth and diversity of applications continues. And now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIO is by enterprise technology. Research ETR indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. >>So the challenge for it managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of it. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next we're going to hear from Maneesh Agra wall and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex, which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment we'll drill into unified compute more than a decade ago. Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS unified compute system. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade, and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. >>Okay. Let's start things off. Gus is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. DD. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, >>Our pleasure here. Uh, look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but um, every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing, um, while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications. Um, and then most modern applications are, um, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, uh, uh, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering a change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across, um, all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, uh, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the bus storage team. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right. Um, back to the origins of UCS, I mean, we widen the networking company, builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So we do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the software for our, um, for our and you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. Um, but the software is called intersite and, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. Um, but then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does go into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, uh, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, uh, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, we brought a platform, I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. Uh, and so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So w tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, um, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, uh, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we took on this ball goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same is the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or on software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how they work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. Um, but it was a pretty big boat patient because, you know, um, the big change with SAS is, is you're, uh, as you're familiar today is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, um, working with, uh, our own companies, security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. Um, so again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but, uh, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compete, I of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business, and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like doing stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right. Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that your intro introducing I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, um, search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants, I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies, and then figure out how to stitch it all together. Cause it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's, that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, um, you know, infrastructure partners like, uh, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, you know, others who want their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are other SAS offerings and software vendors, um, who have now become partners. Like we do not, we did not write to Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, uh, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem, we partnered with a company called ergonomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, uh, you know, w how we have gone about this. >>And, uh, it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the inner side platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, uh, soon coming on, uh, on GC, on, uh, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site is since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage the end in, in a, in an easy to instance. So, >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. Um, so my last question is how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing has become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center. It doesn't matter if they're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades, or they're looking for a consistent operating model. What my crystal ball doesn't mean. There's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So allegations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is most as the data moving data is the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be located with the data that's on the edge. We on the air colo public cloud doesn't matter, but, um, basically you're gonna see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific, I think sovereign is going to play a huge role. Uh, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it goes to making, you know, a good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, whether it's, gonna play control, um, and then distributed cloud also on edge, um, is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way, every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workload data, um, you know, upgrading your liability concerns. That's really what, what we are trying to enable for our customers. >>Uh, you know, I think I agree with doing that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world, uh, a solid open, flexible platform, and it's flexible in terms of the technology flexible in how they want to consume it at some customers are fine with a SAS software. What if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team now that does not work so how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, our perspective sovereignty, we talked about it. So, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. Um, but the last thing I would mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage into some of those, um, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex. Um, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right, thanks DDL. It was a pleasure to have you in the queue. Great to see you. You're welcome in a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where HyperFlex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question and, you know, customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer, and I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move, and process large datasets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think that give our customers kind of some, you know, pose some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today, or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I rightsize it without over provisioning for example? But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or Blade approach which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have, and that creates a lot of, you know, opportunity for siloing infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU-focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together, that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align, for a lot of our customers they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase, without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really rightsized for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009 we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took a management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time, however, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Dave: All right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right, you know, Jim I said in my open that you guys, Cisco had sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things. These data-intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed so how is it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake, we're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned which is one infrastructure that can run any application into it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco but also within the industry. And I think right now as a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground-up work that we did is really paying off, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June, when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So, Vikas I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way, and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way, and hybrid cloud so, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures, and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that and I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-Series right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? >> Sure, and that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs, and hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory-dense system, GPU-dense system, core-dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across the firmware, and software, and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade references of their own. As a result we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really, seeing a slowness in their agility, and high burdened in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile, and drive lower these issues. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the rightful footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model. Where they can create the policy once across compute, network, storage, and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade, and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where, the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their issues. >> Oh, that's key. Less friction is always a good thing. Now of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone, you have hard news as well, what innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely, so we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year Dave, and we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the 5th generation of our very popular Unified Fabric Technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the HCI workload, the SDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular farm factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 Gig end-to-end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of this performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, may it be ethernet adapter, may it be with fiber channel adapters, or may it be the other storage adapters, they've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in the smart release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So Jim you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move, again, to the, kind of to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI, that's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market every, every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow, we have the, you know, the premier cloud-based management you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that you, that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well, and, you know, I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect, and Virtual Interface Card, and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand in creating this 100 Gig end-to-end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to, that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve of these life cycle mismanagement issues, they solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for, like it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly, the fabric that stitches them together is critical and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. X, and the X Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So we, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas, talk, give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to. >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about and James also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCA in less than four to five to six, without rip and replace, as they embrace CXL without rip and replace, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe-based dense drives and so forth. We are also looking forward to X Fabric next generation which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO, by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there, in a moment I'll have some closing thoughts. (bright upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something it figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations, and is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data-intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation, remember all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net, and if you want to learn more please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Mm. >>Welcome back to the Cube. Special presentation. Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Brought to You by Cisco We're here with Vegas Rattana, who's the director of product management for you? CSS Cisco and James Leach, who was director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you again. >>Hey, thanks for having us. >>Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers and as organisations that they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, one of the most common challenges that they face. What are they telling you? How is Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >>Well, you know, first, I think that's a That's a great question. And, you know, the customer centric view is is the way that we've taken. Um, it's kind of the approach we've taken from Day one, right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for their customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the That's where the rubber meets your proverbial road. Um, with the customer. And I would say that you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications. For example, um, those require that we are able to move, um, and process large datasets really in real time. Um, and the other aspect of application, I think, to give our customers kind of some pose some challenges would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application. That application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can't keep up with today. So, um, that creates some some challenges around. How do I build the infrastructure? How do I write? Size it without over provisioning, for example. But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planting those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements and within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges. We see customers who are being forced to move away from the like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits. And they have to move to something like, um, Iraq server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have. And that creates a lot of opportunity for silo going. The infrastructure and those silos, in turn, create multiple operating models within the A data centre environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the the enemy here. Um, and then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratisation of of processing, if you will, right, so it's no longer just CPU focus. We have GPU. We have F p g A. We have things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can can manage this these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management at its core is really right size for for our customers and give them the most value when it when it meets the mark around scale and scope. Um, back in 2000 and nine, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put at the top of the rack, and that works great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, Right? So we're talking about hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centres across clouds. And, um, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those those operational pieces that that touched the application that touched the infrastructure. But they're not the same tool. They tend to be, um, disparate tools that have to be put together. So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of building their own tools. So, um, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >>Right? You know, Jim, I said in my my Open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS. But the X Series is the next generation, the generation of the next decade, which is really important cause you touched on a lot of things. These data intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So how's it going with the X Series? You made a big splash last year. What's the reception been in the field? >>Actually, it's been great. Um, you know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our UCS X series story. Um, I think that the main reason they relate to it as they helped create it, right, it was their feedback and their partnership that they gave us Really, those problem areas, those, uh, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add significant value. So, you know, since we brought you see s to market back in 2000 and nine, we had this unique architectural, um uh, paradigm that we created. And I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history. Um, in terms of growth, Um, what we're seeing now is X series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing, uh, both in terms of the number of customers. But also, more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using and the types of workloads are growing. Right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists not just, um, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, But we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. Um, I think the other piece, you know that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry and I think right now is a You know, a great example. Our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, um, at a kind of a new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any any of our competitors have seen. When they announced something, um, that was new to this space. So I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. Um, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game, Um, as it may have been in the past, Um, X series is out in front today, and we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched that series to the world. And, uh, you know, as we as we continue to do that, um, we're seeing, you know, again tremendous uptake from our customers. >>So thank you for that, Jim. So viscous. I was just on Twitter just today, actually talking about the gravitational pull. You've got the public clouds pulling C x o is one way. And you know I'm Prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud So organisations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away, and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that with that confusion with the X series. Right? So how so? Can you explain that? >>Sure. And and and that's the right, Uh, the context that you built up right there, Dave, if you walk into Enterprise Data Centre, you see platform of computer systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs. And hence you find Dr Note Driving system memory system, computing system, coordinate system and a variety of farm factors. When you do, you, for you and every one of them typically come with a variety of adapters and cables and so forth Just create silence of resources. Fabric is broad. The actress brought the power and cooling implications the rack, you know, the space challenges and above all, the multiple management plane that they come of it, which makes it very difficult for I t to have one common centre policy and enforce it all across across the firmware and software and so forth and then think about the great challenges of the baroness makes it even more complex as these go through the great references of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers. Uh, you know, really, uh, seeing Anna slowness in that agility and high burden, uh, in the cost of overall ownership, this is where the X rays powered by inter side. We have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more Asyl and drive lower tco and we are delivering it by doing three things. Three aspects of simplification first simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure and infrastructure, which removes the narrowness of fun factor and infrastructure which reduces direct from footprint that is required infrastructure were power and cooling better served in the Lord. Second, we want to simplify it with by delivering a cloud operating model where they can create the policy ones across compute network stories and deployed all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they are going to go through the next 23 years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity lowering down there. >>That's key. Less friction is is always a good thing now, of course, because we heard from the hyper flex guys earlier, they had news. Not to be outdone, you have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X series today? >>Absolutely. So we are following up on the excited, exciting extras announcement that we made in June last year. Day and we are now introducing three innovation on experience with the bowl of three things First, expand the supported World War and extra days. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third dramatically reduced the complex cities in the data centre by driving down the number of adapters and cables. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU note using a cable list and very unique X fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPS to the compute note in the model of form factor thereby, our customers can now power in AML workload on any workload that needs many more number of GPS. Second, we are bringing in GPS right onto the computer note and thereby the our customers can now fire up the accelerated video upload, for example, and turf, which is what you know we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology with the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and density is that we have on the computer note our customers can now fire up the big data workloads the F C I work. Lord, uh, the FDA has worked with all these workloads that have historically not lived in the model of form. Factor can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig and two and single board banned word and the multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco validated design to oversee a franchise. And third, the innovations in, uh, in the in the fifth and public again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, made the Internet adapter made with our general doctors or maybe the other stories adapters. They reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable so very, very excited about these three big announcements that we're making in this part of the great >>A lot There. You guys have been busy. So thank you for that. Because so, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have. Customers are adopting. What problems are they telling you that X series addresses and and how do they align with where where they want to go in the future? >>Um, that's a great question. I think if you go back to um and think about some of the things that we mentioned before. Um, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what the cost mentioned, I think, is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move again to kind of to the next level of, of taking advantage of some of these problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look, you know, I think the cost mentioned accelerated VD. That's a great example. Um, these are where customers you know, they need to have this dense compute. They need video acceleration, they need type policy management, right. And they need to be able to deploy these, um, these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X series right now, we're hitting the mark in every every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs. Um, and a lot of room to grow. Um, we have the the premier cloud based management. You know, hybrid cloud suite. Um uh, in the industry. Right. So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that that the cost just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the through the use of the X fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, uh, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, um, and an intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig and end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data again. You know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere be able to get the bandwidth that they need to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to that fit exactly their needs. This is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can take off right away with the infrastructure. As I mentioned, X fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here. We're talking about GPS today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPS that solve these lifecycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like it does for GPU. We can do that with storage or memory in the future, So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregate Asian that actually delivers right. It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing. This is something that that customers can really get value out of Day one. And then finally, I think the future readiness here. You know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPS going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve the drives, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together. It's critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with C XL with with some of the the PC express changes that are coming in the in the very near future. So we're ready to go X and the X fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers. Our customers are out there saying that you know, they want to buy into something like X Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future. We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt, um, their competition as well. So, um, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X Series brings And, um, again, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >>A lot of headroom, uh, for scale and the management piece is key. There just have time for one more question because talk to give us some nuggets on the road map. What's next for? For X X series that we can look forward to? >>Absolutely Dave, as as we talked about. And James also hinted this is the future radio architecture, a lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up no infantry place. And there we are, looking into enabling the customer journey as the transition from PCH in less than 4 to 5 to six without rip and replace as they embraced the Excel without rip and replace as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the desegregated memory desegregated P. C, A, r N B and dance drives and so forth. We're also looking forward to extract Brick Next Generation, which will and now that dynamic assignment of GPS anywhere within the chassis and much more. Um, so this this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the Enterprise Data Centre operations a lot more simpler and drive down the PCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on there. >>Okay, Thank you guys. We'll leave it there in a moment. I'll have some closing thoughts. >>Mhm

>>mhm. >>With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for Hyper Flex at Cisco at Flash for all number four. Love that on Twitter And Deron Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco Mister Hyper flex at Mr Hyper Flex on Twitter. Thanks, guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and and hyper flex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks, David. >>Thanks. Hi, >>Daryn. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud you gotta have on Prem Connection. Right? So you've got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, but you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud, you need a strong foundation. I'm conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building with hyper convergence in particular hyper flex no to make all that work. They need a good, strong Cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that. To be able to connect that around a Saas offering that looks around simplified operations, gives them optimisation and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren, let's stay with you for a minute when you talk to your customers. What are they thinking these days, when it comes to implementing hyper converged infrastructure in both the the enterprise and and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? >>So there's many things they're trying to achieve? Probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyper conversions and storage networking, and we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that, a collapse into hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability. They don't know the end game, so they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper conversions. Very easy is one of the major factors and benefits of hyper conversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around. The simplicity model is the management layer ease of management to make it easier for their operations that we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model, deploying out flex also around the time savings. They make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think that we one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements, and the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper converged, especially with edge edges of major key use case for us and what I want. What our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data centre at the edge without a big investment. They don't compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management employment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deployed hyper conversions. As I said, the savings elements to keep it and again, not always, but obviously those are his studies around about public Cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. We again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers looking for >>Great. Thank you for that, Darrin minutes. We have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >>Yeah, Thanks. Leave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. the first one is a new offer, um, called hyper Flex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Inter site lead and Cisco and decide managed it Hyper flex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AM Iraq, U. C s and Iraq. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local contemporaries witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a very nifty capability to optimise for forage environments. So, you know, this leverages the Ciscos ubiquitous presence. Uh, the networking, um, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyper flex configuration that we have is, uh it do not configuration, which is primarily used in edge environment. Think of a, you know, a back home in a department store or a oil rig. Or it might even be a smaller data centre, uh, somewhere, uh, on the globe. For these two not configurations. There is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for hyper flex as well. The problem that customers faces where you host this witness it cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, um, sort of upgrade rates. Which note gets to survive, so it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environment. So what we've done is we've taken that witness. We've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large a slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from S. R. S R. Texas catalyst, industrial routers, even even a raspberry pi that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any, um, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we're announcing today. >>So I want to ask you about hyper Flex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that? A little bit more Can can hyper flex express help customers respond to some of these issues. >>Yeah, indeed. The, uh, you know, the primary motivation for hyper Flex Express was indeed, uh, an idea that, you know, one of the folks around my team had, which was to build a set of hyper flex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for something in it for customers, for sales as well as our partners. So, for example, you know, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the instal for hyper flex express. These are still hypertext configurations, and you would, at the end of it, get a hyper flex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much much simplifying. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data centre configurations But you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. Um, we've also, you know, already attract attractive price point for these. And of course, you know these will have better lead times because we made sure that, you know, we are using components that are that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, Uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a settled, risky, friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the deceased as well. >>It's interesting many. So I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed this GTR survey again mentioned at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring, uh, server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So so that's encouraging. What about Manisha AMG that's new for hyper flex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, so you know, in the short time that we've had UCS am direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a it's a It's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and hyper flex. Uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from Day one is that it is. It has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage and this we are hoping that will basically unlock, you know, a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper converged experience. >>Yeah, cool. Uh, so, Darren, can >>you can you give us >>an idea as to how hyper flexes is doing in the field? >>Sure, Absolutely So both me and my initial been involved right from the start and before it was called Hyper Flex, and we've had a great journey, and it's very excited to see where we're taking where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they approved the technology and are comfortable with technology. They repeat by for expanding capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an energy perspective, more numbers of science so really good. Endorsement the technology. We get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. Uh, and we are the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers think one example, and I apologise for the worldwide audience. But this resonates with the American audiences the Super Bowl. So the sofa like stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyper Flex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage. Four K video distribution, and it's complete completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few notes across a few racks and have 100 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with High Flex where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases were getting involved in very, very excited. >>Come on, Darren. It's Super Bowl NFL. That's a That's international now. And, you know, the NFL >>NFL. It's >>invading London. Of course I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, But last question for many is give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyper flex? >>Yeah, so you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved the type of flicks since the beginning, Uh, but I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for for hyper Flex. One is in. The site is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the Lifecycle management, which is for hyper flex, which is integrated in winter side today and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of a job. Because Interstate really provides us an ideal platform to gather starts from all the clusters across the globe. Do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer valued, um, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is you'll see us expand the hyper flex portfolio. Go beyond you see us to third party server platforms, and newer, you see a server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is a checks on X CDs. Experience is another thing that we're able to, uh you know, uh, announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But a check sonic series. We'll have that by the end of this calendar year, and that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyper flex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, that we're locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyper flex leader platform. This is the heart of the offering today, Uh, and you'll see the hyper flex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, unique distributed architecture primarily where we get our, you know, record breaking performance from you'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient. And we'll optimise it for, you know, containerised workloads, meaning it will get granular containerised container granular management capabilities and optimised for public. So those are some things that were the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum and maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there and you know many She was talking about the HX on X Series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that, and it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're gonna dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>>Okay, let's start things off Didi Dasgupta is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. Didi. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >>Yeah, our pleasure here. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution off the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications and then most modern applications are, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering the change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the, the storage team of, and now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right back of the origins of UCS. I mean, we, you know, why the networking company builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our. And you know, we've been on this journey for about four years, but the software is called intersite. And, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices, but then we've evolved it the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one, one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does goes into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that managed their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, he brought a platform. I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. And so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, you know, three or four guys getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same in the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or the cyber talk software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how their assets work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it, it was pretty big boat invasion. Cause you know, the big change with SAS is your, as you're familiar, Dave is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities. And we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, working with our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. So again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but I wanted to point out that we are in some ways eating our own dog food. Cause we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I, I of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right? Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that you're introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control multi-tenants I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies and then figure out how to stitch it all together because it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, or, you know, others who want to their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are there other SAS offerings, software vendors who have now become partners? Like we did not, we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem we partnered with a company called urbanomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, you know, w how we have gone about this. And it actually ducked a dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today, that we're announcing on the underside platform, where we're actually been announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on, on GC, on, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site, since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage VMs in, in a, in an instance. >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at know $2 or $3 depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing is become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades or liability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What Mike is the law doesn't mean? I think there's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So obligations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is data moving data is it's the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be co-located with the data that's on the edge, on the edge colo public cloud doesn't matter, but you're basically going to see more customer droughts, more industry-specific clouds. You know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific. I think sovereign is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it comes to making good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, control. And the distributor cloud is also on edge is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey that will have their choice of workloads, data, you know, uptime, reliability, concerns. That's really what, what we are returning any of our customers. >>You know, I think I agree with you that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world a solid open, flexible, and flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some customers are fine with a SAS software, but as I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. So how they want to consume it. They want to, you know, a hundred percent, no sovereignty. We, we talked about. So, you know, job for a decent structure vendor like ourselves is to give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage me to some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right. Thanks, Deedee. Always a pleasure to have you in the cube. Great to see you. >>You're >>Welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>>Mm. Okay, we're back. Digging into the infrastructure to make hybrid work possible. High performance, cost effective, scalable and secure. That's what it's all about. So far, we've covered the rapid migration to WiFi 60 technology and the role that switching is going to play. And now we're gonna get into private five g to do that. Let's welcome Masumi here. Who is vice president and general manager of mobile cable and the Iot business at Cisco and Greg Dorey, who is the vice president of product management for the networking experiences group of Cisco. He's responsible for Catalyst access that whole portfolio enterprise five G Cisco DNA spaces, Cisco, Iasi A lot of stuff there. Uh, Greg gentlemen, welcome, >>Dave. Thank you for having us. >>Yeah, our pleasure. So let's start with you on the topic of private five g five g. What do we need to know about that? And more specifically, you know what's unique about Cisco's private five G? >>So, most importantly, delivering private five G in enterprise terms that's super important to look at five p. Many of our peer groups might have got it wrong. We're looking at private five g with the lens of enterprise. What enterprise really needs is five g going to come and displace a lot of existing technology? Or is it going to help augment the technology that enterprise has an excellent Their digitisation is you need. I wanted to start Dave with the basic premise of hybrid work, and what hybrid work really means. Is it only for knowledge worker or is it for all workers? So we strongly believe hybrid work needs to empower all workers. It's not only connecting remote workers but also bringing people things and space together. And I strongly believe the combination of WiFi six n five g for private network is going to accelerate that journey, bringing people things and space together in a very, very cohesive way. Why are our offer is so unique? We are going to create a continent. Enterprises don't have to make a hard choice. They will be using WiFi technology and five G technology hand in hand without creating a disruption on their policy and identity systems. They don't have to rethink. Do I have to go and build a new background is a common background that will support both WiFi as well as five t Most importantly, delivering this enter offer as a service with the ease of consumption is of operation and trusted environment that they can put their mission critical workloads on. >>I like it. So couple takeaways there are inclusive of all workers, not just knowledge workers non disruptive. Everybody loves to hear that. And of course, the as a service model is key. So let me stay with you. I mean, we can't wait for five g, right? It's lightning fast. They've got super low latency, very high bandwidth. So that's what everybody is excited about. The question, though, is is five g gets introduced. You know it's going to power things like Coyote Networks. Is that going to replace WiFi and legacy Wired broadband? >>Absolutely not. So we see private five years, an augmentation to the enterprise on top of WiFi WiFi. As you heard in the previous conversation, WiFi is bringing more capability with WiFi six and WiFi 16 and five G is going to be yet another augmentation. WiFi and fight. The will coexist within enterprise for many years to come. I would like my friend Greg to talk a little bit about this continuum. Greg. >>Yeah, I think it's sort of like I like to say it's an and not an AR because there's enough use cases out there. Richard Pryor Spectrum And you know, spectrum >>is a constraint, so >>you have private five G, your WiFi six and both offer opportunities. So, for example, in an indoor carpet setting where you're basically connecting your phone for basic browsing or connecting your laptop, WiFi is sufficient. But if it's a process automation, uh, factory where you need seven nines of reliability, private five g is a better technology. Similarly outdoor large areas. It's probably private. Five g right like this, you can have easy handoff between public and private, so it's use case driven, and once it's used case driven, it's going to be an are because there's so many next time use cases, whether it's a are we are drones, self driving cars, you name it right, like And so I think these two technologies five g and Y 5 60 is gonna work hand in hand to deliver awesome outcomes for our customers. >>Yeah, and just the data volumes are gonna be incredible. We always talk about the data volumes. You ain't seen nothing yet is what I always say. But the thing is, every new tech that's introduced into the enterprise, you can almost be certain that is going to bring adoption challenges. And not only that also is going to bring changes in the way you do things. And that brings new complexities from an operational standpoint. So my question is, how are you addressing this with the introduction of five g. >>Dave, this is a fantastic question, and this is why we have spent me and Greg have spent tremendous amount of time to create continual. I'll start with the foundation first, back down. So we have been building this enterprise backbone, supporting what Wild Connexion as well as WiFi Connexion. We wanted to make sure that as private five G camps within enterprise, you don't have to rethink and reimagine your background is the common backbone that will support both WiFi WiFi six WiFi 60 as well as private five g. You rest assured that it is the same backbone that we have heard in the previous section on the Cap 90 that will also support a private key access. The second aspect of private five G is as you build any new technology into enterprise. Oftentimes we get into this trap to get to an outcome. We move fast and we create asylum. And then that silo operation creates a barriers to mainstream it. So upfront we have to think about not creating another silent and how we're doing it. Number one is a device that can connecting to WiFi network or a private five G network. You don't have to reimagine or rethink how I'm going to manage. The identity will create continue of the common identity across the WiFi access or five t access in the same environment. The second aspect of that is, how are we going to reach in all our staff are enterprise staff is well trained with WiFi technology and white technology. Now five G comes with tremendous amount of value and benefit, but it also comes with inherent technology complexity, learning problems. This is where our simple to consume simple to operate model of sass comes to play. That we're going to take all those complexity away. It is a cloud deliberate service enterprise don't have to go through this massive learning car. Adopting this technology last but not list on how you're going to manage your capital. Any new technology and enterprise, Oftentimes you need a huge amount of upfront investment to adopt the technology to get to the other side of getting the outcome. So again, our business model of SARS will allow Enterprise to adopt this new technology and pay as you go model to meet with enterprise needs. Finally, I also wanted to pass to break to touch a little bit more on how we are thinking about this common identity across any access in the enterprise. Greg to your >>So we we talk about it in two different ways. One is a lot of enterprises today use our identity and secure management platform. We call it Isis Co ice platform. And so years and years of policy and identities Excess service, radio service they use, uh, etcetera are plugged in already into our eyes. Right. So if you can share that with this private five years as a service, uh, infrastructure that Muslims been building, we think we'll be able to create that bridge because we're not forcing enterprises to create new identities, a new policy. So thats sort of step one to make it easier. Uh, you also talk through something where, in the case of a public five g network, for example, the It's very convenient because you take your phone out of your pocket and it's connected to the network, right? Was this for WiFi? You have to log into an S I D in your hotel or in your home and home. It's automatic, but that's that logging process that creates friction. And that's a problem, because then you can't be seamless. So we initiated what we call us open roaming, right? Like that's, uh, identity federation that we first created between identity owners. Could be carriers could be, um, anything that anyone who owns an identity and they will share with venues. And so if the sharing happens, then that Onboarding can be automatic and once on boarding is automatic, then it's easy to pass off between five and five G. And so that's again another way in which you can lower the adoption barriers because you share across public private G and WiFi networks. So these are two concrete examples of how we thought about lowering the barriers of adoption. As we enter into this heterogeneous >>world, >>I can't wait. Let's let's talk about how this thing scales in the go to market, what are the most likely or maybe preferred or obvious routes to market for private five g Francisco >>so they stay tuned when when they announce more about it. But I can also assure you that exposed to the spectrum is a challenge for many enterprises when it comes to cellular technology. In some countries, there are more spectrum accessible by enterprise. In many countries, that's not the case. So we have talked to very carefully that how do we bring this offer to the market? Partnering with many service providers and mobile operators, where in countries where we don't have direct access to the spectrum, our partnership with mobile operators that you will hear more about as we come to mobile world Congress is going to allow our enterprise to consume this technology even if they don't have the spectrum in places where the enterprise might have direct spectrum access. We'll also bring in our relativist providers to hide the complexity of the new technology on top of our cell services or a cloud deliberate services. This is the augmentation with the partnership with menaces providers and mobile operators that will ease this journey for enterprises are most important. Primitive in this journey is to keep it simple for enterprise. Make it intuitive and trust it from day one. >>Outstanding. Okay. Assume, Greg, Thanks so much. It's great to have you guys. I really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you. Mm mm.

>>Mm. Every CEO is trying to get hybrid, right? Most people, they've been working remotely for the better part of two years now, and we've spent a lot of time and thought on how to accommodate remote workers and providing tools to make them feel connected and more productive. We've also built remote and hybrid models into our hiring ethos, making it a feature, not a drawback. But what about the underlying infrastructure that powers hybrid work? How is that evolving to be as flexible, scalable and cost effective with the lowest latency possible? Recent survey data from Enterprise Technology Research shows that 56% of executives believe productivity continues to improve, with only 14% citing recent declines in productivity. 26% say it's holding steady. The question is, how do we maintain those positives and minimise the negatives? And what role does the network and underlying infrastructure play in evolving new work models? Welcome to the network powering hybrid work on the Cube, made possible by Cisco. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be your host today. In this programme, you're gonna hear from experts that are going to discuss and introduce new innovations that are specifically designed to energise and support hybrid work. My first guest is Lawrence Wang, who's the vice president of product management at Cisco. And we're going to dig into WiFi six e and what it all means to the future of work. Lawrence, welcome. Good to see you. >>Hey, great to be here. Dave. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here today. >>You bet. Okay. My first big question is what's the big rush? It feels like we were just talking about the shift from y 55 to WiFi six just a few years ago. What's going on there? >>Yeah. I mean, you're right, right. We assets at Cisco. We introduced our first WiFi six access points back in 2019, and one of the things that we've seen is a tremendous rate of adoption moving from WiFi five to WiFi six over the past couple of years. In fact, it's one of our fastest transitions that we've seen between wireless standards. And a lot of the drivers, you know, for that were really just about, you know, making sure that there's better WiFi experiences for, you know, people in the office making sure that they can support. You know more of that. Have you got a set of clients? Reduce the amount of congestion. And over time, what we've seen is that migration has been tremendous. But it also means that we're starting to reach that capacity where five gigahertz is starting to become more crowded and so many of our customers are looking at. Well, what can I actually do to continue to expand? You know that you know that traffic, the number of lanes that I can actually support for wireless traffic And for many of them, they're looking to WiFi succeed as the answer to help them do that simply because six gigahertz as part of that standard introduces a whole new spectrum or a whole new highway that we can get client devices as long as >>well, So it sounds like you're thinking about a different role for offices and campuses going forward. So what your listeners expect to see kind of in the in the near term and the midterm and even a long term near term when they get back into the office and in the long term, how do you see this playing out? >>Yeah, that's an interesting question, right When you think about this context of hybrid work, work is not a place that you go to, but it's really a place that you could be where ultimately you are trying to get work done. It really is reporting that quality of experience, no matter where you choose to work from. And, yes, while the campus is going to evolve and play a different role, it is a critical part of that hybrid work future. And the way I see it here is that the role of the campus is going to change over time. It's not going to be the same that we saw prior to two years ago, and I think for many of our customers about what does it mean to invest in that infrastructure for us to continue to adapt, to support the ways that their employees that are expected or want to work? And a big part of that is investing in infrastructure to support new ways of working? >>Well, you know, Lawrence, I mean, I've personally been lucky because we go to studio and I've been able to come into the office since the pandemic started, but I know a lot of people. They're really excited to get back, to work in person and face to face events and the like. And I know others that say, You know what? I'm moving and I'm always gonna work remotely. I'll never work for another company that forces me to go in the office again. So this sounds like a tall order for it organisations to accommodate that diversity. How do you think they will be able to plan for and manage all this new complexity? >>Yeah. I mean, I think the reality is, you know, talent. It doesn't know any zip codes, right? And I think one of the boons of being able to support a more distributed workforce is to be able to bring in great talent no matter where they're based out of. And I think for I t team. So I think the interesting thing will be what are the drivers to bring people back into the office right? There has to be a purpose that's more meaningful than simply It's a place that I go to every single day. You know, what are the tools and applications I bring in to help support collaboration, And I think important part of making this a great experience in the context of hybrid work is that you do have to make the office a meaningful place for employees to gather, but also making sure that as you connect people around the world as part of the global employee workforce that they still have an equitable experience. So for it teams, it is about thinking about how do I actually manage this infrastructure that's more distributed? But I start to invest in my central campuses and at the same time making sure that I have great quality experiences for everyone. Unified security policies, visibility across all the clients and applications. But there's also increasing pressure from their its core constituency. We know that people are asking more of it. They want them to support you, use cases like safe return office that they want to help you contributor to global corporate initiatives like driving towards zero greenhouse gas emissions. So any number of these activities or initiatives is putting more pressure on teams. >>Interesting. I mean, so I gotta ask you, please don't hate me for this question. But was this just luck on Cisco's part that you got solutions ready for this sort of hybrid work model so quickly. In other words, was it something that you were maybe planning that was going to take years for the market to be ready for And it just got compressed because of the pandemic? Or was this architecture that allows you to be flexible? How did you land here and what appears to be a pretty strong position? >>Yeah, I mean, at Cisco, I think one of the things that we think about is, you know, it's always amazing when you look back at something and then you write the story. But I think if we're being honest with ourselves, if you look at what happened from where we were two years ago to where we are today, including our competitors and customers, I think that no one could have predicted the world that we're operating and living in. And so for us, the question becomes, How did we help our customers support this transition? And ultimately it's about investing in architectures and platforms that are flexible, that allows our customers support use cases that they were thinking of, as well as ones that they never anticipated, and I think that's really the exciting thing about what we've been doing here as part of our hybrid work investments now areas that, you know, I think we double down on and in some ways accelerated because of this. When I think about you know what our customers care about when they start bringing people back into the office. It is about some of these emerging use cases, whether it's more dynamic, way finding, be able to understand the density or the air quality of a given environment. And these are some of the technologies that we have embedded in some of our new, you know, WiFi 60 access points along with our management infrastructure era. So I think that it gives our customers and partners a lot more flexibility than what they had before to really adapt to the changing needs of today and even beyond. >>Well, that's something we've certainly learned throughout the pandemic. Is the ability to be flexible is fundamental? I gotta ask you, what's your preferred mode of work? You go back into the office, you're gonna stay remote. >>Great question. You know, I have come to appreciate, you know, working from home. You know, over the past couple years, got to spend a little more time with my kids at lunch. But I will say I am looking forward to the day when I can have the voice of being back in the office a few days a week as well as I continue to be remote as well as continued to visit my customers and partners all over this great country in the world. So looking forward to that, >>so you're a true hybrid. I guess I'm a hybrid, too. I like being in the office, but I'm travelling a lot when the world returns to the new abnormal anyway. Large. Thanks so much for kicking off the programme with me. Now in a minute, we're going to dig into the core of the network and understand the role it plays in supporting new and flexible work models. You're watching the network powering hybrid work made possible by Cisco on the Cube, your leader in global enterprise tech coverage. Mhm. Yeah,

>> As to the adoption challenges, I wasn't clear on where that should go. I mean, I'm happy to just throw it out there. >> You'll again punch it back to me, right? >> Okay. >> Question comes to me and I'm going to pass the ball to Greg to connect the thread on one backbone is needed. Emphasizing Cat 9K that we just talked about. >> And same thing for the last question. The routes to market? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Yes. >> Great. So we'll use that program for everything. Perfect. >> Masum, could you... Yeah, right there. So mark your place and try not to move that seat. That's it. Now, come forward just a tad, just a tad. There we go. Yeah. Okay, that's fine. Okay Alex, we're good. >> Okay. So Leonard don't leave after this 'Cause I'm going to do my outro. I'm going to do that as a separate asset, okay? >> You bet. >> Okay, great. So guys just it'll be five, four, three, silent, two, one. And then just follow my lead, okay? All right, Alex, you're ready? Masum and Greg, you're ready? >> Ready. >> Ready. >> Okay, here we go on me. On Dave in five, four, three, (beep). Okay, we're back. Digging into the infrastructure to make hybrid work possible. High performance, cost effective, scalable, and secure. That's what it's all about. And so far, we've covered the rapid migration to Wi-Fi 6E technology, and the role that switching is going to play. And now we're going to get into Private 5G and to do that, let's welcome Masum Mir, who is Vice President, and General Manager of Mobile, Cable and IoT business at Cisco. And Greg Dorai who is the Vice President of Product Management for the networking experiences group at Cisco. He's responsible for Catalyst access, that whole portfolio, Enterprise 5G, Cisco DNA Spaces, Cisco ISE, a lot of stuff there Greg. And gentlemen, welcome. >> Dave thank you for having us. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Masum let's start with you on the topic of Private 5G. What do we need to know about that? And more specifically, what's unique about Cisco's Private 5G? >> So most importantly, delivering Private 5G in enterprise terms, that's super important to look at 5G. Many of our peer groups might have got it wrong. We're looking at Private 5G with the lens of enterprise, what enterprise really needs. Is 5G going to come and displace a lot of existing technology, or is it going to help augment the technology that enterprise. It has an excellent the digitization journey. I wanted to start Dave with the basic premise of hybrid work. And what hybrid work really means. Is it only for knowledge worker, or is it for all workers? So we strongly believe hybrid work needs to empower all workers. It's not only connecting remote workers but also bringing people, things and space together. And we strongly believe the combination of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G for private network is going to accelerate that journey bringing people, things and space together in a very, very cohesive way. Why our offer is so unique? We are going to create a continuum. Enterprises don't have to make a hard choice. They will be using Wi-Fi technology and 5G technology hand in hand without creating a disruption on their policy and identity systems. They don't have to rethink, "Do I have to go and build a new backbone?" Is a common backbone that will support both Wi-Fi as well as 5G. Most importantly, delivering this entire offer as a service with the ease of consumption, ease of operation, and a trusted environment that they can put their mission critical workload on. >> Now, I like it. So a couple takeaways there. I mean, it's inclusive of all workers not just knowledge workers, non disruptive, everybody loves to hear that. And of course, it has service model as key Masum, let me stay with you. I mean, we can't wait for 5G, right? It's lightning fast, it got super low latency, very high bandwidth. So that's what everybody's excited about. The question though is, 5G gets introduced, yeah it's going to power things like IoT networks. Is that going to replace Wi-Fi and legacy wired broadband? >> Absolutely not. So we see Private 5G as an augmentation to the enterprise on top of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi as you heard in the previous conversation, Wi-Fi is bringing more capability with Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. And 5G is going to be yet another augmentation. Wi-Fi and 5G will coexist within enterprise for many years to come. I would like my friend, Greg to talk a little bit about this continuum. Greg? >> Yeah, I think it's sort of like, I like to say it's an and not an or. Because there's enough use cases out there which require spectrum. And you know, spectrum is a constraint. So you have Private 5G, your Wi-Fi 6, and both offer opportunities. So for example, in an indoor carpeted setting where you're basically connecting your phone for basic browsing, or connecting your laptop, Wi-Fi is sufficient. But if it's a process automation factory where you need seven nines of reliability, Private 5G is the better technology. Similarly outdoor, large areas, it's probably Private 5G, right? 'Cause you can have easy handoff between public and private. So it's use case driven. And once it's use case driven, it's going to be an or because there's so many next-gen use cases. Whether it's AR VR, drones, you know, self-driving cars you name it, right? And so I think these two technologies, 5G and Wi-Fi 6E is going to work hand in hand to deliver awesome outcomes for our customers. >> Yeah. And just the data volumes are going to be incredible. We always talk about the data volumes. You ain't seen nothing yet is what I always say. But the thing is every new tech that's introduced into the enterprise, you can almost be certain that it's going to bring adoption challenges. And not only that, it also is going to bring changes in the way you do things. And that brings new complexities from an operational standpoint. So my question is, how are you addressing this with the introduction of 5G? >> Dave, this is a fantastic question. And this is why we have spent, me and Greg have spent tremendous amount of time to create continuum. I'll start with the foundation first, backbone. So we have been building this enterprise backbone supported with wired connection as well as Wi-Fi connection. We wanted to make sure that as Private 5G comes within enterprise, you don't have to rethink and reimagine your backbone. It's the common backbone that will support what Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, as well as Private 5G. You're rest assured that it is the same backbone that we have heard in the previous section on the Cat 9K that will also support a Private 5G access. The second aspect of Private 5G is as you build any new technology into enterprise often time we get into this trap. To get to an outcome, we move fast and we create a silo. And then that silo operation creates barriers to mainstream it. So upfront, we have to think about not creating another silo. And how we are doing it. Number one, is a device that can connect into Wi-Fi network or a Private 5G network. You don't have to reimagine or rethink how I'm going to manage the identity. We'll create continuum with a common identity across the Wi-Fi access or 5G access in the same environment. The second aspect of that is how are we going to retain all our staff? Our enterprise staff is well trained with Wi-Fi technology and wired technology. Now 5G comes with tremendous amount of value and benefit. But it also comes with inherent technology complexity, learning curve problem. This is where our simple to consume, simple to operate model of SaaS comes to play. That we're going to take all those complexity away. It is a cloud delivered service. So enterprise don't have to go through this massive learning curve adopting this technology. Last but not least, on how we are going to manage your capital. Any new technology and enterprise often time, you need huge amount of upfront investment to adopt the technology to get to the other side of getting the outcome. So again, our business model of SaaS will allow enterprise to adopt this new technology and pay as your grow model to meet with enterprise needs. Finally, I also wanted to pass to Greg to touch a little bit more on how we are thinking about this common identity across any access in the enterprise. Greg, to you. >> So we thought about it in two different ways. One is, a lot of enterprises today use our identity and secure management platform. We call it ISE, Cisco ISE platform. And so, years and years of policy and identities, and which access servers, radio servers they use et cetera, are plugged in already into our ISE, right? So, if you can share that with this Private 5G as a service infrastructure that Masum's been building, we think we'll be able to create that bridge. Because we are not forcing enterprises to create new identities or new policies. So that's sort of step one to make it easier. We also thought through so something where in the case of a public 5G network, for example. It's very convenient because you take your phone out of your pocket and it's connected to the network, right? Versus for wifi, you have to log into an SSID in your hotel, or in your home, and in home, it's automatic. But that's that login process that creates friction. And that's a problem because then you can't be seamless. So we initiated what we call as open roaming, right? Like that's a identity federation that we first created between identity owners. Could be carriers, could be anything, right? Anyone who owns an identity. And they will share with venues. And so if the sharing happens, then that onboarding can be automatic. And once onboarding is automatic, then it's easy to pass off between Wi-Fi and 5G. And so that's again, another way in which you can lower the adoption barriers 'cause you share across public Private 5G and Wi-Fi networks. So these are two concrete examples of how we thought about lowering the barriers of adoption as we enter into this heterogeneous world. >> Nice, I can't wait. Let's talk about how this thing, scales in the go to market. What are the most likely, or maybe preferred, or obvious routes to market for Private 5G from Cisco? >> So Dave stay tuned right when they announce more about it. But I can also assure you that access to this spectrum is a challenge for many enterprises when it comes to cellular technology. In some countries there are more spectrum accessible by enterprise. In many countries, that's not the case. So we have thought through very carefully that how do we bring this offer to the market partnering with many service providers and mobile operators. Where in countries where you don't have direct access to the spectrum, our partnership with mobile operators, that you will hear more about as we come to Mobile World Congress, is going to allow our enterprise to consume this technology. even if they don't have the spectrum. In the places where the enterprise might have spectrum access, we'll also in our manage service providers to hide the complexity of the new technology on top of our SaaS services, or cloud delivered services. This is the augmentation with the partnership with manage service providers and mobile operators that will ease this journey for enterprises. Our most important primitive in this journey is to keep it simple for enterprise, make it intuitive, and trust it from day one. >> Outstanding. Okay, Masum, Greg, thanks so much. It was great to have you guys on. I really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> In a moment, I'll be back with some closing thoughts and an opportunity for you to actually see this technology in action and talk to the experts directly. Keep it right there.

perfect all right we're good uh muhammad you ready yeah i have a watery eyes always so i always tell my interviewers or the producers that sometimes it shouldn't there shouldn't be a problem in the 10-minute window but well yeah so do that while i'm talking you'll see it on the return feed it's a little delayed but and most people have tears when they see dave vellante yeah i i have that effect on people thanks for that okay we all said we good leonard why don't you go alex bye-bye yeah alex got the i just got the thumbs up we're good okay muhammad here we go on dave in five four three we continue now with the network powering hybrid work now we just heard from lawrence wang on the rapid move to wi-fi 6e which is going to increase wi-fi efficiency enable routers and devices to more efficiently use bandwidth and that additional spectrum that lawrence talked about that means more wi-fi channels which is really going to help reduce overlap between networks and make a noticeable difference especially in crowded places we're here now with muhammad imam who's senior director of product management for catalyst switching this is a multi-billion dollar business for cisco if you ever listen to cisco's earnings calls you'll hear the cfo scott heron he'll talk about the catalyst 9000 and double-digit growth and switching this is the fastest ramping product in cisco's history so muhammad that's got to make you feel pretty good yes indeed thank you david and thank you for having me here yeah great to have you so uh look catalyst 9000 it's been really successful what does the 9000x bring to the table for your customers yeah absolutely and um indeed the catalyst 9000 family of switches have been extremely popular with our customers as you said fastest ramping product in cisco's history and the last four or five years we have really evolved the catalyst 9000 family of switches to a very comprehensive product portfolio um addressing the various enterprise use cases that that we that we address but now we see increase in demand on the networks and that really stems from some of the most recent trends that we are seeing right part of it is hybrid workspaces is going to be a video dominant hybrid workspace right a lot of cases is going to be high definition 4k 8k videos we are seeing cloud-based applications everywhere right my spreadsheet is used to be on excel sheet now it's either an office 365 or smartsheets my files used to be on my computer now it's on in the dropbox right so these are trends that are really uh putting pressure on our networks we are also seeing trends where vr headsets are becoming common they are being used for trainings and education use cases webex hologram in certain industries we are seeing robotics are becoming more and more popular and they come with a lot of um applications that are very latency sensitive and as lawrence mentioned earlier wi-fi 6e is really making over the year multi gigabit wi-fi possible right and for all of these different trends and the recent technologies that that are evolving we really need the network that can really address and deliver for these applications and that's where we are bringing the catalyst 9000 x that addresses the increase in network demand we are expanding the catalyst 9000 family with top-of-line premium introductions in the access layer of the switches of the network as well as in the aggregation and core layers so we are bringing 400 gig high-speed core and enterprise core and edge layers of the network we are bringing point-to-point ip ipsec security which will give you 100 gig of ipsec encryption um high density of multi-gigabit which is becoming very common as we evolve our wi-fi networks because we don't want our wired infrastructure to be the bottleneck when the wireless infrastructure is capable of going more than a gig high density of 90 watt powering the smart buildings use cases right right um these are all different use cases that are being enabled by the catalyst 9000 and the new getless 9000x family is really addressing some of these new trends and applications well it's good because the metaverse is coming too and we're going to need some help with that right who knows how much bandwidth will need for metabolism absolutely yeah guarantee will be a lot more but so i want to i want to hear more about the the new products that you've just launched and maybe how these offerings are going to help with this new hybrid work model that we've just been discussing absolutely so let me start with the catalyst 9300 we are introducing the catalyst 9300x which is the highest density full multi-gigabit platform with 100 gig uplinks and 90 watt of power on every port available right that's an industry first that we are bringing on the catalyst 9300 family it is also capable of one terabit per second of a stacking which is also unheard of in the industry this will serve our customers with all the new trends that we talked about including the hybrid world um and some of the new trends that are going to come in the next decade but 9300x is not just a high-end campus switch it can also be a lean branch and a box solution where you don't really need an sd van but you do need an encryption point to point from the catalyst 93 from your front branch with the catalyst 9300x to the data center or to the cloud so for the first time we are introducing the ipsec based encryption natively in the hardware and that means no compromise on performance and you can get up to 100 gig of encrypted traffic with the catalyst 9300x second is the catalyst 9400 we are introducing soup 2 and soup 2 xl with 100 gig uplinks enhancing and the the scale and performance giving our customers options for fully loaded line rate multi give it board on a 10 slot chassis right it will give you two to three times bandwidth boost to your existing line cards since it completely removes the over subscriptions and you know the soup 2 on the catalyst 9400 is coming up with the version of the asic that we used in the past on the catalyst 9600 that means it's also bringing the core capabilities that we used that we today have on 9600 on the catalyst 9400 and that brings high density 10 gig um ports on the catalyst 9400 without over subscription right with the core capabilities then we have the catalyst 9600 where we are introducing is supervisor 2 which really triples the bandwidth per slot on the catalyst 98600 it introduces 400 gig uplink and truly drives the transition to 200 gig in the core get 6k customers uh with excel scale requirements now they can transition to the cat 9k with soup 2. and by the way we are also introducing a combo line card on the catalyst 9600 which means now you don't have to burn a whole slot for your uplink pores in fact you can get up to 400 gig of uplink with this new line card um so that's that's a bunch of things that we are bringing on the catalyst 9600 in line with catalyst 9600 we are also introducing catalyst 9500x 100 gig box with 400 gig uplinks in a fixed form factor and all the benefits that i just talked about on the on the supervisor 2 and 9600 it's also available in a fixed form factor on catalyst 9500x got it so that's in summary kind of the multiple uh product lines that we are introducing yeah it's a lot to unpack there i mean your the big theme there of course is optionality you got a lot of choices for customers i love the encrypt everything without a trade-off you know no performance impact and anytime you can reduce my oversubscription it's going to make me happy you know muhammad we've reported in our breaking analysis segments the importance of custom silicon and not every company has the resources or the expertise to develop their own silicon cisco of course does catalyst 9k is bringing silicon 1 based products with this launch tell us more about that why is this important yeah that's really exciting development that we have on the cad 9k family because you know the silicon one is a powerful asic that enables high performance and high scale with modern silicon architecture bringing the architect a converged architecture for switching as well as routing cad 9k as we know has been running on a uadp asic which has been a programmable asic it has served us really well so far on the cat9k family but with the silicon one we are taking it to another level silicon one brings the capabilities of uadp asic and unlocks the excel scale and high performance in the enterprise switches this is a critical and foundational element to meet the core requirement for the next ticket silicon one is a 12.8 terabits per second chip supports up to 10 million routes supports much deeper buffers brings multi-slice voq architectures with this new architecture silicon 1a6 has paved the way to transition the cad 6k xl deployments to cat 9k right so that's kind of the the um the silicon one uh importance in the ket99k family that we are bringing now yeah and it brings differentiation a lot of people kind of sometimes don't appreciate that but but when you have the control like that you can do things that you might not be able to do with off-the-shelf silicon but so but i i want to ask you what about customers that previously purchased from you as you evolve the portfolio to 9k x how do you protect their investment yeah thank you for asking that question because when we started building the cad 9k we always thought about investment protection for our customers so if you buy today how you will have a very long life for that for that product and you will be able to unlock new powers on that platform that you have purchased maybe five years back right that's exactly what we are doing with the catalyst 199000x talking about modular right on the modular side the supervisors that that that we are introducing now are backward compatible with the line cars that you already have in some cases the lime card throughput is doubling and tripling because now you have a new machine that is going to power these line cards right so you don't have to change your line card you just change your supervisor and you have much higher performance and scale with this new supervisor similarly on the stackables you can stack with the existing catalyst 9300s for example and you will be able to you don't have to rip and replace everything it's not a forklift upgrade for our customers you can continue benefiting from your existing catalyst 9000 deployments and add to the power with the catalyst 9000x components as well as new platforms that we are introducing nice that's key this just speaks to the software content that you guys i know you have a lot of software engineers running around and this is welcome to the 2020s folks new world you know i i muhammad zero trust was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic but it's really become a mainstream topic today we talked about the infrastructure we know security has to be built in from the start it can't be bolted on and zero trust is really top of mind for customers how are their security requirements changing as a result of hybrid work and and how do you make sure that as we shift to hybrid that these new security requirements are addressed what are you doing there absolutely and we know as you said security is top of mind for our customers in fact security has been highlighted as the number one reason why a lot of customers pick cisco and cat9k we have a comprehensive zero truss architecture with software defined access where we started with segmentation and expanded into endpoint classification and visibility now we are taking that to the next level and we are introducing talus powered truss assessment for unmanaged endpoints to further make the the workplace is stronger with zero trust and software defined access truss analytics it detects traffic from end points that are exhibiting unusual um behavior by pretending to be um using a mag spoofing or probe is spoofing or man the metal techniques when truss analytics detects such anomalies it signals endpoint analytics to lower the trusted score so we have a trusted score system when when the trusted score goes down it shows up on the dashboard and the network admin can completely deny or limit the access to the network from these endpoints from other security aspect that we are introducing and i touched on that briefly earlier is um for non-sdvan internet only branches where we are where where services security services might be in the cloud right that's a trend that we are seeing to secure that connectivity from a lean branch to the cloud we are introducing the ipsec capability with the catalyst 9300x and that's built in as as we just talked about and as far as the automation is concerned for these use cases they are we are bringing those automation with our command center the cisco dna center and we are bringing the full life cycle of automation as well as assurance for the secure connectivity that is being provided with the with the cisco dna center well a couple takeaways there for me i mean endpoint security has really become much more important up for obvious reasons when you have remote workers the built-in ipsec just that really emphasizes that you got to have it you know built in from the ground up you can't just bolt it on and the automation is key the number one problem that csos face is you know lack of talent so automation you know definitely helps helps with that so okay muhammad thank you so much really appreciate you coming on in a moment we'll look at private 5g and what's been happening at mobile world congress you're watching cube's coverage of the network powering hybrid work made possible by cisco

good thumbnail for your video all right thank you all for the patience we are now ready to start filming did you want to take a picture alex yes i do lawrence let me get myself prepared for that okay lawrence we're going to take a screenshot of your input for a thumbnail asset if you can look at the screen and give me a big smile in three two one gotcha great excellent okay and with that i am all good to go and you are lawrence we'll do a five count i'll count you down 543 silent 2-1 and then just follow my lead okay sounds great all right leonard we good okay you're off here we go on dave in five four three every ceo is trying to get hybrid right most people they've been working remotely for the better part of two years now and we've spent a lot of time and thought on how to accommodate remote workers and providing tools to make them feel connected and more productive we've also built remote and hybrid models into our hiring ethos making it a feature not a drawback but what about the underlying infrastructure that powers hybrid work how is that evolving to be as flexible scalable and cost effective with the lowest latency possible recent survey data from enterprise technology research shows that 56 percent of executives believe productivity continues to improve with only 14 percent citing recent declines in productivity 26 percent say it's holding steady the question is how do we maintain those positives and minimize the negatives and what role does the network and underlying infrastructure play in evolving new work models welcome to the network powering hybrid work on the cube made possible by cisco my name is dave vellante and i'll be your host today and in this program you're going to hear from experts that are going to discuss and introduce new innovations that are specifically designed to energize and support hybrid work my first guest is lawrence wang who's the vice president of product management at cisco and we're going to dig into wi-fi 6e and what it all means to the future of work lawrence welcome good to see you hey great to be here dave thanks for having me i'm excited to be here today yeah you bet okay my my first big question is you know what's the big rush it feels like we were just talking about the shift from wi-fi you know five to wi-fi six just a few years ago what's going on there yeah i mean you're right right we as since at cisco we introduced our first wi-fi six access points back in 2019 and one of the things that we've seen is a tremendous rate of adoption moving from wi-fi five to wi-fi six over the past couple of years in fact it's one of our fastest transitions that we've seen between wireless standards and a lot of the drivers you know for that we're really just about you know making sure that there's better wi-fi experiences for you know uh people in the office making sure that they can support uh you know more of that you know set of clients reduce the amount of congestion in our time what we've seen is that migration has been tremendous but it also means that you know we're starting to reach that capacity where you know five gigahertz is starting to become more crowded and so many of our customers are looking at well what can i actually do to continue to expand you know that you know that traffic the number of lanes that i can actually support for wireless traffic and for many of them they're looking to wi-fi 6e as the answer to help them do that simply because six gigahertz as part of that standard introduces a whole new spectrum or a whole new highway that we can get client devices on well so it sounds like you're thinking about a different role for offices and campuses going forward so what should listeners expect to see kind of in the in the near term in the midterm and even the long term near term when they get back into the office and in the long term how do you see this playing out yeah i mean that's an interesting question right when you think about you know this context of hybrid work you know work is not a place that you go to but it's really a place that uh you could be where ultimately you are trying to get work done uh it really really is supporting you know that you know quality of experience no matter where you choose to work from and yes yeah while the campus is going to evolve and play a different role it is a critical part of that hybrid work future and the way i see it here is that you know the role of the campus is going to change over time it's not going to be the same that we saw prior to uh you know two years ago and i think for many of our customers about you know what does it mean to invest in that infrastructure for us to continue to adapt to support you know the ways that you know their employees are expected or want to work and a big part of that is investing in infrastructure to support your new ways of working well you know lawrence i mean i've personally been lucky because we go to studio and i've been able to come into the office since the pandemic started but i know a lot of people they're really excited to get back to work in person and face-to-face events and the like and i know others that say you know what i'm moving and i'm always going to remo work remotely i'll never work for another company that forces me to go in the office again so this sounds like a tall order for it organizations to accommodate that diversity how do you think they will be able to plan for and manage all this new complexity yeah i mean i think the reality is uh you know talent it doesn't know any zip codes right and i think one of the boons of you know being able to support a more distributed workforce is to be able to bring in great talent no matter where they're based out of and i think for it teams i think the interesting thing will be you know what are the drivers to bring people back into the office right there has to be a purpose uh that's more meaningful than simply it's a place that i go to every single day you know what are the you know tools and you know applications i bring in to help support collaboration and i think an important part of you know making this a great experience in the context of hybrid work is that you do have to make the office a meaningful place for employees to gather but also making sure that as you connect people around the world as part of your global employee workforce that they still have an equitable experience so for iet teams it is about you know thinking about how do i actually manage this infrastructure that's more distributed but i still have to invest in my you know central campuses and at the same time making sure that i have great quality experiences for everyone unified security policies you know visibility across all the clients and applications but there's also increasing pressure from their it's core constituency we know that people are asking more of it they want them to support new use cases like safe return office that they want it to help you a contributor to you know global corporate initiatives like driving towards uh you know zero uh greenhouse gas emissions so any number of these activities or initiatives is putting more pressure on ig teams yeah interesting i mean so i gotta ask you please don't hate me for this question but was this just luck on cisco's part that you got solutions ready for this sort of hybrid work model so quickly in other words was it something that you were maybe planning that was going to take years for the market to be ready for and it just got compressed because of the pandemic or is this architecture that allows you to be flexible how did you land here in what appears to be a pretty strong position yeah i mean at cisco i think one of the things that you know we think about is you know it's always amazing when you look back at something and then you write the story but i i think if we're being honest with ourselves if you look at what happened from where we were two years ago to where we are today including our competitors and customers i think that no one could have predicted the world that we're operating and living in and so for us the question becomes how did we help our customers support this transition and ultimately it's about investing in architectures and platforms that are flexible that allows our customers support you know use cases that they were thinking of as well as ones that they never anticipated and i think that's really the exciting thing about you know what we've been doing here as part of our hybrid work investments now areas that you know i think you know we double down on and you know in some ways accelerated because of this when i think about you know what our customers care about when they start bringing people back into the office it is about some of these emerging use cases whether it's you know more dynamic way finding being able to understand the density or the air quality of a given environment and these are some of the technologies that we've embedded in some of our you know new uh you know wi-fi 60 access points along with you know our management infrastructure here so i think that it gives our customers and partners a lot more flexibility than what you know they had before to really adapt to the changing needs of today and even beyond well that's something we've certainly learned throughout the pandemic is is the ability to be flexible is fundamental i got to ask you what's your preferred mode of work you going back into the office are you going to stay remote great question you know i have come to appreciate uh you know working from home you know over uh you know the past couple years got to spend a little more time with my kids at lunch but i will say i am looking forward to the day when i can have the choice of being back in the office a few days a week as well as continue to be remote as well as continue to visit my customers and partners uh you know all over this great country in the world so looking forward to that yeah so so you're a true hybrid i guess i'm a hybrid too i like being in the office but i'm traveling a lot when the world returns to the new abnormal anyway lawrence thanks so much for kicking off the program with me now in a minute we're going to dig into the core of the network and understand the role it plays in supporting new and flexible work models you're watching the network powering hybrid work made possible by cisco on thecube your leader in global enterprise tech coverage

>> Hey actually, Ard, you still on? Yes. >> Yeah, I'm here. >> Are you guys going to host, we're going to host these assets obviously. Are you going to have these anywhere on your websites? >> Yeah, we are. We're going to have 'em on our cloud sites as well as our enterprise networking sites. So I'm going to kind of sprinkle it around for some cross promotion. So yeah, you can even say, it'll be on cisco.com. >> Great. I didn't want to commit to that if you guys weren't doing it, so- >> Yeah, no, we're going to do that for sure. >> I'm just going to add that in, okay. All right Alex, tell me when you're ready. >> We're ready. >> Oops! Hold on, I'm not. (Dave chuckles) Back up. Okay, here we go. Okay, we're back with some final thoughts. Today we heard how wifi 6E is ushering in the next generation of wireless. The technology cycle is actually compressing, it's going faster, which is great news for all of us as the devices that we use and the networks that enable them to communicate are going to be able to more efficient do their jobs. Meaning our experience as users is going to improve quite dramatically. And we heard how new switching technologies from Cisco will not only improve performance but also make us more secure, which is vital in a world where criminals and nation states alike continue to attack our critical infrastructure. Now as workers move from the office to work from home or remotely or wherever they are and back to the office again in a hybrid mode, the threat surface expands and it's up to all of us including technology companies like Cisco to continue to be vigilant and invest in securing our networks and data. And then finally, we heard about the role 5G and private 5G will play in this new world. In our recent predictions post, we said 2022 would see a complete reset of how organizations think about remote work and it's happening. We expect only about a third of employees are going to be back at the office full time, hybrid will be the new reality. That means there are going to be permanent changes in the way we support and secure workers globally. And really importantly, how we're going to increasingly rely on infrastructure that can evolve as our work modes change and deliver highly secure, scalable, and can never go down infrastructure. Okay, now, if you want to check out some of the solution demos and get your questions answered, you can join the Cisco customer and partner event on February 23rd at 10:00 AM Pacific we'll put a URL in the show notes. In this event you'll be able to join in a live Q&A with Cisco experts and get your questions answered directly and see all of this technology in action. Well, that does it for today, thanks for watching The Network, Powering Hybrid Work, made possible by Cisco. And remember all this content is going to be available in thecube.net and on cisco.com so please share that with friends. This is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE, your leader in global enterprise tech coverage. We'll see you soon.

(upbeat music) >> In our recent predictions post, we said 2022 would see a complete reset of how organizations think about remote work. Data from ETR shows that we exited 2021 with 45% of workers still remote, and 29% working in a hybrid mode, with only 26% fully back in the office. The expectation, however, is that hybrid will become the dominant work model in 2022 and beyond, with only about a third of employees returning to the office permanently. As such, we've said that the capabilities to support this new model must evolve and deliver a highly secure, scalable, and never-can-go-down infrastructure. Hello, I'm Dave Vellante, and we're here with Raakhee Mistry, who is the director of product marketing at Cisco on the enterprise, networking, and cloud team. Welcome to theCUBE, Raakhee. >> Thanks for having me, Dave, very excited to talk about hybrid work with you today. >> Great now, so Cisco, you've got a strong point of view on hybrid work and some big news to really lean into and support customers in this transition. Raakhee, could you share a little bit about what we can expect from Cisco in this key area? >> Absolutely, we are thrilled to be diving into the details of our new networking innovation with theCUBE on February 15. Our top Wi-Fi, 5G, and switching experts will be joining you Dave, and they'll be discussing these important topics and how to transform the hybrid world. All of our customers are exploring how to architect more hybrid work, and this is a great opportunity for them to learn how they can prepare their infrastructure for great experiences from anywhere to support smart and sustainable workplaces and deliver secure IoT at scale. Included in this announcement, are new Wi-Fi 6 solutions powered by our industry leading (indistinct) and Meraki access points. In addition, we're going to compliment this technology with our enterprise Wi-Fi stack, with our new private 5G service that's provided by our service provider partners, to deliver more choice of mobile connectivity to our enterprise customers. And of course, we need to deliver a robust backbone, that's ready for all this wireless and IoT demand that's coming (murmurs) today and into tomorrow. And we will reveal the catalyst 9,000 acts, an extension of our flagship switching line. That will be now powered with Silicon one technology. After theCUBE interview that we have with you all on February 15, we will host our own customer virtual event on February 23rd and go even deeper into this technology, with demos, customer stories, and also new industry experts that will provide great advice on how to lead hybrid work and drive this transformation in your organization. This all aligns to Cisco's strategy to help our customers connect, secure, and automate in this new world and deliver an inclusive future for all. >> Okay, wow, thank you Raakhee. A lot to unpack there. And for sure every organization is trying to get hybrid work, right? So mark your calendars February 15th at 9:00 AM Pacific for theCUBE's preview of the network, powering hybrid work made possible by Cisco. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

>>In our recent predictions post, we said 20, 22 would see a complete reset of how organizations think about remote work data from ETR shows that we exited 20, 21 with 45% of workers still remote and 29% working in a hybrid mode with only 26% fully back in the office. The expectation, however, is that hybrid will become the dominant work model in 2022 and beyond with only about a third of employees returning to the office permanently as such. We've said that the capabilities to support this new model must evolve and deliver a highly secure, scalable, and never can go down infrastructure. Hello, I'm David Lante and we're here with Rocky mystery. He was the director of product marketing at Cisco on the enterprise networking and cloud team. Welcome to the cube, Rocky. >>Thanks for having me, Dave, very excited to talk about hybrid work with you today. >>Great. Now, so Cisco, you've got a strong point of view on hybrid work and some big news to really lean into and support customers in this transition. Rocky, can you share a little bit about what we can expect from Cisco in this key area? >>Absolutely. We are thrilled to be diving into the details of our new networking innovation with the cube on February 15, our top wifi 5g and switching experts will be joining you Dave, and there'll be discussing these important topics and how to transform the hybrid work. All of our customers are exploring how to architect more hybrid work, and this is a great opportunity for them to learn how they can prepare their infrastructure for great experiences from anywhere to support smart and sustainable workplaces and deliver secure IOT at scale included in this announcement, our new wifi six solutions powered by our industry, leading capitals and Meraki access points. In addition, we're going to compliment this technology with our enterprise wifi stack, with our new private 5g service that's provided by our service provider partners to deliver more choice of mobile connectivity to our enterprise customers. And of course, we need to deliver a robust backbone. >>That's ready for all this wireless and IOT demand that's coming from today and into tomorrow. And we will reveal the catalyst 9,000 acts and extension of our flagship switching line. That will be now powered with Silicon one technology. After the cube interview that we have with you all on February 15, we will host our own customer virtual event on February 23rd and go even deeper into this technology with demos customer stories, and also new industry experts that will provide great advice on how to lead hybrid work and drive this transformation in your organization. This all aligns to Cisco strategy to help our customers secure and automate in this new world and deliver an inclusive future for all. >>Okay. Wow. Thank you, Rocky. Lots to unpack there and for sure every organization is trying to get hybrid work, right? So mark your calendars February 15th at 9:00 AM Pacific for the cubes preview of the network, powering hybrid work made possible by Cisco. We'll see you there.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. Two great guests Linda Tong, general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Garrick Linn, architect of operations at Match.com. Thanks for joining us. We're talking about AppDynamics, Match.com and customer experience. Mainly around cloud migration. So Linda, great to see you and Garrick, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you again. Thank you for having us. >> Same here. >> Linda, you're a CUBE alumni. we've talked about cloud migration application performance, modern application development, all powered by the Cloud, right? So this is really key and people are relying on the cloud and cloud scale and data to drive the digital transformation, the digital services and applications right now. How has the pandemic affected your customers and their expectations for digital experiences? >> Oh boy, I mean the pandemic has been, it has been rough for our customers, you know, and part of that is what Garrick's going to tell you a little bit more about today, but folks are seeing this increase in expectancy of accelerated speed and delivering innovation, building great applications and iterating on them quickly. And frankly, their customers' demands we're engaging with them through digital services. And that has led to this massive increase in, one, the types of technologies that they're consuming to build and deliver these applications. And two the complexity upon how they actually wrap their arms around it and understand what's going on and deliver these great experiences. And so it's been a rough road for our customers and what we find with AppDynamics and Cisco is our ability to partner with our customers to help them wrap their arms around that complexity. >> John: Garrick, I'd love to get your commentary on this because I'll say, Match.com has been at large-scale for many, many years, and now the pandemic comes in now a new user experience, more accelerated, more action, more things are happening, right? So this is truly the hybrid world coming together. I mean, it is kind of the same game, but kind of new patterns are emerging. What have you seen in the pandemic around the expectations and the services and you guys are providing in the digital experiences? >> Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, Match has been around for quite some time. We've been here for over 25 years. We have an interesting mix, heterogeneous, technology, some old stuff, some new stuff. A lot of the mentality that we try to bring is to innovate. The pandemic was, it brought a lot of uncertainty. We weren't really sure how people were going to react. Was it going to be everybody kind of hunkers down on dating definitely is something that requires human interaction in multiple levels. And it turned out that people were still very much interested in getting to a place where they can find human connections and you know Match as a premium product tries to make that delightful. And so we had our hands full, especially at the beginning, things like, by checking the video features, how does that work? What are the expectations? Is that going to creep people out? If we try to offer that, are they going to use it? How are they going to date? How are they going to talk? How can we make sure that they're safe? All these kinds of things went into it. And so when we have been using AppDynamics for you know, years now, well before the pandemic, and we use that in order to get a gauge, not just on the type of traffic and load, but also, "Hey, you've got these new features, "how do they fit into this huge complex environment?" And so some of those timelines that maybe were a little bit more relaxed were very much accelerated, And like a lot of companies, we had to figure out how to deliver on that. >> John: Yeah, Linda, I want to get your thoughts. We've talked about in the past, AppDynamics has been a leader in really accelerating the value for customers. Now with the pandemic, you mentioned these new experiences are being pulled in from the physical world, right? So you have things that were happening on digital in the application space. Now you have more experiences coming in because there's no places to meet face to face. Now it's coming together, but people have been seeing the value. Well, if I can't meet in person Match.com are going to do some things, new things, online chat, whatever. This dynamic of old way, new way is changing and cloud is powering that. What are you seeing in terms of your customers' journeys around what was once pre-pandemic and now post-pandemic? >> Well, a big part of that is more and more of these experiences rely on digital services and these amazing sort of ways to connect with each other and in a very digital space, expectations of customers have changed. So not only do you experience applications and you want it to be simple, easy to use, delightful, and it delivers on the needs that you want. But on top of that, you expect it to be performant. You expect it to be secure. You expect there to be frankly, no hiccups whatsoever, because now this is your way to connect with others. This is your way to find dates or go on dates. And the last thing you want, is watching your screen pixelate, as you're trying to have an important conversation. And these kinds of experiences and these challenges as people build more and more of these digital services to build these connections, frankly, require a lot more of folks like Garrick and his team. They now have to deliver amazing experiences with perfect performance, no security risks, no bumps in the night. And that's really tough, right? Expectations have gone through the roof. >> John: Yeah, the whole story on that one point, just to kind of add live in this was that that whole concept of moving fast used to take months, right? I mean, weeks, months, now it's days and hours. So months to weeks, days and hours but Garrick, this is the challenge. This is the opportunity with the cloud. Can you just take us through your cloud journey and your goals and some of the impacts that has had on your transition to the cloud? What does that look like? >> Yeah, so we've had our on-prem data centers for quite some time, and we started putting our toe in, I guess, although it was a kind of intense at the beginning, just trying to get people on board and to say, "Hey, this is possible." We started out with a fairly small SWAT team then managed within a couple of months, working closely with our developers. We have a lot of smart people, you know, with background or overall, just security folks over devs to just demonstrate that we could do it. So we managed to take something like 80% of our front end traffic for most of the day, just kind of spinning that up, learning lessons from that, knowing what we didn't know. AppDynamics, if we didn't have that would have been almost impossible to get a read if for no other reason, then just one little tidbit. We used to have a data center in Virginia. And so physics being what it is, you know, there's just been a flight that we have to contend with. And for a couple, few years, we hadn't had the 30 millisecond or so round trip latency on there. So all of a sudden we're going back to the cloud that reintroduced this latency. So what does that mean? Will you be asked to sort of glide by and absorb it? How do we track it? How can we figure out what the Delta is between, you know, here's how we've done things on-prem. Here's how it looks out here. If you are the cross, you know, calls and, you know, AppDynamics was what we used to be able to get a read and say, "Hey, look, it isn't as good as we know we can make it, but it's something, it's a starting point. Here's why, we can show you the graphs. We can show you the data. Let's do this thing." So we then pulled back and we have focused this year on actually our affinity apps, which is a collection of applications that are also going to be okay just in, and so we've been asked to get those completely migrated over. We're going to be running in hybrid mode for a while. We're going to need to be able to compare apples to apples, apples to orangutans, all that. And this is one of the main things for you, we describe. >> {John] If I can just follow up on that just real quick, because I think this is a good point. You got the data points, you double down on that. You're looking at real data, and then you look at success and you double down, that's the playbook. So, and the other thing is that you guys actually have a real operation that's running full throttled, right? (John laughs) So, yeah, so I can see that nice balance. What does the future look like beyond that? Because when you got a business that's scaling, it's running, it's like changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet. You got to continue to push the envelope. >> Yup, so, and no, exactly right. Again, we're a premium product. And so we've got to back that up. And that means, maintaining high availability. And so over the next few years, we're going to be looking at what have we already do? What can we move in piecemeal kind of way where it makes sense? What are the things that we can rethink? We're also using AppDynamics as part of our containerization initiative. You know, we've got lots of virtual infrastructure, but what is it, again, what does it look like on-prem, in a container, go down the list of different things that might be different. And then to be able to compare that to what it looks like, in the cloud. So it's going to be a while yet, but like a lot of companies, when we got into this, we didn't think it was going to be done in six months. Even if we have to deliver those features at a much faster rate, we know that the long haul, we got to make smart decisions and plan the capacity, and, you know, get there. (chuckles) >> John: That's a real pragmatic approach. Linda, you and I both are sports fans. We've talked in the past about sports, and the old adage, what inning are we in growth? It's to use that baseball metaphor. I would say it's a double header, game one won by the cloud, game two is happening now. And the trend is this end-to-end mature, operationally focused customer base. And IT, where IT has shifted to the cloud right now. And they're having this new view of what modern is. End-to-end, understanding different stacks relative to applications. It's not as simple as it was before, but it's relevant. Can you share your views on how that's playing out because, or do you agree with that? And do you see that as an important part of the customer? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's, that complexity that the IT organizations are seeing now, as they fully adopt the cloud for all their new applications and start to migrate some of their existing applications over. That world is only increasing in complexity. The way that you can virtualize your applications, break them out into millions of services, the dependencies you have on third party applications or SaaS services. These things only add that many more data points that you now have to cover and think about and make sure that those things deliver upon their SLAs, right? And wrapping your arms around that requires a partner to help you separate signal from noise. Because now you're going into a world without simplicity that you just mentioned has gotten to some point where it's beyond what you can actually sort of keep in your mind. Beyond what you can just look at data and sift through and understand, you really need tools and systems that come together, and understand that data for you and start to represent your business to you in a new way and abstract away those layers of complexity. While you do that, because I think, as you talk about those innings, that first inning, second inning, or rather first game, second game in the series, it's not a full migration to the cloud, right? There are going to be some applications that stay on-prem that stay in their traditional environments and may never move. And then some of them are going to go hybrid. Some will keep parts of the applications on-prem, and they're going to start to modularize components of it. And so it's not going to be sort of a mass scale migration. And then we're all in the promised land. And we deal with the cloud complexity. It's going to be ever increasing complexity. As we now introduce so many variants of applications, so many variants of technology, and what people are going to need is someone who can help them cover that entire estate and understand it at scale. >> John: Yeah, I mean, I think it's the enterprise conversion, if you will of cloud operations on-premises because of the reasons. And now you've got the edge. Garrick, this is the whole kind of end-to-end stack conversation view. And by the way, there isn't one tech stack to rule them all because you have different use cases. You might have an application that needs a financial gateway or have other capabilities. So integration's huge. This only increases the point Linda was making about complexity behind the scenes. How does AppDynamics help you with this for Match.com? >> So we have quite a bit of infrastructure, you know, a lot of it is shared, well, most of all, maintaining, sandboxes for user data and that sort of thing. And so now the navigating that space is always interesting. So for instance, one of the new things that we have coming out is Star.com It's out there right now. It's a dating site that's geared towards single parents. It does share some of the infrastructure, but we're realizing what that means, how is that different, how our registration flow is different, how our subscription flow is different. Where are the things that DevOps are actively trying to improve on and rethink? That's one of the things that we try to focus on when we're trying to kind of pick out, like, is this a good candidate to move over to the cloud sooner or later? Is this a good candidate for something that needs to be maybe bake a little bit more? And having established those baselines with the shared infrastructure, and having a pretty good understanding of how they react, how they work really helps us, you know, tee up these new initiatives and in front of those needs in a more efficient way. So yeah, absolutely. >> John: What's some of the activity you guys seen? And what's the peak activity on Match.com these days? >> Yeah, so dating apps in general, but not so particular we use a nested or breast fractal peak, and it's a pattern that, from what they told me back in the old days, took a little while to realize was a thing. And not just like, oh we changed something and then did this and produced that. So every evening is our peak basically. So with taking time zones into account, obviously, in the United States from about five to 10 o'clock at night or so, we get this, growing, burst of traffic. So that can be anywhere from 23% sometimes. It kind of varies. Then we have a weekly peak where every, you know, Sunday and Monday we expect a higher amount of traffic than we would other days. And it kind of makes sense from an Archer psychology kind of standpoint where, you know, you're coming off of dates, you're trying to set dates up. That's where a lot of that activity is. And then we have a yearly peak, which goes from around Christmas to President's day. Believe it or not, it's President's day, it's not Valentine's day. And so the sort of thing where when we're trying to plan for capacity and we do a lot of, what cost squeeze tests, were not quite as I guess, engineering, but hey, what does it look like if we go down in capacity by 50%, what happens? where are the weak points? A January, Monday night is very different from a May, Thursday in June (chuckles). So we have to predict, we can anticipate some of that, but we don't know for sure, a lot can change in a year. So when we're preparing for a yearly peak, we really have to pay attention. We have to prep. We have to plan for that and work with that to figure out how we can get through it and maintain that level of service. >> That's awesome, and AppDynamics to help you to do that. I'd love to get a bot to give me the optimal dating times, to share with my single friends. Great stuff. Linda, thank you for coming. Great to see you. Congratulations on a great case study. Great story. How large-scale applications and are working in the modern cloud. So congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Awesome, thank you, so good to be here. >> Okay, CUBE coverage of re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)