>> Announcer: From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and looking forward, we're going to be digging into one of my favorite topics and also the community always loves when we have it. Talking about networking, of course. Happy to welcome you to the program. I have two first time guests. First of all, we have Mike Saur. He is a solutions architect of NetDevOps with CCI. And joining us a long time friend of the program. First time on the program, Omar Saltun, who is a leader, product management for Network Services Orchestrator with Cisco. Omar and Mike, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, nice to be here. >> Thank you, sir. >> All right. So Mike, if you could just set up for us, CCI, Cisco partner, give us a little bit about the organization, what you specialize in, what you're known for. And tell us a bit about your role there. >> Sure. CCI systems is a trusted partner for typical mid market size service providers. That's primarily the focus and that's a lot of different areas of the business, cable access, CMTS, security, data center and now this next evolution of adding NetDevOps as that next step for trusted advisor. I've been in my role for about a year now at CCI with a strong passion for automation and finding the right fit tools to solve problems for our customers, whether that's a commercial product or a open source tool. So a lot of different problems out there and no one size fits all. So it's my passion to bring those types of solutions to CCIs customers. >> Wonderful. Mike, I'm hearing a lot of the themes that I'm very familiar with. I'm sure our audience is when we talk about Cisco, when we've gone to Cisco live, we've been in the DevNet zone. So having a lot of discussions about that NetDevOps piece, can you talk to us a little bit more, just the partnership with Cisco. I would love to hear how NetDevOps fits in with what you're doing and how that fits with Cisco too. >> Yeah, I've been working with Cisco on and off for the past 18 months to try to think outside the box. As we know, Network Services Orchestrator was primarily targeted at the large providers that have the investment resources, the programming staff, to be able to do that. So over the years, having various discussions with product management, Cisco and CCI have come together to partner to solve two of the big problems in our space for our customers. As far as the math problem of the investment that's needed to bring up Network Service Orchestrator, and then also the programming piece of that. So not a lot of the providers in the mid market space have that expertise. So CCI and Cisco are really pulling that all together with various trusted partners to bring that to life for them in a shorter timeframe, with more sets of controls, to bring them up to speed faster so that they can it with a martial arts type journey of starting small and integrating over different phases of the life cycle of automation. >> Great. Well, Omar, let's pull you into the discussion here. It tends to be in general from a product standpoint, a little bit easier to grow up market. We want to talk a bit about the mid market, so that Network Services Orchestrator, NSO. Help explain how that really can support the mid tier as Mike was saying. >> Sure, so we were a little crazy, we started at the top and starting to work our way down. So we're well established with tier one service providers, large enterprises, we have good markets penetration there. I think for us, it was a lot of growth opportunity down into the mid market, both on commercial and tier two, tier three service providers. I know that the challenge in NSO is awesome, but it's got a steep learning curve. So, these partnerships like the one here is perfect because it allows mid market customers to access the capability. But at the same time, they have someone to hold their hands. They have partners like CCI, that have both the technical expertise, as well as kind of understanding kind of what customer problems are, what operations and problem scaling look like in mid market, not just a tier one where the different markets, different requirements. >> Mike I would love to get your viewpoint as to what's happening inside your customers. So networking in general, obviously there's always new technologies that they need to integrate, but there's also the skill sets. NetDevOps, of course, helping pull people along to work closer with developers, coding more something we have to talk about. So the mid tier customer specifically, what challenges they face with bring us into some of those conversations, if you would. >> Right, so I preach a lot and talk about the vicious cycle of not automating. They don't have time 'cause they're too busy doing the day to day jobs. And I love to get into that vicious cycle and kind of bust that up and help to kind of think differently why they need to operate their networks differently. And they can take a lot of those tools and techniques from the software world and really help leverage them on their networks. There's just a skills gap right now with the mid market type folks. They're overworked, stressed. And with obviously the growth of IOT, more devices means more work. It's just a volume metric problem that certain automation tools can really make a difference in their world. And that's really what my passion is at, reducing human error, helping those businesses provide more uptime for their end customers and just driving a different way to operate networks in more efficiently in accurate way. >> And part of that... >> Please go ahead on that. >> And part of that is just not. You know those are the technical expertise, but there's also the how do you stitch things together? Any automation strategy is going to have more than one tool. And there's the idea of how do we stitch tools together? How do we build processes? How do we help up-skill customers? Those kinds of things. I mean, this is kind of the all the pieces that come together when you kind of mesh the technology and the apart for capabilities together. That's really what drives successful automation projects, and then get some of those problems solving and added value that we're talking about here. >> Yeah. I mean, Omar, when I think about scale and I think about automation, service fighters, you think would be some of the leading edge for some of that? Maybe just refresh our audience a bit as to how you help them along and how much, they used to kind of build a lot of their own toolings and that's challenging if you have to keep doing it itself. So why do they turn to Cisco for some of these solutions? >> I think two things, one, we build tools that survive scale, right? For NSO, we have customers managing hundreds of thousands of nodes at one time. So there's a scale on performance that comes from building SB class tooling. But the second piece is just understanding, you know, the operational environment service providers, have they have demanding requirements in terms of SLA scale, reg compliance, those kinds of things. And that's really what we've brought to the table is not just tools that have the power and the scale, but kind of understanding what the operational environment is for the typical tier one SP and making sure the tools mentioned to that. >> Michael... Please go ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of that businesses are changing fastly and keeping up with that speed of innovation is very difficult. And not to mention to, I mean, as a trusted partner for our customers, maybe the answer's not Cisco every time to be honest, maybe there's a different tool. So if we have a tool like NSO that could drive other vendors equipment, I think that makes customers feel safer, better, not vendor lock in. So the power that NSO brings is second to none, in my opinion. So I'm just all about flexibility and in solving problems for our customers. And to me, Network Services Orchestrator is that product. But like I said, there's a lot of integrations that need to be done and we need to break it down for these customers and get them to realize the value of it faster instead of the large deployments that you've seen in the tier one type of space. >> Yeah, Mike, you bring up a really good point. When I think traditionally about automation, we take a process or maybe we optimize a process and we automate it, but what companies need today is I need to react fast and I need to be able to make changes in the future if that's needed. So not fossilizing something, but being able to move forward. So it sounds like with NSO, some of your other things that you put together, you're helping customers not only do what they need today, but be ready for the future. Do I have that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it's just another progression of what CCI already is. That trusted advisor, we have the great opportunity that we talk to so many different providers of the same size, same business goals that we bring best in breed. And our talent that we have at CCI is just amazing and that's a passion that we're trying to get out there into the world that, Hey, we have horsepower and we're ready to help. We're about making lives better. So it's exciting. >> Yeah certainly in the mid market, one of the things we see is customers doing less building and more assembly. So in tier one, they have the time and resources to build stuff from scratch, to write services from scratch, those kinds of things. Mid-markets much more of a simply play, taking things off the shelf. No, maybe a little NSO, but it's also paired with a little bit of Ansible, a little bit of Python, and that's how they're going to handle their automation requirements, both, 'cause it's probably faster and probably in the long run, easier to maintain. >> Well, yeah. You bring up a great point, Omar. When I think traditionally that mid market and the channel partner often would be delivering prepackaged solutions. But today's solutions, you still need that a little bit of flexibility, that little bit of programming, they're not going to, throw a team of PhDs on it like some of the largest customers do. But they still need to be able to put things together and make them fit for what they need and ultimately their customers need. >> Yeah, I mean, every automation project it's still a snowflake. You take something or free VPN, right. Everyone does it, but everyone does it differently. There's no better, there's no worse. But if you're going to automate that you kind of start with an 80% solution, but then you need to line it up whether that's customer's infrastructure, their operations, their staff capabilities and those kinds of things. That's kind of getting over the finish line what CCI brings to the table in the mid market, sure. >> Yup. Mike, it's funny. I'm curious. CCI, does it have any relation with CCIE 'cause when we're talking about that skillsets that we need, obviously, you start, you think about Cisco certifications. How do you keep your team up on the latest technologies, making sure that they can be that trusted advisor that your customers need? >> Well, of course it's a combination of different things, classical learning, but I would say one of the big things is our collaboration capabilities. We have experts in many different areas and usually they have a secondary skill set and we collaborate. And a lot of times we make our own internal training that's more specific to our customers. So example, I really try to recommend to customers to move to EVPN technologies, but there's that learning curve that they don't know how to configure them. Next gen ethernet type of technologies for service providers. So by building an EVPN model and NSO, we're empowering them to leverage that sooner, faster with a smart tool like NSO. And that's really, some of the value that we have, we know what most of our customers use. The big guys tend to use layer three VPNs a lot of time. I would say just that a majority of our customers are very L two VPN vase or infrastructure services, and even offering them up to their own customers. So having a somewhat pre-packaged 80% as Omar had mentioned, and nothing's ever really the same all the time, but 80% of it probably is. And then we'll come in and then we can finish off that last 20% to make it come to life for that customer with a little bit of customization. So making it fit for their environment. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the biggest challenges out there for anyone is, okay, when do I have to revisit what I had? Is there a new technology? Is there a new way of doing things? So you just laid out like, you know, one way that customers, okay, this is the way I should be in my size thinking about VPN. Anything else? What, what kind of key things should people be hearing and they're saying up, if I have this problem, providers like CCI can help. >> Right. Just trying to increase the health of their network by having consistency checks. Over the years, networks have config wonder. It's very hard to keep that up even in the mid market networks. So the cleaner that your network is, the more uptime you're going to have, the easier it is for your network engineers and allows you to scale. Like I said, the time to businesses is just going rapidly. And being able to empower other teams like say knock or even sales engineering to build those L2VPNs for the customer. If you can build them faster by not escalating tickets to the core engineering team, you serve the customer faster and you freed up those network engineers to maybe be more proactive about building out the future network. Cause right now they're just stuck in that day to day grind. So config consistency, and like primary, like service builds L2, L3 VPN. Those are very popular. And one thing that I always like to challenge customers with is that a lot of times they're like, well, we can do it ourselves. And maybe some of these guys have a developer teams and typically they're more focused on the public facing website, internal apps. And I challenged like maybe you could... but what's your time worth to you? And the amount of man hours that were put into NSO, jumpstart you faster. And a lot of times I think you're going to gain more value in just getting that product that you can customize. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's a developer platform. So you bring it to life in your environment. >> Absolutely, there's so many things now that companies need to make that decision. Can they shift left? Can they push it to the platform? Are there solutions that just make things easier so that you can focus on really the things that are important to run your business and get the best utilization out of your people and the skillsets. Wonderful. Mike, Omar want to give you both, give us the final word takeaways you want people to have regarding kind of the opportunity that they can take advantage of, especially in the mid tier. Mike maybe we'll start with you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I am just passionate about getting CCIS name out there. Not only for NetDevOps, but all the other practices that we have at CCI to be that trusted advisor and come talk to us. We have account teams that already, we have systems engineers that are ready. And I feel like one thing leads to another and it snowballs so reach out and I'd love to have a conversation with every single one of them, whether it's a small organization or a large organization, we're here to help. And that's super important to us. >> I think for us, we see automation start, tactically to science project. So ones trying to deal with the pain pointer or dealing with something here frustrated with which is, I think where most folks start. I think that the trick is to work with your peers, talk to your leadership and figure out how you go from science project to strategy and kind of map out the longer journey and be a little thoughtful as you pick tools and figuring out what you want to automate and make sure it has some value to. >> Mike Saur, Omar Sultan, thank you both for joining. Appreciate the update and especially on the CCI and Cisco partnership. >> Thanks too. >> Thank you. Have a great day. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>> From Boston, Massachusets it's theCube. Covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to bean town, everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're covering LiveWorx, the three day conference hosted by PTC. We're at the BCEC, which is kind of the Starship Enterprise. I'm Dave Vellante, with my co-host Stu Miniman. As I say, Cube one day coverage of this three day conference. Maciek Kranz is here. He's the Vice President of Strategic Innovations at Cisco. Maciek, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thank you so much for having me. It really looks like a cube. >> Usually we're out in the open, but they've put us here in a cube, which is great. Of course we were at Cisco Live last week. You were there, it was an awesome show. 27, 28 thousand people. A lot of the innovations that we're talking about here, you guys, you know, at Cisco, are obviously touching upon. Whether it was blockchain or the edge. May I ask you, innovation's in your title. What are you doing here at this conference? >> Basically we're on the mission to make sure that every company, large and small, whatever the industry you're in, gets started on the IOT journey. All of us here, we were talking about it last week at Cisco Live, we are sort of on the mission to make sure that everybody knows how to do it, how to get started, how to go through the journey. So I'm here to promote the cause. >> You had posted a blog a little bit ago on LinkedIn. Check it out, if you go to Maciek's LinkedIn profile you'll see it. Five myths around IOT, and I thought it was quite instructive. I'm going to start with the middle of it, which is IOT is this one big market, and we've been talking about how it's a trillion dollar market. It's almost impossible to size. It's so fragmented, and bringing together the operations technology and information technology world, and there's the edge, there's the core, there's hardware, there's software, there's services. How should we think about the IOT, obviously not as one big market as you pointed out in your blog. >> Right, and you actually nailed it. When you think about sort of a traditional way that technology companies think about the market, it was sort of model of just get a billion people to get on your platform and the good things will happen. Well in the IOT space, as you pointed out, it's a very fragmented market. So you basically need to have two strategies. You either become a horizontal specialist and then you integrate with a vertical specialist to develop a joint solution, or you focus on use case and you focus on one market, and you go deep and focus with customers. So from that perspective the approach is different, but in a nutshell to be successful in this space, it's not only about technology, it's about ecosystem. It's about building the coaliltion of the willing, because at the end of the day, the customers want solutions to their problems. And they don't want to just buy your technology, they want to work with you on developing solutions that drive business outcomes. >> Maciek, one of the things that's been interesting to watch is that people want to try, and they want to try faster. One of the big benefits of public cloud was that I have this sandbox that I could throw some people at, have a little bit of money, and try things and fail and try again. One of the concerns I have when I hear things like PTC and Microsoft get up on stage and say, "It's going to take 20 to 25 partners to put this together." When I hear that it's fragmented, it's going to take time, it's going to take money, help us. Are there are ways I can start playing with things to understand what will and what won't work for my environment, or is this something that I have to throw a million dollars and group of people for a year and a half on? >> It's actually a great point, and it's another, I would say, misconception, which is I need to go deep, have a sort of a big strategy. One of the things that I talk about with the customers is, yes, dream big but start small. So yes, have a sort of a big vision, big architecture, but then focus on a first project, because it's a multi-year, multi-phased journey. So from that perspective, you know, at Cisco we have roughly 14,000 customers that already got started on this IOT journey, and the use cases that we've seen sort of are in four different categories. First one is connect things, so connecting your operations, the second one is remote operations, the third one is predictive analytics, the fourth one is preventive maintenance. So don't be a hero, pick one of these four use cases, try it out, then do a ROI on this, and if your ROI is positive then do a next, maybe more sophisticated, more adventurous kind of a project down the road. So pace yourself. >> This is our 9th year doing theCube, and the one thing we've learned about information technology, operations technology, is it all comes back to data. And you pointed out again, you pointed it out in your piece, it's not just about connecting, it's about the data. So let's talk about the data, the data model. You've got edge, you've got core. You've got this really increasingly complex and elongating data pipeline. You've got physics, you've got latency. So what's your perspective on the data, how that's evolving, and how organizations need to take advantage of the data? >> Dave, I think you nailed it. It may come across funny because I work for Cisco and we connect things, but if you think about the first wave of internet, the main purpose of the devices and the way we were connecting them, was basically for you and I to get access to each other, to get access to the online data, to the online processes. The main purpose we connecting IOT devices, so that they can generate the data, and then we can analyze that data, turn these systems into solutions to drive business outcomes. So from that perspective we're actually seeing a big shift in the sort of data model, and it requires flexibility. Traditionally, we talked about cloud, right? In a cloud we usually see the use cases that require a processing of a lot of data, sort of in the batch possessing mode, or for example if you want to connect a bunch of vending machines, you can connect them directly to the cloud, because these machines actually send only very few packets and they send them very infrequently. Basically saying, "Hey, come on over "and replenish a bunch of supplies." But if you look at connected vehicle, if you look at an oil rig, in the case of oil rig, there's let's say a large one that has 100,000 sensors. These sensors generate a couple terabytes of data per day. You can't just send this data directly to the cloud through the satellite connection, right? You have to process the data on the oil rig based on the policy coming from the cloud. So from that perspective we've seen that there's a need for a more flexible architecture. We call it Fog Computing, which basically allows you to have flexibility of extending the cloud to the edge so you can process the data at the edge. You can execute on the AI functions at the edge as well. So that's one of the big architectural shifts that we've seen with IOT as well. >> Maciek, one of the opportunities of new architectures has been to do a redo for security. When it comes to IOT, though, there's a lot of concern around that, because just the surface area that we're going to have, the devices. Talk to us about how security fits into IOT. >> Yeah, it's hard to talk about IOT without mentioning security, right? And we obviously seen over the last two years a lot of press around IOT denial of service attacks and so forth, and for me I think the silver lining out of all of this news is that, first of all, that we have seen the vendor community finally taking IOT security seriously. So all the security vendors are actually investing in IOT security now appropriately. We now working together as an industry on standards, on interoperability, on sort of come on architectures, even with the device vendors who traditionally didn't pay much attention to security as well. Sort of like what we did with wifi, you remember, about 15 years ago but at a much greater scale. So the vendor community's focusing on it, but more importantly also the businesses are moving from what I would consider sort of a... I would say that kind of a denial. Hoping that their plant is not connected to the outside world and that it's secure. Moving down now to the much more modern model, which is basically a comprehensive architecture working with are-see-sos, across the enterprise, focusing on before, during, and after. So IOT now is being integrated into a broader security architecture, and IT and OT are working together. So yes, there is a concern, yes. There are a lot of events hitting the news, but I also think as an industry we're making progress. >> Just to follow up on that, Cisco obviously has an advantage in security, because you go end-to-end, you guys make everything, and you can do deep-packet inspection, and that seems to be a real advantage here. But then there's this thing called blockchain, and everybody talks about how blockchain can be applied. Where do you see blockchain fitting into the security equation? >> Yeah, I think that's a good question. Maybe a bit more broader story, I actually believe there's four legs to this digital transformations tool. There's IOT generating the data and acting on the decisions, there's AI, there is the fog computing we talked about, and the fourth tool is blockchain, which basically allows us to make sure that the data we're using we can actually trust. At the high level blockchain, people often confuse blockchain and Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but blockchain is an underlying technology behind sort of the crypto, that allows basically multiple parties to write their transactions in a fast and permanent way. But in the enterprise context, in IOT context, blockchain allows us to actually come up with very new use cases by looking at the provenance, and looking at the data across multiple parties. The data we can trust. For example, the use cases such as counterfeiting, there are use cases like food safety. Like patient records. Like provenance of materials. So now we can enable these use cases, because we have a single source of truth. >> I want to ask you about disruption. I like the mental model and picture that you created before of a horizontal technologies, and you kind of get vertical industries, and it seems like, again I'm bringing it back to data. We heard Super Mario at the host of the conference say this was the largest digital transformation conference. Which we laughed, like every conference is a digital transformation conference. But to us, digital transformation, digital means data. And that picture you drew of horizontal technology and vertical industries, it's all data, and data enables disruption. It used to be a vertical stack of talent and manufacturing and supply chain within an industry, and now data seems to be blowing that to pieces in digital. You see Amazon getting into, you know, buying Whole Foods in grocery. You see Apple in financial services. Others, Silicon Valley type companies, disrupting healthcare, which we all know needs disruption. What do you make of disruption? It seems like no industry is safe. It seems like Silicon Valley has this dual disruption agenda. Horizontal technology and then partnering within industries, and everything is getting turned up on its side. What do you make of it all? >> Dave, I think you nailed it. It is about and verus or, right? When you think about companies, you mentioned Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, verus PTC or Rockwell, or Emerson and others. 10 years ago we sort of lived on a different planet, right, and rarely these companies even talked to each other. And now, even at this show, these companies are actually showing joint solutions. So that's precisely, I think, what we've seen, which is technology competence coming from the Valley and from traditional technology industry, and then the vertical and market expertise coming from these more traditional vendors. At the end of the day, it is about technology, but it is also about talent. It is about skillsets. It's about all of us pulling our resources together to develop solutions to drive business outcomes. So cloud, obviously, was a very disruptive force in our industry. But when you think about IOT, just based on what you just said, it seems to me given the assets, the resources, the people, the plants, the equipment, it seems like IOT is maybe somewhat evolutionary. Not a completely... It's a disruptive force in that's new and that it's different, but it seems like the incumbents, I mean look at PTC, their resurgence. It seems like the incumbents have an advantage here. What are your thoughts? >> I think that if they play it right they absolutely do. But it requires also a shift in mindset, and I think we seeing it already, which is moving from a vertical, one company does it all kind of mentality, into the lets build an ecosystem based on open systems, open standards, interoperability. And that's sort of a shift I think we are seeing. So for me, I think that the incumbents, if they embrace this kind of a model, they absolutely have a critical role to play. On the flip side, the technology companies realizing that they need to, it's not only about technology, but it's also about partnering. It's about integrating within legacy ecosystems and the legacy infrastructure. So each of the sides of the coin need to learn new tricks. >> Okay, last question, is your initial thoughts, anyway, on this event, some initial take aways. I know it's early, day one, but you've been here. You've heard the keynotes. Final thoughts? >> I think so far it's actually a great start to the event. I have to say, what we've talked about already, my biggest take away is to see, and actually joy, is to see companies from different walks of life working together. You have robotics companies, you have AI companies, you have industrial companies. All of them are coming up with solutions together, and that's basically what we want to see. Is breaking the barriers and multiple companies working together to move the industry forward. >> And you're also seeing the big SIs are here. I can see Accenture, I can see Deloid. I know InfoSys is here, et cetera, et cetera. So if they're here, you know there's a lot of money to be made. So Maciek, thanks very much. It's really a pleasure having you. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. This is theCube, from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President Global Channel Sales for IBM Storage. CUBE alum, great to see you. Thanks for comin' by. >> Great, we always love comin' and talkin' to theCUBE. >> Love havin' you on. Get the insight, and you get down and dirty in the storage. But I gotta, before we get into the storage impact, the cloud, and all the great performance requirements, and software you guys are building, news is that the CEO of Cisco swung by your booth? >> Yes, Chuck did come by today and asked how-- Chuck Robbins came by today, asked how we're doin'. IBM has a very broad relationship with Cisco, beyond just the storage division. The storage division, the IOT division, the collaboration group. Security's doin' a lot of stuff with them. IBM is one of Cisco's largest resellers through the GTS and GBS teams. So, he came by to see how were doin', and gave him a little plug about the VersaStack, and how it's better than any other converge solutions, but talked about all of IBM, and the strong IBM Cisco relationship. >> I mean, it's not a new relationship. Expand on what you guys are doin'. How does that intersect with division that he put on stage yesterday with the keynote. He laid out, and said publicly, and put the stake in the ground, pretty firmly, "This is the old way." Put an architecture, a firewall, a classic enterprise network diagram. >> Right, right. >> And said, "That's the old way," and put in a big circle, with all these different kinda capabilities with the cloud. It's a software defined world. Clearly Cisco moving up the stack, while maintaining the networking shops. >> Right. >> Networking and storage, always the linchpin of cloud and enterprise computing. What's the connection? Share the touch points. >> Sure, well I think the key thing is everyone's gotta realize that whether you're in a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud configuration, storage is that rock solid foundation. If you don't have a good foundation, the building will fall right over, and it's great that you've got cloud with its flexibility, it's ability to transform, the ability to modernize, move data around, but if what's underneath doesn't work, the whole thing topples over, and storage is a cruel element to that. Now, what we've done at IBM is we have made all of our solutions on the storage side, VersaStack, our all-flash arrays, all of our software defined storage, our modern data protection, everything is what we'll say is cloudified. K, it's, I designed for multiple cloud scenarios, whether it be private, hybrid, or public, or, as you've probably seen, in some the enterprise accounts, they actually use multiple public cloud providers. Whether it be from a price issue, or a legal issues, because they're all over the world, and we're supporting that with all our solutions. And, our VersaStack, specifically, just had a CVD done with Cisco, Cisco Validated Design, with IBM Cloud Private on a VersaStack. >> Talk about the scale piece, because this becomes the key differentiator. We've talked about on theCUBE, many of the times with you around, some of the performance you guys have, and the numbers are pretty good. You might wanna do a quick review on that. I'm not lookin' for speech and feeds. Really, Eric, I'd like to get your reaction, and view, and vision, on how the scale piece is kicking, 'cause clients want scale optionality. They're gonna have a lot of stuff on premise. They have cloud goin' on, multi cloud on the horizon, but they gotta scale. The numbers are off the charts. You're seein' all these security threats. I mean, it's massive. How are you guys addressing the scale question with storage? >> So, we've got a couple things. So first of all, the storage itself is easily scalable. For example, on our A9000 all-flash array, you just put a new one, automatically grows, don't have to do anything, k? With our transparent cloud tiering, you can set it up, whether it be our Spectrum Scale software, whether it be our Spectrum Virtualize software, or whether it be on our all-flash arrays, that you could automatically just move data to whatever your cloud target may be. Whether that be something with an object store, whether that be a block store, and it's all automated. So, the key thing here on scalability is transparency, ease of use, and automation. They wanna automatically join new capacity, wanna automatically move data from cloud to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to on premise, and IBM's storage solutions, from a software perspective, are all designed with that data mobility in mind, and that transportability, both on premise, and out to any cloud infrastructure they have. >> What should Cisco customers know about IBM storage, if you get to talk to them directly? We're here at Cisco Live. We've talked many times about what you guys got goin' on with the software. Love the software systems approach. You know we dig that. But a Cisco deployment, they've been blocking and tackling in the enterprise for years, clouds there. What's the pitch? What's the value proposition to Cisco clients? >> So, I think they key thing for us talkin' to a Cisco client is the deep level of integration we have. And, in this case, not just the storage division, but other things. So, for example, a lot of their collaboration stuff uses under pitting software from IBM, and IBM also uses some software from Cisco inside our collaboration package. In our storage package, the fact that we put together the VersaStack with all these Cisco Validated Designs, means that the customer, whether it be a cloud product, for example, on the VersaStack, about 20 of our public references are all small and medium cloud providers that wheel in the VersaStack, connect 'em, and it automatically grows simply and easily. So, in that case, you're looking at a cloud provider customer of Cisco, right? When you're looking at a enterprise customer of Cisco, man, the key thing is the level of integration that we have, and how we work together across the board, and the fact that we have all these Cisco Validated Designs for object storage, for file storage, for block storage, for IBM Cloud Private. All these things mean they know that it's gonna work, right outta the box, and whether they deploy it themselves, whether they use one of our resellers, one of our channel partners, or whether they use IBM services or Cisco service. Bottom line, it works right out of the box, easy to go, and they're up and running quickly. >> So, Eric, you talked a bunch about VersaStack, and you've been involved with Cisco and their UCS since the early days when they came up, and helped drive, really, this wave of converged infrastructure. >> Right. >> One of the biggest changes I've seen in the last couple years, is when you talk to customers, this is really their private cloud platform that they're building. When it first got rolled out, it was virtualization. We kinda added a little bit of management there. What, give us your viewpoint as to kinda high-level, why's this still such an important space, what are the reasons that customers are rolling this out, and how that fits into their overall cloud story? >> Well, I think you hit it, Stu, right on the head. First of all, it's easy to put in and deploy, k? That is a big check box. You're done, ready to go. Second thing that's important is be able to move data around easily, k? In an automated fashion like I said earlier, whether that be to a public cloud if they're gonna tier out. If I'm a private cloud, I got multiple data centers. I'm moving data around all the time. So, the physical infrastructure and data center A is a replica, or a DR center, for data center B, and vice versa. So, you gotta be able to move all this stuff around quickly easy. Part of the reason you're seeing converge infrastructure is it's the wave of what's hit in the server world. Instead of racking and stacking individual servers, and individual pieces of storage, you've got a pre-packed VersaStack. You've got Cisco networking, Cisco server, VMware, all of our storage, our storage software, including the ability to go out to a cloud, or with our ICP IBM Private Cloud, to create a private cloud. And so, that's why you're seeing this move towards converge. Yes, there's some hyperconverged out there in the market, too, but I think the big issue, in certain workloads, hyperconverged is the right way to go. In other workloads, especially if you're creating a giant private cloud, or if you're a cloud provider, that's not the way to go because the real difference is with hyperconverged you cannot scale compute and storage independently, you scale them together, So, if you need more storage, you scale compute, even if you don't need it. With regular converge, you scale them independently, and if you need more storage, you get more storage. If you need more compute-- If you need both, you get both. And that's a big advantage. You wanna keep the capex and opex down as you create this infrastructure for cloud. 'Member, part of the whole idea of cloud are a couple things. A, it's supposed to be agile. B, it's supposed to be super flexible. C, of course, is the modern nomenclature, but D is reduce capex and opex. And you wanna make sure that you can do that simply and easily, and VersaStack, and our relationship with Cisco, even if you're not using a VersaStack config, allows us to do that for the end user. >> And somethin' we're seeing is it's really the first step for customers. I need to quote, as you said, modernize the platform, and then I can really start looking at modernizing my applications on top of that. >> Right. Well, I think, today, it's all about how do you create the new app? What are you doin' with containers? So, for example, all of our arrays, and all of our arrays that go into a VersaStack, have free persistent storage support for any containerize environ, for dockers and kubernetes, and we don't charge for that. You just get it for free. So, when you buy those solutions, you know that as you move to the container world, and I would argue virtualization is still here to stay, but that doesn't mean that containers aren't gonna overtake it. And if I was the CEO of a couple different virtualization companies, I'd be thinkin' about buyin' a container company 'cause that'll be the next wave of the future, and you'll say-- >> Don't fear kubernetes. >> Yeah, all of that. >> Yeah, Eric Herzog's flying over to Dockercon, make a big announcement, I think, so. (laughing) >> Evaluation gonna drop a little bit. I gotta ask you a question. I mean, obviously, we watch the trends that David Floy and our team, NVMe is big topic. What is the NVMe leadership plan for you, on the product side, for you? Can you take a minute to share your vision for what that is gonna be? >> Sure, well we've already publicly announced. We've been shipping an NVMe over fabric solution leveraging InfiniBand since February of this year, and we demoed it, actually, in December at the AI Conference in New York City. So, we've had a fabric solution for NVMe already since December, and then shipping in February. The other thing we're doing is we publicly announced that we'd be supporting the other NVMe over fabric protocols, both fabric channel and ethernet by the end of the year. We publicly already announced that. We also announced that we would have an end to end strategy. In this case, you would be talking about NVMe on the fabric side going out to the switching and the host infrastructure, but also NVMe in a storage sub-system, and we already publicly announced that we'd be doing that this year. >> And how's the progress on that plan? You feel good about it? >> We're getting there. I can't comment yet, but just stay tuned on July 1st, and see what happens. >> So, talk about the Spectrum NAS, and other announcements that you have. What's goin' on? What are the big news? What's happening? >> Well, I think that, yeah, the big thing for us has been all about software. As you know, for the analysts that track the numbers, we are, and ended up in 2017, as tied as the number one storage software company in the world, independent of our system's business. So, one of the key powers there is that our software works with everyone's gear, whether it be a white box through a distributor or reseller, whether it be our direct competitors. Spectrum Protect, which is a, one of the best enterprise backup packages. We backup everybody's gear, our gear, NetApp's gear, HP's gear, Pure's gear, Hitachi's gear, the old Dell stuff, it doesn't matter to us, we backup everything. So, one of the powers that IBM has, from a software perspective, is always being able to support not only our own gear, but supporting all of our competitors as well. And the whole white box market, with things that our partners may put together through the distributors. >> I know somethin' might be obvious to you, but just take me through the benefits to the customer. What's the impact to the customer? Obviously, supporting everything, it sounds like you guys have done that with software, so you're agnostic on hardware. >> Right. >> So, is it a single pane of glass? What's the benefit to the customer with that software capability? >> Yeah, I feel there's a couple things. So, first of all, the same software that we sell as standalone software, we also sell on our arrays. So if you're in a hybrid configuration, and you're using our Flashsystem V9000 in our Storwize family, that software also works with an EMC, or NetApp box. So, one license, one way to do everything, one set of training, which in a small shop is not that important, but in a big shop, you don't have to manage three licenses, right? You don't have to get trained up on three different ways to do things, and you don't have to, by the way, document, which all the big companies would do. So it dramatically simplifies their life from an opex perspective. Makes it easier for them to run their business. >> Eric, we'd love to get your opinion on just how's Cisco doin' out there? It's a big sprawling company. I looked at the opening keynote, the large infrastructure business doing very well in the data center, but they've got collaboration, they do video, they're moving out in the cloud. Wanna see your thoughts as to how are they doing, and still making sure they take care of core networking, while still expanding and going through their own transformation, that they're talkin' very public about. How do we measure Cisco as a software company? >> Well, we see some very good signs there. I mean, we partner with 'em all the time, as I mentioned, for example, in both the security group and our collaboration group, and I'm not talkin' storage now, just IBM in general, we leverage software from them, and they leverage software from us. We deliver joint solutions through our partners, or through each of the two service organizations, but we also have products where we incorporate their software into ours, and they incorporate software in us. So, from our perspective, we've already been doing it beyond their level, now, of expanding into a much greater software play. For us, it's been a strong play for us already because of the joint work we've been doing now for several years on software that they've been selling in the more traditional world, and now pushing out into the broader areas, like cloud, for example. >> Awesome work. Eric, thanks for coming on. I gotta ask you one final, personal, question. >> Sure. >> You got the white shirt on, you usually have a Hawaiian shirt on. >> Well, because Chuck Robbins came by the booth, as we talked about earlier today, felt that I shouldn't have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on, however, now that I've met Chuck, next time, at next Cisco Live, I'll have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on versus my IBM traditional shirt. >> Chuck's a cool guy. Thanks for comin' on. As always, great commentary. You know your stuff. >> Great, thank you. >> Great to have the slicing and dicing, the IBM storage situation, as well as the overall industry landscape. At Cisco Live, we're breakin' it down, here on theCUBE in Orlando. Second day of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more live coverage after this break.

>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier with my cohost this week, Lauren Cooney, and our next guest, Ed Warnicke, distinguished consulting engineer with Sysco Systems, CUBE alum. Great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Good to be back. >> So great developer action, end of day one. We're going to be here all day tomorrow. So day one's kind of coming into the books. Your thoughts on what's happening here. Different crowd but active. >> No extremely active. Actually, one of the things I've noticed, and this is sort of a subtle point when you've been around a lot of open source projects is you have a lot of people who are new to the Kubernetes community are coming in. And one of the things I found extremely heartening is, they've got a really organized approach to it. When they did their developer summit, they had an entire track for bringing new contributors on. They've just revamped their documentation to help people that are here, and they're finding better and better ways to articulate the things that people need to hear to help them make the leap to Cloud Native. 'Cause one of the underappreciated things about Cloud Native is that it's different from the move to Cloud 1.0 that we made a few years ago, is that Cloud Native is not a lift and shift behavior. You have to change the way you think about doing your job. >> And that's the global platform. This is not just a transformation process. It's a lifetime transformation. >> Absolutely. >> Huge personnel issue. People process technology, technology last one. >> Ed: Have you accepted Cloud Native into your heart? >> I have come to terms with my-- (Ed laughing) lift and shift problem that I have, and I'm now aware, self-aware of Cloud Native. >> The first step is to admit you have a problem. (John chuckling) The making amends to your infrastructure takes longer. >> I mean, look if-- >> And you would know, so. (laughing) Well, anyways. >> We're all working on it. >> So, I have a question for you here. As you were talking about how you're seeing a lot of new developers coming on in and things along those lines. I'm also running into a lot of new developers at the hotel, at dinner, just walking around and having discussions. Where do you see these guys coming from? I see them coming from banks, from large technology companies that are based in Europe. Where are you seeing these folks? >> So that ends up matching very closely with what I'm seeing as well. From all over the place. From people who finance large energy projects, right? From all areas of finance. Basically, all the sorts of people who have big compute problems are starting to turn up at the Cloud Native world because this is literally where you solve those problems. And I think that's part of what's driving the ecosystem is, the folks in Kubernetes made a number of incredibly intelligent decisions early on about how their architecture was built in terms of the modularity and expandability of it. And the result is that you get lots of people with lots of energy coming in saying, "I have a problem like this." There's an obvious well-worn path to try and put together a proposed solution for solving problems like this. And they engage with the community. One of the things that you're seeing just in terms of how the community grows itself is, they've got special interest groups, SIGs for various areas in Kubernetes. They've now had to spawn working groups that come under them. You're just seeing things like Kubernetes proposals for how you're going to do things coming to far. So there's a lot of the maturity process that you expect to deal with the scale of people who want to solve their problems this way. >> So you're actually not seeing sprawl. You're seeing highly organized groups coming together in a way that can make the platform more positive. >> Yeah, absolutely. Not only am I not seeing sprawl, but I'm starting to see highly intelligent things being said by the people who work at what we think of as the core of Kubernetes. So I've heard a number of people make the comment that they expect the Kubernetes core to actually shrink in terms of what it offers because the broader ecosystem is picking up so much of the slack. So this sort of core APIs of, this is what is Kubernetes without having picked out some options that meet your needs, is keeping itself very tight while having architected it in a way where you could have this broad ecosystem without the kinds of problems you sometimes get with sprawl in other communities. >> So whilst you want to get bigger, but you've got to get smaller to get bigger. >> In some sense, yeah. You have to decide what's really important to get right in the core and really nail it. >> What are they getting right, in your opinion? What's right about it that's going on? You mentioned some of the smart decisions that they're making. >> So, a couple of the things that they've gotten really, really right are our relentless focus on developer needs. So I see this particularly in networking, and I think we've talked about this before. Developers don't want to know about subnets. They don't want to know about L2 segments. They don't even want to know about IP addresses, frankly. What they really care about is two things. Reachability and isolation. Everybody can talk to everybody unless they decide you should be isolated. And service discovery and service running. Those are the only two things they care about, and wouldn't you know it! In Kubernetes, you have network policies that control the reachability and isolation and services that do services discovery and service routing for you. So they've absolutely nailed the fundamental developer needs. >> Made you pain point. >> Yeah. >> So what's your take on just the ecosystem. Obviously, we've commented, and this is always a dangerous game with communities, is logo farm, everyone's here, right? >> Yeah, I mean, they took the CNCF logos and probably, I think they broke them into three categories now. I'm not exactly sure what that means. >> John: A whole new sponsorship level for-- >> Architecture? I'm not sure. (John and Ed laughing) But, Ed, maybe you could provide some clarity here. >> Well, I mean, there is a certain risk in being loved to death, right? Kubernetes is full blown into what I will sometimes call crises of success, which is, you are succeeding so wildly that it's beginning to be a problem. And that's good to see. But I think you're starting to see certain categories of things that are emerging. And there was a good set of readouts from the various SIGs to Kubernetes yesterday in the developer summit. So you've got a bunch of stuff around networking. You have a bunch of things around storage. These are sort of fundamental infrastructure issues. But you have a bunch of things, literally, about how so we expand the Kubernetes platform. How does that work? How do we produce the constructs we need to solve the various problems that are arising, and those things are all sort of progressively moving forward. And we're getting to sort of the interesting point where the people who did the original turn of the APIs are being really blunt and honest saying, "Look! "These are the things we got right, "and these are the things we got wrong." And there's a lot to be said for having that level of honesty with yourself on stage in public, right? When you're the guy who wrote the code, it's unequivocally your mistake. And being able to stand up and say, "Look, "we got this one wrong." >> But that's the community trust that you have, and that's what makes the community. >> And that trust goes both ways. It's the trust of the community in that leader standing on the stage, but it's also the trust of that leader that we're going to move fast, we're going to do things right, but there's always a turn of the crank to do things better. And we got to be straightforward about that. >> And their self-awareness around the iteration is key. They're putting their egos at the door, checking it at the door, focusing on the advancement. I got to get your thoughts, from both of you guys, I want to ask you guys both a question. I know that you're doing a lot a work with some start-ups, and you with Cisco, the big company. What's interesting about this ecosystem is, the balance between the big players and the enablement for the small start-ups to be successful. We had a variety of start-ups here with news on theCUBE. This is the give get between sharing in projects where there's a balance and everyone can thrive and survive and grow together. Thoughts on that balance. Start-ups have needs, but they're not as big as the big guys. So what's your thoughts on-- >> Why don't you start, Ed. >> Well, to begin with, we can't do everything much as we would like to. Back to the self-honesty, you have to be honest with yourself about that. And nobody has a monopoly on the good ideas. And so you really have to engage with the ecosystem and figure out how different aspects of the problem knit together. I've had a lot of interesting conversations. I, personally, have some interest in what I sort of call unified IO. So converged networking storage. So I'm talking to a lot of folks who are doing storage stuff, lot a little start-ups that are doing really cool things with storage about things we can do to help them there from the network side, and they're excited about that, right? And it's that, that's the sort of open source spirit that makes it possible to have all these start-ups because, I'll be really frank, most of these start-ups, if they were having to try and build the thing themselves, they're simply not resourced to do it. But with so much support from the community in the broad, on a relatively thin start-up budget, you can move mountains. >> Yeah, if you tap the formula properly, that's the key. >> The start-ups are getting more and more sophisticate about tapping that formula because only... Getting a good product is only a very small part of the equation. You also have to get the connection with the community because you have to make sure, even if you're entirely self-interested, if you build a thing, there will be a thing in the open source that does that. And it is a fundamental truth in the modern era that 80% of the value or more of all software is its connection to everything else in the ecosystem. >> Lauren, I want to get your thoughts on this. You're doing this now as a new start-up, you're a founder of and running, but you've built programs. Modern architectures at play here. You're seeing microservices growth phenomenal. Cloud Native is just whole nother ball game, going to a whole nother level. As you're engaging out there, what are you seeing for this modern community formula playbook, whatever you want to call it. There's a way to do things now at a whole nother level that this is going. >> No, I-- >> Your thoughts. >> I definitely agree. I think the developer experience is really key, making it simple, making it just seamless, right? So folks don't have to wait to download something, or they don't have to wait for, you know. They can just click a couple buttons through a GUI and make it really, really simple, especially those on-boarding. What I see from the start-up side is a lot of... This is interesting because I think it's important. A lot of start-ups coming from companies that wouldn't allow them to do open source inside the companies. So they're leaving these larger companies, and they're doing start-ups. They're raising pretty good capital for seed rounds and A rounds. And I think, this is something that's pretty hot right now and we want to take a look at. And the VCs are definitely looking. >> What about the big companies that we all know, obviously Cisco, IBM, you see Amazon here. They have huge scale. Even Microsoft has had developer programs been successful over the years, we all know that. What's the modern tweak that they're making that you're seeing work? >> Oh, I think it's the small teams. Adrian was on here earlier talking about microservices and micro-teams, and I think he's absolutely right. You have to have teams that are building these services that are moving quite quickly and doing it in a way that's rapid enough to keep up or be ahead of the market. >> The micro-team point, I think, is actually really apropos because... This is going to sound very engineering propellor-head, but the management overhead gets to be quite steep when you try and do anything with big teams, right? So you got to have very loose coupling to everything else in the system, which is exactly what Cloud Native is about. And that's what you see not only in the start-ups but you see these sort of hybrid approaches emerge, where you have a start-up that has a small team and another start-up that has a small team that's nearby and a large company like Cisco that has a small team, and there's an interaction between all of these. And we're sort of operating as the growing up of this larger team completely across boundaries. It'll resolve actual user problems. >> I think it's a historic time. I think you guys are right on. This is such an exciting time for, if you're an engineer, software developer, or anyone in large-scale systems, and building applications is going to a whole nother level. Look at blockchain right around the corner, decentralized applications is coming soon. We won't go there in this interview 'cause it's KubeCon, but I got to get your take. What's your view so far of what's working here, hallway conversations you're having? What are some of the things going on here that someone who's not here might want to know about? >> I tend to be very focused on networking things, so the thing that I'm most excited about that's happening here is, the entire world seems to be getting meshy, right? So there's a huge excitement around service mesh and Istio, which I think is extremely well-placed. The fundamental thing that's really happening there is, they're progressively taking parts of the problem that you're not good at if you're writing a microservice, and they're pulling them out into a sidecar envoy so that you don't have to worry about service discovery and service routing. You don't have to worry about the policies for how you're going to figure out what things you do about getting to the next guy in the chain of the work. You don't have to worry about even things as simple as making sure that you respond to faults well, right? And there's a whole new set of ways that you think about problems in this space that's emerging there. One of the things that I'm actually really excited about that's also meshy is when you get to things like people who have less common network problems. So the operators with NFV, people who have more sophisticated network needs. We're starting to reimagine that stuff in the language of service mesh, right? So rather than trying to force all the legacy thinking about networking into Cloud Native where it's not wanted, we try and recast the problems we have into Cloud Native ways of thinking about them. And I think that ends up being intensely powerful. It's, frankly, almost overwhelming because there's so much conceptually going on in this space that you want to be able to draw on for the palette for the things that you're painting. >> Yeah, I mean, it's your point earlier about, and you were kind of joking but serious. This is a mind melt, you got to buy in to the philosophy of this new era of... (Ed laughing) Yeah, just kind of buy into, the Cloud Native is a global platform. It is a fundamental new thing. It's not just a methodology, it's a new way. >> It's a new way of thinking about things. The C in Cloud Native does not stand for container. Container is the smallest possible chunk of this. If you just slap all your applications into containers and try and do a lift and shift, you're going to fall on your face really hard. >> John: In what areas? Just like, what? >> Well, I'll give you a really simple example. Let's say that I have an application that I'm running in vApps, right? And I've got my big database VM. I've got my big web front VM. So I pick them up, I containerize them, I drop them into Kubernetes. So I've got one replica of my database VM and one replica of my web front VM, and that's going to break sometime in the first 24 hours. Because I need to, basically, pick them up and say, "OK, I need a bunch of replicas that are dynamically coming up for all of these things. I need the services to wire mesh them together." So for whatever reason, I lose some number of my replicas, that everything comes back up and goes forward and we never even notice, right? In some sense, the ideal situation is, you have a major bug in your code, right? Let's say you have a piece of code that's leaking memory and it dies every 24 hours. You want, if you think about it right and you deploy it 'cause you don't know you have this bug, you won't even notice that you screwed up that bug because the infrastructure will protect you from it. But if you just try and lift and shift, you're not going to have a happy experience because it's not going to work the way you expect it to. >> And then monitoring tools are getting better, too, and so if you're coming in on the other side you get that. Well, and thanks so much for the commentary. Great, great summary of the event. Any surprises here for you? Any ah-ha moments or revelations or epiphanies or any kind of surprises, good or bad or ugly? >> One of the things I was very impressed with is, I'm very impressed with what you can do with no code. I don't know if you saw that keynote this morning. >> Lauren: With Kelsey. >> In response to Dan Kohn's point about all the sort of total attack surface area. Kelsey got on stage and did the no code project, which has perfect security for whatever it is that you deploy it for. The fact that you can get on code, do something like that, move an entire audience of thousands of people, that's impressive. You don't see speakers who do that very often. That was, I wouldn't say shocking, but very much a pleasant surprise. And it speaks very much to the code of the community. The keynotes today were some of the best I've ever seen. I am not a keynote person, I seldom attend them. The keynotes today were extremely well-done. They had good energy and they were relevant. The walking through of the evolution of the community in brief punctuated explanations of what's going on and why they're important, I've never seen it done better. >> Yeah, they were hitting their marks well. Well, great, thanks for coming on, Ed. Great to see you. >> Yep. >> Thank you, Ed. >> This is commentary from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE coverage of the CNCF, Cloud Native Compute Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, KubeCon 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, Lauren Cooney. Thanks for watching. Be right back. (electronic musical flourish)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. (upbeat music) >> Well, welcome back. We are live, here on theCUBE, which, of course, is a flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE. And we're really a media, and we're very glad to have here with us for the second of our three days of coverage here at re:Invent, AWS, throwing quite a bash, here at The Sands in Las Vegas. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walsh, and we're joined now by Manan Shah, who is the director of product management, at, or a director of product management, I'd say, at Cisco Systems. Are you used to hearing that yet, at Cisco Systems? >> We are getting close to it. >> Primarily at Viptela, acquisitioned just three months ago, so things are going well for ya. >> Things are going great. We are really excited to take the journey forward. It's been less than 90 days since we got acquired. We had a great ride at Viptela, As Steven told me, we were the market leaders with the largest traction in the fortune finders space. And Cisco was a natural fit. And now we are very excited to take this journey forward with Cisco's broader partner ecosystem and the customer base. >> So what's that all about? What brought the two of you together, in your opinion? >> Manan: That's a very interesting question. >> Stu: You mean other than money, right? (laughing) >> Always the big driver. >> Absolutely. >> But when it comes down to doing business, what was it? >> So, if you look at Cisco and how they're transitioning. I'll talk about business and technology together. If you talk about business, Cisco as a company is all moving toward a subscription-based business model. A large portion of Cisco's business today is very CapEx-heavy. And Viptela was all about subscription business model. And so that was very attractive to Cisco. The other piece was, we went head to head against Cisco in a lot of different fortune finder account. And we had a lot of success. So they saw the solution that we brought to the table and they saw the benefits of keeping it simple, yet sophisticated. That was a strand of Viptela solution. And that was very, very enticing to Cisco. The other piece was that this large deployment, a lot of customers are moving toward a cloud-first model. And one of the key value provs of Viptela was everything was cloud first and 90% of our customers, we were hosting their control plan and management plan in the cloud. And so as customers moved toward this cloud journey, they wanted to consume it as a service. And that was very attractive to Cisco, also. So all of these together made it very attractive for Cisco to look at us as not just a competition but something they can build on, build a business. >> John: Complement, right? >> Yeah >> So, the ST-WAN's been a hot space and, you know, been a couple of acquisitions that happened. Cisco had, you know, one or two solutions already before the acquisition, depending on who you talk to. Talked about that fit. Can you walk us through a little bit, kinda, you know, I'm sure you have to go through the portfolio stuff, how you position it, things like that, you think about the customers. But yeah, walk us through the -- >> So, Cisco had I-WAN solution, which was the legacy ST-WAN that Cisco had. Cisco also has Meraki ST-WAN solution. And now with acquisitions, Cisco has Viptela biz ST-WAN. So, the way we looked at it is the way Viptela, the ST-WAN solution was built, is all of the intelligence was in the fabric. And the end nodes were, what we call the edge routers were connecting into the fabric and building the leveraging the intelligence that was there. Now, the end nodes could be residing in a branch, be residing in a data center, or in a cloud location like AWS. And so the way we are approaching is, the intelligence will all remain in the fabric and rather than just having Viptela's routers as the end node, we will leverage the Cisco's broader portfolio as end nodes into that fabric. So, if you look at Viptela's, it was all internet-based products. Now, if you wanted a T1E1 interface, if you wanted a DSL interface, we, Viptela, did not have it. Cisco already has it. So it naturally made sense to leverage all of the breadth of portfolio that Cisco had and build that into the fabric. And that is what we are moving towards. In the next few months we will have a new software which will leverage all of those capabilities and have the full breadth of portfolio connecting to that ST-WAN fabric. >> All right, can you connect the dots with us now, being here at AWS, how's that fit in, you know, networking, of course, critical component for cloud, but yeah. >> Absolutely, and this is the best time. If you look at what AWS did over the last few months, they actually had a third party evaluate a lot of different ST-WAN vendors and they published a paper that talked about in toto ST-WAN. Listed all of the vendors and the capabilities. So they are acknowledging ST-WAN as a big movement going forward, and a big market, and they want to be part of it. We have seen a lot of customers, as they move their workloads into cloud, and into AWS, they want to extend the network fabric, continue to use the same tools that they will be using, and automate the capability of extending the fabric into the cloud. So, segmentation, so security, visibility, automation. Those are some of the key value prop or key data points that customers are asking us, saying, we want a single tool that will do that. And that is what we have done with the automation that we have built. >> I've seen over the last, this is my fifth year at the show. About two years ago, networking seemed to really kinda pick up. If I'm correct, I saw more than one Cisco booth, even. 'Cause I think there was another acquisition -- >> Manan: That's right. >> Cisco have. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of kind of Cisco in the public cloud these days? >> Yeah, so Cisco has always embraced cloud. And Cisco's overall strategy has been, we will enable customers to take their workloads wherever they want to be. So whether it's the traditional data centers, or AWS, or any other cloud, Cisco always has this multi-cloud strategy. And helping customers to build this fabric that would extend not only from branch to data centers, but branch to cloud, branch to data center, data center to cloud, no matter where the applications are, no matter where the users are. It's all about connecting users to the application, wherever they decide. >> So what's affected that, in terms of multi-cloud and my decision about where I'm gonna put whatever workload? I mean, different capabilities, right? I've got different considerations. So what do you think is motivating people now, or what's instigating people to make these decisions about what they're gonna do where? >> So, there's various evaluation criteria on how you adopt a cloud. So a lot of customers start with one cloud, get familiar with it, run some, develop applications, then run some production application. Once they get comfortable with it, then they want to expand to multi-cloud and less reliant on one particular cloud. But essentially leverage the best of what each cloud provider has to offer. And that is what we want to enable all customers to do, connect applications wherever, whichever cloud they decide, and connect users to those applications. >> Yeah. When I think back, I've worked with Cisco for a lot of my career. You know, branch was something that was critically important. How much has changed, moving to cloud? How much is the same, kind of extending from branch to cloud? >> Yeah, that's a great point. If you look at how the branch and the WAN has not evolved for the last 20 years, it was all about MPLS and the connectivity and getting service from the providers. Well, with the applications moving outside of data centers into cloud, historically, you would take all of your branch staffing into your data center, get it serviced by the applications that are in the data center, and only about 5% would go out to the internet. But if the applications are in the cloud, why do I need to take all the traffic from branch to the data center? Why can't I just go from branch to the cloud? Or data center to the cloud? Or campus to cloud? So, the fundamental design principals have changed. And as a result, you have to evolve in terms of how you design the WAN, how you deploy it, and how you evolve the thought process around consumption model. The other aspect that has changed is, because of internet and cellular, and customers want to build a ST-WAN fabric that is transport agnostic. You can leverage MPLS, you can leverage internet, you can leverage cellular. Why do I care about what connected? I tie my applications to a certain SLA. As long as any part that meets that SLA, I'm okay as the solution takes it, as long as it's secure. And that is what customers are looking for. The last piece that customers are looking for is the change in the consumption model. A lot of customers want to consume it as a service. Historically, they would get everything from a MSP or a service provider. Now they are looking at, okay, how do I, instead of having everything in my plan, consume it as a service. And that's where we saw, in the early days of Viptela, 90% of our customers consuming control plan and management plan from our hosted locations. >> Great. Wanna understand, you know, it's been three months since the acquisitions. I'd expect, being part of Cisco, you get access to a lot more customers. What else has changed? What is it like, coming to an event like this, under the Cisco umbrella mean? >> Yeah, so, there are a few other things that have changed. The first and foremost, as you rightfully said, is access to a lot of Cisco customers. Cisco is a great brand. And going against them, I always faced that. And now, being part of Cisco, I am leveraging that. Cisco has a great brand and what customers want is that, the product from Cisco that is solid and that works for years to come. The other aspect that has changed is, with us being part of Cisco, we are not only leveraging the customer and the partner ecosystem, we are integrating with the broader product portfolio that Cisco has. I give you the example of the routing portfolio that we are integrating in. In addition to that, Cisco has a great product portfolio in the security side. So we are leverage, we are integrating in the Cisco security portfolio, as well, to provide this end-to-end customer solution that leverages security, networking and a whole bunch more. >> So, I don't know if it's a friction point, but you did things a certain way. >> Absolutely. >> Right? You were a competitor. >> Yes. >> Cisco does things a certain way. They were a competitor. So, I mean, how do you make that work? Because ultimately, there's gotta be, I just assume, some difference of approach. >> Manen: And I would, I would be very honest -- >> It's inevitable, right? >> Yeah, it's inevitable, and it's there. The way, the pace at which we were delivering, right? We want to continue to deliver at the same pace. We want to continue to renew it at the pace that we were delivering as a startup. And that is one of the promises that Cisco has done. Cisco leadership has been very up front about, tell us what worked as a startup, and we want to incorporate that. And that has been one of the surprising things that, walking in, I was always cautious that, hey, would we be able to execute at the rate we want to execute. And that is one of the leadership promises that we have got is, we are behind you, we fully trust the capabilities that you have. Go run with it. And we are, we see that day in and day out, across the entire leadership team. >> John: It's a great stamp to have, right? >> It is a great stamp to have. And now, when we were as a startup, a lot of customers, when we are trying to close a business, they will say, do I really wanna do business with a startup? And there was always that financial and other conveniences that would come into play. Well, all of those is off table now. Now that we are part of Cisco, we have the Cisco brand that's backing us. And that's been a huge advantage and it has increased our sales byplan significantly. >> Your world's gone to this. >> Exactly. >> Right, right. Well, good for you. >> Manan: Thank you. Congratulations on the acquisition. And look forward to maintaining the surveillance on the progress, here. >> Absolutely, we are very excited. >> John: Thank you, Manan. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Manan Shah from Cisco Systems. Back with more, Stu and I will be, here from re:Invent. We're at AWS here in Las Vegas, and back in a bit. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans, it's the Cube covering VeeamON 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stu Miniman. Frank Palumbo is here. He's the senior vice president at Cisco Systems. And Andy Vandeveld is the vice president of Global Alliances at Veeam Software. Gents, welcome to The Cube. >> How we doing? >> Thank you. >> It's great to be here. >> Good, Frank, hot off the keynote. It was great, Yankees fan, love it. The rivalry continues. Of course you guys know the Cube, Red Sox fans, some of us. Stu's not. >> Not all of us. >> So we love it. We love the action, and it's always fun. But Frank we had to cut out a little bit before your keynote because we had to get ready to do the Cube. But you put up a slide that was awesome. We could do an hour on The Cube on that, and it's all about the apps, I mean really. But you had this great slide with apps and microservices and virtualization and bare metal and OnPrim and really laying out the complexity today. And you guys are at the heart of that. Maybe give us a quick summary of how you guys see the world. >> When you're talking about the applications, the application profile, it's important, the network kind of brings this together because we do touch everything. Where people are in this kind of application history is some of them are on legacy, mainframe. Some of them are on RISC processors. But as a network provider, we have to bring those in too even with the more modern applications. So you look at what the platforms or workloads are on so move those in. And then you're looking at workload placement, on Prim or in the Cloud. Do we put data in a colo? Do we put the application in the Cloud? There's different hybrid mentalities to do that. Then you get into the systems management where there's just too much stuff out there. Humans can't manage it anymore so the machines and the software have to manage the machines and the software. We'd like to think we're right in the middle of that because of the way we bring things together with the network. >> So Andy, I look at the... Stu and I walked the floor before we come in here, the ecosystem is really quite impressive-- >> Andy: Thank you. >> for a relatively small company. I mean not that small anymore. It didn't just happen overnight. Maybe you could talk a little bit about themes and philosophy with partnerships and some of the things that you're doing with Alliances generally and specifically get into the Cisco partnership. >> Well I think partnerships have been in our DNA since the beginning of the company. We're a 100% channel-lead company. We don't have a direct sales force. That's an important piece of the company's philosophy. These alliances are really key for us because as we start to move into markets that are maybe a little bit higher than where we've been into the large enterprise and mid-enterprise and large enterprise, we really look at partnerships like the one with Cisco that are going to benefit Veeam and the customers by us being together doing joint developments. Some of the things that Frank talked about in his keynote speech, those are the sorts of things that create solutions for that level of customer where Cisco's been resident for many, many years. So we look at these partnerships as really central to where Veeam wants to go as a company and where we think customers want Veeam to participate with the partners. >> What's the specific nature of the partnership? Can you unpack that a little bit for us? >> From my side, certainly we have a robust go-to-market relationship in terms of when we're positioning UCS or Hyperflex, our server and hyper converged platforms, now we can bring to bear the Veeam value problem as we go forward with customers. And customers look to Cisco really to complete the story and offer an end-to-end solution. We weren't able to complete it without the Veeam technology. Then on the development side, some of the things that we're doing, we've integrated so now the Veeam software can work with our Snap technology and hyper converge. So you're starting to see it come together at the screen level with the bits and bytes in terms of the integration. >> Dave: So there's a greater degree of technical integration as well. >> Frank: Yes. >> It's not just go-to, I mean that's important because a lot of times back-up data protection is kind of an afterthought. It's a bolt-on. But if you're going to be a complete solution provider, that's fundamental and it's becoming more important. >> I think you know I was just mentioning to Frank back in the green room before we came out here I look at the start of this partnership as really being about 18 months ago. Although we'd had a partnership for a while, we really kind of started about 18 months ago in this meeting that we had at their partner conference in Maui. And Radmeer and I sat down with Frank and kind of explained why we thought data protection was a solution that Cisco could get behind particularly now that they were coming out with their S-Series devices. But that's just the start of it. It has to come with integration as well. Then we started with Hyperflex. It was a new product for them, 1.0 version. With the 2.0 version, we got integrated with snapshot technology like Frank mentioned. I look at this short runway of time in this relationship that kicked off with our meeting with Frank and he got it right away. We didn't have to explain it. >> Dave: It resignated. >> Frank: Oh, no question. We're very proud of our S-Series storage server. The hardware is nice. The infrastructure piece is nice, but it really doesn't come together unless you got the application on a run with it. That's where Veeam just jumps in and fills that gap perfectly for us. >> Frank, I think back to when virtualization really took off. Networking was one of the things that we had to fix. It put a lot of stress on the network. It's one of the reasons Cisco created UCS and backup also creates a lot of strain on the network. So it seems a natural fit. Can you talk about all the complexities that are coming and how you're going to be, what can we expect to see from jointly going forward? >> I think we've learned a lot from Veeam in terms of they've been able to really attack complex issues in a very simple fashion. Simplicity is the game with customers right now. Things are moving so fast. If you can't be simple, you're going to have a tough time out there. So I think that's where it's really come together for us in that vein. But when you look at the value of data and whether it's a second old or two years old or a year old, there's so many different more paradigms coming out about what you can do with this data. And customers and even customers of customers have now found ways to use this data either to make better decisions, monetize it, to stay away from things. So that's why this whole lifecycle for us is so important. This is where Veeam and us can really do some nice things for customers. >> Andy, can you build on that about the multi-Cloud position that Veeam has? How many of those, do you know, touch what Cisco's doing here and how does the partnership help drive that value of data type offering? >> For Veeam, our message is all about availability, availability of the data which makes the applications available and which basically makes the business stay up and running. One analogy we use is a cell phone. When you're cell phone dies, you can't get access to your email. You can't get access to your instant messages. >> Dave: You freak bascially. >> You feel like you're lost, right? >> Frank: It's getting kind of pathetic. >> Yeah. >> Dave: It is pretty bad. >> So think about not being able to get access to your data or access to your applications because of some outage, not being able to backup and recover. Your business could go out of business. Working with Cisco on solutions that are on premise, that are in the Cloud, that are multi-Cloud is really the value of the partnership that we have that we bring together. It's just at the beginning. We've got solutions that we're building now. We got solutions that are on the horizon. We've got a very strong go-to-market partnership in a very short period of time that are targeting enterprise customers, service providers, the whole gamut. It's really that sort of relationship that you find in an industry every so often. When it comes together like it has with us and Cisco, it's really a very strong, strong value prop. >> Well Veeam capitalized on the original virtualization trend with VMware that was a big transformation, the server infrastructure. You're seeing a huge network transformation now. There are so many forces affecting the network that I wonder, Frank, if you could comment on. You got ScaleOut. There's Flash. There's Cloud. There's Microservice. There's DevOps makes everything go faster. The flattening of the network. Describe what's happening and then maybe you can talk about how your ecosystem is going to take advantage of that. From what were the challenges the network has is exactly like you said. You have certainly the virtualized workloads now. The Microservices containerize workloads. I think the one people forget about is there's still a ton of bare metal out there, right? You look at the Hadoop workloads and such. A lot of these are bare metal oriented, right? Quite frankly, moving a VM around a fabric is actually pretty easy to do. But when you got to move a bare metal workload around a fabric, and that's something we can do with UCS the way we do it statelessly, that's much harder. That's why we have the extraction layer with what we call the fabric interconnection with UCS to do that kind of stuff. I think that's sometimes lost in the translation in terms of how you're going to handle all these different workloads. >> If I understand it, the link then to the opportunity for you guys, Andy, is that the stakes are just much higher now, right? You could do so much more around the networks. Stakes are so much higher. That increases the need for your products and services. Carry that through if you would. >> Well, it is. As we make our way up-market into the enterprise, the amount of data that businesses are spinning off of, their infrastructure and their data center or from robo offices or wherever, is growing immensely. Being able to have a partnership with an infrastructure provider like Cisco, where we can put solutions together that really give the customers the rock solid base for backing up their data and making sure that it's available is really critical for us as we move into those larger enterprise and larger environments. So this is an essential relationship I would say. >> I think, too, if I could mention, this is something our channel wanted to see, too. We're the same. We're at about 98% of our business goes through the channel. So they're selling our full line of infrastructure products. This completes the story for them. So we got a lot of guides to them say, "Hey, yes, Cisco. "We'd like to see you come together with Veeam "so we can start bundling offers out there in the market "and be that kind of end-end-to supplier, too." That was a big impetus especially from mid-market up to enterprise customers. >> Excellent, well, we got to wrap there. The partnerships give you huge leverage as a small, again not so small company anymore. The fact that you can get somebody like Frank to come down, talk about the partnership, is a testament to what you guys have built. So congratulations. Really appreciate you guys coming on The Cube. >> No, my pleasure, our pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube. We're live from New Orleans, VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (tinkling music)

>> Over and welcome to this special cube conversation here in the Palo Alto Studios of Cube. Part of our People. First project with Mayfield Fund and Co creation with Cuban John Very your host. Very special guest. Judy Estrin. She's the CEO of J Labs and author of the book Closing the Innovation Gap. She's also well known for being an Internet entrepreneur. Pioneer worked on the initial TCP IP protocol with Vin Cerf from When the A Stanford Great History Computer Science. You have computer systems in your blood, and now you're mentoring a lot of companies. Author you a lot of work, and you're lending your voice to some cutting edge issues here in Silicon Valley and around the world. Thanks for joining me today for the conversation. >> Thank you. It's fun to be here, >> So I love the fact that you're here. You're a celebrity in the commute computer industry circles. You were there at the beginning, when the computer systems or the Internet were being connected as they built out of stone of the whole system's revolution in the eighties, and the rest is history. Now we have cloud computing, and now we're seeing a whole nother level step function of scale. And so you've kind of seen it all. You've seen all all the waves. Actually, something like make is they have seen some of the ways, but you've seen all of them. The most compelling thing I think that's happening now is the convergence of social science and computer science. Kind of our motto. Silicon Angle. You recently wrote to Post on Medium that that has been kind of trending and going viral. I want to get your perspective on that. And they're They're interesting because they they bring a little bit of computer science called the authoritative Authority Terrian Technology Reclaiming Control far too attention, part one. We go into great detail to lay out some big picture computer industry discussions. What's it all about? What's what's the What's the idea behind these stories? >> So let me back up a little bit in that, a Sze Yu said. And we can go into this if you want. I was very involved in a lot of thie, ah, innovation that happened in the Village Valley in terms of microprocessors, the Internet, networking, everything that laid the foundation for a lot of the things we see today incredible opportunities for my career for problems we solved over the last ten years. Ten, twelve years. Um, I began to see a shift and a shift in the culture and a shift in the way technology was impacting us. And it's not all good or bad. It's that it felt like we were out of balance and that we were becoming shorter and shorter, term focused and actually my book in two thousand eight closing the innovation gap. The main message there is let's not forget about the seeds you plant that all of this comes from because we're reaping the benefit of those seeds. We're not planning new seats and that we were becoming in the Valley in the nation the way we thought about things more and more short term focused and technology was causing some of that and benefitting and not been and at a disadvantage because of that. So that started with my book in two thousand eight and then in twenty fourteen, I think it was I did a Ted talk a Ted X talk called Balancing our Digital Diets, and I was even Mohr concerned that we were out of whack in terms of the consequences of innovation, and I drew an analogy to our food's systems, where so much innovation and creating cheap calories and energy and things like high fructose corn syrup that it took years to realize that, Oh, there's some negative consequences of that innovation. And so that was kind of a warning that, um, we weren't thinking enough about the consequences of at that point. Social media. That was before fake news, and I talked about tweets and how truth that lies went faster than truth, not knowing how bad that situation was going to be and then leading up to the election and after the election. We all know and have all learned now about the impacts of these technologies on our democracy, and I believe on our society and humanity. And I don't think it's just about our election system. I think it's about our psyches and how the technology's air impacting the way we think our fear and anxiety level of our kids and us is adults. So I been talking to people about it and advising, and I finally decided as, uh, I was collaborating with people that I felt that a lot of the awareness was in pockets that we talked about data privacy or we talked about addiction. But these air things were all interrelated, and so I wanted to one ad. My voices is technologists because I think a lot of the people who are writing the building, the awareness and talking about it if you are in government or a journalist's or even a social scientist people, it's really easy to say, Yeah, you say that, but you don't understand. It's more complicated than that. You don't understand the technology. So one, I do understand that technology. So I felt adding my voice as a technologist. But I'm also, uh, just increasingly concerned about what we do about it and that we take a more holistic view. So that's what, what what the pieces are about. And the reason I broke it into two pieces is because they're too long for most people, even the way they are. But the first is to build awareness of the problems which we can dig into it a high level if you want. And then the second is to throw out ideas as we move towards discussing solutions. So let me take a breath because you were goingto jump in, and then I can. >> No, it's just because you're connecting the foundational of technology foundation technology, identifying impact, looking at pockets of awareness and then looking at how it's all kind of coming together when you talk like that The first time I saw O subsystem interrupt us connection so someone could get like a operating system. And I think the society that you're pointing out in the article, the first one intention was there only to relate. And I think that's the key part. I think that's interesting because we run into people all the time when we do our cue broadcasts that have awareness here and don't know what's going on this. So this context that's highly cohesive. But there's no connection, right? So the decoupled right but highly cohesive, That's kind of systems. Architecture concept. So how do we create a robust technology's society system where technology and I think that's a threat that we're seeing this? What I cleaned out of the articles was your kind of raising the flag a little bit to the notion of big picture right system, kind of a foundational, but let's look at consequences and inter relationships, and how can we kind of orchestrate and figure out solutions? So what was the reaction to expand on that concept? Because this is where I was. It was provocative to me, >> right? So I think there are two thought trains that I just went down. One is that one of the problems we have that has been created by technology and technology is suffering from again. It's causing both cause and effect is not enough seats, system thinking and so one issue, which is not just this is not just about social media and not just about a I, but over the last twenty years we've increasingly trained, I think, are, Ah, engineers and computer scientists in Mohr transactional thinking. And as we move quicker and quicker to solve problems, we are not training our leaders or training our technologist to think in terms of systems. And so what I mean by systems is two things that you can break, that any problems have pieces. But those pieces air inter connected. We are interconnected, and that you, if you don't keep those things in mind, then you will not design things in a way, I believe that have the longevity and make the right type decisions. The second is the law of consequences when you have a system, if you do something here, it's going to impact something here. And so that whole notion of taking was thinking through consequences. I'm afraid that we're training people as we are focusing on being more and more agile, moving more and more quickly that it's in technology and in society that we're losing some of that system, thinking >> that they kind of think that's the trade off is always around. Whenever he had systems conversations in the past, but my old systems had on trade offs, we have overhead, so we have more memory. How do we handle things? So this is kind of That's just what happens. You tell about consequence, but >> we don't have all those we I'm older than you. But we started at a time when that we were limited. We were limited by memory. We were limited by processing. We were limited by band with and a different times. As thie industry emerged, the constraints were in different areas. Today, you don't have any of those constraints. And so, if you don't have any of those constraints. You don't get trained in thinking about trade offs and thinking about consequences. So when when we come into just what drove me to write, this one set of things are foundational issues and what I mean by foundational it's it's our relationship to technology. And the fact of the matter is, as a society, um, we put technology on a pedestal, and we have, uh, this is not to be taken out of Cut is not to be taken the extreme of talking about people, but overall, our relationship with technology is a bullying, controlling relationship. That's why I called it authoritarianism. >> Upgrade your iPhone to the new version. >> Well, whether it's as a user that you're giving up your your your authority to all these notifications and to your addiction, whether it is the fact that it is the control with the data, whether it is predictive ai ai algorithms that are reading your unconscious behaviors and telling you what you think, because if it's suggesting what you by putting things in front of you. So there are all of these behaviors that our relationship with technology is not a balanced relationship and you could one. You have a culture where the companies that are that have that power are driving towards. It's a culture of moving fast growth only don't think about the consequences. It's not just the unintended consequences, but it's the consequences of intended use. So the business models and at which we don't need to go into, because I think a lot of other people talk about that all end up with a situation which is unhealthy for us as people and humanity and for us as a society. So you take that part and it is. There's a parallel here, and we should learn from what happened with industrial Ah, the industrial revolution. We want progress. But if we don't pay attention to the harm, the harmful byproducts and trade offs of progress, it's why we have issues with climate. It's why we have plastic in our oceans. It's because you, you judge everything by progresses just growth and industrialization without thinking about well being or the consequences. Well, I believe we now face a similar challenge of digitization, so it's not industrialization. But it's digitalization that has byproducts in a whole number of areas. And so what the the article does is get into those specifics, whether it's data or anxiety, how we think our cognitive abilities, our ability to solve problems, All of those things are byproducts of progress. And so we should debate um, where we what we're willing to give up one last thing. And then I'll have to come in, which is one of the problems with both of these is is humans value convenience. We get addicted to convenience, and if somebody gives us something that is going to make things more convenient, it sure is held to go backward. And that's one of the reasons the combination of measuring our goodness as a country or a CZ. Globalization by economic growth and measuring our personal wellness by convenience, if something is more convenient, were happier. Take those two together, and it makes a dangerous cop combination because then our need for community convenience gets manipulated for continued economic growth. And it doesn't necessarily end up in, Ah, progress from, ah, well being perspective. >> It's interesting point about the digitization, because the digital industrial revolution, when the digital revolution is happening, has consequences. We're seeing them and you point them out in your post Facebook and fake news. There's also the global landscape is the political overlay. There's societal impact. There's not enough scholars that I've been trained in the art of understanding into relationships of technology, and Peg used to be a nerd thing. And now my kids are growing up. Digital natives. Technology is mainstreams, and there it is. Politics. You know, the first hack collection, Some of the control, The first president actually trolled his way. That president, I said that I'm the kid. That was my position. He actually was a successful troll and got everyone he trolled the media and you got the attention. These air new dynamics, This is reality. So is you look forward and bring these ideas, and I want to get your thoughts on ideas on how to bring people together. You've been on a CTO Cisco Systems. I know you've been sleeping on a board. This is a cross pollination opportunity. Bring people together to think about this. How do you do You look at that? How do you view how to take the next steps as a as an industry, as a society and as a global nations? It eventually, because cyber security privacy is becoming polarized. Also on a geography bases in China they have. GPR is hard core there. In Europe, he got Asia. With Chinese. You got America being American. It's kind of complicated as a system architecture thinking. How do you look at this? What is the playing field where the guard rails? What's your thoughts on this? Because it's a hard one, >> right? So it is a hard one and it isn't. It isn't easy to pave out a path that says it's solvable. Um, nor does Climate right now. But you have to believe we're going to figure it out because we have to figure it out. So I think there are a lot of pieces that we need to start with, and then we need to adjust along the way. And, um, one piece is and let me back up. I am not. I don't believe we can leave this up to the industry to solve the incentives and the value systems and the understanding of the issues. The industry is coming from an industry perspective, and you can't also. You also can't leave it just two technologists because technologists have a technology person perspective. I don't believe that you just can have government solve it for a variety of reasons. One is, if it takes a spectrum of things to legislation, tends to be retroactive, not forward looking. And you need to be really careful not to come up with regulation that actually reinforces the status quo as opposed to making something better. But I think we need to. We do need to figure out how to govern in a way that includes all of these things. So once >> it's running, it's clear that watching the Facebook hearing and watching soon dark sky in front of the house. Our current elected officials actually don't even know how the Internet works, so that's one challenge. So you have a shift in its every beat >> and it and it's actually, if you think about the way legislation often gets made one of the problems with our democracy right now, I'm not going to put it in quotes. But I want to put it >> out. >> Is that the influence of money on our democracy means that so often the input toe legislation comes from industry. So whether it's again big tech, big pharma, big Oil, big. That's the way this cycle works in places where we have had successful legislation that industry input, what you need industry input. You just don't want industry to be the on ly input that is balanced with other input. And so we need infrastructure in the world. In the country that has policy ideas, technology. This needs to come from civil society, from the academy from non profits. So you need the same way we have environmental sciences. We need to fund from government, not just industry funded that science. That's number one. And then we need ways to have conversations about influencing companies to do the right thing. Some of it is going to be through legislation some of it is going to be for through pressure. This, in some ways is like tobacco in some ways, like it's like food. In some ways, it's like climate on DH. It's so and an underlying any of this to happen. We need people to understand and to speak up because awareness amongst whether it's individuals, parents, teachers, we need to give people the information to protect themselves and to push back on companies and to rally pushback on government. Because if if there's not an awareness of people are walking around saying, Don't take away my service, don't make this less convenient don't tax my soda. Don't tell me my text messages. That's right, so and I'm not saying taxes of the way. But if there isn't what what I'm focused on is, how do we build awareness? How do we get information out? How do we get companies like yours and others that this becomes part of >> our >> messaging of understanding so we can be talking about I >> think it's, you know back, Teo, The glory days of the TCP epi Internet revolution. He sent a package from here to there. It's a step. Take a first step. I personally listening to you talk feel and I said, It's on The Cuban people know that. You know, my my rap know that I've been pounding this. There's a counter culture in there somewhere. Counter culture's is where action happens, and I think you know, tax regulation and, you know, the current generations inherited. It is what it is we have. You're laying out essentially the current situation. John Markoff wrote a great book, What the door Mail said, talking about how the sixties counterculture influence the computer industry from breaking in for getting computer time for time sharing, too hippy revolution question I have for you put you on the spot. Is Is there a counterculture in your mind? Coming a digital hippie quotes is because I feel it. I feel that that let the air out of the balloon before it pops. Something has to happen and I think has to be a counterculture. I yet yet can't put my finger on it. Maybe it's a digital kind of a revolution, something compelling that says Whoa time out. >> All right? I think we need a couple of counter culture's in that in layers of it, because, um, I think there is going to be or is starting to be a counterculture amongst technologist and the technology industry and entrepreneurs who are some it's still small who are saying, You know what? This chasing unicorns and fastest growth and scale, you know, move faxed and break things. But, um, we want to move fast, but we want to think about whether we're breaking what we're breaking is really dangerous, you know, move fast and break things is fine, but if it's oops, we broke democracy. That isn't something that, uh that is I'm sorry you have to think about and adapt more quickly. So I think there is Are people who are talking about let's talk openly about the harm. Let's not just be tech optimists. Let's understand that it's small, but it's beginning and you're seeing it in a I for instance, the people who are saying Look, were technologists, we want to be responsible. This is a powerful weapon or tool. And let's make sure we think about how we use it. Let me just say one thing, which is, I think we needed another kind of counterculture, which I'm hoping is happing in a number of areas, which is societally saying, You know, we have a slow food movement. Maybe we just need a slow down, a little bit movement. So if you look at mindfulness, if you look at kids who are starting to say, You know what? I want to talk to someone in person, I don't. So we we need some of that counter movement where I'm hoping the pedestal starts to come back. In terms of people looking for real connectivity and not just numbers of connections, >> it's interesting, You know, everything has a symmetrical, responsible thing about it. For every fake news payload and network effect is potentially an opposite reaction of quality network effect. It's interesting, and I don't know where it is, but I think that's got it could be filled, certainly on the economic side, by new entrepreneurial thinking, like one observation I'm making is you know this. Remember, they'll bad boys of tech and he's smiling. Now It's bad gals, too, which is growing still lower numbers. So I think there's gonna be a shift to the good, the good folks right moment. But she's a she's a good entrepreneur. She's not just out there to make a quick buck or hey, mission driven za signal we're seeing. So you start to see a little bit more of a swing to Whoa, hey, let's recognize that it's not about, you know, could Buck or >> so, yes, but between you and I, it's teeny compared to the other forces. So that's what those of us who believe that needs to happen need to continue to >> one of those forces money making. >> I think it's a combination of, Ah, money and how much money, Dr. Celebrity culture, um, the forces, the power that's in place is so strong that it's hard to break through, um, short term thinking, not even being trained. So like so many things in our culture, where you have entrenched power and then you see uprising and you get hope and that's where you need the hope. But, um, we've seen it so often in so many movements, from race to gender, where you think, Oh, that's solved, it's not solved and then you come back in and come back at it. So I just I would argue that there is little bits of it, but it needs fuel. It needs continuity. It it. And the reason I think we need some government regulation is it needs help because it's not gonna >> happen. You should question, you know, some successes that I point out Amazon Web services, Google even having a long game kind of narrative they're always kind of were misunderstood at first. Remember, Google was loud by search is not doing too well. Then the rest is history. Amazon was laughed. Amazon Web services was laughed at. So people who have the long game seemed to be winning in these transitions. And that's kind of what you're getting at. You think long term, the long game. If you think in terms of the long term vision, you then going look at consequences differently. How many people do you run in? The valleys actually think like that. Okay, >> so we're talking about two different things. One is long term thinking, and I do think that apple, Google, Amazon have taken long term thinking's. So there are a good example. But if you look at them, if we look at the big companies in terms of the way they approached the market and competition and their potential negative impacts on overall society, they're part of the power. They're not doing anything to change the systems, to not >> have good and continue to benefit. The rich get richer. >> So there this This is why it's complicated. There are not good guys and bad guys there are. These people are doing this and that. So do I think overall dough? I see more long term thinking. Um, not really. I think that the incentives in the investment community, the incentives in the stock market. The incentives culturally are still very much around shorter term thinking. Not that there aren't any, but >> yeah, I would agree. I mean, it tends to be, you know, Hey, we're crushing it. We're winning, you know? Look at us. Growth hack. I mean, just the languages. Semantics. You look at that. I think it's changed. I think Facebook is, I think, the poster child of short term thinking growth hacks move fast, break stuff and look where they are, you know, they can't actually sustaining and brand outside of Facebook, they have to buy Instagram and these other companies to actually get the kind of growth. But certainly Facebook is dominate on the financial performance, but they're kind of sitting in their situation. I think you know the bro Grammer movement, I think is kind of moving through the white common ear culture of Okay, let's get some entrepreneurship going. Great. Rod. I think that's stabilising. I think we're seeing with cloud really science and thinking for good. That's a positive sign. >> Well, I'm I'm glad to hear that from you, you know, and all >> you're probably going with. >> No, no, no, I'll take that and take that into feeding my hope because I hope, >> well, the movement is classic. Look, we're not gonna tolerate this anymore. I think transparency in my final question to you before you get to some of the more entrepreneur Question says, If you look at the role of community on data, science and connectedness, one of the things about being connected is you got potential potential for collective intelligence. So if you look at data, as I said, networks, what if there was a way to kind of hone that network to get to the truth fast? Esther, something we've been working on here, and I think that's something that, you know changes media. It changes the game. But collective intelligent, the role of the community now becomes a stakeholder and potentially laying out. So his problems and you're part of the Mayfield community was co created this video with roll community, super important people. The rule of the of the person your thoughts on >> so I community is a word that is has takes on a lot of meetings, and the problem is when you mean it one way and use it the other way, the same as data driven. So I think there's at one level which is community and conductivity that has to do with collecting input from lots of sources. And when you talk about investigative journalism or they're in environmental situations or all sorts of areas where the ability to collect information from lots of sources that air interested and analyze that information that is one level of community and connectivity and networking because of people you know which is great, there's another type. When people talk about community, they mean a sense of community in terms of what humans need and what that connectivity is. And most online networks don't give you that level. The online needs to be augmented by, Ah, inter personal understanding. And one of the problems. I think with today's technology is we're fitting humans into bits that technology Khun Support, as opposed to recognizing what are our human needs that we want to hold on to and saying There are some things that are not going to fit into somebody's data set. So in that first type of community than absolutely, I think there's lots of benefits of the cloud and wisdom of the crowd. But if you're talking about humans connecting in people. You don't have the same type of, uh, that that really community online tools can help. But we should never confuse what happens in our online world >> with your final question for, you know, we got We're pushing the time here. Thank you for spending time. First of all, it's great conversation. You've seen the movie with venture capital from the beginning. You know, all the original players seeing what is now just where's that come from? Where are we? What's the state of VC? Then? He hope to the future, they all adding value. How do you see that evolving and where are we with? >> You know, I would. I think venture capital has gone through a lot of different phases. And like so many things, especially those of us who want computers, we liketo lump them all together. They're not altogether. There are some small, Yes, like they field. And the I do think, though, that something shifted in the lead up to the dot com. Ah, and later the burst. And what shifted is venture capitalists. Before that time were company builders. They were the financiers, but they saw themselves with the entrepreneur building companies because of the expansion leading up to two thousand, and the funds grew and the people coming into the field were, they became more bankers and they took more financial supposed to balancing financing and entrepreneurship. It felt like it moved. Maurin toe. This is a private equity play, Um, and I think the dynamic with entrepreneurs and the methodology overall shifted, and I don't know that that's changed Now again, not across the board. I think there are some, uh, those firms that have identified our partners within firms who still very much want Teo filled companies and partner with entrepreneurs. But I think the dynamic shifted, and if you view them as that's what they are, is private equity investors. And don't expect something else. If people need money, that's a good pick. Ones that are the best partner >> is your partner. If you want a banker, go here. If you want Builder, go their key distinction. Judy. Thanks for sharing that insight. We're Judy Estrin. Sea of Jail as author of Closing Innovation. Gabbas Wellman's well known entrepreneur advisor board member formally CTO of Cisco. And again, Great gas. Thanks for coming on I'm John for Herewith. Cube conversation. Part ofmy Mayfield. People first with the Cube. Thanks for watching.

>> From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here. Day three of wall to wall coverage at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2018, here in Seattle, theCUBE's been breaking it down all week. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Tuan Nguyen who is the principal engineer in technical marketing, cloud products and solutions at Cisco Systems. Tuan, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. Thank you. >> So obviously, cloud has been a big part of Cisco. We've seen at Cisco Live last year and Cisco Barcelona. >> Yeah. >> Got your big European event coming up, Cisco Live in Europe. >> Yes. >> Cloud has been a big part of the CEO's conversations on stage. >> Yes. >> Cisco's going all in on cloud, DevNet. >> Yeah. >> DevNet Create, two communities. You guys got a cloud native vibe going on in Cisco. >> Yeah, we do. >> Cloud centered. You got some products that are addressing this. >> Right. >> This is a, shift for Cisco, big time. >> Yeah. >> You've in the cloud, but this is like all. It feels like an all in. >> Right, right. Yeah, yeah, so what we've been evangelizing to people here is that Cisco is a software company, right? We certainly have a very strong heritage in our enterprise relationships related to our hardware platforms but we're transitioning and we're really making that conversion to being a software company. Cisco has been acquiring talent and technology in the past couple years. We've developed some strong relationships with Google and AWS as well and we developed these reference architectures that our customers can buy as kind of a single unit and get the support that they need from us. >> Yeah. >> So. >> We covered your recent announcement with AWS. >> Yes. >> Really nice, elegantly designed Kubernetes strategy where using EKS over here, you got the Cisco stuff on here so it's seamless experience for the customer which is great, congrats, I think that's a great announcement. I think it's directionally correct. I think that's what customers want. But I want to ask you a bigger question I want to get your opinion on, perspective. When you look at Kubernetes, what we're hearing here at the show from end users and from the emerging start ups that are contributing is that, breaking down the monolithic application into a series of granule sets of services is what everyone is doing. That's clearly, that microservices, a variety of other things, Kubernetes can connect that. But it's the network that brings it together. >> Right. >> So we're seeing the policy knobs inside Kubernetes as being a very strategic benefit. We had one expert say, "A lot of people "aren't taking advantage of those policy knobs. "This is a great opportunity." >> Right. >> You guys are, (laughing) as networked as you could be at Cisco. This is your DNA. >> Yeah. >> How are you guys looking at Kubernetes? Are you looking at the policy knobs? How do you talk to your customers about this new opportunity with Kubernetes? >> Yeah. >> What's the real up side-- >> Yeah. >> For your customers with Kubernetes? >> Yeah. So one, you mentioned, we see Kubernetes as very pervasive so we offer an on prem version of Kubernetes and of course, you know, we partner with Google and with AWS to deliver on cloud versions of Kubernetes and related to policies, application policies, in the form of Istio and network policies or security policies in the form of a network interface. Our on prem solution offers three types of CNIs. So we're very flexible in that way and certainly if you are a Cisco customer and you have a Cisco ecosystem of hardware platforms then we natively integrate into those platforms and we let you leverage your existing investments, yeah. >> So if I look at it that way, then I'm saying, okay, I'm good with Cisco right now. >> Yeah. >> Do I have to change anything with Kubernetes? What's the impact to me, as a Cisco customer? >> Yeah. >> Is this added value? Consistent environment? What's the impact to the customer's day to day, operational? (laughing) >> Sure, sure. Yeah. >> Environment? >> Yeah, so our customers are asking us to tie both VM based and container based workloads into CICD, so we obviously, with with our ACI/CNI we give them the capability to construct policies in Kubernetes that end up on the hardware platform, right? That's number one. Then we also have a hardware registry, we have security policies, that can be carried across different platforms, so in your private cloud and VMware and OpenStack, you can carry those same policies. For us, we've got application delivery, frameworks and platforms, that deliver the application in the form of both VM and container based as well as bare metal and we kind of unify the user experience, when it comes to application deployment in Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so Tuan, I'm actually glad that we got you towards the end of what we've been talking about here because one of the things we've been teasing apart is, multi clouds, in many ways, is like what we've been talking about a long time about multi vendor. >> Yeah. >> And the networking space is an area that we really understand. You know, what worked and what didn't work in a multi vendor world and the management piece was often the breaking point because just stitching all those together, we've looked for the last few years, customers have multi cloud and getting their arms around that and how do I manage that, can be a real challenge. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We know Cisco's making investments, they've made acquisitions. Tell us, what have we learned from the past? What's different about this now that will make it successful where management has been one of the pitfalls for quite a long time? >> Yeah, yeah. So I think what we've learned from the past is that customers are asking us for policies that can span across the multi cloud, right? So, whereas certain platforms will give you a hybrid cloud experience, Cisco is investing in things like VPN meshed apologies into CSR, in ASR, in protecting workloads as they move across different cloud targets. And then also in the provisioning and life cycle management. We feel that customers want the capability to run applications in any cloud environment and under any type of overlay or underlay networking platforms, yeah. >> Tuan, one of the things that you talk about not only getting your arms around it but there is multi axis's that I need to optimize for. One of the ones, of course, sorting out is cost. So, you know, where does Cisco sit in this environment? The big shift that I think was really highlighted for me last year, going to Cisco Live is, it used to be most of what I'm managing, I control. >> Right. >> Today, most of the network and most of the environments that I'm in charge of? They're outside of my purview. >> Right. >> With doing that multi cloud world. >> Right. >> So how I make sure that I don't, you know, get myself in trouble with the CFO? >> Right. >> Or have unexpected things come up? >> Right, right, yeah. I came through a software acquisition called CliQr Technologies and CliQr Technologies is that one tool that gives you that experience and allows you to see cloud cost. So cloud cost from a hourly, metered perspective but also from a budgeting perspective. And we're adding additional components into our platform that gives you like true cost for all of your compute, all of your network, your storage, your services like Lambda and then also makes recommendations on the instant sizes that you need to use. We have policies like suspension policies that help our customers to save on their cloud bill. In a lot of ways, the life cycle management aspect of applications is something that differentiates us from other cloud management platforms. >> Talk about the cost side and the cost of ownership. I've always been talking about the cloud as the TCO or total cost of ownership, changes a bit. What are some of the challenges that you've seen the customers having that you guys are helping with? When you look at integrating security, networking and application performance and management? Cause it's not siloed anymore. >> Yeah. >> They're integrating together. >> That's right. >> This is a new dynamic. >> Right, right. >> What's state of the art? What are you guys doing? You guys address that? What are some of the customer challenges? Just, what's your thoughts on that area? >> Yeah so most of the time there are two basic challenges to this. One is, you know bringing the cloud economy into the private cloud consumption is something that our platform does. And then also being able to visualize all the costs. Helping our customers to make good decisions about what types of workloads run where best and whether it's, so we enable, obviously, VMs as well as cloud native, container based, micro services to co-exist in a single platform so we'll deploy VMs and containers in a hybrid fashion. >> Yeah. >> Or we'll deploy them into the same and we'll give you the utilization of those workloads based on dollar amounts, based on run time and also based on the type of workload. >> So here's the curve ball question for you. Now multi cloud comes into the equation? >> Yeah. >> How do you guys deal with that because workload, in some cases, I've heard from customers that refactoring those workloads is a problem. >> Right. >> So if I'm going to run true multi cloud, I'm going to have multiple clouds, I need networks to know, have smarts, around where I want to put that and do I want it in different geography maybe or region? So the network has the intelligence on a lot of things. >> Right. >> How are you guys addressing the multi cloud component? >> Yeah, yeah. >> With workload? Without refactoring? >> Yeah. So because we can compose applications that consist of both VMs and containers, right? One of the projects, just one of the use cases that we worked on with our relationship with Google was to, from cloud center, to deploy cloud native workloads in GKE that would navigate and basically traverse the VPN network to go back into the on prem target in order to access a database that was kind of a legacy database using an API URL. So that whole workflow was something that we solved for with our reference architecture so, you know, we obviously have the portfolio of products that allows our customers to take advantage of both hardware, software and networking and security and monitoring all in one reference architecture. >> A lot of opportunities for you guys. I think you're positioned well. We've covered you guys on the DevNet, DevNet Create. >> Yeah. >> You're seeing the cloud center, this dashboard kind of model of looking at the operations side, the development side. A lot of changes. Really kind of fit right into your wheelhouse. >> Yes, yeah. >> I think the Kubernetes policy knobs, it's a big story that I'm walking away with on this trip and saying, wow, policy sounds like a networking thing. Networking guys love policy. >> Yeah. >> If you can automate it? >> Yeah, that's right. >> And managed the costs? >> Yeah. >> It's a good thing. >> Yeah. >> Thanks for coming on, appreciate your insight. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> CUBE coverage here, day three continues. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for wall to wall coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. We'll be right back with more, after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, The CloudNative Computing Foundation, and Antico System Partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Day two live coverage here in Seattle of the CNCF KubeCon and CouldNative. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman here all week for three days as multiple years we've been covering KubeCon. We've been covering this community, all the way back to the OpenStack days to now CloudNative and Kubernetes, rise of Kubernetes, and KubeCon has been great. CloudNative Computing Foundation and the center of it has been an individual CUBE alumni that we've talked to many times, Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems. Great to have Lew on, good to see you. >> Great to be back again. >> We got a great history of conversations and every year we kind of have a pinch me moment where it's like it's so awesome right now, the technology's coming together, now more than ever, the standardization, the maturization of Kubenetes and what's going on around it, is probably one of the most exciting trends. It's not just about Kubernetes, it's about what that's enabling, ecosystems, storage, networking and compute, now the, is working now magically creating a lot of value. So, we've talked about it, what's the update from your perspective, how do you see it evolving now? >> I see it very much the same way, I had a short little keynote today, yesterday, and was talking about I think we've entered this kind of golden age of software where because of the number of projects that are now going into the CNCF for example, and elsewhere, and get up repositories, we just have a major driving force which is the accumulation of the software that's used now to power the cloud, power data centers, totally transforming infrastructure. We're no longer cabling as I sort of say has no become code. >> Yeah. >> And that's all about the software, it's about through the open source communities. >> We've been talking about before we came on camera about the, and we've had other conversations about the historical waves of innovation. AI's been around for a while, you know all these things have kind of been around but now with cloud computing and the resources available in terms of compute power, storage, and networking now programmable, it's creating a lot of innovation right. And this has been a tailwind for some and a headwind for others, companies that have transformed and understood that have been leveraging it. We've seen conversations from Net App, Cisco, you guys are transform, you turned it into a tailwind, for Cisco, because now all that magic can come in for the programmability on the networking side. >> Exactly right, yeah. We see AI as having a big impact across the board on all of these, we're big contributors also into Cube Clove, for example, because on top of Kubernetes, the biggest issue we're going to have in AI going forward is we don't have enough AI engineers. We don't have enough people who are trained in that. So we need to create these tools and the services that we see coming out in the cloud now for AI are designed to make it easy to consume AI. You don't have to be an AI expert in order to use it and that sort of thing is really exciting. >> How is the CloudNative environment changing IT investments 'cause again, the old days I'd have to throw a machine at something, I got to buy this and siloed, you got now horizontal capabilities, you got the vertical specialization with machine learning and AI as you just referenced. How is it changing investments, people now are looking at re-imagining their infrastructure, they're re-imagining how apps are built. How is Kubernetes, CloudNative impacting IT investments? >> So we've found for example when we talk to our customers and everything else, they're all using multiple clouds. So I think internally we're getting to see a rise here now is this multi-cloud environment that we have. And so Cisco with what we've been doing with our hybrid solutions for AWS and hybrid solutions that we're having with Google is making it so that you can have the same environment within your data center as you have in the cloud, and then we connect the two so that now the IT infrastructure really is looking like a cloud and there's many clouds, multiple clouds in your own data center, in multiple service providers. That makes it easier for IT to really consume CloudNative technology. >> I wonder if you can chill us down a level from what we're talking- you talk about cube flow and machine learning remember back to big data, was like okay, well what do we have to do with the network? Well, I need some more buffering but you know, how are we what is just the base infrastructure layer and where Kubernetes and this ecosystem just becomes the platform for all of the modern applications, and what has to be done differently, I wonder if you could help- >> Yeah so one of the big challenges I think is this how do we connect the different clouds together with your own data center. And that's why we, the hybrid solutions, where Cisco's driving now are designed specifically to make that easy because it's scary for IT organizations to say they're going to open up some part of their firewall to have connections coming in, and so we provide a solution that makes it easy for people. And that means that things such as cube flow, and things like that, they can be running, perhaps they might do some of their research in a hybrid- in a public cloud provider, such as AWS or Google. And then they want to run it now in production within their own data center, and they don't want to change a thing. And at the same time, we're seeing other capabilities. You want to access some service in the cloud as a part of your enterprise app. >> Yeah one of the things people have a hard time understanding is what is just kind of standardized, okay I've got compliant Kubernetes it can run all these places and then there's areas where Cisco has done deep integration work with both Google Cloud and with AWS, maybe help understand what are the standard pieces and what's the extra engineering work needed to be done to support some of these? >> Well I think what has helped us all is the fact that Kubernetes has really taken off. So we really are seeing if you have a Kubernetes platform and you adhere to the public APIs of Kubernetes and everything else like that, you then can have the portability of applications back in the java days we were going after that, and now we're seeing it with Kubernetes. And so by what we've developed has been with the Cisco container platform is an on premise manage Kubernetes environment that looks identical to what you find in the Kubernetes environment at AWS or at Google. So the same interfaces are there, the IT doesn't have to relearn things, they can actually get the advantage of that standardization. >> And that's key for operations and IT because that is the promise of cloud operations. Similar on both platforms on premises and in the cloud. And the next question is okay from a networking perspective, we've had many conversations with Suzie Wee at Cisco around network programmability or net dev options as you guys call it, which is kind of a play on dev ops. This is the future because with multi-cloud the apps don't need to know about where to provision workloads, which cloud when, is it better region over here, latency, network factors come in, you still got to move things around, put A to B, edge of the network for IOT. Talk about the importance of network programmability now more than ever with CloudNative why it's so important. >> Well the first and foremost, it has to be driven by APIs. The old days of actually going out and having people configure network switches to make connectivity or open up provisions and firewalls and things like that, that's behind us. Now we have that all being because of programmability of the network through what we've been doing with ACI and other technologies, we can make it so we can connect these clouds and make it, maintain the security. We're also seeing other things such as isteo and edgebased computing and things like that come into play, where again, the ordinary developer doesn't have to learn all of the details of networking and security, but the operations people need it to be secure, need it to be able to be moved around, need to be able to have telemetry so they can tell what's going on. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE, Stu and I were yesterday riffing on this but for a while, but it's also now trickled into the Silicon Valley conversations around some of the tech elite people around architecture. Cloud architects are in high demand and there's two schools of thought. There's a persona around a systems architect, more of a systems view, operating systems kind of view, that's cloud that's operating, environment, serverless, advanced, these are kind of concepts that is a systems-oriented thinker. And then you have the application developer that looks like an app server kind of world. Those are all paradigms that we've lived through. >> Right. >> Now coming together now in one, horizontally scaled both cloud that's a system, vertical specialization around the apps, and with dev ops layer, having these guys work together. Talk about this dynamic, your thoughts on it, how it shapes employee selection, people who lead projects. 'Cause the CTO and architect role's now more important, but the software side's just as important. >> Yeah so I think one thing that's become very clear is that we need to make it easier for the domain experts in an application area to just take care of their part. And so that's why like one of the previous episodes we talked about here was about istea, where we've actually separated out essentially the data play, the transport of data around with security, encryption, identity, and everything else from the actual application code of the micro service. That makes it much easier because now the engineering teams are too large, you can't have everybody know everything anymore, like you say, we've got specialists in different areas. We need to be able to provide then, underlying systems that connect these things and that underlying system then has to be managed by your operations people. So we've got dev ops where the application people are writing code actually that the operations people use, so that we can actually have this kind of uniform infrastructure that is maintainable. >> And security is super important and all that good stuff. >> Yeah so Lew it's interesting, we've been watching so many of the pieces we've worked on OpenStack, it was really from the bottoms up building the infrastructure, we've seen the dynamic the last two years, Kubernetes some, and server-less even more, coming from the top down. We want to get your thoughts on that, we've been digging in and trying to tease out some of the Knative pieces that are being discussed here, versus some of the functions things that are happening, especially in Amazon and Microsoft, I'd love to get your take. >> I think we're always seeing this progression in platforms for computing, and programming languages, and paths we've talked about years ago. All of these things are designed always to make it easier. So you're right we've got for example Knative now really coming on as saying can we standardize a way specifically helping Kubernetes people move into this area. Like I've mentioned before the Kubeflow again, how can we start to standardize these pieces? The beauty of this is, the standardized pieces are coming out in open source. So everybody gets it, and that means it's deployable in your public clouds, it's deployable in your data center, and then through a lot of the hybrid technology that Cisco's working, you can connect those together. But you're right we're going to continue to see innovation, that's great, because we need that, we need that constantly. What we need to be able to do is make it easier to consume and then integrate into these systems. And that's where I think Kubernetes has a lot do with how we make it easier. >> Final question on Cisco then I want to go on a more personal note with you on your situation which is news breaking here on theCUBE. Cisco has successfully transformed it's direction, it's been always a great leader in networking, always a great business, billions and billions of dollars in revenue. Now with CloudNative and Kubernetes, the relationship I saw with Amazon, you got Google, you guys have taken that systems view in making things programmable. Explain the Cisco strategy from your perspective as a CTO and as a legend in the industry, for the people that know Cisco, know the old Cisco, what is the new Cisco? And how does Kubernetes and how does all this CloudNative fit into the new Cisco? >> I think the new Cisco really is focused now on where customers are taking their computing resources and it is in this multi-cloud world where we're seeing it's not a fight anymore. You can't say I have a reason to keep things here in my data center, I'm never going to go to cloud, and other customers are saying I'm never going to have a data center, now everybody's saying we're probably going to have both. And Cisco as a networking company, this plays right into our strength because what you have to be able to do is now connect those environments in a secure way, in a manageable way. And so this plays right into where Cisco's growth I think is going to be, it'll be in much more of these kinds of services that allow that to happen, and in the relationships and partnerships that we have with the major cloud providers. >> This basically, the decomposition of monolithic applications into sets of microservices is connected by the network. >> Exactly right. >> This is the fundamental beauty of where you guys see that tailwind. >> Exactly. >> Awesome. Well Lew you've been a legend in the industry, I've been following your career from the beginning. You've been- you have product that's in the Computers Museum you've done amazing work at Sun Microsystems, I mean just a great story career, the work you've done at Cisco, you've been on theCUBE so many times, I don't know that number. You've really contributed to the industry and this news now about your situation, share the news about what's happening with you. >> Well I made announcements at our CNCF board and our OpenStack board meetings that I'm leaving Cisco and so I'm having to withdraw from the board positions as well as Cloud Foundry and that's sad in a way because I have relationships with those people, but it many ways after I want to spend some time to really see where the future is again, because as you know in my career I've changed several times. And I'm so looking forward to actually, now going into sort of a new direction which may be much more moving up the stack. I think there's very exciting things going on in AI, there's exciting things going on in genomics. There's a lot of activity going on so we've been building this technology for a purpose to allow us to have those kinds of things. Now I want to start focusing much more directly. >> And you're leaving Cisco on what date? >> Leaving Cisco beginning of January. >> Well congratulations, great work and I think one of the trends I think this speaks to is I see a lot of computer scientists, a lot of people who have some DNA from the old ways like you do, and been there, and contributed at a seminal level, just some great contributions. Seeing computer science as an opportunity to solve problems. This is kind of a renaissance from seasoned pioneers and young people coming together. This is a great opportunity, is that kind of what you're thinking, you're just going to attack the problem? >> There's 8000 people here, this show's sold out and this is all developers so people who have background in computer science or are getting online and learning it themselves, this is an opportunity and the time to get in. >> You've been a great mentor to many, you've been a great contributor in the open source community, again, your contributions at the systems level and you understand certainly what's going on with CloudNative, looking forward to following up and congratulations. >> Yep, well I hope to be back again. >> Of course, you're VIP CUBE alumni. Lew Tucker, exciting news, Cisco's transformed. He's moving on to- taking on some big new challenges, thanks for coming on theCUBE really appreciate it. Lew Tucker, Vice President CTO systems, Cisco systems, moving on to some new endeavors. Here in theCUBE we're covering the live coverage here at KubeCon CloudNative I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more day two interviews after this short break. (upbeat music)

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services Intel and their ecosystem partners welcome back everyone live here the cube coverage at Amazon Web service AWS reinvent 2018 our sixth year covering Amazon now 52,000 lost people here packed house this is where the industry gathers to really kind of check out the future where the state of the cloud business is what it means to enterprise I'm John Fourier the post of the cube with Lauren Cooney co-host me.we this week on set one of two sets here our next two guests Jeff monk resulting systems engineer stealthWatch cloud that's now part of Cisco Systems and Earth has been Product Marketing Manager jetbrains welcome to the cube guys thanks for coming on thanks launched six years now we've been covering Amazon we were here when kind of people didn't really understand what it was we saw here so Jerry Chen just gave him a venture capitalist and Braille app and we're like this is gonna be big it's big but the big news here this week is on premises okay you guys cisco you own premises with routing networking developers of programming applications in the cloud needs to run on premise it's a big theme it's all kind of coming together it's kind of first validation this year that on-premises is not going away and cloud is becoming more prevalent for data and analytics for coding for DevOps but now working seamlessly together you guys agree with this recently announced the deal with AWS right you have networking which the critical part of the holy trinity of infrastructure network storage compute powering a new class of software development and tools what's your view on this I mean give us a take yeah so from a Cisco stealthWatch standpoint like you said we see that customers are not necessarily going away from on-premise deployments a lot of organizations have got large data centers and Colo facilities they still run all right and they've also got workloads in the public cloud so what we see is you know any some kind of mixture of organizations that have still got bare metal servers and virtual machines on premise that they need visibility into and one protect then they've also got public cloud workloads that are virtual machines but then they've gone beyond virtual machines and there are things like micro services and server lists and containers and they need a solution that can protect all those different environments and that's what stealthWatch comes into play and i want to get you guys saw it on on this because i'll see now security used to be a blocker for cloud it can't put seven the cloud skids not secure now security is their baseline at least needs more work you've got to have that visibility and you guys have a programmable strategy for the network is now coding be pcs is becoming more important than ever before right how is security evolving as compute start to get more powerful storage of storage data it's not going away it's only growing with IOT and IOT edge with connectivity networking now has to up its game write an application of elves don't want anything to do with all that anymore they want to just program so what's this mean for people what are security right for security yeah so what we're seeing and I mentioned a second ago was the expansion into micro services serverless cloud native if you will and organizations are continuing to go that route but what they don't realize is as they expand into those different technologies they're actually increased creating an increasing attack surface if you will right they're not really thinking about that and what they're doing is opening up multiple new points out to the internet that are vulnerable and it to exposure and risk right so they're not thinking about securing those new environments that are deploying and that's where we come into play also awesome let's talk about jet Breen what do you guys do what's the relationship with Cisco how do you fit in what's the story so let me start with introducing jetbrains little but you're just talking about all these various spaces where people have to run their code nowadays yeah if you want to develop for all these environments you need tools that allow you to develop for all these environments at JetBrains that were tooling professionals what we do we are software developers we make tools for software developers we really want to give the developer all this power in their hands to be able to develop insight for example containers and step through their code as they go inside these environments of course our own products and our own services they are all a lot of them are hosts on AWS and Cisco comes in there and healthy let's make sure that all of our servants that we have online remains secure and the relationship with Cisco is part of the go-to-market you guys share products together what's the relationship as jetbrains is actually a stealthWatch customer they've been a customer for a few years now and we actually protect all of their Amazon workloads they've got deployed in the Amazon infrastructure anything from ec2 instances to RDS redshift lambdas pretty much any sort of service that they're using from a compute standpoint in Amazon stealthWatch cause in protecting for a few years now so with kubernetes and now lambda the old days was was still grade you spit up an instance ten seconds lambda you can do this in really really high velocity how does that change the tooling how does it impact your world it's a customer so for us as the customer self watch it impacts us that we have to of course make sure that whenever these lambdas fire we know what's going on and we can see what's happening and one of the things we really want to do within Jefferson we want to give our developers we want to empower they want to make sure that they can experiment that they can make new things and it's all Excel what really helps us make sure that when our developers are out there doing things we can still maintain that we're following the best practices and everything stay secure how does automation guys weave in because kubernetes is a big battleground right now we're seeing important one as orchestrating and managing cluster certainly the state of application data unstated applications also with AP is obviously growing visibility is critical but automations may be right around the horizon ku Bernays at some point gonna be automated away and if so what's that looked like from software standpoint because yeah it's dynamic now so what we see from a kubernetes and a container orchestration perspective is that the kubernetes itself is designed to do the automation all right it's elastic expand and contract right but what you may be looking at today is a small kubernetes cluster with a couple of nodes and a couple dozen pods then all sudden tomorrow based on load you could be looking at hundreds of nodes and thousands of pots a massively increased attack surface if you will it right there's a building into and trying to figure out what's going on there right stealth watts cloud luckily we're there we're in kubernetes today and what we do is we deploy automatically in the kubernetes environment and in a way that allows us to expand with you automatically so as your cluster expands we will give you complete visibility into everything that's moving east west in kubernetes as well as north south so it's a very simple deployment doesn't matter where kubernetes lives we've got you covered if people are going to download stealthWatch from the catalog right what is it how would you describe right so stealthWatch cloud it is a SAS offering all right so we get asked that a lot just today over in the booth you know we've got a lot of questions about where do we put our sensors where do you put the collectors people if they're having a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that it's straight API calls okay we're bringing in cloud trail we're bringing in I am and cloud watch BPC flow logs right and we're bringing it all in all automated over the API AWS - AWS where we live and it is a SAS billing offering writes if there's nothing that you have to go deploy it's a 5-minute integration you can buy it right there on the AWS marketplace like you said for public or private network monitoring and it's a subscription billing so it's a true SAS you're looking to kind of expand you know your footprint in this space with kubernetes is there any thought of you know some sort of code donation to kubernetes to actually increase your footprint among users and get them more engaged or is that something that you you know talked about thought about things like that donating code donating some code yeah I don't honestly don't think there's anything that we've ever discussed about donating commenting like that what about you guys are donating code to the kubernetes project well just to increase your footprint right so you would have available as a component of kubernetes and people would put into there great idea yeah yeah it's not something that I know that we discussed but yeah I mean if we could deploy something that would be open source that we actually part of that project that would be a huge visibility for us and I think that's big sensitive you look at what's going on in Cisco whether things like to give you guys a prop here is that the def net developer community has really taken - cloud native and with definite create dev net at Cisco live and Cisco Barcelona we've been this past year what a sea change I mean you got command line interface dudes going hey I need to be dashboard oriented meaning I gotta automate stuff so the notion of programming the network it's not a foreign concept to network engineers they're pretty smart right they get things so how is this world of all I mean how is the persona of a Cisco customer that needs to get more software development shops going what's it like I mean is there future dashboards as their future gonna be scripts event alerts let me manage it so how do you guys see that persona evolving I think what we see and you can probably relate to this also erst is that more and more organizations it doesn't matter how averse they are to cloud and new development technologies more organizations are going towards a DevOps oh yeah framework with C ICD constant continuous integration and continuous delivery right so it's hard to avoid the fact that that's where the paradigm is shifting and in doing so as we move into more cloud native and serverless capabilities you're looking at things that don't get necessarily involved operating systems and IP addresses and traditional endpoints and that's where most organizations are going so and so from a security perspective we've got to go there also know about your relationship with just as a customer are you happy what's it like how's the product so if I were very happy we've had some great experiences with the onboarding of stealthWatch cloud yeah we had some of course you know as you're starting to get started we needed a little bit of assistance getting used to the tool and getting started and getting anything configured the support was very helpful and they really helped us get started and then at some point we actually did some of this cloud automation and we set up terraform scripts so we could actually automatically configure stealthWatch cloud into many of our AWS accounts great great stuff final question for Cisco what's next for you guys on the product side anything going on give a quick plug of what's happened yeah I'd say what's next for us from a stealth watch cloud standpoint is you're going to see more integration with the Cisco portfolio we're integrating with the Cisco identity services engine integrating with the next-gen firewall integrating with the new encrypted traffic analytics that you've probably discussed here on the cube before so it's a tiger portfolio integration because that really sets us apart awesome guys thanks for coming on the key appreciate the insight good to see a customer here thanks for coming I appreciate very good job kubernetes at the head start as at the center of all the action with developers cluster man has been scaling up lamda server list this is the really the fasting programming gold networks is key the queue bringing all the coverage here live in Las Vegas for 80 bus reinvent 2018 I'm Shepard Lauren Cooney stay with us for more coverage after this short break [Music]

Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering People First Network. Brought to you by Mayfield. >> Hello, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for an exclusive conversation, CUBE conversation, part of the People First Network with theCUBE and Mayfield fund. I'm here with John Chambers at his house in Palo Alto. John Chambers is the former CEO/Chairman of Cisco Systems, now running J2C, JC2 Ventures. Great to see you, thanks for spending time! >> It's a pleasure to be together again. >> I'm here for two reasons. One, I wanted a conversation about People First and technology waves, but also, I want to talk about your new book, which is exciting, called Connecting the Dots. And it's not your standard business book, where, you know, hey, rah-rah, you know, like a media post these days on the internet; it's some personal stories weaved in with the lessons you've learned through the interactions you've had with many people over the years, so exciting book and I'm looking forward to talking about that. >> Thank you! >> Again, John Chambers, legend, Cisco, 1991 when you joined the company from Wang before that. 400 employees, one product, 70 million in revenue. And when you retired in 2015, not so much retired, 'cos you've got some--. >> I'm working on my next chapter! >> You've got your next chapter (laughs)! 180 acquisitions, 447 billion in revenue, you made 10,000 people millionaires, you created a lot of value, probably one of the biggest inflection points in computer history, the evolution of inter-networking and tying systems together, it was probably one of the biggest waves somewhat before the wave we're on now. So an amazing journey, now you're running JC2 Ventures and investing in game-changing start-ups. So you're not retired? >> No. It was only my next chapter. I made my decision almost 10 years before I left Cisco first, to make for a very smooth transition because it's my family, and out of the 75,000 people, I hired all but 23 of them! And in terms of what I wanted to do next, I really wanted to both give back, create more jobs, get our start-up engine going again in this country, and it's currently broken, and I want to do that on a global basis, in places like France and India as well. So I'm on to my next chapter, but the fun part in this chapter is that I do the things that I love. >> And you've got a great team behind you, but also, you have a great personal network. And I want to get into that, of your personal stories as well as your social network in business and in the community; but one of the things I want to get up front, because I think this is important for this conversation is, you've been very strong. I've seen you present many times over the years, going way back into the 90's. You're eloquent, you're people-oriented, but you have a knack for finding the waves, seeing transitions, you've been through many waves. >> Yes I have, good and bad. >> Good and bad. But one of the big ones, how do you spot those transitions? And what wave are we in now? I mean, talk about the wave that's happening now, it's unprecedented on many levels, but, different, but it's still a wave. >> It is, and outgoing market transitions and often combined with either economic changes or business model changes with technology. And part of the reason that I've been fortunate to be able to identify many of them is I listen to customers very carefully, but also, you're often a product of your prior experiences. Having experienced West Virginia, one of the top states in the US in terms of the chemical industry, uh, during the 40's and 50's and 60's when I was growing up there, and literally more millionaires in West Virginia than there were in the entire Great Britain. We were on top of the world in the chemical industry, and the coal industry, and yet, because we missed transitions, and we should've seen them coming, the state fell a long way, so now we're trying to correct that with some of the start-up activity we'll talk about later. As you see this, and then I went to Boston, 128, we were talking earlier, Wang Laboratories, the mini-computer era, but I was in IBM first out of the central part of the nation, so I watched IBM and Mainframes, and then I watched them miss on going to the mini-computer, and then miss in terms of the internet. So I was able to see the transitions that occurred in Boston, Route 128, where we were the Silicon Valley of the world, and we knew it, and this unusual area out in California called Silicon Valley, we paid almost no attention to, and we didn't realize we failed to make a transition from the mini-computer era to the pc and the internet era. Then I joined Cisco, and saw the internet era. So part of it is, you're a product of your experiences, and know the tremendous pain that occurs, because Boston 128 is nowhere near what it used to be, so there's no entitlement in this new world out of the thousand high-tech companies that I was associated with, including four or five giants in mini-computers, none of them are really in existence today, so it shows you, if you don't identify the transitions, number one, you're going to have an opportunity to benefit by them, but number two, you sure have an opportunity to get hurt by them. >> And you know, these waves also create a lot of wealth and value; not just personal wealth, but community wealth, and Cisco in particular had a good thing going for them, you know, TCP-IP was a defact-- not even a standard, it was a defacto standard at that time, IBM and these kinds of digital equipment corporations dominated the network protocol. Even today, people are still trying to take out Cisco competitively, and they can't because they connected the world. Now the world's connected with digital, it's connected with mobile, so we're kind of seeing this connected wave globally. How do you think about that, now that you've seen the movie at the plumbing levels at Cisco, you now have been traveling the world, we're all connected. >> We are. And it's important to understand that I'm completely arms-length with Cisco, it's their company to run now, and I'm excited about their future. But I'm focused on the next chapter in my life, and while I think about the people at Cisco everyday, I'm into the start-up world now, so how do I think about it now? I think most of the innovation over the next decade will come from start-ups. The majority of the top engineering students, for example, at a Stanford or an MIT or a Polytechnique in France, which is the top engineering school, I think, in Europe, or at the ITs in India, they are all thinking about going to start-ups, which means this is where innovations going to come from. And if you think about a digital world going from the time you and I, we almost recruited you to Cisco, and then we finally did; there's only a thousand devices connected then when Cisco was founded. Today there are about 20 billion devices connected to the internet; in the future, it's going to be 500 billion in a decade, and so this concept of digitalization combined with artificial intelligence, all of a sudden we'll get the right information at the right time to the right person or machine to make the right decision, sounds complex, and it is. And it's ability to do that, I think start-ups are well-positioned to play a key role in, especially in innovation. So while the first stage of the internet, and before that were all dominated by the very large companies, I think you're going to see, in this next phase of digitalization, you're going to see a number of start-ups really emerge, in terms of the innovation leaders, and that's what I'm trying to do with my 16 investments I've made, but also coaching probably another 50 uh, start-ups around the world on a regular basis. >> And the impact of outside Silicon Valley, globally, how do you see that ecosystem developing with the entrepreneurship models that are now globally connected in with these connection points like Silicon Valley? >> It will partially in parallel, partially, it's a new phenomenon. I sold the movie of Boston 128, as I said earlier, and on top of the world, and there is no entitlement. The same thing's true with Cisco, um, sorry, of Silicon Valley today; there's no entitlement for the future, and just because we've led up until this point in time, doesn't mean we will in 10 years, so you can't take anything for granted. What you are seeing, since almost all job creation will be from start-ups, and small companies getting bigger, the large companies in total will probably not add any head count over this next decade because of artificial intelligence and digitization, and so you're now going to see job growth coming from those smaller companies, if these small companies don't get a forum to all 50 states, if they don't get a chance to grow their head count there, and the economic benefits of that, then we're going to leave whole states behind. So I think it's very important that we look at the next wave of innovation, I think there's a very good probability that it will be more inclusive, both by geography, by gender, and all diversity measures, and I'm optimistic about the future, but there are no guarantees, and we'll see how it plays out. >> Let's talk about your next chapter. I was going to wait, but I want to jump while we're on the topic. JC2 is a global start-up, game-changing start-up focus that you have. What is the thesis? What are you looking for, and talk about your mission? >> Well, our mission is very simple. I had a chance to change the world one time with Cisco, and many people, when I said Cisco's going to change the way the world works, lives, learns, and plays by enabling the internet, everybody said nice marketing, but you're a router company. And yet, I think most people would agree, probably more than any other company, we had the leadership role in changing the internet and the direction going on, and now, a chance to do it again, because I think the next wave of innovation will come from the start-ups, and it doesn't come easy. They need coaches, they need strategic partners, they need mentors as much as they need the venture capitalists, so I would think of as this focusing on disruptive start-ups that get very excited in these new areas of technology, ranging from physical and virtual worlds coming together, to artificial intelligence and automation everywhere, to the major capabilities on cyber security across that to the internet of things, so we're trying to say, how do we help these companies grow in skill? But if I was just after financial returns, I'd stay right here in the Valley. I can channel anybody, VC's here that I trust and they trust me, and it would be a better financial return. But I'm after, how do you do this across a number of states, already in seven states, and how do you do it in France and India as role models? >> It's got a lot of purpose. It's not just a financial purpose. I mean, entrepreneurs want to make money, too, but you've made some good money over the years, but this is a mission for you, this is a purpose. >> It is, but you referred to it in your opening comments. When we were at Cisco, I've always believed that the most successful owe an obligation to give back, and we did. We won almost every corporate social responsibility award there was. We won it from the Democrats and the Republicans, from Condie Rice and George Bush and from Hillary Clinton and President Obama. We also, as you said, made 10,000 Cisco employees millionaires just in the first decade. And we tried to give back to society with training programs like Network Academies and trained seven million students. And I think it's very important for the next generation of leaders here in the Valley to be good at giving back. And it's something that I think they owe an obligation to do, and I think we're in danger now of not doing it as well as we should, and for my start-ups, I try to pick young CEOs that understand, they want to make a financial return, and they want to get a great product out of this, but they also want to be fair and giving back to society and make it a win-win, if you will. >> And I think that's key. Mission-driven companies are attracting the best talent, too, these days, because people are more cognizant of that. I want to get into some of your personal stories. You mentioned giving back. And reading your book, your parents have had a big role in your life--. >> Yes, they have. >> And being in West Virginia has had a big role in your life. You mentioned it having a prosperity environment, and then missing that transition. Talk about the story of West Virginia and the role your parents played, because, they were doctors, so they were in the medical field. The combination of those two things, the culture where you were brought up, and your family impacted your career. >> I'm very proud of being from West Virginia, and very proud of the people in West Virginia, and you see it as you travel around the world. All of us who, whether we're in West Virginia, or came out of it, care about the state a great deal. The people are just plain good people, and I think they care about treating people with respect. If I were ever run off a road at night in the middle of the night, I'd want to be in West Virginia, (both laugh) when I go up to knock on that door. And I think it carries through. And also, the image of our state is one that people tend to identify in terms of a area that you like the people. Now what I'm trying to do in West Virginia, and what we just announced since last week, was to take the same model we did on doing acquisitions, 180 of them, and say here's the playbook, the innovation playbook for doing acquisitions better than anyone else, and take the model that we did on country digitization, which we did in Israel and France and India with the very top leaders, with Netanyahu and Shimon Peres in Israel, with Macron in France and with Modi in India, and drove it through, and then do the same thing in terms of how we take the tremendous prosperity and growth that you see in Silicon Valley, and make it more uniform across the country, especially as traditional business won't be adding head count. And while I'd like to tell you the chemical industry will come back to West Virginia and mining industry will come back in terms of job creation, they probably won't, a lot of that will be automated in the future. And so it is the ability to get a generation of start-ups, and do it in a unique way! And the hub of this has to be the university. They have to set the pace. Gordon Gee, the President there, gets this. He's created a start-up mentality across the university. The Dean of the business school, Javier Reyes is going across all of the university, in terms of how you do start-ups together with business school, with engineering, with computer science, with med school, et cetera. And then how do you attract students who will want to really be a part of this, how do you bring in venture capital, how do you get the Governor and the President and the Senate and the Speaker of the House on board? How do you get our two national senators, Shelly Moore Capito and also Joe Manchin, a Democrat and a Republican working together on common goals? And then how do you say here's what's possible, write the press release, be the model for how a country, or a state, comes from behind and that at one time, then a slow faller, how do we leap frog? And before you say it can't be done, that was exactly what people said first about India, when I said India would be the strongest growing economy in the world, and it is today, probably going to grow another seven to 10%. That means you double the per capita of everyone in India, done right, every seven to 10 years. And France being the innovation engine in Europe to place your new business, you and I would have said John, no way, just five years ago, yet it has become the start-up engine for Europe. >> It's interesting, you mentioned playbook, and I always see people try to replicate Silicon Valley. I moved out here from the East Coast in 1999, and it's almost magical here, it's hard to replicate, but you can reproduce some things. One of the common threads, though, is education. The role of education in the ecosystem of these new environments seems to be a key ingredient. Your thoughts about how education's going to play a role in these ecosystems, because education and grit, and entrepreneurial zeal, are kind of the magic formula. >> Well they are in many ways. It's about leadership, it's about the education foundation, it's about getting the best and brightest into your companies, and then having the ability to dream, and role models you can learn from. We were talking about Hewlett-Packard earlier, a great role model of a company that did the original start-up and Lou Platt, who was the President of HP when I came out here, I called him up and said, you don't know me, Lou, I'm with a company you've probably never heard of, and we have 400 people, but I don't know the Valley, can you teach me? And he did, and he met with me every quarter for three years, and then when I said what can I do to repay you back, because at that time, Cisco was on a roll, he said John, do it for the next generation. And so, that's what I'm trying to do, in terms of, you've got to have role models that you can learn from and can help you through this. The education's a huge part. At the core of almost all great start-up engines is a really world-class university. Not just with really smart students, but also with an entrepreneur skill and the ability to really create start-ups. John Hennessey, Stanford did an amazing thing over the last 17 years on how to create that here at Stanford, the best in the world, probably 40% of the companies, when I was with Cisco, we bought were direct or indirect outgrowth of Stanford. Draw a parallel. Mercury just across the way, and this isn't a Stanford/CAL issue, (both laugh) equally great students, very good focus on interdisciplinary activities, but I didn't buy a single company out of there. You did not see the start-ups grow with anywhere near the speed, and that was four times the number of students. This goes back to the educational institution, it has to have a focus on start-ups, it has to say how they drive it through, this is what MIT did in Boston, and then lost it when 128 lost it's opportunity, and this is what we're trying to do at West Virginia. Make a start-up engine where you've got a President, Gordon Gee, who really wants to drive this through, bring the political leaders in the state, and bring the Mountaineers, the global Mountaineers to bare, and then bring financial resources, and then do it differently. So to your point, people try to mimic Silicon Valley, but they do it in silos. What made Silicon Valley go was an ecosystem, an education system, a environment for risk-taking, role models that you could steal people from--. >> And unwritten rules, too. They had these unwritten rules like pay it forward, your experience with Lou Platt, Steve Jobs talks about his relationship with David Packard, and this goes on and on and on. This is an important part. Because I want to just--. >> Debt for good is a big, big issue. Last comment on education, it's important for this country to know, our K through 12 system is broken. We're non-competitive. People talk about STEM, and that's important, but if I were only educating people in three things, entrepreneurship, how to use technology, and artificial intelligence; I would build that into the curriculum where we lose a lot of our diversity, especially among females in the third, fourth, fifth grade, so you haveta really, I think, get people excited about this at a much earlier age. If we can become an innovation engine again, in this country, we are not today. We're not number one in innovation, we're number 11! Imagine that for America? >> I totally agree with ya! And I don't want to rant and waste a lot of time, but my rants are all on Facebook and Twitter. (both laugh) Education's a problem. It's like linear, it's like a slow linear train wreck, in my opinion, but now you have that skills gaps, you mentioned AI. So AI and community are two hot trends right now. I'm going to stay with community for a minute. You mentioned paying it forward. Open source software, these new forms of operational scale, cloud computing, open source software, that all have this ethos of pay it forward; community. And now, community is more important than ever. Not just from the tech world, but you're talking about in West Virginia, now on a global scale. How does the tech industry, how can the tech industry, in your opinion, nurture community at local, regional, global scale? >> This is a tough one John, and I'd probably answer it more carefully if I was still involved directly with Cisco. But the fun thing is, now I represent myself. >> In your own opinion, not Cisco. There's a cultural thing. This is, Silicon Valley has magic here, and community is part of it. >> Yes, well it's more basic than that. I think, basically, we were known for two decades, not just Cisco, but all of the Valley as tech for good, and we gave back to the communities, and we paid it forward all the time, and I use the example of Cisco winning the awards, but so do many of our peers. We're going to Palestine and helping to rebuild Palestine in terms of creating jobs, et cetera. We went in with the Intels of the world, and the Oracles and the other players and HP together, even though at times we might compete. I think today, it's not a given. I think there is a tug of war going on here, in terms of what is the underlying purpose of the Valley. Is it primarily to have major economic benefits, and a little bit of arm's length from the average citizen from government, or is it do well financially, but also do very well in giving back and making it inclusive. That tug of war is not a given. When you travel throughout the US, today, or around the world, there are almost as many people that view tech for bad as they do tech for good, so I think it's going to be interesting to watch how this plays out. And I do think there are almost competing forces here in the Valley about which way should that go and why. The good news is, I think we'll eventually get it right. The bad news is, it's 50/50 right now. >> Let's talk about the skill gap. A lot of leaders in companies right now are looking at a work force that needs to be leveled up, and as new jobs are coming online that haven't been trained for, these openings they don't have skills for because they haven't been taught. AI is one example, IOT you mentioned a few of those. How do great leaders, proactively and reactively, too, get the skills gaps closed? What strategies can you do, what's the playbook there? >> Well two separate issues. How do they get it closed, in terms of their employees, and second issue, how do we train dramatically better than we've done before? Let's go to the first one. In terms of the companies, I think that your ability to track the millennials, the young people, is based upon your vision of doing more than quote just making a profit, and you want to be an exciting place to work with a great culture, and part of that culture should be giving back. Having said that, however, the majority of the young people today, and I'm talking about the tops out of the key engineering schools, et cetera, they want to go to start-ups. So what you're going to see is, how well established companies work with start-ups, in a unique partnership, is going to be one of the textbook opportunities for the future, because most companies, just like they didn't know how to acquire tech companies and most of all tech acquisitions failed, even through today. We wrote the textbook on how to do it differently. I think how these companies work with start-ups and how they create a strategic relationship with a company they know has at least a 50/50 probability of going out of business. And how do you create that working relationship so that you can tap into these young innovative ideas and partnerships, and so, what you see with the Spark Cognition, 200 people out of Texas, brilliant, brilliant CEO there in terms of what he is focused on, partnering with Boeing in that 50/50 joint venture, 50/50 joint venture to do the next FAA architecture for unmanned aircraft in this country. So you're going to see these companies relate to these start-ups in ways they haven't done before. >> Partnership and collaboration and acquisitions are still rampant on the horizon, certainly as a success for you. Recently in the tech industry we're seeing big acquisitions, Dell, EMC, IBM bought Red Hat, and there's some software ones out there. One was just going public and got bought, just recently, by SAP, how do you do the acqui-- you've done 180 of them? How do you do them successfully without losing the innovation and losing the people before they invest and leave; and this is a key dynamic, how do companies maintain innovation in an era of collaboration, partnerships, and enmity? >> I had that discussion this morning at Techonomy with David Kirkpatrick, and David said how do you do this. And then as I walked out of the room, I had a chance to talk with other people and one of them from one of the very largest technology companies said, John, we've watched you do this again and again; we assumed that when we acquired a company, we'd get them to adjust to our culture and it almost never worked, and we lost the people at a tremendously fast pace, especially after their lock-in of 18 to 24 months came up. We did the reverse. What we did was develop a replicatible innovation playbook, and I talk about it in that book, but we did this for almost everything we did at Cisco, and I would've originally called that, bureaucracy, John. (both laugh) I would've said that's what slow companies do. And actually, if done right, allows you to move with tremendous speed and agility, and so we'd outline what we'd look for in terms of strategy and vision; if our cultures weren't the same, we didn't acquire them. And if we couldn't keep the people, to generate the next generation of product, that was a bad financial decision for us, as well. So our attrition rate averaged probably about 5% or over while I was at Cisco for 20 years. Our voluntary attrition rate of our acquired companies, which normally runs 20% in these companies, we had about four. So we kept the people, we got the next generation product out, and we went in with that attitude in terms of you're acquiring to be able to keep the people and make them a part of your family and culture. And I realize that that might sound corny today, but I disagree. I think to attract people, to get them to stay at your company, it is like a family, it is like how you succeed and occasionally lose together, and how you build that family attitude under every employee, spouse, or their children that was life-threatening, and we were there for them in the ways that others were not. So you're there when your employees have a crisis, or your customer does, and that's how you form trust in relationships. >> And here's the question, what does People First mean to you? >> Well people first is our customer first. It means your action and everything you do puts your customers and your people first, that's what we did at Cisco. Any customer you would talk to, almost every customer I've ever met in my life would do business with us again, or with me again, because your currency in today's world is trust, track record, and relationships, and we built that very deep. Same thing with the employees. I still get many, many notes from people we helped 10 or 15 years ago; here's the picture of my child that you all helped make a difference in, Cisco and John, and you were there for us when we needed you most. And then in customers. It surprises you, when you help them through a crisis, they remember that more than when you helped them be successful, and they're there for you. >> Talk about failure and successes. You talk about this in the book. This is part of entrepreneurship, you can't succeed without failures. Handling failures is just as important as handling successes, your thoughts on people should think about that from a mindset standpoint? >> Well, you know, what's fun is those of you who are parents, or who will be parents in the future, when your child scores a goal in soccer or makes a good grade on a test, you're proud for them, but that isn't what worries you. What worries you is when they have their inevitable setbacks, everybody has that in life. How do you learn to deal with them? How do you understand how much were self-inflicted and how much of it was done by other causes, and how they navigate through that determines who they are. Point back to the West Virginia roots, I'm dyslexic, which means that I read backwards. Some people in early grade school thought I might not even graduate from high school much less go to college. My parents were doctors, they got it, but how I handled that was key. And while I write in the book about our successes, I spend as much time on when disaster strikes, how you handle that determines who you are in the future. Jack Welch told me in the 90's, he said John, you have a very good company, and I said Jack, you're good at teaching me something there, we're about to become the most valuable company in the world, we've won all of the leadership awards and everything else, what does it take to have a great company? He said a near-death experience. At the time I didn't understand it. At the end of 2001 after the dot com bubble, he called me up, he said, you now have a great company, I said Jack, it doesn't feel like it. Our stock price is down dramatically, people are questioning can I even run the company now, many of the people who were so positive turned very tough and--. >> How did you handle that? How did you personally handle that, 'cos--. >> It's a part of leadership. It's easy to be a leader when everything goes well, it's how you handle when things are tough, and leadership is lonely, you're by yourself. No matter how many friends you have around you, it's about leadership, and so you'd lead it through it. So 2001, took a real hard look, we made the mistake of focusing, me, on the numbers, and my numbers in the first week of December were growing at 70% year over year. We'd never had anything negative to speak of, much less below even 30% growth, and by the middle of January, we were -30%. And so you have to be realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much the market, I felt the majority of it was market-inflicted, I said at the time it's a hundred year flood. I said to the employees, here's how we're going to go forward, we need to bring our head count back in line to a new reality, and we did it in 51 days. And then you paint the picture from the very beginning of what you look like as you recover and in the future and why your employees want to stay here, your customers stay with you and your shareholders. It wiped out most of our competitors. Jack Welch said, John, this is probably your best leadership year ever, and I said Jack, you're the only one that's going to say that. He said probably, and he has been. >> And you've got the scar tissue to prove it. And I love this story. >> But you're a product of your scars. And do you learn how to deal with them? >> Yeah, and how you-- and be proud of them, it's what, who you are. >> I don't know if proud's the right word. >> Well, badge of honor. (both laugh) >> Red badge of honor, they're painful! >> Just don't do it again twice, right? >> We still make the same mistake twice, but at the same time when I teach all these start-ups, I expect you to make mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you're not taking enough risk. And while people might've, might say John, one of your criticisms is that you spread yourself a little bit too thin in the company at times, and you were too aggressive. After thinking about it, I respectfully disagree. If I had to do it over, I'd be even bolder, and more aggressive, and take more risks, and I would dream bigger dreams. With these start-ups, that's what I'm teaching them, that's what I'm doing myself. >> And you know, this is such a big point, because the risk is key. Managing risk is actually, you want to be as risky as possible, just don't cut an artery, you know, do the right things. But in your book, you mention this about how you identify transitions, but also you made the reference to your parents again. This is, I think, important to bring up, because we have an expression in our company: let's put the patient on the table and let's look at the problem. Solving the problems and not going out of business at that time, but your competitors did, you had to look at this holistically, and in the book, you mentioned that experience your parents taught you, being from West Virginia, that it changed how you do problem solving. Can you share what that, with that in conscience? >> Well, both parents were doctors, and the good news is, you got a lot of help, the bad news is, you didn't get a lot of self 'cos they'd fix you. But they always taught me to focus on the real, underlying issue, to your point. What is the real issue, not what the symptom is, the temperature, or something else. And then you want to determine how much of that was self-inflicted, and how much of it was market, and if your strategy's working before, continue, if your strategy was starting to get long in the tooth, how do you change it, and then you got to have the courage to reinvent yourself again and again. And so they taught me how to deal with that. I start off the book by talking about how I almost drowned at six years of age, and as I got pulled down through the rapids, I could still see my dad in my mind today running down the side of the river yelling hold on to the fishing pole. It was an ugly fishing pole. Might've cost $5. But he was concerned about the fishing pole, so therefore I obviously couldn't be drowning so I focused both hands on the fishing pole and as I poked my head above water, I could still see him running down. He got way down river, swam out, pulled me in, set me on the side, and taught me about how you deal when you find yourself with major setbacks. How do you not panic, how do you not try to swim against the tide or the current, how you be realistic of the situation that you're in, work your way to the side, and then you know what he did? He put me right back in the rapids and let me do it myself. And taught me how to deal with it. Dad taught me the business picture and how you deal with challenges, Mom, uh, who was internal medicine, psychiatry, taught me the emotional IQ side of the house, in terms of how you connect with people, and I believe, this whole chapter, I build relationships for life. And I really mean it. I think your currency is trust, relationships, and track record. >> And having that holistic picture to pull back and understand what to focus on, and this is a challenge for entrepreneurs. You're now dealing with a lot of entrepreneurs and coaching them; a lot of times they get caught in the forest and miss the trees, right? Or have board meetings or have, worry about the wrong metrics, or hey, I got to get financing. How should an entrepreneur, or even a business leader, let's talk about entrepreneur first and then business leader, handle their advisors, their investors, how do they manage that, how do they tap into that? A lot of people say, ah, they don't add much value, I just need money. This is important, because this could save them, this could be the pole for them. >> It could, or it could also be the pole that causes the tent to collapse (both laugh). So I think the first thing when you advise young entrepreneurs, is realize you're an advisor, not a part of management. And I only take young entrepreneurs who want to be coached. And as I advise them, I say all I'm asking is that you listen to my thoughts and then you make the decision, and I'll support you either way you go, once you've listened to the trade-offs. And I think you want to very quickly realize where they are in vision and strategy, and where they are on building the right team and evolving the team and changing the team, where they are in culture, and where they are on their communication skills because communication skills were important to me, they might not have been to Jack Welch, the generation in front of me, but they were extremely important to ours. And today, your communication mismatch on social media could cost your company a billion dollars. If you're not good at listening, if you're not good at communicating with people and painting the picture, you've got a problem. So how do you teach that to the young players? Then most importantly, regardless of whether you're in a big company or a small company, public or private sector, you know what you know and know what you don't. Many people who, especially if they're really good in one area, assume that carries over to others, and assume they'll be equally as good in the others, that's huge mistake; it's like an engineer hiring a good sales lead, very rarely does it happen. They recruit business development people who appeals to an engineer, not the customer. (both laugh) So, know what you know, know what you don't. For those things you don't know, surround yourself with those people in your leadership team and with your advisors to help you navigate through that. And I had, during my career, through three companies, I always had a number of advisors, formal and informal, that I went to and still go to today. Some of them were very notable players, like our President Clinton or President Bush, Shimon Peres, Henry Kissinger, or names that were just really technical leads within companies, or people that really understood PR like Thomas Freedman out of the New York Times, or things of that. >> You always love being in the trenches. I noticed that in Cisco as an observer. But now that you're in start-ups, it's even more trenches deeper (laughs) and you've got to be seeing the playing field, so I got to ask ya a personal question. How do you look back at the tech trends that's happening right now, globally, both political, regulatory technology, what advice would you give your 23-year-old self if you were breaking into the business, you were at Wang and you were going to make your move; in this world today, what's going on, what would you be doing? >> Well the first thing on the tech trend is, don't get too short-term focused. Picture the ones that are longer term, what we refer to as digitization, artificial intelligence, et cetera. If I were 23 years old, or better yet, 19 years old, and were two years through college and thinking what did I want to do in college and then on to MBA school and perhaps beyond that, legal degree if I'd followed the prior path. I would focus on entrepreneurship and really understand it in a lot more detail. I learned it over 40 years in the business. And I learned it from my dad and my mom, but also from the companies I went into before. I would focus on entrepreneurship, I'd focus on technology that enables entrepreneurship, I would probably focus on what artificial intelligence can do for that and that's what we're doing at West Virginia, to your point earlier. And then I would think about security across that. If you want really uh, job security and creativity for the future, if you're a really good entrepreneur, with artificial intelligence capability, and security capability, you're going to be a very desired resource. >> So, we saw you, obviously networking is a big part of it. You got to be networking with other people and in the industry, would you be hosting meet ups? Young John Chambers right now, tech meet ups, would you be at conferences, would you be writing code, would you be doing a start-up? >> Well, if we were talking about me advising them? >> No, you're 23-years-old right now. >> No, I'd just be fooling around. No, I'd be in MBA school and I'd be forming my own company. (both laugh) And I would be listening to customers. I think it's important to meet with your peers, but while I developed strong relationships in the high-tech industry, I spent the majority of time with my customers and with our employees. And so, I think at that age, my advice to people is there was only one Steve Jobs. He just somehow knew what to build and how to build it. And when you think about where they were, it still took him seven years (laughs). I would say, really get close to your customers, don't get too far away; if there's one golden rule that a start-up ought to think about, it's learning and staying close to your customers. There too, understand your differentiation and your strategy. Well John, thanks so much. And the book, Connecting the Dots, great read, it's again, not a business book in the sense of boring, a lot of personal stories, a lot of great lessons and thanks so much for giving the time for our conversation. >> John, it was my pleasure. Great to see you again. >> I'm John Furrier here with the People First interview on theCUBE, co-created content with Mayfield. Thanks for watching! (upbeat electronic music)

(techy music) >> Hello, everyone, I'm John Furrier, here in theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto for a special CUBE Conversation. Breaking news here in Silicon Valley and at Cisco Systems. News around Cisco partnering with Amazon Web Services, and here to talk about it is Fabio Gori, senior director of cloud solutions marketing at Cisco. Good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hello, John, how are you doing? >> So, big news, Cisco and AWS collaborate to accelerate innovation. A first kind of its kind of announcement. Love the pioneering aspect of this announcement. Obviously Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud provider who's been into hybrid cloud lately because they've been talking about that as their connection point into the enterprise. You guys are the leader in the enterprise at networking and other services. I don't even know how much market share you have these days, but you guys pretty much own the enterprise. Everyone kind of knows that. This deal with Amazon, you guys are doing the first hybrid Kubernetes on AWS. Talk about the announcement, what's the, why is this so important to Cisco? >> So, you named it, the solution name is actually a bit of a mouthful, but you mentioned the three keywords: is hybrid, is Kubernetes, is AWS, and this is the first solution of this kind that really integrates these two environments in a way that will be exceptionally beneficial for organizations that want to accelerate their innovation path, which ultimately means delivering applications faster without having to worry about constraints in terms of where to develop, where to deploy. This will really set them free to take their decisions. >> You know, one of the things we've been speculating on theCUBE a lot around cloud... There's been tons of debates, hybrid cloud, private cloud, multi-cloud, public cloud. All this stuff's been going on. One thing that's been very clear is the public cloud has demonstrated speed, agility, faster time to value, and for app developers that's been great. Cloud native, if you're born in the cloud it's just a great environment. If you've been on-premise and you had that legacy and/or existing pre-cloud environment, that trend has been more toward cloud operations, so not so much everything's moving to the cloud, although, you know, Andy Jassy would love to see everything move to Amazon, and that's his goal, but stuff stays on-prem, it's going to be for a while, but the cloud operations on-premise is essentially cloud but on-premise. So, that's this new hybrid dynamic. This is what enterprises have been re-imagining their infrastructure on. This is where a lot of the energy has been. How does that, that your solution for Kubernetes with Amazon, solve that problem? Does it help customers get to the cloud faster? Is it an operating model? Explain the nuance of how customers-- >> It's fundamentally all of that. If you think about it, and your introduction is spot-on, is customers really want to use the public cloud, right? The services in the public cloud, why? Because it gives them speed. I think that's a big change that we've seen since, I would say a few quarters, right, where people started really trading off speed and innovation for cost, right? Originally it was like, "I want to shut down my data center. "The cloud is going to be cheaper." Well, it's not about cheaper, it's faster, and people want to develop new digital experiences, which boils down to building applications faster. So, what ultimately they want to do is making the infrastructure on-prem looking like a bit more like the public cloud. Now, it's never going to be just like the public cloud with all the bells and whistles and innovation, but it's got to be such that you can actually take the best innovation of the public cloud, Kubernetes first, to the on-prem, rather than the other way around, right? That's our North Star, that's our belief, and Kubernetes is clearly a big winner in the container market. The way to develop new applications is based on containers. Kubernetes is the orchestrator right now in the marketplace. Every single big cloud provider has launched Kubernetes-based services in various forms, and so the enterprises are now looking at businesses of every size. They are trying to figure out how to really develop this capability on-prem, because in the end, as you know, it's never kind of black and white, right? We're still working with mainframes, long life to the mainframes. Going to be around for 20 years, probably. We're going to have traditional databases, ERP systems and the like for a very, very long time. What do you do, right? Everything that you develop new in the cloud needs to ultimately connect back to the existing systems because that's what you need. >> So, the simplicity of this is interesting. I want to just rewind that for a second. So, you're taking the best of Amazon, the container service, and alas, a container service with Kubernetes, bringing, making that available on-premises through the Cisco container platform-- >> Correct. >> So, this is the linchpin, so it's almost like-- >> Correct. >> You're not trying to take Cisco and say, "Oh, we're cloudified." >> Correct. >> You're taking the Cisco environment, which everyone runs, and some people think it runs great and-- >> Correct. >> They're not going to change that overnight, (chuckles) but you now enable them to take what they're doing here and make it compatible with the cloud and on-ramp to the cloud? >> So, the idea is fundamentally not so much taking EKS on-prem, that's not the thing, but the idea is having a container platform that fundamentally gives you pretty much a transparent way of interacting with the other side, and when I say transparent I really mean the linchpin of the solution, which is around the identity and authentication, right? What we've done that really differentiates this, that makes this so unique right now is that we have integrated IAM, you know, identity and authorization, sorry, and authentication in common. So, you're going to use the same set of keys on both sides, which of course is a developer dream because you don't have to use different type of keys in authentication models if you're a user. It's the same thing, and it's a dream for IT operation, because of course this is much simpler, as well as for the CSO and the security team. This makes it extremely secure, reduces the risk so that you have really a very consistent, integrated kind of solution, which is good-- >> So, there's engineering involved on Cisco's side. Can you elaborate on-- >> Actually, it's been a collaboration between the two sides, so-- >> Okay, explain, explain the partnership. >> So, absolutely, it's actually a collaboration. So, we've been collaborating to build this integrated architecture, right? It is a Cisco solution, but developed in collaboration with AWS, right, and so what we've been doing is fundamentally looking at how EKS was going to available to the container platform-- >> Mm-hm. >> Right, so that you'll be able to fundamentally orchestrate your containers in the most efficient way, regardless of where the containers actually end up being, which is actually what we're hearing from customers. Customers want to just take the containers that are coming from the developers and be free to develop whatever they want. Sorry, to deploy whatever they want. >> So, the containers are key here. So, the container service-- >> Yeah. >> And Kubernetes, which orchestrates containers, works across with the identity layer allows for, what, seamless interaction? Is that the key for developers is that I can... Take me through a quick use case. Explain it with an example. >> I don't know, you may take a new application in the banking, on the banking side, or you can take some new artificial intelligence kind of applications, or machine learning. What you fundamentally can do now is deciding, well, first of all what kind of tools you want to use. Do you want to use the AWS cloud with all the development tools, do you want to use yours? It doesn't matter, at the end there is an endover between the developers and the IT operations team, and the IT operations team, now with this solution, can fundamentally, quickly and easily provision clusters wherever they want, right, and they do it on the basis of their specific parameters, their specific goals, what do you want? It could be cost, it could be security, it could be reliability. Whatever it is, right? >> Mm-hm. >> It doesn't matter, this is not about the religion of whether it's public cloud or on-prem. It's just using the best of both worlds and deploying wherever it makes sense. >> You know, Andy Jassy and I always talk when we, at re:Invent. He always comes back to the same refrain, he always hits the same notes: "We listen to our customers, we're driven by the customers. "They take us where we want to go." >> Yeah. >> I know Cisco's been very customer-centric as well. How is the customers' reaction? What have they been telling you around why the solutions to develop... I mean, because we know Shadow IT's been going on with Amazon-- >> Yeah. >> For, you know, almost a decade. They put their credit card, they sneak up on Amazon, build some stuff, and look how easy, and then bring back to the IT department saying, "Hey, look what I did in the cloud, now you implement it." "Whoa, we've got network policies." So, there's been kind of that kind of tension, kind of R&D, if you will-- >> Yeah. >> But it's still happening. That kind of goes away here with this kind of announcement. How is the customer needs been profiled as you look at the announcement? What's the key reasons why they want this solution, and why did Amazon glob onto it, because they're not going to do something unless-- >> Yeah. >> It's a customer need. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that. >> Well, I would say, you know, it's really meeting the customer where they are, right, and again, we have two environments that, you know, have been inspired by different kind of criteria, right? There's a lot about application modernization, there's a lot about security, all about compliance on-prem. Of course the cloud is also very secure. I think we're over these kind of artificial discussions, but as AWS will say, it's a shared responsibility model, right? They guarantee the security of the cloud, and you're responsible for the security in the cloud, and so ultimately what people want to have is how can we actually integrate these two worlds in a consistent fashion, right, so that I have a consistent environment. That's really the keyword here, consistent environment where I have comomino networking between these things, wherever they are, comomino securing them, including authentication, identity and authentication, comomino monitoring this application, because the alternative is building another silo, and that's what people don't want to do. >> Mm-hm. >> Right? If I add another silo I may add innovation, but it comes to a very high cost. >> Yeah. >> People want to add innovation without disruption. They want to have this consistency and just extend the way they do things, of course going into a devops model and getting faster and faster, because that's the way to compete. >> Now, I think IT operations is an area, with the development enablement you guys have had, and with the work you guys have been doing DevNet and DevNet Create, this notion of programmability-- >> Yeah. >> You're right in line with the wave that everyone wants to ride, which is lower the cost of mundane tasks and/or scripts and things of that nature, command line interface, that's kind of like a hodge podge, make the network programmable and automate, and make the developer freer to do better things seems to be the trendline, so with that in mind, does this fit that horizontally scalable vision of the cloud? Do you see this having impact into say network sales, application, where's the key impact points for the customer, what impacts them? >> It's a huge impact, right, and depends whether you're taking like a tactical view of things, like literally application by application, or classes of application, or you're really thinking about where is this trend kind of taking you, right? Now, if you take the former kind of approach, then you're starting kind of identifying a whole bunch of different issues, like again, for instance the security one. The networking one is huge, right? People go, I don't know, Office 365 and they get disappointed. Why, because all the traffic gets tromboned through the data center because that's how things were. >> Choked them. >> Right? Now you're completely changing the application on top, and you discover that the infrastructure underneath hasn't been designed to accommodate those kind of traffic flows-- >> Yeah. >> Right, and so you're starting solving problem by problem. The fact of the matter is with the rise of the cloud the infrastructure and the processes in IT need to change altogether. Its infrastructure, its processes with of course the rise of devops, its relentless automation, right, potentially driven by, you know, more and more machine learning, and you know, AI kind of capabilities unfold. >> Just talk about that, because this is a big discussion, because I'm interviewing a lot of CIOs or CXOs or senior IT practitioners, and the ones that are successful are the ones who recognize the wave. Some people take different steps, they'll experiment, they'll do some tests. Some will just go all in and revamp, but they all recognize the one point. They've got to re-architect and re-imagine-- >> Yeah. >> The It infrastructure-- >> Yeah. >> Up and down, and the cloud is a big force and function-- >> Yeah. >> A role of data, programmability, automation. Now new concepts in some cases. Containers we all have been around for a while, but how do you guys talk to your customers, because this is something-- First of all, do you believe in that, and two, what do you talk to your customers about when you're saying, "Look, the hard truth "is how we got here is not how we go forward." >> Absolutely, well, you know, there are different ways. You can either boil the ocean, or for instance you take a solution like this. If you take a solution like this, you can actually sit down and discuss how to build a solution and architect a solution like this in collaboration with AWS. It took establishing four key principles, right? The first one has got to be hybrid, right, which means you need to strive to build this consistent environment between the two domains. Second, it has to be production-grade. We're speaking with customers adopting Kubernetes. They're saying that they get to a point where they need to integrate 20 opensource tools. Now, I wonder whether that's going to take you anywhere over the long term once you scale, you know, your operation. Can you actually do it with that kind of approach? Third, and this is a big one, you have to be able to manage this new hybrid reality, managing not just the new apps, but the old apps as well, and fourth, it's got to be extensible. You're starting from, like-- >> Yeah. >> Containers and authentication, how about everything else, right? How about cloud management and orchestration? How about application performance management, because now apps are getting everywhere, and of course, you know, that's probably the next episode of theCUBE that we can do together, they're going to the edge. >> (chuckles) Yeah. >> So, it's getting very, very complicated. So, even with a simple, well, "simple" example like this, you're starting seeing some principles that you need to establish, and that should inspire how you actually transform your infrastructure and operation. The worst thing that you can do is taking a tactical approach and just going step-by-step, and then, you know, move by move. >> Well, let's definitely do that CUBE. A couple of segments we'll have to do more of a deep dive with some slides. Certainly the edge is going to be a big point, but I want to ask you the impact to your customer base, because I think this is a game-changing announcement. I mean, Amazon Web Services, they don't do a lot of Barney deals. They don't do, you know, a lot of deals that look good on paper. They're very specific about how they do their business development, so it's a huge win for them, I think, and for you guys, but I think Cisco customers are going to be impacted, so please explain the impact to Cisco customers. What does it mean to me, I'm a Cisco customer. I've got routers, I've got switches, I've got UCS servers. I got all kinds of stuff in there. How does this impact my life, what changes, do I throw away gear, do I buy new gear, do I buy software? How do I buy the service, am I buying Amazon, do I have to now... Explain all that, how does the customer engage with the solution, and what's the impact to their environment? >> Well, that's a very big question. (laughs) Let me frame it a little bit, right? First of all, how are they impacted? They're impacted by the cloud altogether, right, and very often they're using multiple clouds, so we know it's multiple services, so they need to start thinking in terms of those principles that we said before. From a company standpoint, of course we've been well known over the last 30, 35 years, right, not to leave everybody behind. We're trying to, of course, accommodate the change of the infrastructure, and for instance, how do you move from CLI to more programmability through, for instance, you know, the rise of IBN, which is the intent-based networking where you have more policy-based models that help you fundamentally automate in the network, whether it's about, you know, connecting your data centers or connecting your branches, you have to fundamentally adopt more and more automation into your strategy, and so what we're doing is we're fundamentally helping customers making this kind of transformation. You mentioned DevNet, I think that's like the tip of the iceberg of also a new Cisco wave, right, where it's all about, if you want, transforming the talent that's been working with us in the company and outside the company, and having them taking it to the next level where instead of, you know, going classic CLI you're more and more kind of thinking in an automated fashion, because you have to get fast. The only thing that really matters is getting faster. >> I noticed you guys aren't just... Give you guys a lot of props here because you guys have a lot of meat on the bones with this announcement. Simplifying container orchestration with the Cisco hybrid solution for Kubernetes on AWS. You know, Linux Foundation wants to see it that way, Amazon's that way, but you guys have a lot of code up and running on the Sandboxes, and for the folks watching, developer.cisco.com/aws. developer.cisco.com/aws. You already got Sandboxes up already. >> Absolutely. >> Five labs for cloud native, you got the EKS-- >> Yep. >> Cloud thing up and running. >> Yeah, and we'll continue adding more and more material. The cloud is a different world, right? People want to experiment it, and by the way, if you think about how we're packaging and pricing the solution, you can actually start in a very modular way, right? You can just go with the software if you want, or you can buy the software and the hardware underneath. You can go with one, three, or five years. You can get demos of the solution. If you want, it's a different way of experimenting Cisco, but we're there. I mean, we made the change. We're totally for adding a softer motion to an already strong kind of hardware component that has been traditionally our strength, and if you think about it, having the full stack we can do some magic. If you buy Cisco software, like this solution, and then you put in Cisco hardware, such as HyperFlex and ACIR data center infrastructure-- >> Yeah. >> That a lot of customers are using you get fundamentally greater performance, you get a single number to call-- >> Yeah. >> Which is actually great. >> You know, it's interesting Fabio, and I talked with Lou Tucker years ago and then, well, continue to talk to him every year, as well as Susie Wee, and we see this on the cloud native, born on the cloud side, IT doesn't exist in a lot of these cloud native companies because the developers do all the IT, so you guys are seeing a surge in DevNet and DevNet Create where the Cisco ecosystem, your customers are turning into developers naturally-- >> Absolutely. >> And so we've seen that shift at Cisco-- >> Yeah. >> And that has happened internally. You guys recognize that the developer ecosystem, not the cloud native, but the application developers and-- >> Yeah. >> That your command line interface guys-- >> Yeah. >> And gals are turning into developers because-- >> Absolutely. >> Slinging code these days is pretty straightforward. >> Absolutely, if you look at our, actually my friend Susie Wee and how she is pitching this change. She talks about DevNet ops, others talk about DevSec ops. Whatever that is, you know, whatever kind of terminology you're using, it boils down to the same concept. You have to automate the way that you manage the infrastructure, right? >> Mm-hm. >> Infrastructure needs to become more responsive and faster. You can open five or six trouble tickets just to provision, you know, a container to a developer that's not going to carry it in the future. >> Yeah, it's kind of against them. >> It's got to be fast. >> Yeah, and then, you know, making the network programmable is the devops movement that's coming 2.0. >> Absolutely. >> And you guys are aware of, I know you are. It's interesting to see how Amazon relates to that. When you talk about that to AWS, what's the conversation like? Do they like, they obviously get it, and they're smart, they must get it immediately. >> I mean, absolutely, the reason why we're having this collaboration is very simple. I mean, they get the same requests from the customer. We're fundamentally speaking to the same people. Yeah, there may be differences sometimes, you know, the developer versus the IT operation, but in the end it boils down to the request, "Hey, you know, the public cloud is fantastic, "but I also want to have a solution for on-prem," right? "I have my needs," and if you're not totally burned into the cloud you have to, you want to have investment protection. You want to have, you know, your on-prem environment for whatever reason, right, and it's not about religion, it's about economics, it's about, you know, viability of certain solutions and the likes. >> Well, great news, congratulations. Fabio, great announcement with Amazon Web Services, good deal, hybrid cloud. Now, you guys, also at Cisco, you guys aren't married to one cloud, so I've got to ask the hard question. With impact to Google, Microsoft, you guys have relationships. How does this match up from an integration standpoint with other clouds? Is it deeper, is it more coming on the other clouds? Can you just kind of give us a description of the evolution of Cisco with the other clouds in this hybrid architecture? >> You know, I want to stay true to one of the principles that we mentioned and we orbited around this conversation, right, for the last 15 minutes, and that is we're customer-centric, right? Customers want to use the clouds that they want to use, we're there to help them, right? Now, AWS is of course, if you look at the share it's a pretty big market leader, but we will work with all the providers that our customers want to use. That's actually the North Star that we have. Now, if you look at the kind of, if you want, products or stacks or architectures, you will see that there is a huge degree of commonality across all of this, right? So, we're using kind of the same baseline software, but configuring slightly different ways for a, different way, for a simple reason, right, because the clouds are different, and not just the clouds are different, the cloud providers are different. So, we're paying full respect, you sit down, you discuss objectives, and then you actually go after those goals. >> Yeah, you just got to get out there and do those... You got to just do the work and integrate in. >> So, you have to expect a slight degree of integration-- >> Yeah. >> Because of the nature of the cloud business and the cloud providers, but I think when you look from a customer standpoint, what they want and what they're asking Cisco to do, they want to have commonalities. >> Mm-hm. >> Right? They want to have the same mean of networking, the same mean of securing these environments. They want to have the same way of extracting analytics, especially for application performance, and they want to have comomino managing and orchestrating all of these resources because the alternative is fundamentally getting lost into different tools and different clouds that by design cannot work in other environments, and so that's what customers want, and that's what we're pursuing as a company. >> Fabio, talk about the announcement in terms of just summarizing it real quick. You talked to a lot of customers, you've been doing press tours all day today, analysts, financial Wall Street, all the whole nine yards. Now you're here on theCUBE. What's the summary, what's the big walkaway looking back now after the announcement? Talk about the impact, what is this about? What is actually happening in your mind? How are people reacting to it, how big will this be? >> You know, I have two things in mind when I give myself that kind of question, right? The first one is I have this concept in my mind of making Kubernetes the engine of your innovation, right? This is about really transforming this new container orchestration technology that sounded esoteric until (chuckles) a few months ago into the cornerstone of the innovation, right? We've been talking about hybrid for a long while, but we believe that it's about mostly taking the best of the public cloud and making it work on-prem, rather than going the other way around, that's for sure, and I would say in general is this is a big first step into closing that gap between the infrastructure and the applications, which is kind of by definition closing the public cloud, but when it comes to the on-prem world we're still pretty far away, right, and so clearly there's a lot of competition in the marketplace, and we want to win that battle to close this gap, and closing that gap means fundamentally enabling customers to innovate and developing their new digital experience faster, and that's actually the nature of their business. >> Yeah, and they get value. >> It's not an IT conversation anymore, it's a business. >> And the value extraction and creation from new applications, and I think you've got to give credit to the Kubernetes community, because what's great about Kubernetes and then watching that evolve. We were there-- >> Yeah. >> theCUBE present at creation when it started, you know, hanging around OpenStack and all the different activities around the Linux Foundation before it went there, was that you had containers obviously happening, but the industry got behind kind of a defacto standard. >> Yeah. >> We've seen this before, TCPIP sounds like one of those things that just became a defacto standard and then it became a standard-- >> Well, another example with Linux itself, right? I mean, once, you know, big companies started going behind it and offering enterprise cloud support we saw really very, very rapid ramp-up. I think we're seeing the same with Kubernetes. I think now there are a bit less doubts about where the world is going. This is a clearly a winner, and people, I think, are now-- >> Yeah, and it's clear you guys are getting behind it. It's just Amazon doesn't do deals, like I said, unless it's a serious thing, so congratulations. You guys are getting behind Kubernetes. >> Yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Yeah, thank you for that. >> All right, Fabio Gori. Here inside the studio with Cisco, breaking down the hot news, game-changing news, Cisco's partnering with AWS with Kubernetes to really bring a level of industry standard and seamless integration between on-premises and the cloud, and excited to keep bringing you more action. Coming up we're going to be at the CNCF event, Kubcon, check us out there and also Amazon re:Invent, theCUBE will have multiple sets there. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for this CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (techy music)

(upbeat inspirational music) >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier in the Palo Alto Studios for Cube Conversation. I'm here with David Link who's the CEO of ScienceLogic. David, thanks for coming in. Good to see you. >> Great to be here, John. >> So, thanks for coming in. You came in from D.C., that's where your headquarters and ScienceLogic, you guys are having good business run right now. You're self-funded early on, now you get to venture back. Take a minute to explain how you guys got started, what does the company do? >> So, this is the classic story of entrepreneurship. We started in the garage. Myself and a couple of co-founders believed that IT management operations was broken and it was broken because a lot of the industry had really focused on having silos of data, the silos of data, the network, the application, the security, the storage, now cloud, containers and every technology had its own data silo of manageability. We believe that that was intrinsically wrong to understand how the service that combined all these different applications and technologies was behaving. We wanted a service view, so we brought it all together, kicked off, really the first seven years we boot strapped the company, the first year and a half we coded, got the product to market, it grew very quickly, got to the Inc. 500 a couple times, and then we attracted a lot of financing options. We had about 250 companies approach us. We never made one outbound call and fortunately, we had some really great and strong investors in EA, then Intel Capital, and three and a half years ago, our last round of financing was with Goldman Sachs and they've really been a great catalyst to help us continue our growth over the last five years. I think we've grown about 540% on the revenue side, so it's been an exciting time. >> Well congratulations. It's always a good success story to be a hot deal when you don't have to make any calls, they come to you. >> Yes. >> And that's good, that's part of growth, but I got to ask you what year did you start the company up? >> 2003. >> So, it's not obvious then, it's obvious to you as a visionary, but now people now know IT operations is broken. Cloud highlights it in a big way. The lights get turned on, the cockroaches are running around, but web services were still booming at that time. You start to see the beginning of the whole web services movement, you guys saw this early. Now, it's well recognized that IT operations can be automated away and Cloud certainly has an automations vibe to it. AI has been a big part of the AI operations. Is this kind of where you guys started with that vision? Was the original vision kind of where it is today? Take us through kind of what you saw and what's happening today. >> So, thematically we have this next wave of the computer architecture, Cloud computer architecture, edge computing where the way you manage that kind of infrastructure is different than the classic client server. There are different needs, different requirements, and that thematically has led with the change of infrastructure. Applications are changing and applications are now more infrastructure-aware. When we started the company, usually applications sat on one system or a cluster of systems and they weren't widely distributed. So now that the applications profile is changing, the architects are changing to microservices, that really puts huge strain on our industry. The industry, the total adjustable market, is about 25 billion dollars a year annual spent on tools. John, if you can imagine that. 25 billion a year is spent. It's going through an amazing, I would say, tectonic shift because why? Infrastructure's shifting and as more people move workloads to the Cloud into what I would call ephemeral workloads where they're moving around, that causes all kinds of pressure on the systems and record to manage that so that you understand what is happening at this moment in time. Where is it? What Cloud is it running on? How's the application performing? And you really need to tie the application to the infrastructure real-time. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. I interviewed a CIO this past week for a big company. I won't say the name 'cause we haven't published the video yet, but he told me candidly, he said that, look it, we outsourced everything and we outsourced our way into oblivion and what he meant by that was is that the core competency of IT, and he reference the book, Nick Carr, IT Doesn't Matter, which kind of was true, but wasn't true. Now, IT has a competitive advantage and essentially, they had this anemic IT department that was outsourced and they lost their competitive advantage, so he's like the reinvestment in IT is more than ever now because of Cloud, because of these new environments. So, I kind of believe that to be true. I'm sure you do too, but the reaction really is is you've got a lot of Legacy vendors that were dictating how to do things. >> Yes. >> I'm IBM, I'm Oracle, you got to do it this way and you were kind of constrained, IT was constrained by that. Now, you got to be much more agile, you have workloads that are dynamic, provisioning, orchestration, this is a whole new dynamic. What's the impact to the IT buyer, the IT environment with this new model, this new modern dynamic, new modern era? >> When you think about CIOs and CEOs, the pressure that they have to be Cloud first. Cloud first is such a strong... At the Board level, there's pressure. The adoption of Cloud now is happening faster and more rapidly than the adoption of virtualization, maybe it's doubling in the speed in the time warp, but what that means is that most CIOs are dealing with as many as nine to 11 Clouds, not one. You have a federation of Clouds: Private Clouds, public Clouds, software as a service Clouds, and that's your IT landscape, so it's changing so quickly that you have to think of it in a more federated approach. That means that the way you used to manage your private systems, and now your public systems, are really different and you've got to look at them more holistically because often they're communicating with one another in hybrid architectures. So, that's really the heart at our mission, to provide the context of how all the services you're trying to deliver as a CIO are behaving. What's their availability? What's the risk of the service having a problem? And knowing that real-time is ultimately what you want to do with your Cloud first strategy, but you need the right tooling operationally to affect that kind of outcome for your team. >> So, what's the core problem that you guys are solving? 'Cause obviously, there's a lot of complexity now, it's a new environment, so I still got the baggage of some Legacy environments. Is it monitoring you're solving? I guess, what's the core problem is my question that you guys are solving? If you had to kind of finish that, the core problem is blank. >> The core problem is visibility. The Holy Grail is application to infrastructure and the problem is that's becoming so complicated because everything is moving around. The more abstraction layers where it's a container, which is abstracted on top of a virtual machine, which is on top of bare-metal server. SD-WAN is an abstraction on top of an MPLS network. So, you have all of these layers that get from a software-defined perspective, they get abstracted away from the actual equipment that it's running on. Well, when that happens, where is the problem? Because it's moving around. The problem isn't in one place. So, that application to infrastructure awareness, it's almost like one of the things that we've looked at in the world of Facebook. You've got a lot of relationships, you've got videos, you've got friends, you've got all these different connections that are constantly moving around with data streams. What we do as a company is pull all these different data streams from the technologies themselves, from the Cloud providers, from the application layer, pull it together in a data hub that we can then understand how they all relate to one another so you can really, truly understand service impact and that is the crux of the problem most companies are dealing with now. You've got to fight with your Legacy, 'cause you still have that and it's not going away tomorrow, so you've got to make sure you're good at that, you've also got Cloud, the Cloud first initiative, and then you've got in between systems that are using both. That's really where we play. We're really good at the Legacy, we're good at Cloud, and connecting the two together and that is a really tough space because most Legacy providers really didn't get good with managing hyperactive ephemeral Cloud estates. The guys who started over the last five years building tools to manage the Cloud are really good at Cloud, but they don't cover Legacy. They're not going to cover a net app or hyper-converge, typically. So, we combine the both, Legacy and Cloud together in one management system, monitoring management paradigm, and then there's an automation engine where we actually proactively remediate problems real-time. So, the three together is where algorithmic operations, AI Ops, comes together. >> David, I want to dig into the offering, but before we get there, I want to get your thoughts on two trends: one is multi-Cloud. Recently, we've seen a lot of hybrid Cloud discussion, but now the big hubbub is multi-Cloud and the other one is AI Operations. So, I've been saying on The Cube, everyone who's in IT Operations is screwed, going to get automated away by AI. It's kind of tongue in cheek, but it's kind of a reality is that those old business models that were based upon certain service levels are going to be done in software. Now, you've got multi-Cloud. So, first question is what is multi-Cloud definition that you have for that? What does it mean? What is multi-Cloud? >> In our world, multi-Cloud is... Most large organizations use more than one Cloud and half of that is driven by what Cloud is best to operate a particular application profile? Amazon's really good at a lot of application profiles, but Azure might be better at certain Microsoft profiles, and then Google has profiles, and IBM Watson has profiles. Depending upon what you're trying to do with the application, where it was born, how it's living, how it's been re-factored, you're going to use one Cloud or the other, but most customers that we see have many Clouds. There really isn't one Cloud management scape when you're using... Vendors are still reasonably proprietary in the public hyper-scales. >> Some are better than others. >> And some are better. It depends on the use case. So, we try to bring all that together so that you're not looking at four panels, you're looking at one. >> So, you make it easy with one dash port. Okay, AI Operations. This is a hot trend, a lot of venture capitals are funding companies that have AI Ops in it, machine-learning obviously booming, no doubt software automation is coming. I'm seeing it everywhere. What does that mean? What is the definition of AI Operations? I mean, I'm bombastic at saying the industry sectors is going to crumble. I kind of think it will, but it will shift, but what is the impact to IT Operations with AI and what is AI Ops? >> We like to think of it as a life cycle. So, when you look at the life cycle of operations you have at the beginning of the life cycle, provisioning, so when we think about algorithmic, there's many different layers of automation: machine learning, cognitive learning, and you're going to use different parts of algorithmic operations for different parts of the life cycle. So at the very beginning, you're going to connect generally to a provisioning system so you know what's been provisioned or de-provisioned so we can automatically align a manageability template because nobody can be on a keyboard now, John. This has to be all machine to machine. So, once then it gets provisioned, then there's the run operate part and how do you learn from the normal operating conditions that you're looking for? The anomalies that you would look for to detect things aren't behaving appropriately? And then, once you understand those anomalies and the patterns, you can remediate them proactively, adding resources, decreasing resources, changing configurations, those are the things that kind of that last tier, and then that final tier, when there is a problem, if there is a problem, you've got to then raise a ticket, you've got to then work through the incident management of that ticket so there's another multi-step layers of automation to the incident management orchestration layer of solving problems, closing out a ticket. So, we have so many different layers across that life cycle that we plug into, most of which are native to our core platform. >> And your secret sauce is managing all the workloads that are moving around really fast, so to complicate that even further, you've got a lot of stuff moving around to track it all. I love what you said about not typing on the keyboard anymore, but essentially I'll translate that from what I heard was command line interface of CLIs has been the primary mechanism for dealing with either network and or storage, which is moving packets from here to there and moving storage from now to then, storing stuff. So, CLI is moving to a programmable model? This is the big takeaway. So, I totally think this is the mega trend. The command line interface mode of operation is moving to programmable, which hits your run and operate. >> Correct. >> This is the mega trend. Your thoughts? >> It is and that's one of the layers of complication because instead of a CLI, it's an API, and it's usually a restful API or a graph API. Those APIs are very different in construct and instead of talking to one device, that one device is virtualized into a hundred or a thousand and so with one API call, you actually create a thousand devices versus one device and understanding how one system is behaving, like a CLI would be to one system, right? So, that is a layer of complication where when we make an API call, we break it up into hundreds of things that then we track and understand the tenancy of what is a multi-tenant nature of that? What is the organization? What is the service view for all these little components that are part of one API call? And that abstraction layer makes it really difficult for the enterprise because the one thing about our API economy right now, there is no standard. Every vendor chooses their own formats for their products and in some cases, many formats for products in a product family. So, that layer of complexity, John, is what we're really solving for. The customer doesn't have to worry about that. We take care of that for them, but you're right, the API has become the CLI and it's just a level of complexity beyond what most enterprises are wanting to deal with themselves. That's why they bring us in to help. >> That is so important too that the data's in the API. >> That's right. >> That's key and Cloud's got orchestration challenges, state and state-less applications. All right, let's get into ScienceLogic's offering. So, what do you guys provide to customers? Talk about the product. How do you guys deliver it? Is it software, is it Cloud, is it service, is it appliance? Take us through the offering. What's the key secret sauce? How do people buy and use your product? >> So, our product's delivered as a service. You can use it in the Cloud. We deliver it as a service in our Cloud, but we also provide it if customers are using Amazon or IBM or Google or Microsoft. They can put our product, same code-base, same product, they subscribe to it, it's a subscription license model, so it's a pay-as-you-go and you pay for the number of devices that are under management. Typically, there are some customers, whether it's in the government, financial services, or international locations where they might want to deploy our product on premise, so we offer the same mode, either in the Cloud or on premise, but most customers now are choosing to deploy the product in the Cloud and that is a really easy... It's easy to get >> That's good for you guys. >> It's great for us because there's consistency of operations, we can keep everything up to date, and most customers want technology delivered as a service. They just want it to work. They want it to solve the business problem and do it easily, efficiently, even better, solve complex problems in an easy format. >> Give some customer examples or benefits or anecdotal stories around customers that have used your service that extracted benefits and value out of it, and second part of that question is when does someone know they need your product? What are the smoke signals? Is something breaking or is it just pain? When do they know to call you guys? So first one is customer examples or stories and then how does someone know who's watching this, hey I might need these guys? >> There are four segments that we cover. We have customers all over the world. There's enterprise customers. This is really a product for large enterprise, Fortune 1000 companies, so Clorox would be a customer, Hughes Satellite would be a customer, Cisco Systems out here in the valley is a customer, Dell, EMC, so it depends on what problem we're trying to solve for the customer. >> So large IT deployments basically? >> Very large, multinational, big networks, hundreds of thousands of devices, tens of thousands of devices is where those companies have immense complexity, lots of heterogeneous technology that comes together to deliver a service. They need a really robust solution to manage that proactively. So, enterprise customers, service providers, so a lot of managed service providers, infrastructure service providers, Telcos, they all use it, so I think we have about 60% of the infrastructure as a service providers use our product to deliver managed services to their customers and then the federal government all over the world, we have government customers around the world. I think right now about 70,000 organizations use our product every day and it's fairly evenly split, AMIA and AsiaPac, and then the US is our biggest market. >> You know, it's interesting you mention heterogeneous. I always kind of smile because you mentioned client server earlier. Every wave has their reflection point and I think what's going on with Cloud and I'd love to get your reaction is that Cloud, where it's winning, is it's a scale out, large scale, pool of resources. We look at what's going on with Amazon, all this, is that you don't need to know what service they have, just get more servers, so you're scaling out. >> Yes. >> But now, you need to have heterogeneous components. It's not just X-86. You could have a GPU, you have other stuff, AI going on, so heterogeneous is different now, but it's still the same came, it's still complex, it needs to be abstracted away. Is this kind of the key area that you're riding on? Is that right? What's your thoughts about that concept? >> Well to a large degree, John, the Cloud providers have really provided a layer for you to not have to worry about that, but we've seen customers actually with hyper-converged environments that they build in-house and or systems that they built because of geo-fencing in different countries that need the data kept in the country. There are requirements that drive people to build their own system, so the real thing that we're seeing a tremendous struggle with right now is that context, understanding what connects to what. All the different technologies that come together, all the heterogeneity that comes together to deliver a service, and whether you buy best in class technologies to solve one part of the stack, the landscape of whether it's your load balancer or a caching server or the database or the server, the network, all those different components, the security layer, those components that come together, often people have chosen specific technologies to solve those problems. The Cloud kind of abstracts that away with they hyper-scalers, but often you're putting infrastructure that you have on prem combined with infrastructure in the Cloud to deliver an aggregate solution so that multi-tiered architecture, just like back in the day, a three-tiered architecture, we're seeing those emerging again with public Cloud because you might want the data that actually generates the information on the web client's side to be in your data center, but you still have to understand how the service is behaving. So, we really look at all layers of the stack to solve the problem and that's really hard to do. >> Well David, great to have this conversation. Before we end, I want you to get a quick plug in for the company. How many employees, offices? What's the revenue like? What's your goals? You don't have to share the revenue if you don't want to, but if you want to, you can. Give a plug for the company. What's happening? >> Well, I'm really proud of what the team's done. We've got a great team of employees, about 370 employees today, full-time, they're spread all over the world, probably 80% are here in the Americas and the vision for the company, we think that this is a big opportunity. We are far from done. We really started the company to disrupt the industry 'cause the industry, as I said, was a silo industry and it really is, 20 years later, it's still that way. It's not really converged into a unified solution. We have great aspirations. Every year we've been growing the business 40, 50% a year for the last several years, and this year, we'll round over 100 million within the next 12 months of our run rate, so it's an exciting time for the company. >> Well, you've got a great model, SAS, in a massively growing and changing market, complex market, heterogeneous networks, apps are all being abstracted away and automation's driving this, so I think it's a perfect storm of innovation. Congratulations and thanks for chatting on The Cube here in Palo Alto. >> Love to be here, John. Thanks for having me. >> John Ferrier here, Cube Conversation, and we're here with David Link, CEO of ScienceLogic, and also the founder. Self-funded, big venture rounds, growing like a weed, based in D.C. This is the Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (dramatic inspirational music)

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit New York 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in New York City for AWS Amazon Web Services Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick here for wall-to-wall coverage here for the one day event. Our next guest is TK Keanini, distinguished engineer at Cisco. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> We had some chat on before they came on camera about protocols, deep-packet inspection, networking. I see Cisco now, moving up the stack. I'm sure, back in the day when you were there and recently, that's been the big debate for Sysco of the stack but the cloud has created a whole new stack, right, so a lot of action. Seems like the same movie from a couple generations ago happening out in real time at a much more accelerated rate, welcome to theCube, what's your toughs? >> Thank you so much, yeah, you know, anybody who's been in this business for the last 20-25 years, I always joke and say, you know, same circus, different clowns. You know, it's the same thing again and it's exciting because I mean, you saw the keynote, the people here, everybody's excited about doing develop on this new thing. It's got new economics, new scale, it's definitely got more security, I think, and yeah, we're just really moving aggressively with our customers towards the future. >> You know, TK, I want to get your thoughts 'cause one of the thing we've been saying on theCube, we've been covering Amazon reinvent since 2012, 2013 timeframe and so we've seen the growth but it's always been a developer haven, you know, cloud native, you were born in the cloud, like most startups were back in the day, you had great goodness and then you could become a drop box and be so big you had to do your own data so I get that but for the most part developers check small, medium sized businesses, check now large enterprises, great developers. Now, you're getting clear visibility on operators. So the confluence between operators of networks and infrastructure and IT operations merging together and having some synergy and cohesiveness with developers for applications, new work loads. What's your thoughts on that because this is really becoming the big ah-ha moment where I can now operate now at a level and have a developer haven going on, your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, so I think you heard it in the keynote today, security is everybody's problem, right? And it certainly is the developer's problem, it maybe even starts with the developer. You know, threat actors are clever, you could say that threat actors were the first to go cloud first and they're not ashamed of what they use, they're going to get what they want and so you know, the idea of providing security as a service to those developers is a new thing I will say. Usually I'm building product and service for the security expert. Now, it's this web app developer, right? And their first question to me is "where's the API?", right? "Where's my libraries", right? How can I treat you like I treat storage, like I treat networking? They don't want to grow up and become a networking expert, they just want to have their application scale and so that's the real focus is, understanding the customer and building that service at the highest quality. Much of the expertise, I have to mechanize inside of my algorithms and my machine learning but again, delivering them a service so that they can protect and become incredibly expensive for those threat actors to pursue. >> And the alternative in the old days was provision a lot of hardware, do a lot of configuration management, security audits, meeting, put up a perimeter, now you can create sets of services. >> Yeah, and a lot of automation, right? That's key. Like, you don't have enough people to test. You have to automate your tests. You don't have enough people to read over documents, you have to automate that acquisition. Everything's about augmentation and automation. Security, all aspects of security are following suit. >> Yeah. >> TK, I wonder, you talk a lot about the threat-act revolution, through some other interviews and that's really an recurring theme because it's kind of your way of saying how you have this kind of have this arms race but the other big thing that's happened in the threat act is that it's gone the hacker, maybe trying to cause a disruption to nation states and much more organize. Is that as evolved in the amount of resources that they now have to deploy versus just some stand alone hacker? Have have you seen that evolve, what are some of the responses? >> Yeah, I still get goosebumps thinking about it. 'Cause back when we started it was more like, you know, we were just sharing a craft, you know. It was a lot like amateur radio, you know? You broke into something, you shared that skill, not anymore. I mean these are real, a nation state, threat actors, criminals and they're running a real business, okay? >> Right. And if you do really good security, you're essentially adding to their cost of operation and they don't like that. So it is really a business against a business. And they think like a business. They're well resourced like a business, they're patient and sometimes you know, in certain cases going after the weak, in some cases they're incredibly targeted, they're coming after you because you are a center of excellence for that sector and it doesn't matter, you know, how high you build the wall. They're going to find a way to go under it (laughs) or go around it or find a way to declare no wall but yeah, it's fun because like I said, instead of waiting for something to fail, like a hard drive or you're just building IT systems for resiliency, in my world, these threat actors are talented. >> Right. Right? So everyday if intervene, I force them to intervene. If they intervene, they force me to intervene. That's funny you say they're running a business, so is that part of your defense is just increasing their cost of goods to hold in a major, major way? >> It really is, you know, we've seen a lot of trends shift. For instance, you know, Ransomware a little while ago, that was a big deal because you know, they'd hold your machine hostage, it'd cost you $200 maybe $300 to get out of it, okay? The problem with that is tomorrow their gig's up, okay? Now the shift has been to cryptomining or cryptojacking. If they compromise your machine and can get a quarter out of that machine just by doing Bitcoin mining, they will essentially make 25 cents tomorrow, so they've shifted to a recurring revenue stream, okay? This is important, okay? >> Right, right. >> Because tomorrow and the next day and the next day, they're still undetected, okay? And when I say about raising their cost of operations if you can find that cryptomining on your network, no matter where your network is and shut them down, you've just taken a little bit away from their recurring revenue stream, right? And that's the dynamics we're facing daily. >> Disruption is key. Making it complex and keeping disruption. >> Having more visibility than they do, having more detection than they do and basically knowing yourself better than they do. >> Right. >> Is absolutely critical. >> I want to hear your thoughts, TK, on a couple things. One observation is you know, during the Snowden era, you know, the mainstream population and world whether it's capital markets or IT, didn't talk much about "metadata", but then after Snowden, "metadata" became a big thing and we now know what metadata is and now obviously with the Russian involvement in the election, spearfishing is now, I mean its been out there, but you're seeing specifically what was done there with spearfishing, so easy to pull off. >> Yeah. >> How are we getting better at detecting, preventing, against the humans who just think oh hey, a job offer for you, or a real elegant bait and certainly with mobile, doesn't have that DNS visibility, mobile makes it easier to do some spearfishing. Spearfishing is a big deal. >> Yeah. >> Your thoughts on it? >> Yeah, and that's again, that big trend in shift is a long time ago, you know, we built security systems to watch for people breaking into networks. Today, the threat actors are logging into your network 'cause they've already gotten your credentials through some means, okay? So how do you detect somebody who's actually impersonating you on the network? The same sort of security bells are not going to ring. And this applies for a cloud or on pram, or anything. >> Right, right. >> It's the same game and really, you know, being able to do that detection from the telemetry that comes native from then environment is critical. >> And so really just more analytics, more telemetry, more instrumentation? >> It's not about the data, it really is about the analytics. I mean, yes the telemetry has to be necessary and sufficient but the analytical outcome has to be pointed at exactly that, you are trying to detect fraud, you are trying to detect. You know, it's like in the old days, if I gave you my general ledger, right, and you were an accountant, you would just be looking for errors. Okay, that's fine for operation but say you're trying to cath a crook. I hand you that same general ledger, you're going to come at it with a different pair of eyes. >> Right. >> A different mental model. You're trying to find the crook. >> Right. >> Who is actively hiding from you. That's the type of analytics we're focused on. >> So this is interesting, talk about machine learning, and AI could be assist you mention, automation, Stealthwatch Cloud is something that you've mentioned. What is that, what's going on around there, how do you get that lens to be turned on quickly in context? 'Cause real time is about contextual relevance. >> That's right. >> At any given moment you've got to be ready alert and looking for things. >> So the beauty of AWS is they can deploy in any one way. You can have your virtual servers, you can have the containerized, or you can be serverless. That's the thing, the cool kids are doing serverless, okay? >> Right, right. >> You have to provide the same level of threat analytics for all three, no matter what. The good news is, it's not about not having the data. AWS gives you a rich set of telemetry from many, many sources. What we do is first synthesize all that together, run our analytics on it and point out where you may be exposed or there are threat activities that's either, maybe even from the inside, not necessarily from the outside, you know, in your Snowden account but there's anonymous activity that requires attention. All of those things, all that developer wants to do is make sure that they you know, delivered to their customers. Business continuity. >> Right, right, yeah. >> They're not interested in security. >> TK, I've got to ask you the question around security around you know, can you see the papers, so you know, Pat Gelsinger, Cube alumni, now CEO of VMware, said on theCube, Dave Vellante co-host theCube, asked him years ago "is security a do-over with the cloud?". This was back when the cloud was being poo-pood as a security mod, oh it's not secure in the cloud, now it's looking damn good, right, so. >> And now it's more secure, I think, yeah. >> Now it's more secure, and yeah, that's pretty clear. >> Yeah. >> So there's a chance for people to get a mulligan, get a re-do, to rethink security. How do you engage conversations and how do you advise friends, colleagues, customers around if there's a chance to do security over, with a no-perimeter model, with a API microservices centric view. Whats the strategy, what's the architecture, what's the approach? >> Yeah, you know, I don't know, there's a couple of cases, it's not a one size fits all. We have a lot of successful businesses transitioning and they really can't turn their back on yesterday, you know, they have to bring that transition forward. >> Right. >> So there's that one crowd and they're going to have a different playbook because they have a set of skills and a set of things that are different. On the other end of the extreme, you have businesses that don't know on print, I mean, honestly, they were born in the cloud and their cloud made it. >> Yeah. >> And then you have most of everybody who is in between, you know, hybrid, multi-cloud, they're just doing, but functionally they're all trying to achieve the same thing which is, you're trying to get the elastic economics, you're tying to get parts of their business that elastic to that elastic compute, right? But all-in-all, the treat actor doesn't care whether they come in through your mobile device or through that cloud workload, they're after something very specific, which is, there's something in your organization, in your digital business that they want. >> So a couple of thing I want to follow up with. One is kind of the changing world of identity and security because of firewalls and you know, the walls have got to come down, they've got a lot of holes in them. You know, so much more focus on who are you? But to your point, oftentimes they're coming in as you, so the identity maybe not necessarily is a great way. >> That's right. >> Then you've got this other thing which is basically pattern detection, right, and online detection, right and we hear over and over that the average time to know that you've been breached is months and many, many days. So, how are you kind of factoring in those two things to do a better job? >> Yeah, and it is accretive, meaning there are net new ways of establishing identity. For instance, you know, if this thing is acting like a printer and its acted like a printer for the last ten years and one day that device gets up and starts checking out source code, that's a problem, (laughs) right? Okay, so there's all these sort of things around novelty and around the dimensions of novelty. It may be a volumetric novelty, it might be a protocol novelty, in serverless, I'll give you an example with serverless. We treat serverless as a first-class object, as if it actually was persistent and if it makes a very novel API call that it never did before, I think you should probably know about that. >> Yeah. >> If it starts to exfiltrate 20 gigs of data and never did that before, you probably should take a look at that, right? And these are all things from a DevOps standpoint, they want to know first, certainly. You know, there really is no excuse in cloud for you to be like "oh, I wouldn't have been able to know that", no, you can, 'cause it's all there. >> Right, right. >> And microservices in containers provide great value here. >> Incredible value, incredible value. And just again, that dynamic nature of that orchestration, you know, that orchestration brought us to basically a way where, you know, me as a developer, I used to know exactly where I was going to run and how long I was going to run and everything. I have no idea where my code runs anymore, right? And that's the case here and so security takes a completely different turn there because a lot of things that in your analytics were things that you needed to persist, those things are gone, everything's ephemeral now. So what if I wanted to run a report for ten years? Like what in that ten years stayed the same? Probably nothing, okay? So you actually have to use a lot of algorithms to say that heres a composite type of set of data features and if these things persist over time, it's kind of like the way humans work. >> Right, right. >> TK, great to have you on theCube, thanks for joining us, thanks for sharing your insight. Real quick, you're giving a talk for Cisco here? >> Yep. >> Which you're doing in a, working the hallway, give an update. >> Come join me at five o'clock, I think, it's going to be on self-launched clouds, so it will be a great talk. >> Self-launched cloud, again, thanks for coming out to Cisco Systems. >> Alright, thanks. >> And of course we're covering all the Cisco action at DevNet and Cisco Live just recently and DevNet create the cloud native portions of Cisco, and we're going to dissect TK here on theCube. Breaking it down, I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, stay with us, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: From Copenhagen, Denmark, it's the Cube. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the Cube's exclusive coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon 2018, part of the CNCF, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, I'm John Furrier cohost of the Cube, here with my cohost this week Lauren Cooney, the founder of Spark Labs. Got two great guests in the industry here, Lew Tucker, the CTO of Cloud Computing for Cisco Systems and Aparna Sinha who's the group project manager for Google Cloud, thanks for coming on, great to see you guys. >> Great to be here >> Thanks for having us. >> So obviously the two big players, you've got networking, you've got moving up the stack and Google Cloud with all the goodness you have hundreds of people here at this show. Cloud native big, you're cloud native, >> Aparna: Yeah. >> You guys are running the networks a lot of stuff's happening, but the big story's the Kubernetes de facto standard position that's been echoed by many people here, Kubernetes tightly controlled core with a lot of innovation going on around Kubernetes. >> Aparna: Yes. >> When I hear words like de facto standards, it reminds me of the old networking days when the OSI model and the TCPIP was forming. Massive shifts at that point. >> Lew: Yeah, yeah. >> Almost a seminal moment now. >> Yeah but in fact I think in open source it's a different notion than in the old days of standards. Here we've got multiple communities, multiple companies that are working together to create a common platform and that's what I think the success of open source is about. So actually, Kubernetes coming into CNCF has really makes that possible and we just graduated it so we should have a celebration around Kubernetes now has graduated in terms of a CNCF project. >> Yeah and you know one think I would say about de facto standard, I don't take that for granted. Kubernetes is built as a platform that runs anywhere across on premises, data centers, public clouds, runs anywhere but, you know that it will be or is a de facto standard is something that we don't take for granted. We make sure in the community that we're working on increase support for, for example different types of storage with a storage interface standard, different types of networking, with a CNI different types of run times, so establishing those interfaces and establishing those standards is key to making it the platform. But that's certainly the potential of Kubernetes is to be-- >> Yeah I mean it's not the end game, it's the beginning. >> Aparna: It is. >> And the nurturing and making sure that ecosystem with thrive is important. And that's why I want to get your thoughts, 'cause you've got Google and Cisco here so lets talk about first the relationship, you guys are working together. >> Lew: Absolutely, yeah. >> Talk about the relationship between Google and Cisco. >> Sure, I think it came about because we're both recognizing that enterprises for example are incorporating cloud computing as a part of their overall IT strategy. And so they needed to find a way, how can they actually make that happen without companies that are working in both of those areas getting together. So it's very natural I think for the two of us to sort of come together because this way we can take our enterprise customers and using Kubernetes as sort of the foundational platform make it so that they can run applications wherever they want, they can run it in their private data center they can run it in Google Cloud, and we can make this now, to provide a lot of the networking so that you can extend private networks into Google Cloud and vice versa, so I think it's a marriage made in heaven in that way. >> Aparna you're reaction to the partnership. >> Yeah, you know, Google is a very developer friendly, developer focused company, always has been, you know the majority of Google is actually developers so it's a company for developers by developers and you know with Google Cloud actually the irony is we're also a networking company and so there's a nice affinity working with Cisco. Our DNA is very much open source, there's multiple projects that have come out of Google that have been very successful open source projects. I mean Tenser Flow, Kubernetes I think is unique in that we've really created and participated and built a community around it and so with this partnership, we're really excited to have Cisco also be part of the community, certainly with Kubernetes but also the Istio Project. And a lot of the projects in cloud native have come from Google's experience running services at global scale. Kubernetes certainly came that way from the Borg heritage and then Istio also from, from what we call one platform, internally to manage service. >> That's a great point, you brought up scale and it's interesting, it's almost like you have two large scale companies here, you have Cisco with massive scale footprint of enterprises from day one, routers you need to move packets around the internet. You guys have built scale for Google with millions of services out there, millions of users, I mean it's unprecedented. So now as you come into the enterprise, the Cisco relationship is an opportunity to blend the best of Google with the footprint at Cisco, how is that going to work, how's that working and what's the vision? I mean obviously it's a nice match, you've got a great footprint in the enterprise, you've got massive scale with the cloud, bringing that in, moving it out, hybrid cloud obviously, is that the? >> Yeah well we often notice for example as I sort of said, the foundational piece is actually running Kubernetes everywhere and so we just recently announced a Cisco container platform which is based on Kubernetes, that means that enterprises now can develop applications in Google Cloud and then run them in their enterprises or vice verse and then on top of that and we're adding in the networking capabilities, through things such as CSR and things like that to allow us to connect both the enterprise and their public cloud running Kubernetes and then Istio as we're mentioning is this thing on top and I'm, as you know, a big fan of where that really is going to take us because I think one of the things that enterprises want to be able to do is that they want to be able to consume services out of Google Cloud, whether it be in kind of terms of the data services or increasingly AI, intelligence service, Tenser Flow, be able to use as a part of their enterprise applications and so I have within my team for example contributed both in terms of what we're doing in terms of Istio, Kubernetes, I've got people on my team who are bringing for example IPB6 into Kubernetes, that's important because, guess what, service providers also want to move into a container world. And then also Cube Flow and so all of these things are starting to come together so that you can start building applications as an assembly of these services and many other services that I will see coming from the public cloud and Google in particular. >> Aparna, I want to ask you, because this is important to distinguish this Istio trend because we asked a lot of people at the Cube here and in our reporting, okay what's next after Kubernetes? If you have a de facto standard, you have stuff coming around it, an eco system, everyone talks about service mesh and Istio project. >> Aparna: Yeah. >> Now the best thing about infrastructure as code which is dev ops in the cloud is you can make things programmable and automate, so if you look at what Istio's doing, it feels like an application benefit but also an automated networking concept with services. >> Aparna: Sure. >> So you got kind of a new dynamic going on where a lot of dynamic things are happening a lot of services are being provisioned, maybe for the first time. >> Aparna: Yeah, yeah. >> So how do you instrument it? This is going to be a future area of innovation. >> So again going back to that standard, right? That platform that runs everywhere, why is it a standard, why is it becoming a standard and I hear this from our customers, our users, it's because they don't have to train multiple times for multiple different environments, they can really scale their workforce, they can hire people that they trained up in Kubernetes and they can scale that workforce so it applies regardless of where they go and it gives them that mobility and if you think about the eco system around Kubernetes right so Kubernetes is one project, a major big project but then the eco system around Kubernetes has really exploded in the last year it has gone from 4000 projects to 15000 projects and I was looking through those projects and seeing you know, which are the ones that have the most stars and there's actually three projects that stood out as having more than 3000 stars but being new, like in the last year and Istio was at the top of that list and obviously it's very popular in terms of the number of stars but it's only one year old and I don't know how much people know that. >> And I think it's interesting, 'cause I'm going to throw kind of a curve ball here at you and say, you know I'm hearing that the service mesh is actually, people are using it. >> Aparna: Yes. >> But it's actually hasn't been deployed into production, is that the case? >> Aparna: It's starting to be. >> Okay. >> So on GKE, Google Kubernetes Engine we've got customers that are deploying Istio, it's starting. >> Lauren: Okay. >> Again it's a one year old project and then also on premise, using the open source and we've got a program called the EEPE program it's like an early program, they're deploying and using Istio and it tends to be a very nice attach to Kubernetes. >> So what is the use case for that? >> One of the things to understand, it is very new and less than a year old, we're not even at a one dot out yet but the components that go into it, Envoy for example has been battle tested because Istio's made up of, just to get technical, in terms of having proxies that make up the data plane and that's battle testing or whatever. So now we're adding a control plane on top of that, where policy, telemetry, observability, all of that comes to the fore. That's what's new. So bringing that together and so people have and Istio's not the only service mesh, service meshes have actually been made up of these proxies and have you manage them, Istio's just seems to be a better way to the community is agreeing-- >> A proxy can be very inefficient, so I want to just ask a question on that because one of the things that I'm trying to understand is for the average person in tech, not the inside baseball, they're trying to understand why is Istio so powerful. >> Aparna: Yes. >> So is there, what paid points are they solving? >> The easiest way to think about that is we've moved to a microservices architecture and that's so that every development team can focus on their particular area of expertise, they don't want to have to learn networking and everything else, so what we've done is we've offloaded all of the issues around how do you do load balancing, circuit breakers and telemetry off to a service mesh, that allows the developer to dramatically increase their productivity because they're only focused on their one application area and now the operations team brings that together through the networking concept. >> Aparna: Yes. >> So they built a distributed application without having to know very much about the specificity. >> Yes, it's very much that separation of concern and you know Kubernetes has the same principle, it separates you know the infrastructure from the applications and what Istio does, it allows you to manage those applications at scale, visualize them, make them secure and to control them in a scalable way, so you're not writing the service management pieces into the application and the developer is therefor freed from that burden and the application operations team can then manage things like distributing certificates or rotating certificates, right? Those are things you need to do across all of your services. >> So you're bringing us on that system and I know you guys run at scale, hundreds of thousand of services, if not more, I don't know what the number is, millions whatever it is. >> Aparna: Four million containers. >> Tons. >> Aparna: A week! >> So when you talk about that, what I'm hearing and I've talked to the SRE, site reliable engineers before, the roll of the admin is gone to more of an operator and then the operator role is less of an operating, 'cause it's operating only on exception, 'cause if you got policy in the control plane, that seems to be where the action is, is that, am I getting that right? How do you explain that notion of less admin, more operational kind of-- >> There is a change in roles, the administration of the application is not so application specific if you will, right? And I think the best analogy to it is the way we do development at Google, everybody is a developer right? And they write their services but there's a lot of common infrastructure that you do not replicate so for example storage, monitoring, logging, you know publishing your API, you know quotas, rate limiting, chargebacks, billing, all of that is common infrastructure, you write your service, it is immediately using all of that infrastructure, you don't build those things into your application and that has so many benefits, you know you can write your service and it can be global. >> So on time savings, no brainer, automation-- >> And when you change any one of those services that has a monitoring or anything, now you don't have to tell the application development team that that change is happening. >> So this is infrastructure as code, passes the test right? You can program the infrastructure. >> This is services, this is a services world, rather than infrastructure world or an application siloed world, this is the world of services, that's really what we're here for. >> What's the growth in microservices? I'm seeing different stats, can you just give an order of magnitude, just from your own personal experience in looking at the market, how fast is the notion of microservices growing? 'Cause this is really the proxy for the cloud native shift. And you guys are certainly micro services oriented, we talk about this all the time, any data or any anecdotes around growth of microservices? >> Well I mean there's a lot of surveys and most of the surveys point towards, I think containers are a good proxy, you know 88 percent of enterprises are using containers, it's becoming, whether you move to the cloud or not actually containers are basically a way of doing things more repeatedly, giving you efficiency from an infrastructure perspective giving you reliability so that you know you can basically exchange out the hardware and your container environment is still resilient and then giving you that developer productivity, that's becoming something that enterprises are embracing, it seems from these surveys and I think that's the building block for microservices. >> And I think many people are already moved, remember Soho, we've got history here, so we've been trying to move towards this world in which it is a services world and before it was much too heavyweight Ectimel RPC and everything that made it, Soap and everything else, difficult to do these things. Now things have gotten much much easier. So a lot of people are actually doing a services architecture already. And the microservices I think is just a more formal way of doing that at a finer grain and when you get to this finer grain, that's when you need something like a service mesh now to pull things back together again. >> Alright, lets do a plug for the service mesh, people that are watching have got to be intrigued by this conversation, what's the state of the service mesh piece, lot of stars so good good community vibe going on, how do they get involved, what's needed, where's the white space, where's the work being done? >> And I think also John, what skills are needed to actually as a developer, you know we've got a lot of new folks here at that show that are just learning about this and what do they need to know to actually do this and bring this back to their companies. >> If they're, so first of all it's at Istio.io so that's the place to start, there's a lot of very good documentation there, there's very simple examples that can be downloaded so that you can try it out, you can try it out we're using containers so on top of cumulating, you can do it on your laptop, you can do it in the cloud so we're in this wonderful age of the internet in fact that most of the learning is done online and that you can get everything you need online you don't have to walk away from the show with a CD pack or anything else like that. So I would encourage developers to just simply try it out by themselves. Remember then there's Istio developers, people that are actually contributing code into Istio, that's sort of a specialized group of people who are very interested in it. More people, it'll be 10 to one users of Istio than there will be actually of the Istio developer community and the Istio developer community I urge people to get involved 'cause that's where we need to expand the number of use cases and make sure that we're covering the things that are important across the board for variety. >> Yeah, I mean Istio's not that difficult to learn, it's an L7 Proxy. It has a great affinity to Kubernetes project so if you are using Kubernetes or are involved in Kubernetes project then it basically is something that you can deploy into your Kubernetes cluster and you can get started with it. There are a number of trainings and workshops actually at this conference, there were a couple of Istio trainings and there are many tracks and then there's training online, there's a tutorial on the Google site with the GKE and I think on many other companies as well to get started with Istio but it's basically a proxy and in, it's not actually only limited to Kubernetes, you can run it in a VM environment, you can, it basically any service, it is a proxy that intercepts and you know basically can provide load balancing, traffic managing, quotas, all of those things that you expect of a rich proxy and so if you have a networking background it's actually very easy to pick it up. >> That's great, now when you're talking about these kind of, you know, these proxy and things along those lines, I'm sure that there are use cases that are the first ones to pop up, can you talk a little bit about that. >> Yes, I think the first use case of Istio is actually Canary, Canary deployment, so being able to route traffic from one version of your application to another version of your application. Make sure that that, lets say it's an upgrade, you know, make sure that that's running well and then gradually route more of you're traffic. So that's a very developer centric use case that appeals and then of course security. And that's a less developer centric, more control and ops perspective and then observability and again, control, also an ops perspective, those are the three main use cases. >> Okay. >> That's great, that's awesome and you have Cube Flow going on here, you guys had a couple of Google folks on. >> Yes, so I mentioned three projects that are the top projects, Istio number one, number two is Cube Flow, again within the last year, more than 3000 stars and then the last one is Scaffold. >> Great stuff, I love the programmability, automation. >> And one of the things that we mentioned before, because when people hear proxy, they think of the old time, actually when you've used a proxy and a DNS which now it's very high performance and one of the things that you're seeing also, it connects up with other open source projects such as FDIO which is VPP, which is now being used, integrated into envoy which is a proxy, so the data plane itself, I think is going to be more efficient than people trying to do their own network. >> That's a good point Lew, I mean people think proxies are inefficient, it's a hack, a bridge between point A and point B. >> Yes, that was a lot of the initial skepticism around this, so you know, this was about two years ago we were sitting around saying okay, Kubernetes, what's next? And we came up with a open service broker, so you can consume services and then the early start of Istio, starting with Envoy and then building the service mesh around that and that was indeed one of the early concerns as well, will it be too heavy, will it add latency, will there be performance bottle neck, I think a lot of that concern has been addressed and it will continue to be addressed. >> Well we got to wrap up be I want to get some comments from you guys, reaction to the show here in Europe, obviously Google is in big force, Istio is prime time, you predicted that in Austin, it looks like it's tracking beautifully, reactions, what did you walk away with here from this event? What observations, revelations, surprises, share some color for the folks that couldn't make it. >> We were talking earlier about the number of use cases now that we've seen that our customers are coming in and describing how they're using Kubernetes and other of the technologies making up the cloud native world. And that allows people to learn and so that's what I'm always excited, because I can sit there in the audience and you can see everybody else going oh, I'm going to apply that to what I'm trying to do and just the breath now of-- >> John: So you're surprised at the uptake, or you're happy with the uptake, that's your reaction? >> Yeah and I think you would agree too. >> Yeah, I think the reason I come to KubeCon is to meet users, it's a user conference, and with each passing KubeCon, it becomes more and more user-centric so some of the talks here, the takeaways that I had, you know the folks from Spotify talked about how users need to get more involved and the benefits of getting more involved in the community, that was a very inspiring talk. Another talk yesterday talked about how Kubernetes needs to be a platform for everything, not just cloud native, but actually also Legacy and so these are points. And then the third piece, a lot of users talking about multicloud, right and making that a reality, these are things that I'm taking away as you know, users are doing this today. >> John: Multicloud certainly is a path, people have that outcome in mind. >> Yes. >> Doing the work now to get there. Thanks for coming on, Aparna and Lew. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you guys, you're awesome, senior folks in the industry, experienced executives, driving the change here, cloud native, microservices architecture, whole new modern paradigm shift in software architecture, here at KubeCon, Kubernetes, Istio, hot projects, Cube Flow and more here on the Cube, live coverage here in Copenhagen, stay with us for more coverage, after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Austin Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE live in Austin, Texas for our exclusive coverage at the CloudNative Conference and KubeCon with Kubernetes via theCUBE. theCUBE which we're live, and 8 years running, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE Media, my colleague, Stu Miniman. And I'm excited to have Cube alumni, and its distinguished industry legend, Lew Tucker, Vice President CT of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Great to be back, it's one of my favorite shows. >> Lou, we've had many conversations over the years, and it's always great to have you on because you're on the cutting-edge perspective, but you have a historical view as well, you've seen many waves of innovation. And obviously you own lots of property in the Computer's History museum, your resume goes on and on. But, you got to admire this community. Three years old, it was you, me and JJ we're sitting around at OpenStack in Vancouver three and a half years ago, having a beer after the event one of these days, and we were talking about Kubernetes, and we were really riffing on orchestration and kind of shooting the arrow forward, kind of reading the tea leaves. And we were predicting inter-clouding, inter-networking, Cisco core competency, the notion of application developers wanting infrastructure as code. We didn't actually say mircoservices but we were kind of describing a world that would be microservices, and this awesomeness that's going on with the Cloud. What a ... [Lew] You were right. You were right. >> We were right, it wasn't me, it was the community. This is how communities operate. >> It is. I think that what we're seeing, and particularly in these open source communities, you're getting the best ideas. And therefore, a lot of people are looking at this future space, and then we bring the kids out of the communities, get the projects that we work together on it, and that's how we move it forward. >> You've been a great leader in the community, just want to give you some props for that, you deserve it, but more importantly is just the momentum going on right now. And I want to get your take, you're squinting through the growth, you're looking at the innovation, looking at the big picture, certainly from a Cisco perspective, but also as an industry participant. Where's the action? Obviously containers grew, that tide came in, a lot of boats floated up. We saw microservices boom, then we now, Kubernetes' getting better and better, multiple versions, it's - some say commoditized, some would say more inter-operable. Really, that's the connection tissue for multi-cloud. >> Exactly right. >> Do you see the same thing? Where's the action? >> So, cloud computing is going everywhere now. And so it's natural that we see one of the next phases of this is in the area of multi-cloud. The customers, they are in public cloud, they have private data centers where they want to run similar applications. They don't want to have a completely different environment. What they really want to see is a consistent environment across which they can deploy applications. And that consistent environment also has to have security policies, authentication services, and a lot of these things. And to really drive the innovation, what I find interesting is that, the services that are coming now out of public cloud, whether it be an AI or server list, event-driven kind of programming models. Enterprises want to connect into them. And so one of the things I think that that leads to is that you're beginning to hear talk now, just beginning to hear it, which is this project called Istio. Which is a service mesh, because what that really allows -- >> John: What's the project name? >> It's called Istio? >> John: Istio. >> Lew: I-S-T-I-O. >> Okay. >> dot I-O. Everything is open source, it's a project that's contributed to by Google, and IBM, and Lyft, and now Cisco's getting involved in it, as well. And what it really plays into is this world of multi-cloud. That now we can actually access services in the public cloud from your own private data center, or from the public running applications in a public cloud, you can access services that are back in your data center. So it's really about this kind of application-level networking stack, that means that application developers can now off-load all of that heavy work to a service mesh, and therefore that'll accelerate application development. >> So it's interesting, I heard some talk about things like Envoy edge and service proxies, and service proxies have been a nice tool to kind of cobble together old legacy stuff, but now you're seeing stuff go to the next level. This data I heard in the keynote, I want to get your reaction 'cause this kind of jumps out at me. Lyft had created a mesh over hundreds of thousands of services over millions of transactions per second. Lyft. Uber's got some stuff on the monitoring side, Google's donated - This is large scale cloud guys who had to build their own stuff with open source, now contributing all this stuff back. This is the mesh you're talking about, correct? >> This is exactly right, yes. Because what we're seeing is, we've talked about micro services, and Kubernetes is about orchestration of containers. And that has accelerated application development and deploying it. But now the services, each one of those services still has all of this networking stuff they have to deal with. They have to deal with load balancing, they have to deal with retries, they have to deal with authentication. So instead, what is happening now, we're recognizing these common patterns, this is what the community does (mumbles). You see a common pattern, you abstract it, and you push that out into what is known as side cars now, so that the application developer doesn't have to -- the application doesn't get changed when you need to change, like, 'bring up a couple more services over here' 'put this on a different cloud'. The individual components now are unaffected by that, because all of that work has been offloaded into a service mesh. >> Lew, bring us inside a little bit. Dig into that next level of kind of networking. 'Cause you speak, kind of networking administrator, running around the data center, you get everything from pulling cables to zoning and everything like that. Now it's multi-cloud, multi-service, everything's faster. Through all the architect, the person running it, automation ... We don't have an hour, but give us a little bit about what it means to be a networking person these days. >> Well, it's interesting, because one of the things that we know application developers did not want to become, is to be a network engineer. And yet to do a lot of what they had to do, they had to learn a lot of those skills. And instead they would rather set things up by policy. For example, they would like to be able to say, 'if I'm deploying now the version two of my application', it's a classic thing we talk about in this deal, 'the next version we want to just direct' '5% of the traffic to it, make sure it's okay' 'before we turn over the whole thing.' You should be able to do that at the application level, and through a service mesh that is built in networking at the application level, the application guys can do it. Now the role of the network engineer is still the same, they have to provide the basic infrastructure to allow that to happen. And for example, a lot of the infrastructure now is extending the Cloud from public cloud through the cloud BPM services that they have back into the data center. So Cisco, for example, is putting technologies that are running at AWS and at Google, and Azure, that allows that to come back into the data center. So we can run Cisco virtual routers in the Cloud, connected back up in the data center. So their standard networking policy that the networking engineers really want to see enforced, they can be assured that that's enforced, and then Istio layers on top of it. >> And that's decoupled from the application. >> Right. Right. >> This is what we've been talking about since 2010, our eighth year of theCUBE, infrastructure as code. This is what DevOps was all about, and now it's evolving mainstream. >> Absolutely right. You really want infrastructure to be as boring as possible. And capable and then secure. And now give a lot more control over to the application developer. And we also know, right now it's really based largely on Kubernetes, it's a great example, but that will connect into virtual machines, it will connect into legacy services. So all of this has to do with connecting all of those pieces that are today in an enterprise, moving to a public cloud. And that transition doesn't happen wholesale. You move a couple over. >> Lew, one thing. I want you to look back, John talked about - We interviewed a bunch of years in OpenStack. What's your take on the role of OpenStack today, is there still a roll in OpenStack, and how's that kind of compare/contrast to what we're doing here? >> Happy to answer, because I actually am on both boards, I'm on the CNCF board and I'm on the OpenStack board, and I have contributors on my teams to both efforts across the board. And I think that the role that we're seeing of OpenStack is Openstack is evolving also, and it's becoming more embracive and it's becoming about open infrastructure. And it's really about, how do you create these open infrastructure plays. So it is about virtual machines, and containers, and bare metal, and setting up of those services. So Kubernetes works just great on top of OpenStack, and so now people get to have a choice, because one of the hard things I think for, mostly enterprise developers and everything else, is that the pace is changing so fast. So how do they try out some of the newer technologies that still can be connected back into the existing legacy systems? And that's why I think that we're seeing the role for OpenStack is to make that, you can put it with virtual machines, you can stand them up in there, and you can have the same virtual machines essentially running in the Cloud. >> So virtual machines versus other approaches has come up as a trade off, we heard in the keynote, between cost - I mean, speed, and security. Security's super important. So let me get your thoughts on how that plays out, because we've got the pluggable logger tech, which is another big theme we heard in the keynote, which is essentially just meaning, having a very focused, leverageable piece of code that can be connected into Kubernetes. But with VM's now, some are saying VM's are slow when you're trying to do security, but you want slow, boring when you need it, but you want speed and secure when you need it, too. How do you get both out of that? >> Without being too geeky in terms of, a virtual machine is emulating an entire computer. And so it looks like a computer, so you're running your traditional applications on top of a virtual machine. The same as they would if they were running on what we call, bare metal machine. So that is by necessity, much heavier. You're bringing around a whole operating system and things like that. Containers -- >> And there's a role for that, too. >> There's absolutely a role for that. >> Now containers? >> But containers, then, are really much more about, it's an application packaging exercise, so that you can say, 'I'm going to run this application, I just want all its dependencies packaged up.' I'll assume there's an operating system there. I'm going to count on the fact that there's a single operating system. So you can spin up containers, they're much more lightweight, much more quickly. And now there's even things such as Kata Containers that are coming out of Intel, which is now merging those technologies. >> Male: The clear containers. >> Clear containers, they came originally Clear Containers, and now it's merging, because we're saying, 'we want the security and the protection that you get' 'with a virtual machine, tied into, like the VTX' 'instruction set, in the hardware'. So you can get that level of security, assurances, but now you get the speed of containers. So, I think we're continuing to see the whole community evolving in this direction and making things easier for application developers, faster to do. They're increasing in scale, so management and orchestration - we talked about that three years ago, that that would be a big issue, and guess what? Of course it is. That's exactly what Kubernetes is addressing. >> And the role of the data is going to be critical, this is where a lot of people in the enterprise that we talked to, love the story, they love the narrative, but they're hearing things that they've never heard before and they kind of, slow down. So I'd like you to take a minute, Lew, and explain to the person watching, CIO, chief architect, network guy, whatever - what the hell is this Kubernetes hubbub about? What is Kubernetes, from your perspective? How would you wrap that up and describe the, what it is, and the impact to the customer? >> So, formally it's an orchestration of the container. So what that means is that, when you're developing an application, if you want it to be resilient, you want several instances of that application running, and you want traffic, then, to be low-balanced across it. Kubernetes provides that level of orchestration, to make sure there's always three running. If one fails, it can bring up another one. And it can do that completely automated. So it's a layer that really manages the deployment of containers. As an application developer, you still write your application, you package it up into a container, could be a doc or a container, and then you deploy it using Kubernetes in there. What is interesting, and I think that this is what we've recognized in this last year, I think, is that Kubernetes has a very simple networking model. Which is basically that of having a way to load-balance across multiple containers and keep them running. If you have anything more complicated about different services that you want to talk to from those containers, that may be different places in the universe, we don't have a mechanism for doing that. And everybody was having to write their own. So again, that's where the idea of a service mesh, STF -- >> John: That's where the meshing comes in. >> That's where the mesh ... >> Hundreds and hundreds of services. >> Lynkerd has been doing it for a while, Envoy. >> And Lyft and Uber, they had to do it because they had massive explosion of devices. >> Right, exactly right. And so that's why getting together the code from Lyft and Envoy, adding a control plane to it, which is what Istio really is about, brings that out, too. >> Sounds like an operating system to me, but Lew I one more question for you. You mentioned in, as you described it, Kubernetes, isn't that auto-scaling? If I'm familiar with AWS, isn't that just auto-scaling? Or is it auto-scaling for application instances? Or is auto-scaling more - defined differently? >> It does do the scaling part, it does the resiliency part, but it has a very simple model for that. And that's why you need to have other - but it's a beginning of that orchestration layer. >> Because at the container level, it has all those inherent problems. >> Right. And it can make sure to keep those containers alive and well, and manage the life cycle. >> John: And that's the difference. >> And that's the real difference. Whereas the auto-scaling from Amazon, as a service, is purely a networking capability then tied into bringing up new instances. >> So this is like auto-scaling on steroids. >> It is. But one of the differences also is that Kubernetes and what we're doing here is all open source. So you can run it anywhere. You don't get, a lot of people are very concerned about being locked in to, it used to be, you were locked into Oracle, or to Microsoft, or Java, on premise of things like that. >> Whatever proprietary operating system. >> And now they have concern being locked into these services that are in the public cloud providers. And what we're seeing now with Kubernetes and we're seeing in almost everything around here, by open sourcing them, the advantage is now the enterprise can run the same technology inside, without being locked into a vendor, as they do in the public cloud. >> Lew, so we spent a bunch of time talking about multi-cloud. Some of the more interesting pieces is what's happening at the edge, and IOT. We've heard Cisco talking about it for many years, networking of course important. What's your take, what are you working on, with regards to that these days. >> There's a couple new trends that we've been, IOT is actually now really getting realized, I think, because it is pushing a lot of the computing out to the edge, whether it be in cell phone towers or base stations, retail stores, that kind of edge. At the same time, we're seeing this multi-cloud that we want the big services. If I want to use a machine learning service, I want to use it up in the cloud, and I need to now connect it back to those devices. So multi-cloud is really about, addressing how do you develop applications that run across multiple, in the cloud, on the edge, in an IOT device. There's also, I think you've probably been hearing, server lists, and function as a service. These are, again, a lighter weight way to have kind of an event-driven model, so that if you have an IOT device and it just causes an event, you want to be able to spawn essentially a service, in the cloud, that only runs to process that one event, and then it goes away. So you're not paying to run instances of virtual machines or whatever, sitting there waiting for some event. You get a trigger, and you only pay - so it has this micro-billing capability as a part of it - so that you just can use only the resources. We finally realized the promise that we always had in cloud computing, which is that, pay for only what you need, for what you use. And so this is another way to do that. >> Lew, it's great to have you on theCUBE again, good to see you, great to get the update. I'd like to ask you one more final question to end the segment here. You always have your ear to the ground, reading the tea leaves, you have a unique skill to understand the tech at the root level. What's coming next? If we go back and we have these nice conversations where we're riffing on what's coming out in the next two, three years. It's unclear to some of the visionaries out there, so I got to ask you, what's going to be hot, what do you see emerging? As we saw Kubernetes and discussed, we couldn't have predicted this, I couldn't have. I knew it was going to be hot, I knew it was going to be big, but not this big, changing industry. What do you see out there? What would be the conversation you'd say, 'You know, we've got to watch this,' 'this is going to be a value creation opportunity,' 'enabling technology that's going to make a lot of things' 'flow nicely' - what kind of tech should ... >> Well, it may be a trite answer, 'cause I think a lot of people are seeing the same thing, is that we're actually laying the groundwork here, when we talk about multi-cloud, things that are distributed across multiple things. Accessing different services. I'm still a big believer in, it's going to be in the strength of those services. Whether they be speech-translation services, whether they be recommendation engine, whether it means big data services. Access to those services is what's going to be important. Three or four years from now, we're going to be talking about the intelligence -- >> Without a lot of heavy lifting to integrate it. >> Yes, that's exactly the point. We want it so that somebody can almost visually wire up these things, and take advantage of tremendously powerful machine-learning algorithms. That they don't want to have to hire the machine-learning experts to do it, they want to use that as a service. >> Slinging API, slinging services, wiring things up, sounds like it's an operating system to me. >> It's always an operating system at the end of the day. >> Lew Tucker, Vice President and CTO at Cisco Systems. Industry legend, on the board of CNCF, the fastest-growing organization, where projects equal products equals profit, and of course the OpenStack. Lew, thanks for coming on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, back here live in Austin for more live coverage of CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, after this short break. >> Lew: Thank you.