>>Collibra is a company that was founded in 2008 right before the so-called modern big data era kicked into high gear. The company was one of the first to focus its business on data governance. Now, historically, data governance and data quality initiatives, they were back office functions and they were largely confined to regulatory regulated industries that had to comply with public policy mandates. But as the cloud went mainstream, the tech giants showed us how valuable data could become and the value proposition for data quality and trust. It evolved from primarily a compliance driven issue to becoming a lynchpin of competitive advantage. But data in the decade of the 2010s was largely about getting the technology to work. You had these highly centralized technical teams that were formed and they had hyper specialized skills to develop data architectures and processes to serve the myriad data needs of organizations. >>And it resulted in a lot of frustration with data initiatives for most organizations that didn't have the resources of the cloud guys and the social media giants to really attack their data problems and turn data into gold. This is why today for example, this quite a bit of momentum to rethinking monolithic data architectures. You see, you hear about initiatives like data mesh and the idea of data as a product. They're gaining traction as a way to better serve the the data needs of decentralized business Uni users, you hear a lot about data democratization. So these decentralization efforts around data, they're great, but they create a new set of problems. Specifically, how do you deliver like a self-service infrastructure to business users and domain experts? Now the cloud is definitely helping with that, but also how do you automate governance? This becomes especially tricky as protecting data privacy has become more and more important. >>In other words, while it's enticing to experiment and run fast and loose with data initiatives kinda like the Wild West, to find new veins of gold, it has to be done responsibly. As such, the idea of data governance has had to evolve to become more automated. And intelligence governance and data lineage is still fundamental to ensuring trust as data. It moves like water through an organization. No one is gonna use data that isn't trusted. Metadata has become increasingly important for data discovery and data classification. As data flows through an organization, the continuously ability to check for data flaws and automating that data quality, they become a functional requirement of any modern data management platform. And finally, data privacy has become a critical adjacency to cyber security. So you can see how data governance has evolved into a much richer set of capabilities than it was 10 or 15 years ago. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube's coverage of Data Citizens made possible by Calibra, a leader in so-called Data intelligence and the host of Data Citizens 2022, which is taking place in San Diego. My name is Dave Ante and I'm one of the hosts of our program, which is running in parallel to data citizens. Now at the Cube we like to say we extract the signal from the noise, and over the, the next couple of days, we're gonna feature some of the themes from the keynote speakers at Data Citizens and we'll hear from several of the executives. Felix Von Dala, who is the co-founder and CEO of Collibra, will join us along with one of the other founders of Collibra, Stan Christians, who's gonna join my colleague Lisa Martin. I'm gonna also sit down with Laura Sellers, she's the Chief Product Officer at Collibra. We'll talk about some of the, the announcements and innovations they're making at the event, and then we'll dig in further to data quality with Kirk Hasselbeck. >>He's the vice president of Data quality at Collibra. He's an amazingly smart dude who founded Owl dq, a company that he sold to Col to Collibra last year. Now many companies, they didn't make it through the Hado era, you know, they missed the industry waves and they became Driftwood. Collibra, on the other hand, has evolved its business. They've leveraged the cloud, expanded its product portfolio, and leaned in heavily to some major partnerships with cloud providers, as well as receiving a strategic investment from Snowflake earlier this year. So it's a really interesting story that we're thrilled to be sharing with you. Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy the program. >>Last year, the Cube Covered Data Citizens Collibra's customer event. And the premise that we put forth prior to that event was that despite all the innovation that's gone on over the last decade or more with data, you know, starting with the Hado movement, we had data lakes, we'd spark the ascendancy of programming languages like Python, the introduction of frameworks like TensorFlow, the rise of ai, low code, no code, et cetera. Businesses still find it's too difficult to get more value from their data initiatives. And we said at the time, you know, maybe it's time to rethink data innovation. While a lot of the effort has been focused on, you know, more efficiently storing and processing data, perhaps more energy needs to go into thinking about the people and the process side of the equation, meaning making it easier for domain experts to both gain insights for data, trust the data, and begin to use that data in new ways, fueling data, products, monetization and insights data citizens 2022 is back and we're pleased to have Felix Van Dema, who is the founder and CEO of Collibra. He's on the cube or excited to have you, Felix. Good to see you again. >>Likewise Dave. Thanks for having me again. >>You bet. All right, we're gonna get the update from Felix on the current data landscape, how he sees it, why data intelligence is more important now than ever and get current on what Collibra has been up to over the past year and what's changed since Data Citizens 2021. And we may even touch on some of the product news. So Felix, we're living in a very different world today with businesses and consumers. They're struggling with things like supply chains, uncertain economic trends, and we're not just snapping back to the 2010s. That's clear, and that's really true as well in the world of data. So what's different in your mind, in the data landscape of the 2020s from the previous decade, and what challenges does that bring for your customers? >>Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think you said it well, Dave, and and the intro that that rising complexity and fragmentation in the broader data landscape, that hasn't gotten any better over the last couple of years. When when we talk to our customers, that level of fragmentation, the complexity, how do we find data that we can trust, that we know we can use has only gotten kinda more, more difficult. So that trend that's continuing, I think what is changing is that trend has become much more acute. Well, the other thing we've seen over the last couple of years is that the level of scrutiny that organizations are under respect to data, as data becomes more mission critical, as data becomes more impactful than important, the level of scrutiny with respect to privacy, security, regulatory compliance, as only increasing as well, which again, is really difficult in this environment of continuous innovation, continuous change, continuous growing complexity and fragmentation. >>So it's become much more acute. And, and to your earlier point, we do live in a different world and and the the past couple of years we could probably just kind of brute for it, right? We could focus on, on the top line. There was enough kind of investments to be, to be had. I think nowadays organizations are focused or are, are, are, are, are, are in a very different environment where there's much more focus on cost control, productivity, efficiency, How do we truly get value from that data? So again, I think it just another incentive for organization to now truly look at data and to scale it data, not just from a a technology and infrastructure perspective, but how do you actually scale data from an organizational perspective, right? You said at the the people and process, how do we do that at scale? And that's only, only only becoming much more important. And we do believe that the, the economic environment that we find ourselves in today is gonna be catalyst for organizations to really dig out more seriously if, if, if, if you will, than they maybe have in the have in the best. >>You know, I don't know when you guys founded Collibra, if, if you had a sense as to how complicated it was gonna get, but you've been on a mission to really address these problems from the beginning. How would you describe your, your, your mission and what are you doing to address these challenges? >>Yeah, absolutely. We, we started Colli in 2008. So in some sense and the, the last kind of financial crisis, and that was really the, the start of Colli where we found product market fit, working with large finance institutions to help them cope with the increasing compliance requirements that they were faced with because of the, of the financial crisis and kind of here we are again in a very different environment, of course 15 years, almost 15 years later. But data only becoming more important. But our mission to deliver trusted data for every user, every use case and across every source, frankly, has only become more important. So what has been an incredible journey over the last 14, 15 years, I think we're still relatively early in our mission to again, be able to provide everyone, and that's why we call it data citizens. We truly believe that everyone in the organization should be able to use trusted data in an easy, easy matter. That mission is is only becoming more important, more relevant. We definitely have a lot more work ahead of us because we are still relatively early in that, in that journey. >>Well, that's interesting because, you know, in my observation it takes seven to 10 years to actually build a company and then the fact that you're still in the early days is kind of interesting. I mean, you, Collibra's had a good 12 months or so since we last spoke at Data Citizens. Give us the latest update on your business. What do people need to know about your, your current momentum? >>Yeah, absolutely. Again, there's, there's a lot of tail organizations that are only maturing the data practices and we've seen it kind of transform or, or, or influence a lot of our business growth that we've seen, broader adoption of the platform. We work at some of the largest organizations in the world where it's Adobe, Heineken, Bank of America, and many more. We have now over 600 enterprise customers, all industry leaders and every single vertical. So it's, it's really exciting to see that and continue to partner with those organizations. On the partnership side, again, a lot of momentum in the org in, in the, in the markets with some of the cloud partners like Google, Amazon, Snowflake, data bricks and, and others, right? As those kind of new modern data infrastructures, modern data architectures that are definitely all moving to the cloud, a great opportunity for us, our partners and of course our customers to help them kind of transition to the cloud even faster. >>And so we see a lot of excitement and momentum there within an acquisition about 18 months ago around data quality, data observability, which we believe is an enormous opportunity. Of course, data quality isn't new, but I think there's a lot of reasons why we're so excited about quality and observability now. One is around leveraging ai, machine learning, again to drive more automation. And the second is that those data pipelines that are now being created in the cloud, in these modern data architecture arch architectures, they've become mission critical. They've become real time. And so monitoring, observing those data pipelines continuously has become absolutely critical so that they're really excited about about that as well. And on the organizational side, I'm sure you've heard a term around kind of data mesh, something that's gaining a lot of momentum, rightfully so. It's really the type of governance that we always believe. Then federated focused on domains, giving a lot of ownership to different teams. I think that's the way to scale data organizations. And so that aligns really well with our vision and, and from a product perspective, we've seen a lot of momentum with our customers there as well. >>Yeah, you know, a couple things there. I mean, the acquisition of i l dq, you know, Kirk Hasselbeck and, and their team, it's interesting, you know, the whole data quality used to be this back office function and, and really confined to highly regulated industries. It's come to the front office, it's top of mind for chief data officers, data mesh. You mentioned you guys are a connective tissue for all these different nodes on the data mesh. That's key. And of course we see you at all the shows. You're, you're a critical part of many ecosystems and you're developing your own ecosystem. So let's chat a little bit about the, the products. We're gonna go deeper in into products later on at, at Data Citizens 22, but we know you're debuting some, some new innovations, you know, whether it's, you know, the, the the under the covers in security, sort of making data more accessible for people just dealing with workflows and processes as you talked about earlier. Tell us a little bit about what you're introducing. >>Yeah, absolutely. We're super excited, a ton of innovation. And if we think about the big theme and like, like I said, we're still relatively early in this, in this journey towards kind of that mission of data intelligence that really bolts and compelling mission, either customers are still start, are just starting on that, on that journey. We wanna make it as easy as possible for the, for our organization to actually get started because we know that's important that they do. And for our organization and customers that have been with us for some time, there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity to kind of expand the platform further. And again, to make it easier for really to, to accomplish that mission and vision around that data citizen that everyone has access to trustworthy data in a very easy, easy way. So that's really the theme of a lot of the innovation that we're driving. >>A lot of kind of ease of adoption, ease of use, but also then how do we make sure that lio becomes this kind of mission critical enterprise platform from a security performance architecture scale supportability that we're truly able to deliver that kind of an enterprise mission critical platform. And so that's the big theme from an innovation perspective, From a product perspective, a lot of new innovation that we're really excited about. A couple of highlights. One is around data marketplace. Again, a lot of our customers have plans in that direction, how to make it easy. How do we make, how do we make available to true kind of shopping experience that anybody in your organization can, in a very easy search first way, find the right data product, find the right dataset, that data can then consume usage analytics. How do you, how do we help organizations drive adoption, tell them where they're working really well and where they have opportunities homepages again to, to make things easy for, for people, for anyone in your organization to kind of get started with ppia, you mentioned workflow designer, again, we have a very powerful enterprise platform. >>One of our key differentiators is the ability to really drive a lot of automation through workflows. And now we provided a new low code, no code kind of workflow designer experience. So, so really customers can take it to the next level. There's a lot more new product around K Bear Protect, which in partnership with Snowflake, which has been a strategic investor in kib, focused on how do we make access governance easier? How do we, how do we, how are we able to make sure that as you move to the cloud, things like access management, masking around sensitive data, PII data is managed as much more effective, effective rate, really excited about that product. There's more around data quality. Again, how do we, how do we get that deployed as easily and quickly and widely as we can? Moving that to the cloud has been a big part of our strategy. >>So we launch more data quality cloud product as well as making use of those, those native compute capabilities in platforms like Snowflake, Data, Bricks, Google, Amazon, and others. And so we are bettering a capability, a capability that we call push down. So actually pushing down the computer and data quality, the monitoring into the underlying platform, which again, from a scale performance and ease of use perspective is gonna make a massive difference. And then more broadly, we, we talked a little bit about the ecosystem. Again, integrations, we talk about being able to connect to every source. Integrations are absolutely critical and we're really excited to deliver new integrations with Snowflake, Azure and Google Cloud storage as well. So there's a lot coming out. The, the team has been work at work really hard and we are really, really excited about what we are coming, what we're bringing to markets. >>Yeah, a lot going on there. I wonder if you could give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you, you talked about, you know, the marketplace, you know, you think about data mesh, you think of data as product, one of the key principles you think about monetization. This is really different than what we've been used to in data, which is just getting the technology to work has been been so hard. So how do you see sort of the future and, you know, give us the, your closing thoughts please? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I, and I think we we're really at this pivotal moment, and I think you said it well. We, we all know the constraint and the challenges with data, how to actually do data at scale. And while we've seen a ton of innovation on the infrastructure side, we fundamentally believe that just getting a faster database is important, but it's not gonna fully solve the challenges and truly kind of deliver on the opportunity. And that's why now is really the time to deliver this data intelligence vision, this data intelligence platform. We are still early, making it as easy as we can. It's kind of, of our, it's our mission. And so I'm really, really excited to see what we, what we are gonna, how the marks gonna evolve over the next, next few quarters and years. I think the trend is clearly there when we talk about data mesh, this kind of federated approach folks on data products is just another signal that we believe that a lot of our organization are now at the time. >>The understanding need to go beyond just the technology. I really, really think about how do we actually scale data as a business function, just like we've done with it, with, with hr, with, with sales and marketing, with finance. That's how we need to think about data. I think now is the time given the economic environment that we are in much more focus on control, much more focused on productivity efficiency and now's the time. We need to look beyond just the technology and infrastructure to think of how to scale data, how to manage data at scale. >>Yeah, it's a new era. The next 10 years of data won't be like the last, as I always say. Felix, thanks so much and good luck in, in San Diego. I know you're gonna crush it out there. >>Thank you Dave. >>Yeah, it's a great spot for an in-person event and, and of course the content post event is gonna be available@collibra.com and you can of course catch the cube coverage@thecube.net and all the news@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Valante for the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hi, I'm Jay from Collibra's Data Office. Today I want to talk to you about Collibra's data intelligence cloud. We often say Collibra is a single system of engagement for all of your data. Now, when I say data, I mean data in the broadest sense of the word, including reference and metadata. Think of metrics, reports, APIs, systems, policies, and even business processes that produce or consume data. Now, the beauty of this platform is that it ensures all of your users have an easy way to find, understand, trust, and access data. But how do you get started? Well, here are seven steps to help you get going. One, start with the data. What's data intelligence? Without data leverage the Collibra data catalog to automatically profile and classify your enterprise data wherever that data lives, databases, data lakes or data warehouses, whether on the cloud or on premise. >>Two, you'll then wanna organize the data and you'll do that with data communities. This can be by department, find a business or functional team, however your organization organizes work and accountability. And for that you'll establish community owners, communities, make it easy for people to navigate through the platform, find the data and will help create a sense of belonging for users. An important and related side note here, we find it's typical in many organizations that data is thought of is just an asset and IT and data offices are viewed as the owners of it and who are really the central teams performing analytics as a service provider to the enterprise. We believe data is more than an asset, it's a true product that can be converted to value. And that also means establishing business ownership of data where that strategy and ROI come together with subject matter expertise. >>Okay, three. Next, back to those communities there, the data owners should explain and define their data, not just the tables and columns, but also the related business terms, metrics and KPIs. These objects we call these assets are typically organized into business glossaries and data dictionaries. I definitely recommend starting with the topics that are most important to the business. Four, those steps that enable you and your users to have some fun with it. Linking everything together builds your knowledge graph and also known as a metadata graph by linking or relating these assets together. For example, a data set to a KPI to a report now enables your users to see what we call the lineage diagram that visualizes where the data in your dashboards actually came from and what the data means and who's responsible for it. Speaking of which, here's five. Leverage the calibra trusted business reporting solution on the marketplace, which comes with workflows for those owners to certify their reports, KPIs, and data sets. >>This helps them force their trust in their data. Six, easy to navigate dashboards or landing pages right in your platform for your company's business processes are the most effective way for everyone to better understand and take action on data. Here's a pro tip, use the dashboard design kit on the marketplace to help you build compelling dashboards. Finally, seven, promote the value of this to your users and be sure to schedule enablement office hours and new employee onboarding sessions to get folks excited about what you've built and implemented. Better yet, invite all of those community and data owners to these sessions so that they can show off the value that they've created. Those are my seven tips to get going with Collibra. I hope these have been useful. For more information, be sure to visit collibra.com. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of Data Citizens 2022 Collibra's customer event. My name is Dave Valante. With us is Kirk Hasselbeck, who's the vice president of Data Quality of Collibra Kirk, good to see you. Welcome. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. Excited to be here. >>You bet. Okay, we're gonna discuss data quality observability. It's a hot trend right now. You founded a data quality company, OWL dq, and it was acquired by Collibra last year. Congratulations. And now you lead data quality at Collibra. So we're hearing a lot about data quality right now. Why is it such a priority? Take us through your thoughts on that. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's definitely exciting times for data quality, which you're right, has been around for a long time. So why now and why is it so much more exciting than it used to be? I think it's a bit stale, but we all know that companies use more data than ever before and the variety has changed and the volume has grown. And, and while I think that remains true, there are a couple other hidden factors at play that everyone's so interested in as, as to why this is becoming so important now. And, and I guess you could kind of break this down simply and think about if Dave, you and I were gonna build, you know, a new healthcare application and monitor the heartbeat of individuals, imagine if we get that wrong, you know, what the ramifications could be, what, what those incidents would look like, or maybe better yet, we try to build a, a new trading algorithm with a crossover strategy where the 50 day crosses the, the 10 day average. >>And imagine if the data underlying the inputs to that is incorrect. We will probably have major financial ramifications in that sense. So, you know, it kind of starts there where everybody's realizing that we're all data companies and if we are using bad data, we're likely making incorrect business decisions. But I think there's kind of two other things at play. You know, I, I bought a car not too long ago and my dad called and said, How many cylinders does it have? And I realized in that moment, you know, I might have failed him because, cause I didn't know. And, and I used to ask those types of questions about any lock brakes and cylinders and, and you know, if it's manual or, or automatic and, and I realized I now just buy a car that I hope works. And it's so complicated with all the computer chips, I, I really don't know that much about it. >>And, and that's what's happening with data. We're just loading so much of it. And it's so complex that the way companies consume them in the IT function is that they bring in a lot of data and then they syndicate it out to the business. And it turns out that the, the individuals loading and consuming all of this data for the company actually may not know that much about the data itself, and that's not even their job anymore. So we'll talk more about that in a minute, but that's really what's setting the foreground for this observability play and why everybody's so interested. It, it's because we're becoming less close to the intricacies of the data and we just expect it to always be there and be correct. >>You know, the other thing too about data quality, and for years we did the MIT CDO IQ event, we didn't do it last year, Covid messed everything up. But the observation I would make there thoughts is, is it data quality? Used to be information quality used to be this back office function, and then it became sort of front office with financial services and government and healthcare, these highly regulated industries. And then the whole chief data officer thing happened and people were realizing, well, they sort of flipped the bit from sort of a data as a, a risk to data as a, as an asset. And now as we say, we're gonna talk about observability. And so it's really become front and center just the whole quality issue because data's so fundamental, hasn't it? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's imagine we pull up our phones right now and I go to my, my favorite stock ticker app and I check out the NASDAQ market cap. I really have no idea if that's the correct number. I know it's a number, it looks large, it's in a numeric field. And, and that's kind of what's going on. There's, there's so many numbers and they're coming from all of these different sources and data providers and they're getting consumed and passed along. But there isn't really a way to tactically put controls on every number and metric across every field we plan to monitor, but with the scale that we've achieved in early days, even before calibra. And what's been so exciting is we have these types of observation techniques, these data monitors that can actually track past performance of every field at scale. And why that's so interesting and why I think the CDO is, is listening right intently nowadays to this topic is, so maybe we could surface all of these problems with the right solution of data observability and with the right scale and then just be alerted on breaking trends. So we're sort of shifting away from this world of must write a condition and then when that condition breaks, that was always known as a break record. But what about breaking trends and root cause analysis? And is it possible to do that, you know, with less human intervention? And so I think most people are seeing now that it's going to have to be a software tool and a computer system. It's, it's not ever going to be based on one or two domain experts anymore. >>So, So how does data observability relate to data quality? Are they sort of two sides of the same coin? Are they, are they cousins? What's your perspective on that? >>Yeah, it's, it's super interesting. It's an emerging market. So the language is changing a lot of the topic and areas changing the way that I like to say it or break it down because the, the lingo is constantly moving is, you know, as a target on this space is really breaking records versus breaking trends. And I could write a condition when this thing happens, it's wrong and when it doesn't it's correct. Or I could look for a trend and I'll give you a good example. You know, everybody's talking about fresh data and stale data and, and why would that matter? Well, if your data never arrived or only part of it arrived or didn't arrive on time, it's likely stale and there will not be a condition that you could write that would show you all the good in the bads. That was kind of your, your traditional approach of data quality break records. But your modern day approach is you lost a significant portion of your data, or it did not arrive on time to make that decision accurately on time. And that's a hidden concern. Some people call this freshness, we call it stale data, but it all points to the same idea of the thing that you're observing may not be a data quality condition anymore. It may be a breakdown in the data pipeline. And with thousands of data pipelines in play for every company out there there, there's more than a couple of these happening every day. >>So what's the Collibra angle on all this stuff made the acquisition, you got data quality observability coming together, you guys have a lot of expertise in, in this area, but you hear providence of data, you just talked about, you know, stale data, you know, the, the whole trend toward real time. How is Calibra approaching the problem and what's unique about your approach? >>Well, I think where we're fortunate is with our background, myself and team, we sort of lived this problem for a long time, you know, in, in the Wall Street days about a decade ago. And we saw it from many different angles. And what we came up with before it was called data observability or reliability was basically the, the underpinnings of that. So we're a little bit ahead of the curve there when most people evaluate our solution, it's more advanced than some of the observation techniques that that currently exist. But we've also always covered data quality and we believe that people want to know more, they need more insights, and they want to see break records and breaking trends together so they can correlate the root cause. And we hear that all the time. I have so many things going wrong, just show me the big picture, help me find the thing that if I were to fix it today would make the most impact. So we're really focused on root cause analysis, business impact, connecting it with lineage and catalog metadata. And as that grows, you can actually achieve total data governance at this point with the acquisition of what was a Lineage company years ago, and then my company Ldq now Collibra, Data quality Collibra may be the best positioned for total data governance and intelligence in the space. >>Well, you mentioned financial services a couple of times and some examples, remember the flash crash in 2010. Nobody had any idea what that was, you know, they just said, Oh, it's a glitch, you know, so they didn't understand the root cause of it. So this is a really interesting topic to me. So we know at Data Citizens 22 that you're announcing, you gotta announce new products, right? You're yearly event what's, what's new. Give us a sense as to what products are coming out, but specifically around data quality and observability. >>Absolutely. There's this, you know, there's always a next thing on the forefront. And the one right now is these hyperscalers in the cloud. So you have databases like Snowflake and Big Query and Data Bricks is Delta Lake and SQL Pushdown. And ultimately what that means is a lot of people are storing in loading data even faster in a SaaS like model. And we've started to hook in to these databases. And while we've always worked with the the same databases in the past, they're supported today we're doing something called Native Database pushdown, where the entire compute and data activity happens in the database. And why that is so interesting and powerful now is everyone's concerned with something called Egress. Did your, my data that I've spent all this time and money with my security team securing ever leave my hands, did it ever leave my secure VPC as they call it? >>And with these native integrations that we're building and about to unveil, here's kind of a sneak peek for, for next week at Data Citizens. We're now doing all compute and data operations in databases like Snowflake. And what that means is with no install and no configuration, you could log into the Collibra data quality app and have all of your data quality running inside the database that you've probably already picked as your your go forward team selection secured database of choice. So we're really excited about that. And I think if you look at the whole landscape of network cost, egress, cost, data storage and compute, what people are realizing is it's extremely efficient to do it in the way that we're about to release here next week. >>So this is interesting because what you just described, you know, you mentioned Snowflake, you mentioned Google, Oh actually you mentioned yeah, data bricks. You know, Snowflake has the data cloud. If you put everything in the data cloud, okay, you're cool, but then Google's got the open data cloud. If you heard, you know, Google next and now data bricks doesn't call it the data cloud, but they have like the open source data cloud. So you have all these different approaches and there's really no way up until now I'm, I'm hearing to, to really understand the relationships between all those and have confidence across, you know, it's like Jak Dani, you should just be a note on the mesh. And I don't care if it's a data warehouse or a data lake or where it comes from, but it's a point on that mesh and I need tooling to be able to have confidence that my data is governed and has the proper lineage, providence. And, and, and that's what you're bringing to the table, Is that right? Did I get that right? >>Yeah, that's right. And it's, for us, it's, it's not that we haven't been working with those great cloud databases, but it's the fact that we can send them the instructions now, we can send them the, the operating ability to crunch all of the calculations, the governance, the quality, and get the answers. And what that's doing, it's basically zero network costs, zero egress cost, zero latency of time. And so when you were to log into Big Query tomorrow using our tool or like, or say Snowflake for example, you have instant data quality metrics, instant profiling, instant lineage and access privacy controls, things of that nature that just become less onerous. What we're seeing is there's so much technology out there, just like all of the major brands that you mentioned, but how do we make it easier? The future is about less clicks, faster time to value, faster scale, and eventually lower cost. And, and we think that this positions us to be the leader there. >>I love this example because, you know, Barry talks about, wow, the cloud guys are gonna own the world and, and of course now we're seeing that the ecosystem is finding so much white space to add value, connect across cloud. Sometimes we call it super cloud and so, or inter clouding. All right, Kirk, give us your, your final thoughts and on on the trends that we've talked about and Data Citizens 22. >>Absolutely. Well, I think, you know, one big trend is discovery and classification. Seeing that across the board, people used to know it was a zip code and nowadays with the amount of data that's out there, they wanna know where everything is, where their sensitive data is. If it's redundant, tell me everything inside of three to five seconds. And with that comes, they want to know in all of these hyperscale databases how fast they can get controls and insights out of their tools. So I think we're gonna see more one click solutions, more SAS based solutions and solutions that hopefully prove faster time to value on, on all of these modern cloud platforms. >>Excellent. All right, Kurt Hasselbeck, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and previewing Data Citizens 22. Appreciate it. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. >>You're welcome. Right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more coverage from the Cube. Welcome to the Cube's virtual Coverage of Data Citizens 2022. My name is Dave Valante and I'm here with Laura Sellers, who's the Chief Product Officer at Collibra, the host of Data Citizens. Laura, welcome. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Nice to be here. >>Yeah, your keynote at Data Citizens this year focused on, you know, your mission to drive ease of use and scale. Now when I think about historically fast access to the right data at the right time in a form that's really easily consumable, it's been kind of challenging, especially for business users. Can can you explain to our audience why this matters so much and what's actually different today in the data ecosystem to make this a reality? >>Yeah, definitely. So I think what we really need and what I hear from customers every single day is that we need a new approach to data management and our product teams. What inspired me to come to Calibra a little bit a over a year ago was really the fact that they're very focused on bringing trusted data to more users across more sources for more use cases. And so as we look at what we're announcing with these innovations of ease of use and scale, it's really about making teams more productive in getting started with and the ability to manage data across the entire organization. So we've been very focused on richer experiences, a broader ecosystem of partners, as well as a platform that delivers performance, scale and security that our users and teams need and demand. So as we look at, Oh, go ahead. >>I was gonna say, you know, when I look back at like the last 10 years, it was all about getting the technology to work and it was just so complicated. But, but please carry on. I'd love to hear more about this. >>Yeah, I, I really, you know, Collibra is a system of engagement for data and we really are working on bringing that entire system of engagement to life for everyone to leverage here and now. So what we're announcing from our ease of use side of the world is first our data marketplace. This is the ability for all users to discover and access data quickly and easily shop for it, if you will. The next thing that we're also introducing is the new homepage. It's really about the ability to drive adoption and have users find data more quickly. And then the two more areas of the ease of use side of the world is our world of usage analytics. And one of the big pushes and passions we have at Collibra is to help with this data driven culture that all companies are trying to create. And also helping with data literacy, with something like usage analytics, it's really about driving adoption of the CLE platform, understanding what's working, who's accessing it, what's not. And then finally we're also introducing what's called workflow designer. And we love our workflows at Libra, it's a big differentiator to be able to automate business processes. The designer is really about a way for more people to be able to create those workflows, collaborate on those workflow flows, as well as people to be able to easily interact with them. So a lot of exciting things when it comes to ease of use to make it easier for all users to find data. >>Y yes, there's definitely a lot to unpack there. I I, you know, you mentioned this idea of, of of, of shopping for the data. That's interesting to me. Why this analogy, metaphor or analogy, I always get those confused. I let's go with analogy. Why is it so important to data consumers? >>I think when you look at the world of data, and I talked about this system of engagement, it's really about making it more accessible to the masses. And what users are used to is a shopping experience like your Amazon, if you will. And so having a consumer grade experience where users can quickly go in and find the data, trust that data, understand where the data's coming from, and then be able to quickly access it, is the idea of being able to shop for it, just making it as simple as possible and really speeding the time to value for any of the business analysts, data analysts out there. >>Yeah, I think when you, you, you see a lot of discussion about rethinking data architectures, putting data in the hands of the users and business people, decentralized data and of course that's awesome. I love that. But of course then you have to have self-service infrastructure and you have to have governance. And those are really challenging. And I think so many organizations, they're facing adoption challenges, you know, when it comes to enabling teams generally, especially domain experts to adopt new data technologies, you know, like the, the tech comes fast and furious. You got all these open source projects and get really confusing. Of course it risks security, governance and all that good stuff. You got all this jargon. So where do you see, you know, the friction in adopting new data technologies? What's your point of view and how can organizations overcome these challenges? >>You're, you're dead on. There's so much technology and there's so much to stay on top of, which is part of the friction, right? It's just being able to stay ahead of, of and understand all the technologies that are coming. You also look at as there's so many more sources of data and people are migrating data to the cloud and they're migrating to new sources. Where the friction comes is really that ability to understand where the data came from, where it's moving to, and then also to be able to put the access controls on top of it. So people are only getting access to the data that they should be getting access to. So one of the other things we're announcing with, with all of the innovations that are coming is what we're doing around performance and scale. So with all of the data movement, with all of the data that's out there, the first thing we're launching in the world of performance and scale is our world of data quality. >>It's something that Collibra has been working on for the past year and a half, but we're launching the ability to have data quality in the cloud. So it's currently an on-premise offering, but we'll now be able to carry that over into the cloud for us to manage that way. We're also introducing the ability to push down data quality into Snowflake. So this is, again, one of those challenges is making sure that that data that you have is d is is high quality as you move forward. And so really another, we're just reducing friction. You already have Snowflake stood up. It's not another machine for you to manage, it's just push down capabilities into Snowflake to be able to track that quality. Another thing that we're launching with that is what we call Collibra Protect. And this is that ability for users to be able to ingest metadata, understand where the PII data is, and then set policies up on top of it. So very quickly be able to set policies and have them enforced at the data level. So anybody in the organization is only getting access to the data they should have access to. >>Here's Topica data quality is interesting. It's something that I've followed for a number of years. It used to be a back office function, you know, and really confined only to highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare and government. You know, you look back over a decade ago, you didn't have this worry about personal information, g gdpr, and, you know, California Consumer Privacy Act all becomes, becomes so much important. The cloud is really changed things in terms of performance and scale and of course partnering for, for, with Snowflake it's all about sharing data and monetization, anything but a back office function. So it was kind of smart that you guys were early on and of course attracting them and as a, as an investor as well was very strong validation. What can you tell us about the nature of the relationship with Snowflake and specifically inter interested in sort of joint engineering or, and product innovation efforts, you know, beyond the standard go to market stuff? >>Definitely. So you mentioned there were a strategic investor in Calibra about a year ago. A little less than that I guess. We've been working with them though for over a year really tightly with their product and engineering teams to make sure that Collibra is adding real value. Our unified platform is touching pieces of our unified platform or touching all pieces of Snowflake. And when I say that, what I mean is we're first, you know, able to ingest data with Snowflake, which, which has always existed. We're able to profile and classify that data we're announcing with Calibra Protect this week that you're now able to create those policies on top of Snowflake and have them enforce. So again, people can get more value out of their snowflake more quickly as far as time to value with, with our policies for all business users to be able to create. >>We're also announcing Snowflake Lineage 2.0. So this is the ability to take stored procedures in Snowflake and understand the lineage of where did the data come from, how was it transformed with within Snowflake as well as the data quality. Pushdown, as I mentioned, data quality, you brought it up. It is a new, it is a, a big industry push and you know, one of the things I think Gartner mentioned is people are losing up to $15 million without having great data quality. So this push down capability for Snowflake really is again, a big ease of use push for us at Collibra of that ability to, to push it into snowflake, take advantage of the data, the data source, and the engine that already lives there and get the right and make sure you have the right quality. >>I mean, the nice thing about Snowflake, if you play in the Snowflake sandbox, you, you, you, you can get sort of a, you know, high degree of confidence that the data sharing can be done in a safe way. Bringing, you know, Collibra into the, into the story allows me to have that data quality and, and that governance that I, that I need. You know, we've said many times on the cube that one of the notable differences in cloud this decade versus last decade, I mean ob there are obvious differences just in terms of scale and scope, but it's shaping up to be about the strength of the ecosystems. That's really a hallmark of these big cloud players. I mean they're, it's a key factor for innovating, accelerating product delivery, filling gaps in, in the hyperscale offerings cuz you got more stack, you know, mature stack capabilities and you know, it creates this flywheel momentum as we often say. But, so my question is, how do you work with the hyperscalers? Like whether it's AWS or Google, whomever, and what do you see as your role and what's the Collibra sweet spot? >>Yeah, definitely. So, you know, one of the things I mentioned early on is the broader ecosystem of partners is what it's all about. And so we have that strong partnership with Snowflake. We also are doing more with Google around, you know, GCP and kbra protect there, but also tighter data plex integration. So similar to what you've seen with our strategic moves around Snowflake and, and really covering the broad ecosystem of what Collibra can do on top of that data source. We're extending that to the world of Google as well and the world of data plex. We also have great partners in SI's Infosys is somebody we spoke with at the conference who's done a lot of great work with Levi's as they're really important to help people with their whole data strategy and driving that data driven culture and, and Collibra being the core of it. >>Hi Laura, we're gonna, we're gonna end it there, but I wonder if you could kind of put a bow on, you know, this year, the event your, your perspectives. So just give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, definitely. So I, I wanna say this is one of the biggest releases Collibra's ever had. Definitely the biggest one since I've been with the company a little over a year. We have all these great new product innovations coming to really drive the ease of use to make data more valuable for users everywhere and, and companies everywhere. And so it's all about everybody being able to easily find, understand, and trust and get access to that data going forward. >>Well congratulations on all the pro progress. It was great to have you on the cube first time I believe, and really appreciate you, you taking the time with us. >>Yes, thank you for your time. >>You're very welcome. Okay, you're watching the coverage of Data Citizens 2022 on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>So data modernization oftentimes means moving some of your storage and computer to the cloud where you get the benefit of scale and security and so on. But ultimately it doesn't take away the silos that you have. We have more locations, more tools and more processes with which we try to get value from this data. To do that at scale in an organization, people involved in this process, they have to understand each other. So you need to unite those people across those tools, processes, and systems with a shared language. When I say customer, do you understand the same thing as you hearing customer? Are we counting them in the same way so that shared language unites us and that gives the opportunity for the organization as a whole to get the maximum value out of their data assets and then they can democratize data so everyone can properly use that shared language to find, understand, and trust the data asset that's available. >>And that's where Collibra comes in. We provide a centralized system of engagement that works across all of those locations and combines all of those different user types across the whole business. At Collibra, we say United by data and that also means that we're united by data with our customers. So here is some data about some of our customers. There was the case of an online do it yourself platform who grew their revenue almost three times from a marketing campaign that provided the right product in the right hands of the right people. In other case that comes to mind is from a financial services organization who saved over 800 K every year because they were able to reuse the same data in different kinds of reports and before there was spread out over different tools and processes and silos, and now the platform brought them together so they realized, oh, we're actually using the same data, let's find a way to make this more efficient. And the last example that comes to mind is that of a large home loan, home mortgage, mortgage loan provider where they have a very complex landscape, a very complex architecture legacy in the cloud, et cetera. And they're using our software, they're using our platform to unite all the people and those processes and tools to get a common view of data to manage their compliance at scale. >>Hey everyone, I'm Lisa Martin covering Data Citizens 22, brought to you by Collibra. This next conversation is gonna focus on the importance of data culture. One of our Cube alumni is back, Stan Christians is Collibra's co-founder and it's Chief Data citizens. Stan, it's great to have you back on the cube. >>Hey Lisa, nice to be. >>So we're gonna be talking about the importance of data culture, data intelligence, maturity, all those great things. When we think about the data revolution that every business is going through, you know, it's so much more than technology innovation. It also really re requires cultural transformation, community transformation. Those are challenging for customers to undertake. Talk to us about what you mean by data citizenship and the role that creating a data culture plays in that journey. >>Right. So as you know, our event is called Data Citizens because we believe that in the end, a data citizen is anyone who uses data to do their job. And we believe that today's organizations, you have a lot of people, most of the employees in an organization are somehow gonna to be a data citizen, right? So you need to make sure that these people are aware of it. You need that. People have skills and competencies to do with data what necessary and that's on, all right? So what does it mean to have a good data culture? It means that if you're building a beautiful dashboard to try and convince your boss, we need to make this decision that your boss is also open to and able to interpret, you know, the data presented in dashboard to actually make that decision and take that action. Right? >>And once you have that why to the organization, that's when you have a good data culture. Now that's continuous effort for most organizations because they're always moving, somehow they're hiring new people and it has to be continuous effort because we've seen that on the hand. Organizations continue challenged their data sources and where all the data is flowing, right? Which in itself creates a lot of risk. But also on the other set hand of the equation, you have the benefit. You know, you might look at regulatory drivers like, we have to do this, right? But it's, it's much better right now to consider the competitive drivers, for example, and we did an IDC study earlier this year, quite interesting. I can recommend anyone to it. And one of the conclusions they found as they surveyed over a thousand people across organizations worldwide is that the ones who are higher in maturity. >>So the, the organizations that really look at data as an asset, look at data as a product and actively try to be better at it, don't have three times as good a business outcome as the ones who are lower on the maturity scale, right? So you can say, ok, I'm doing this, you know, data culture for everyone, awakening them up as data citizens. I'm doing this for competitive reasons, I'm doing this re reasons you're trying to bring both of those together and the ones that get data intelligence right, are successful and competitive. That's, and that's what we're seeing out there in the market. >>Absolutely. We know that just generally stand right, the organizations that are, are really creating a, a data culture and enabling everybody within the organization to become data citizens are, We know that in theory they're more competitive, they're more successful. But the IDC study that you just mentioned demonstrates they're three times more successful and competitive than their peers. Talk about how Collibra advises customers to create that community, that culture of data when it might be challenging for an organization to adapt culturally. >>Of course, of course it's difficult for an organization to adapt but it's also necessary, as you just said, imagine that, you know, you're a modern day organization, laptops, what have you, you're not using those, right? Or you know, you're delivering them throughout organization, but not enabling your colleagues to actually do something with that asset. Same thing as through with data today, right? If you're not properly using the data asset and competitors are, they're gonna to get more advantage. So as to how you get this done, establish this. There's angles to look at, Lisa. So one angle is obviously the leadership whereby whoever is the boss of data in the organization, you typically have multiple bosses there, like achieve data officers. Sometimes there's, there's multiple, but they may have a different title, right? So I'm just gonna summarize it as a data leader for a second. >>So whoever that is, they need to make sure that there's a clear vision, a clear strategy for data. And that strategy needs to include the monetization aspect. How are you going to get value from data? Yes. Now that's one part because then you can leadership in the organization and also the business value. And that's important. Cause those people, their job in essence really is to make everyone in the organization think about data as an asset. And I think that's the second part of the equation of getting that right, is it's not enough to just have that leadership out there, but you also have to get the hearts and minds of the data champions across the organization. You, I really have to win them over. And if you have those two combined and obviously a good technology to, you know, connect those people and have them execute on their responsibilities such as a data intelligence platform like s then the in place to really start upgrading that culture inch by inch if you'll, >>Yes, I like that. The recipe for success. So you are the co-founder of Collibra. You've worn many different hats along this journey. Now you're building Collibra's own data office. I like how before we went live, we were talking about Calibra is drinking its own champagne. I always loved to hear stories about that. You're speaking at Data Citizens 2022. Talk to us about how you are building a data culture within Collibra and what maybe some of the specific projects are that Collibra's data office is working on. >>Yes, and it is indeed data citizens. There are a ton of speaks here, are very excited. You know, we have Barb from m MIT speaking about data monetization. We have Dilla at the last minute. So really exciting agen agenda. Can't wait to get back out there essentially. So over the years at, we've doing this since two and eight, so a good years and I think we have another decade of work ahead in the market, just to be very clear. Data is here to stick around as are we. And myself, you know, when you start a company, we were for people in a, if you, so everybody's wearing all sorts of hat at time. But over the years I've run, you know, presales that sales partnerships, product cetera. And as our company got a little bit biggish, we're now thousand two. Something like people in the company. >>I believe systems and processes become a lot important. So we said you CBRA isn't the size our customers we're getting there in of organization structure, process systems, et cetera. So we said it's really time for us to put our money where is and to our own data office, which is what we were seeing customers', organizations worldwide. And they organizations have HR units, they have a finance unit and over time they'll all have a department if you'll, that is responsible somehow for the data. So we said, ok, let's try to set an examples that other people can take away with it, right? Can take away from it. So we set up a data strategy, we started building data products, took care of the data infrastructure. That's sort of good stuff. And in doing all of that, ISA exactly as you said, we said, okay, we need to also use our product and our own practices and from that use, learn how we can make the product better, learn how we make, can make the practice better and share that learning with all the, and on, on the Monday mornings, we sometimes refer to eating our dog foods on Friday evenings. >>We referred to that drinking our own champagne. I like it. So we, we had a, we had the driver to do this. You know, there's a clear business reason. So we involved, we included that in the data strategy and that's a little bit of our origin. Now how, how do we organize this? We have three pillars, and by no means is this a template that everyone should, this is just the organization that works at our company, but it can serve as an inspiration. So we have a pillar, which is data science. The data product builders, if you'll or the people who help the business build data products. We have the data engineers who help keep the lights on for that data platform to make sure that the products, the data products can run, the data can flow and you know, the quality can be checked. >>And then we have a data intelligence or data governance builders where we have those data governance, data intelligence stakeholders who help the business as a sort of data partner to the business stakeholders. So that's how we've organized it. And then we started following the CBRA approach, which is, well, what are the challenges that our business stakeholders have in hr, finance, sales, marketing all over? And how can data help overcome those challenges? And from those use cases, we then just started to build a map and started execution use of the use case. And a important ones are very simple. We them with our, our customers as well, people talking about the cata, right? The catalog for the data scientists to know what's in their data lake, for example, and for the people in and privacy. So they have their process registry and they can see how the data flows. >>So that's a starting place and that turns into a marketplace so that if new analysts and data citizens join kbra, they immediately have a place to go to, to look at, see, ok, what data is out there for me as an analyst or a data scientist or whatever to do my job, right? So they can immediately get access data. And another one that we is around trusted business. We're seeing that since, you know, self-service BI allowed everyone to make beautiful dashboards, you know, pie, pie charts. I always, my pet pee is the pie chart because I love buy and you shouldn't always be using pie charts. But essentially there's become proliferation of those reports. And now executives don't really know, okay, should I trust this report or that report the reporting on the same thing. But the numbers seem different, right? So that's why we have trusted this reporting. So we know if a, the dashboard, a data product essentially is built, we not that all the right steps are being followed and that whoever is consuming that can be quite confident in the result either, Right. And that silver browser, right? Absolutely >>Decay. >>Exactly. Yes, >>Absolutely. Talk a little bit about some of the, the key performance indicators that you're using to measure the success of the data office. What are some of those KPIs? >>KPIs and measuring is a big topic in the, in the data chief data officer profession, I would say, and again, it always varies with to your organization, but there's a few that we use that might be of interest. Use those pillars, right? And we have metrics across those pillars. So for example, a pillar on the data engineering side is gonna be more related to that uptime, right? Are the, is the data platform up and running? Are the data products up and running? Is the quality in them good enough? Is it going up? Is it going down? What's the usage? But also, and especially if you're in the cloud and if consumption's a big thing, you have metrics around cost, for example, right? So that's one set of examples. Another one is around the data sciences and products. Are people using them? Are they getting value from it? >>Can we calculate that value in ay perspective, right? Yeah. So that we can to the rest of the business continue to say we're tracking all those numbers and those numbers indicate that value is generated and how much value estimated in that region. And then you have some data intelligence, data governance metrics, which is, for example, you have a number of domains in a data mesh. People talk about being the owner of a data domain, for example, like product or, or customer. So how many of those domains do you have covered? How many of them are already part of the program? How many of them have owners assigned? How well are these owners organized, executing on their responsibilities? How many tickets are open closed? How many data products are built according to process? And so and so forth. So these are an set of examples of, of KPIs. There's a, there's a lot more, but hopefully those can already inspire the audience. >>Absolutely. So we've, we've talked about the rise cheap data offices, it's only accelerating. You mentioned this is like a 10 year journey. So if you were to look into a crystal ball, what do you see in terms of the maturation of data offices over the next decade? >>So we, we've seen indeed the, the role sort of grow up, I think in, in thousand 10 there may have been like 10 achieve data officers or something. Gartner has exact numbers on them, but then they grew, you know, industries and the number is estimated to be about 20,000 right now. Wow. And they evolved in a sort of stack of competencies, defensive data strategy, because the first chief data officers were more regulatory driven, offensive data strategy support for the digital program. And now all about data products, right? So as a data leader, you now need all of those competences and need to include them in, in your strategy. >>How is that going to evolve for the next couple of years? I wish I had one of those balls, right? But essentially I think for the next couple of years there's gonna be a lot of people, you know, still moving along with those four levels of the stack. A lot of people I see are still in version one and version two of the chief data. So you'll see over the years that's gonna evolve more digital and more data products. So for next years, my, my prediction is it's all products because it's an immediate link between data and, and the essentially, right? Right. So that's gonna be important and quite likely a new, some new things will be added on, which nobody can predict yet. But we'll see those pop up in a few years. I think there's gonna be a continued challenge for the chief officer role to become a real executive role as opposed to, you know, somebody who claims that they're executive, but then they're not, right? >>So the real reporting level into the board, into the CEO for example, will continue to be a challenging point. But the ones who do get that done will be the ones that are successful and the ones who get that will the ones that do it on the basis of data monetization, right? Connecting value to the data and making that value clear to all the data citizens in the organization, right? And in that sense, they'll need to have both, you know, technical audiences and non-technical audiences aligned of course. And they'll need to focus on adoption. Again, it's not enough to just have your data office be involved in this. It's really important that you're waking up data citizens across the organization and you make everyone in the organization think about data as an asset. >>Absolutely. Because there's so much value that can be extracted. Organizations really strategically build that data office and democratize access across all those data citizens. Stan, this is an exciting arena. We're definitely gonna keep our eyes on this. Sounds like a lot of evolution and maturation coming from the data office perspective. From the data citizen perspective. And as the data show that you mentioned in that IDC study, you mentioned Gartner as well, organizations have so much more likelihood of being successful and being competitive. So we're gonna watch this space. Stan, thank you so much for joining me on the cube at Data Citizens 22. We appreciate it. >>Thanks for having me over >>From Data Citizens 22, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. >>Okay, this concludes our coverage of Data Citizens 2022, brought to you by Collibra. Remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. And don't forget to check out silicon angle.com for all the news and wiki bod.com for our weekly breaking analysis series where we cover many data topics and share survey research from our partner ETR Enterprise Technology Research. If you want more information on the products announced at Data Citizens, go to collibra.com. There are tons of resources there. You'll find analyst reports, product demos. It's really worthwhile to check those out. Thanks for watching our program and digging into Data Citizens 2022 on the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you soon.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. And we're back at AWS Re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE and we're here, day two. Actually we started Monday night and we got wall-to-wall coverage. We going all the way through Thursday, myself. I'm Dave Volante with the co-host, David Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also here. Of course, John Furrier. Partners, technologists, customers, the whole ecosystem. It's good to be back in the live event. Of course we have hybrid event as well a lot of people watching online. Anshu Sharma is here. He is the co-founder and CEO of Skyflow, new type of privacy company, really interested in this topic. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thanks for bringing me here. >> It's timely, you know. Privacy, security, they're kind of two sides of the same coin. >> Yes. >> Why did you found Skyflow? >> Well, the idea for Skyflow really comes from my background in some ways. I spent my first nine years at Oracle, six years at Salesforce. And whether we were building databases or CRM products, customers would come to us and say, "Hey, you know, I have this very different type of data. It's things like social security numbers, frequent flyer card numbers, card numbers. You know, can you secure it better? Can you help me manage things like GDPR?" And to be honest, there was never a clear answer. There's a lot of technology solutions out there that do one thing at a time, you can walk around the booths here, there's like a hundred companies. And if you use all those hundred things correctly, maybe you could go tell your board that maybe a social security number is not going to be lost anymore. And I was like, "You know, we've simplified everything else. Why is it so hard to protect my social security number? It should be easy. It should be as easy as using Stripe or Twilio." And this idea just never went away and kept coming back till a few years ago, we learned about the Facebook privacy challenges, the Equifax challenges. And I was like, boy, it's the time. It's time to go do it now. >> You started the company in 2019. Right? >> Yes. >> I mean, your timing was pretty good, right? So what are the big sort of Uber trends that you're seeing? Obviously GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act. I heard this morning. Did you hear this? That like, if you post a picture on social media now without somebody's permission, you're now violating their privacy. It's like, you can see the smiles on Anshu's face. >> Its like every week, we're like every week, there's a new story that could be like, well, Skyflow. The new story is the question, the answer is Skyflow. But honestly I think what's happened is, the issue is put very simple. You know all we're trying to do is protect people's social security numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers, things we hold dear. At the same time, it's complex. Like what does it mean to protect your social security number let's say? Does that mean I don't get to use it for filing your taxes? Well, I need your credit card number to process a payment. And we were like, this is just too complicated. Why, how do companies like Apple do it? How do companies like Netflix manage not have as many breaches as my hotel that barely has any data. And the answer is those companies actually have evolved to a completely different architecture, the zero trust data architecture. And that was our inspiration for starting this company. >> Yeah. I mean. How many times have you been asked to give your social security number? And you're like, why? why do you want it? What are you going to do with it? How do you protect it? And they go, "I don't know." >> You know, what's even, my favorite is like, you give your social security number to say TurboTax, how many days of the year do they need to use it? One. How many days of the year do they have it? And the thing is, it's a liability for those CTOs too. >> Yeah right. >> The CTO of Walgreens, the CTO of Intuit. They don't really want that social security number just so they can process your card once a year, or your social security number once a year. It's almost like we're forcing them to hold onto data. And then they have to bear the burden of having these stories. Like, you know, everybody wants to prevent a New York Times story that says, what Robin Hood had a breach, Twitter had a breach. >> So walk us through how Skyflow would address something like that. So take the, you know, take the make a generic version of TurboTax, social security members. There they are right now, they're sitting in a database somewhere. Hopefully there's some security wrapped around it in some way or another. What would you advise a customer like that to do? And what are you actually doing for them? >> So, look, it's very simple. You are not going to put your username passwords in a generic database. You're going to use something like OD Zero or Octa to do it. We're living in a world where we have polyglot data stores. Like there's a key value store. There's a time series database. There is a search database like Elastic. There's a log database like Splunk. But PII data, Somehow we think just fine. If it's in a hundred places and our answer is that we should do the same thing that companies like Apple, Netflix, Google, everybody, does. They take this data. They completely isolate it from the databases. And it gets stored in a custom data store in our case, that would be Skyflow. And essentially we'd give you encrypted tokens back and you can use these encrypted tokens that look like fake social security number. It's called a Format Preserving Encryption. So if you think about all the breakthroughs we've had in homomorphic encryption, on secure elements, like the way your phone works, the credit card number is stored in a secure element. So it's the same idea. There's a secure part of your data stack, which is Skyflow. That basically keeps the data always protected. And because we can compute and search on encrypted data, this is important, everybody can encrypt data at rest. Skyflow is the first company that's come out and said, "Look, you can keep your phone number and social security number, encrypted while I can run an aggregation query." So I can tell you what's the balance of your customer's account balance. And i can run that query without decrypting, a single row of data. The only other company I know that can do that internally is a certain Cupertino based company. >> So think about it. Anybody can walk something up to a certain degree, but allowing frictionless access at the same time. >> While it's encrypted. So how do you make that? Are you, is a strategy to make that a horizontal service? That I can put into my data protection service or my E-commerce service or whatever. >> It's a cloud-based service that runs on AWS and other clouds. We basically given instance just like, you'll get an instance of a post-grad store or you get an API handled to OD Zero. You basically instantiate Skyflow of what gets created. It can be in your AWS environment, dedicated VPC. So it's private to you and then you have a handle and then basically you just start using it. >> So how, how do you, what's the secret sauce? How do you do that? >> The secret source. Well, now that we filed the patents on it, I can reveal the secret sauce. So the holy grail of encryption right now, if you go talk to people at a leading company, is there's something called Fully Homomorphic Encryption. That's fundamentally the foundation on which things like Bitcoin are built actually. But the hard part about Fully Homomorphic Encryption is it works. You can actually do mathematical computations on it without decrypting the data, but it's about a million times slower. >> Yes slower, right. >> So nobody uses it. My insight was that we don't need to do multiplications and additions on phone numbers. You never take my phone number and divide by your social security number. (Dave laughing) These numbers are not numbers, they are data structures. So our insight was if you treat them as specialized data structures, we're all talking about basically about 80 different types of data across the globe. Every human being has an ID, date of birth, height, color of eyes. There's not that many fields. What we can do then is create specialized encryption schemes for each data type. We call this polymorphic data encryption. Poly means multiple. As a result of that, we can actually store the data encrypted and build indexes on it. Since we can index interpret data, it's kind of like, imagine you can run real-time queries on data that's encrypted. Every other data store, When you encrypt the data, it becomes invisible to database. And that's why we had to build this as a full stacked service. Just like the Snowflake guys had to start with the foundation of storage, rethink indexing, and build Snowflake. We did the same thing, except we built it for encrypted indexes Whereas they built it for encrypted, for regular data stores. >> So thinking, if you think about today's tech stack, it's evolving, right? The data protection and security are coming together. Where does this fit? Is it sort of now becoming a fundamental part of the-- >> We think every leading company, whether you're building a new brokerage application or you are the largest bank in the world, and we're talking to some of them right now. They're all going to have an internal service called a PII wall. This wall just like Apple and Google have their own internal walls. You're going to have a wall service in your service oriented architecture, essentially. And it's going to basically be the API. Every other application and database in your company is not going to store my social security number. The SSNs don't belong in 600 databases at a leading bank. They don't belong inside your customer support system. Think about what happened with Robinhood two weeks ago, right? Someone tricked one call center guy into giving the keys up, which is fine happens. But why did the call center guy have access to like a million email addresses? He's never used going to use that. So we think if you isolate the PII, every leading company is going to end up with a PII Wall, as part of their core architecture. Just like today, we have an Alt API, you have a Search API, you have a Logging API, you're going to have a PII API. And that's going to be part of your modern data stack. >> So okay. So this is definitely not a bolt on, right? It's going to be a fundamental company, just like security is, just like backup is. It's now, you got to have it. It's-- >> Yes. I mean, if you think about it, it just logically makes sense. Like you should be isolating this data. You don't keep your money and gold around at home. You put it either in a locker or a bank. I think the same applies for PII. We just haven't done it because companies would pay off a fine for $10,000 or a million dollars. And. >> Yeah. So you've recently raised $45 million to expand your efforts. Obviously that means that people are looking at this and saying there's opportunity, right? What does that look like when you think of growth, where during your go to market strategy at first you're convincing people that it's a good idea to do it. Do you think or hope for, hope one day that there's an inflection point where it's not that people are thinking, you know, let's do this because it's a good idea, but people are like, I have to do this because if I don't, it's irresponsible and I'm going to be penalized for not having it. It becomes something that isn't really a choice. It's something where you just do it. >> So, you know, when we were starting the company, we didn't even have a word to explain what we were trying to do. We would say things like what if there was a cloud service for XYZ. And, but over the last one year, I don't want to take credit for creating this market, but this market has been created in the last year and a half. And you know, we get tons of people, including some of the largest institutions emailing us, saying, "I'm looking to build a PII wall, API service inside my company. Can you tell me why your product meets that need?" And I thought that would take us three to five years to get there. And, you know, we've ended up creating a category, basically just like other companies have. And I think, you know, you don't get, I believe in market permission. You don't get to create a category. The market gives somebody the permission to create a category. Saying, "Look, this makes sense. Something like this should emerge." And if you're there at the right time, like you said. >> Yep. >> You get to take the opportunity. >> So where are you at as a company say for some, some capital is great. When do you scale? >> We're scaling now? So we just doubled our headcount in the last nine to 10 months. We're now 75 people. We think we'll be about 150 to 200 people in the next year. We are hiring across all regions. We just hired a head of Asia pack from segment.com. We just hired our first, you know, lead on international expansion. And in the US, we have an office in Palo Alto. We have an office in Bangalore. We just announced a data residency solution for Europe, data residency solution for India and emerging markets. Because data residency is another one of those things that's just emerging right now. And irrespective of whether you believe in security and privacy. Data residency is one of those things that you are mandated to implement. >> And where are you hiring? Is it combination to go to market? Tell me about your go to market. >> The go to market. We are direct sales organization, but we work with partners. So we haven't announced some of these partnerships, but you're working with some of the companies here who either are large database companies, large security companies. We think there is a win-win relationship between us and some of the partner. >> You're a partner model, partner channel model. >> So, direct sales but partner assisted. >> Yeah. Right. All right. We got to go. Hey, awesome story. Congratulations. Best of luck. >> Very interesting. >> Love to have you back and track the progress. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Okay. Thank you for watching theCUBE, the leader in and high-tech coverage. We're at Re-Invent 2021. Be right back (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe, but it's the cube presenting active DQ, intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by IO Tahoe. >>Now we're going to look at the role automation plays in mobilizing your data on snowflake. Let's welcome. And Duncan Turnbull who's partner sales engineer at snowflake and AIG Vihara is back CEO of IO. Tahoe is going to share his insight. Gentlemen. Welcome. >>Thank you, David. Good to have you back. Yeah, it's great to have you back >>A J uh, and it's really good to CIO Tao expanding the ecosystem so important. Um, now of course bringing snowflake and it looks like you're really starting to build momentum. I mean, there's progress that we've seen every month, month by month, over the past 12, 14 months, your seed investors, they gotta be happy. >>They are all that happy. And then I can see that we run into a nice phase of expansion here and new customers signing up. And now you're ready to go out and raise that next round of funding. I think, um, maybe think of a slight snowflake five years ago. So we're definitely on track with that. A lot of interest from investors and, um, we're right now trying to focus in on those investors that can partner with us, understand AI data and, and automation. >>So personally, I mean, you've managed a number of early stage VC funds. I think four of them, uh, you've taken several comp, uh, software companies through many funding rounds and growth and all the way to exit. So, you know how it works, you have to get product market fit, you know, you gotta make sure you get your KPIs, right. And you gotta hire the right salespeople, but, but what's different this time around, >>Uh, well, you know, the fundamentals that you mentioned though, those are never change. And, um, what we can say, what I can say that's different, that's shifted, uh, this time around is three things. One in that they used to be this kind of choice of, do we go open source or do we go proprietary? Um, now that has turned into, um, a nice hybrid model where we've really keyed into, um, you know, red hat doing something similar with Santos. And the idea here is that there is a core capability of technology that independence a platform, but it's the ability to then build an ecosystem around that made a pervade community. And that community may include customers, uh, technology partners, other tech vendors, and enabling the platform adoption so that all of those folks in that community can build and contribute, um, while still maintaining the core architecture and platform integrity, uh, at the core of it. >>And that's one thing that's changed was fitting a lot of that type of software company, um, emerge into that model, which is different from five years ago. Um, and then leveraging the cloud, um, every cloud snowflake cloud being one of them here in order to make use of what customers, uh, and customers and enterprise software are moving towards. Uh, every CIO is now in some configuration of a hybrid. Um, it is state whether those cloud multi-cloud on prem. That's just the reality. The other piece is in dealing with the CIO is legacy. So the past 15, 20 years they've purchased many different platforms, technologies, and some of those are still established and still, how do you, um, enable that CIO to make purchase while still preserving and in some cases building on and extending the, the legacy, um, material technology. So they've invested their people's time and training and financial investment into solving a problem, customer pain point, uh, with technology, but, uh, never goes out of fashion >>That never changes. You have to focus like a laser on that. And of course, uh, speaking of companies who are focused on solving problems, don't can turn bill from snowflake. You guys have really done a great job and really brilliantly addressing pain points, particularly around data warehousing, simplified that you're providing this new capability around data sharing, uh, really quite amazing. Um, Dunkin AAJ talks about data quality and customer pain points, uh, in, in enterprise. It, why is data quality been such a problem historically? >>Oh, sorry. One of the biggest challenges that's really affected by it in the past is that because to address everyone's need for using data, they've evolved all these kinds of different places to store all these different silos or data marts or all this kind of clarification of places where data lives and all of those end up with slightly different schedules to bringing data in and out. They end up with slightly different rules for transforming that data and formatting it and getting it ready and slightly different quality checks for making use of it. And this then becomes like a big problem in that these different teams are then going to have slightly different or even radically different ounces to the same kinds of questions, which makes it very hard for teams to work together, uh, on their different data problems that exist inside the business, depending on which of these silos they end up looking at and what you can do. If you have a single kind of scalable system for putting all of your data into it, you can kind of sidestep along to this complexity and you can address the data quality issues in a, in a single and a single way. >>Now, of course, we're seeing this huge trend in the market towards robotic process automation, RPA, that adoption is accelerating. Uh, you see, in UI paths, I IPO, you know, 35 plus billion dollars, uh, valuation, you know, snowflake like numbers, nice cops there for sure. Uh, agent you've coined the phrase data RPA, what is that in simple terms? >>Yeah, I mean, it was born out of, uh, seeing how in our ecosystem concern community developers and customers, uh, general business users for wanting to adopt and deploy a tar hose technology. And we could see that, um, I mean, there's not monkeying out PA we're not trying to automate that piece, but wherever there is a process that was tied into some form of a manual overhead with handovers and so on. Um, that process is something that we were able to automate with, with our ties technology and, and the deployment of AI and machine learning technologies specifically to those data processes almost as a precursor to getting into financial automation that, um, that's really where we're seeing the momentum pick up, especially in the last six months. And we've kept it really simple with snowflake. We've kind of stepped back and said, well, you know, the resource that a snowflake can leverage here is, is the metadata. So how could we turn snowflake into that repository of being the data catalog? And by the way, if you're a CIO looking to purchase a data catalog tool stop, there's no need to, um, working with snowflake, we've enable that intelligence to be gathered automatically and to be put, to use within snowflake. So reducing that manual effort, and I'm putting that data to work. And, um, and that's where we've packaged this with, uh, AI machine learning specific to those data tasks. Um, and it made sense that's, what's resonated with, with our customers. >>You know, what's interesting here, just a quick aside, as you know, I've been watching snowflake now for awhile and, and you know, of course the, the competitors come out and maybe criticize why they don't have this feature. They don't have that feature. And it's snowflake seems to have an answer. And the answer oftentimes is, well, its ecosystem ecosystem is going to bring that because we have a platform that's so easy to work with though. So I'm interested Duncan in what kind of collaborations you are enabling with high quality data. And of course, you know, your data sharing capability. >>Yeah. So I think, uh, you know, the ability to work on, on datasets, isn't just limited to inside the business itself or even between different business units. And we were kind of discussing maybe with their silos. Therefore, when looking at this idea of collaboration, we have these where we want to be >>Able to exploit data to the greatest degree possible, but we need to maintain the security, the safety, the privacy, and governance of that data. It could be quite valuable. It could be quite personal depending on the application involved. One of these novel applications that we see between organizations of data sharing is this idea of data clean rooms. And these data clean rooms are safe, collaborative spaces, which allow multiple companies or even divisions inside a company where they have particular, uh, privacy requirements to bring two or more data sets together for analysis. But without having to actually share the whole unprotected data set with each other, and this lets you to, you know, when you do this inside of snowflake, you can collaborate using standard tool sets. You can use all of our SQL ecosystem. You can use all of the data science ecosystem that works with snowflake. >>You can use all of the BI ecosystem that works with snowflake, but you can do that in a way that keeps the confidentiality that needs to be presented inside the data intact. And you can only really do these kinds of, uh, collaborations, especially across organization, but even inside large enterprises, when you have good reliable data to work with, otherwise your analysis just isn't going to really work properly. A good example of this is one of our large gaming customers. Who's an advertiser. They were able to build targeting ads to acquire customers and measure the campaign impact in revenue, but they were able to keep their data safe and secure while doing that while working with advertising partners, uh, the business impact of that was they're able to get a lifted 20 to 25% in campaign effectiveness through better targeting and actually, uh, pull through into that of a reduction in customer acquisition costs because they just didn't have to spend as much on the forms of media that weren't working for them. >>So, ha I wonder, I mean, you know, with, with the way public policy shaping out, you know, obviously GDPR started it in the States, you know, California, consumer privacy act, and people are sort of taking the best of those. And, and, and there's a lot of differentiation, but what are you seeing just in terms of, you know, the government's really driving this, this move to privacy, >>Um, government public sector, we're seeing a huge wake up an activity and, uh, across the whole piece that, um, part of it has been data privacy. Um, the other part of it is being more joined up and more digital rather than paper or form based. Um, we've all got stories of waiting in line, holding a form, taking that form to the front of the line and handing it over a desk. Now government and public sector is really looking to transform their services into being online, to show self service. Um, and that whole shift is then driving the need to, um, emulate a lot of what the commercial sector is doing, um, to automate their processes and to unlock the data from silos to put through into those, uh, those processes. Um, and another thing I can say about this is they, the need for data quality is as a Dunkin mentions underpins all of these processes, government pharmaceuticals, utilities, banking, insurance, the ability for a chief marketing officer to drive a, a loyalty campaign. >>They, the ability for a CFO to reconcile accounts at the end of the month. So do a, a, uh, a quick, accurate financial close. Um, also the, the ability of a customer operations to make sure that the customer has the right details about themselves in the right, uh, application that they can sell. So from all of that is underpinned by data and is effective or not based on the quality of that data. So whilst we're mobilizing data to snowflake cloud, the ability to then drive analytics, prediction, business processes off that cloud, um, succeeds or fails on the quality of that data. >>I mean it, and, you know, I would say, I mean, it really is table stakes. If you don't trust the data, you're not gonna use the data. The problem is it always takes so long to get to the data quality. There's all these endless debates about it. So we've been doing a fair amount of work and thinking around this idea of decentralized data, data by its very nature is decentralized, but the fault domains of traditional big data is that everything is just monolithic and the organizations monolithic technology's monolithic, the roles are very, you know, hyper specialized. And so you're hearing a lot more these days about this notion of a data fabric or what calls a data mesh. Uh, and we've kind of been leaning in to that and the ability to, to connect various data capabilities, whether it's a data warehouse or a data hub or a data Lake that those assets are discoverable, they're shareable through API APIs and they're governed on a federated basis. And you're using now bringing in a machine intelligence to improve data quality. You know, I wonder Duncan, if you could talk a little bit about Snowflake's approach to this topic. >>Sure. So I'd say that, you know, making use of all of your data, is there a key kind of driver behind these ideas that they can mesh into the data fabrics? And the idea is that you want to bring together not just your kind of strategic data, but also your legacy data and everything that you have inside the enterprise. I think I'd also like to kind of expand upon what a lot of people view as all of the data. And I think that a lot of people kind of miss that there's this whole other world of data they could be having access to, which is things like data from their business partners, their customers, their suppliers, and even stuff that's more in the public domain, whether that's, you know, demographic data or geographic or all these kinds of other types of data sources. And what I'd say to some extent is that the data cloud really facilitates the ability to share and gain access to this both kind of between organizations inside organizations. >>And you don't have to, you know, make lots of copies of the data and kind of worry about the storage and this federated, um, you know, idea of governance and all these things that it's quite complex to kind of manage this. Uh, you know, the snowflake approach really enables you to share data with your ecosystem all the world, without any latency with full control over what's shared without having to introduce new complexities or having complex attractions with APIs or software integration. The simple approach that we provide allows a relentless focus on creating the right data product to meet the challenges facing your business today. >>So, Andrea, the key here is to don't get to talking about it in my mind. Anyway, my cake takeaway is to simplicity. If you can take the complexity out of the equation, we're going to get more adoption. It really is that simple. >>Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that that whole journey, maybe five, six years ago, the adoption of data lakes was, was a stepping stone. Uh, however, the Achilles heel there was, you know, the complexity that it shifted towards consuming that data from a data Lake where there were many, many sets of data, um, to, to be able to cure rate and to, um, to consume, uh, whereas actually, you know, the simplicity of being able to go to the data that you need to do your role, whether you're in tax compliance or in customer services is, is key. And, you know, listen for snowflake by auto. One thing we know for sure is that our customers are super small and they're very capable. They're they're data savvy and know, want to use whichever tool and embrace whichever, um, cloud platform that is gonna reduce the barriers to solving. What's complex about that data, simplifying that and using, um, good old fashioned SQL, um, to access data and to build products from it to exploit that data. So, um, simplicity is, is key to it to allow people to, to, to make use of that data. And CIO is recognize that >>So Duncan, the cloud obviously brought in this notion of dev ops, um, and new methodologies and things like agile that brought that's brought in the notion of data ops, which is a very hot topic right now. Um, basically dev ops applies to data about how D how does snowflake think about this? How do you facilitate that methodology? >>Yeah, sorry. I agree with you absolutely. That they drops takes these ideas of agile development of >>Agile delivery and of the kind of dev ops world that we've seen just rise and rise, and it applies them to the data pipeline, which is somewhere where it kind of traditionally hasn't happened. And it's the same kinds of messages as we see in the development world, it's about delivering faster development, having better repeatability and really getting towards that dream of the data-driven enterprise, you know, where you can answer people's data questions, they can make better business decisions. And we have some really great architectural advantages that allow us to do things like allow cloning of data sets without having to copy them, allows us to do things like time travel so we can see what data looked like at some point in the past. And this lets you kind of set up both your own kind of little data playpen as a clone without really having to copy all of that data. >>So it's quick and easy, and you can also, again, with our separation of storage and compute, you can provision your own virtual warehouse for dev usage. So you're not interfering with anything to do with people's production usage of this data. So the, these ideas, the scalability, it just makes it easy to make changes, test them, see what the effect of those changes are. And we've actually seen this. You were talking a lot about partner ecosystems earlier. Uh, the partner ecosystem has taken these ideas that are inside snowflake and they've extended them. They've integrated them with, uh, dev ops and data ops tooling. So things like version control and get an infrastructure automation and things like Terraform. And they've kind of built that out into more of a data ops products that, that you can, you can make yourself so we can see there's a huge impact of, of these ideas coming into the data world. >>We think we're really well-placed to take advantage to them. The partner ecosystem is doing a great job with doing that. And it really allows us to kind of change that operating model for data so that we don't have as much emphasis on like hierarchy and change windows and all these kinds of things that are maybe use as a lot of fashioned. And we kind of taking the shift from this batch data integration into, you know, streaming continuous data pipelines in the cloud. And this kind of gets you away from like a once a week or once a month change window, if you're really unlucky to, you know, pushing changes, uh, in a much more rapid fashion as the needs of the business change. >>I mean, those hierarchical organizational structures, uh, w when we apply those to begin to that, what it actually creates the silos. So if you're going to be a silo Buster, which aji look at you guys in silo busters, you've got to put data in the hands of the domain experts, the business people, they know what data they want, if they have to go through and beg and borrow for a new data sets, et cetera. And so that's where automation becomes so key. And frankly, the technology should be an implementation detail, not the dictating factor. I wonder if you could comment on this. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, making the, the technologies more accessible to the general business users >>Or those specialists business teams that, um, that's the key to unlocking is it is interesting to see is as people move from organization to organization where they've had those experiences operating in a hierarchical sense, I want to break free from that and, um, or have been exposed to, um, automation, continuous workflows, um, change is continuous in it. It's continuous in business, the market's continuously changing. So having that flow across the organization of work, using key components, such as get hub, similar to what you drive process Terraform to build in, um, code into the process, um, and automation and with a high Tahoe leveraging all the metadata from across those fragmented sources is, is, is good to say how those things are coming together. And watching people move from organization to organization say, Hey, okay, I've got a new start. I've got my first hundred days to impress my, my new manager. >>Uh, what kind of an impact can I, um, bring to this? And quite often we're seeing that as, you know, let me take away the good learnings from how to do it, or how not to do it from my previous role. And this is an opportunity for me to, to bring in automation. And I'll give you an example, David, you know, recently started working with a, a client in financial services. Who's an asset manager, uh, managing financial assets. They've grown over the course of the last 10 years through M and a, and each of those acquisitions have bought with it tactical data. It's saying instead of data of multiple CRM systems now multiple databases, multiple bespoke in-house created applications. And when the new CIO came in and had a look at those well, you know, yes, I want to mobilize my data. Yes, I need to modernize my data state because my CEO is now looking at these crypto assets that are on the horizon and the new funds that are emerging that around digital assets and crypto assets. >>But in order to get to that where absolutely data underpins and is the core asset, um, cleaning up that, that legacy situation mobilizing the relevant data into the Safelite cloud platform, um, is where we're giving time back, you know, that is now taking a few weeks, whereas that transitioned to mobilize that data, start with that, that new clean slate to build upon a new business as a, a digital crypto asset manager, as well as the legacy, traditional financial assets, bonds stocks, and fixed income assets, you name it, uh, is where we're starting to see a lot of innovation. >>Yeah. Tons of innovation. I love the crypto examples and FTS are exploding and, you know, let's face it, traditional banks are getting disrupted. Uh, and so I also love this notion of data RPA. I, especially because I've done a lot of work in the RPA space. And, and I want to, what I would observe is that the, the early days of RPA, I call it paving the cow path, taking existing processes and applying scripts, get letting software robots, you know, do its thing. And that was good because it reduced, you know, mundane tasks, but really where it's evolved is a much broader automation agenda. People are discovering new, new ways to completely transform their processes. And I see a similar, uh, analogy for data, the data operating model. So I'm wonder whenever you think about that, how a customer really gets started bringing this to their ecosystem, their data life cycles. >>Sure. Yeah. So step one is always the same is figuring out for the CIO, the chief data officer, what data do I have, um, and that's increasingly something that they want towards a mate, so we can help them there and, and do that automated data discovery, whether that is documents in the file, share backup archive in a relational data store, in a mainframe really quickly hydrating that and bringing that intelligence, the forefront of, of what do I have, and then it's the next step of, well, okay. Now I want to continually monitor and curate that intelligence with the platform that I've chosen. Let's say snowflake, um, in order such that I can then build applications on top of that platform to serve my, my internal, external customer needs and the automation around classifying data reconciliation across different fragmented data silos, building that in those insights into snowflake. >>Um, as you say, a little later on where we're talking about data quality, active DQ, allowing us to reconcile data from different sources, as well as look at the integrity of that data. Um, so they can go on to remediation, you know, I, I wanna, um, harness and leverage, um, techniques around traditional RPA. Um, but to get to that stage, I need to fix the data. So remediating publishing the data in snowflake, uh, allowing analysis to be formed performance snowflake. Th those are the key steps that we see and just shrinking that timeline into weeks, giving the organization that time back means they're spending more time on their customer and solving their customer's problem, which is where we want them to be. >>This is the brilliance of snowflake actually, you know, Duncan is, I've talked to him, then what does your view about this and your other co-founders and it's really that focus on simplicity. So, I mean, that's, you, you picked a good company to join my opinion. So, um, I wonder if you could, you know, talk about some of the industry sectors that are, again, going to gain the most from, from data RPA, I mean, traditional RPA, if I can use that term, you know, a lot of it was back office, a lot of, you know, financial w what are the practical applications where data RPA is going to impact, you know, businesses and, and the outcomes that we can expect. >>Yes, sir. So our drive is, is really to, to make that, um, business general user's experience of RPA simpler and, and using no code to do that, uh, where they've also chosen snowflake to build that their cloud platform. They've got the combination then of using a relatively simple script scripting techniques, such as SQL, uh, without no code approach. And the, the answer to your question is whichever sector is looking to mobilize their data. Uh, it seems like a cop-out, but to give you some specific examples, David, um, in banking where, uh, customers are looking to modernize their banking systems and enable better customer experience through, through applications and digital apps. That's where we're, we're seeing a lot of traction, uh, and this approach to, to pay RPA to data, um, health care, where there's a huge amount of work to do to standardize data sets across providers, payers, patients, uh, and it's an ongoing, um, process there for, for retail, um, helping to, to build that immersive customer experience. >>So recommending next best actions, um, providing an experience that is going to drive loyalty and retention, that's, that's dependent on understanding what that customer's needs intent, uh, being out to provide them with the content or the outfit at that point in time, or all data dependent utilities is another one great overlap there with, with snowflake where, you know, helping utilities, telecoms energy, water providers to build services on that data. And this is where the ecosystem just continues to, to expand. If we, if we're helping our customers turn their data into services for, for their ecosystem, that's, that's exciting. And they were more so exciting than insurance, which we always used to, um, think back to, uh, when insurance used to be very dull and mundane, actually, that's where we're seeing a huge amounts of innovation to create new flexible products that are priced to the day to the situation and, and risk models being adaptive when the data changes, uh, on, on events or circumstances. So across all those sectors that they're all mobilizing that data, they're all moving in some way, shape or form to a, a multi-cloud, um, set up with their it. And I think with, with snowflake and without Tahoe, being able to accelerate that and make that journey simple and as complex is, uh, is why we found such a good partner here. >>All right. Thanks for that. And then thank you guys. Both. We gotta leave it there. Uh, really appreciate Duncan you coming on and Aja best of luck with the fundraising. >>We'll keep you posted. Thanks, David. All right. Great. >>Okay. Now let's take a look at a short video. That's going to help you understand how to reduce the steps around your data ops. Let's watch.

>>Around the globe presenting accelerating automation with Deb brought to you by Cisco >>We're back. This is Dave Vellante and TKK Anini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we? >>No, that no one did, but yeah, it, uh, that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred. Uh, and, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, are along with our partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but what people essentially accept, expect that to, you know, at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>No, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease their, the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator. But as, as work shifts from home, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that, um, we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation, you know, generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting a security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight, right? >>Yeah. Well, there's, they're clever, uh, giving them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, uh, a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but it also you having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I, I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what, what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no data center required, no distract required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of cloud. Um, it's, it's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, uh, you know, it is the, the, uh, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we, we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, can my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw it. Um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your, your premise. >>When I, when I first started, um, playing online games, I'm going back to the text based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It is two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, it, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is, is sort of the, the magic recipe is, is not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. I'm definitely >>Seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you? >>Yeah, no, and it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass Blair is over there. I'm like what happened to the band? So that's, that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and, and, and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. >>I love these, I love >>Things. Thanks for inviting me and I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Uh, like the sign says to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the queue. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We break back with our next guest, this short break.

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with dev net in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube, but in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that. Creativity. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net senior vice president in general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe presenting accelerating automation with damnit brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX all that great stuff. Many Wade Lee, who's the director, senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first. We don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net creative, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years where virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you've had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are >>Coming online is, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. Uh, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for start a, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business stay alive. And to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>Now one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and, you know, have you guys got some acquisitions, you about thousand eyes? Um, um, you've got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game in security Cooper and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place and now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, um, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they have to build in and what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first, everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>Cause you know, you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. Well, you've >>Been falling, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people rumblings are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>We got dev net created right around the corner, virtual unfortunate won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. >>Thanks. Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard, uh, Susie is about people and one of the things that's close to your heart and you've been driving is, uh, as senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network, automation, developer, which Susie mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite data that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on a dev net site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dump space as well, and are helping people with that service or what it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. Okay. >>I ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned a observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we need it? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, um, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Eric and Mandy. If you guys can wrap up this accelerate automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, I'm only can imagine the enablement that's gonna create. Can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with dev net and tee up dev net create Mandy, we'll start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every Devin event over the past years, you know, damnit is bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that the people's skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the Duveneck community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping >>That customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. >>Can I add one, add one more thing? Yeah. I was just gonna say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>Yeah. That's what I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that. By saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. Happy to be here. >>Okay. I'm Jennifer with the cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment virtual tour face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching. >>Welcome back. And Jeffrey, >>The cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev data van, it's called accelerating automation with dev net and the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is, is not going away. They've been doing this since the middle of March or all the way to October. And so we're excited to have our next guest is Thomas Shively. He's the vice president of product marketing and data center networking for the intent based networking group at Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. Exactly, >>Exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls in their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16 hit and everybody had to go home. >>Wow, good point. Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network >>Much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more operative as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it, 2000 East to West, as we say on the data center. Right. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >>Right. You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning, can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends and the way I look at this trans as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while then. So in a sense, we, we, we prep was, or no, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little block, a little, little, uh, abrupt before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if he didn't, if he didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we sold our match. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. Yeah, >>I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of, of trends, right? The other great, uh, trend as public cloud, um, and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focused on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might have played some compliance reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your sinks. And so I sing in the end, what a, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed. But the logic context section, which we see in the last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is where a lot of my discussions I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of. >>Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. And I said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? >>Right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools, uh, and that's a whole range, right? And this is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speeds, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use NoMo tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further and saying, I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pleasing, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration with relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right? And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see a given. I, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about. The cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all of these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throat to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer. You, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just sit. I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they want to actually structure the operation. Right? One of the nice things around this or automation plus, uh, tool integration, cloning to, and integration is you actually opened this up, not a soul automation train, not just to the network operations personnel, right. You also open it up and can use this for the second ops person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, is literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional, you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I got to hand over the sec ups team, and they can directly call these these KPIs, right? Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>That's interesting, you know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously change software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those. None of those is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes to saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI decent, a controller or our multicell orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. Uh, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she formed Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is emotion where in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying, Neil, all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little plugin. I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetApps person or dev ops person or SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right. And it's simplest thing that like sent books and why moments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code Coda there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly. And that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation we're in and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning, that's the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily. Right, >>Right. That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right. Democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and can make the changes and then opening up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the, it says application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happening with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get projects started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lands, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right. This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right. And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to, uh, adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's not just automation. I say, we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private, private networks into which of private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing, what a business looks at, right. They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment. What's a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this. Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. It's really democratisation. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in, in, in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting is we, we started on the Cisco data center side. We started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on these, on these products, uh, they have all the capabilities they are, they can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them point. >>Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and in social media, right. What what's driving your digital transformation is that the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. I highly recommend everybody roll up his sleeves and you know, the best races you can have. >>And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, you know, like say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. I look forward to that as well. All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? >>I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, or along with our partner, DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's know, North of 70% >>Plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our, our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable as sort of the, of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my, you know, dog's name is the password, you know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all of the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively. And I make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if, when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, that there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I, I see that with an asterisk because, um, if, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant Tessa mill component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? Let's say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there in that, in that data set. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation, and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on the outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in, in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about what computers are gonna run on, or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so what, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right? There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to, you know, security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical do, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines, if the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if, if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code while we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company likes companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatize is the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick doc. I don't care, but they sort of laid out this pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy mean beyond GDPR and California consumer privacy act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and Mose. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He needs to be walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me, >>Really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is, is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or are you >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, try not try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming a, this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there? And what are you? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters. Isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass players go over there. Like what happened to the band? That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So things thanks for inviting me and I miss you, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says kidney, thanks so much for coming to the Q. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>After the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual. We're not face to face the cubes been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's, who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is beast vice president of product. Uh, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area it's converged in multiple theaters and technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you, but first thousand eyes is recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important, the new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, it's really been an exciting six months for the entire team and customers, >>You know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the Cova dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, the home of the conference book talk track we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandoned from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home. VPNs are passe. Maybe it's SD when maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed this at scale. What's your view on this? And what is thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a early, simple, uh, connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say, functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the it organization newly chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, to be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, as you get into some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data at the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. First off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right inside, you know, data, um, alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen. You have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, to allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as our employees, >>Classic policy based activity, taking it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it, people are like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CTPs infrastructure across, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you've got the cloud. How has your technology helped the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, a great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and where in the past you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need, enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, what, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. They're having to work collaboratively with a different ISP. If they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question, we think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it. Teams. Um, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them just got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a war situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment at time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to, uh, be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same se land-based rollout, where you're looking to say benchmark, and you can confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ESPs within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch, give you that competence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights. The classic financial model ROI got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation and who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things, but as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products, it means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the deal that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you've said, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need with the level of automation, you'll be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And, you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking for. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>And ultimately, I think, you know, when you're looking at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a fraud perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure that's running upon, but the network it's connected to, and then ultimately the user in the sense of that user and by leveraging that thousand eyes and being able to then integrate thousand into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developer's looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. We've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks Joe Vaccaro, vice president of product here, but thousand nine is now part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. You really have to automate you human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got a Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. >>Good to see Kuhn. >>Thank you for having me >>Joining him as Eric nip. He is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was cool. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think that the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them as the women, the flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah. W we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic that just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a serve as an elastic is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>And then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the, you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CIC pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as, and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. You know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. We like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security change from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no, I'm so, wow. The kudos that you, you found that book I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis in the primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices, that's digitally connected devices. >>Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about parameters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guys up or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data and the context, what data is being accessed. And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because of the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We at Dave runs it on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days at Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd and, and I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, con really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, because five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they've been able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to, you know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have a host Sarah that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing, you know, partners and customers employing programmability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that can provide, >>Um, bringing on board those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT in the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you, uh, clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an you're an a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, not itself was a, was a, a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean, obviously he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, we were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several years, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to me, programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that is automated, or if that decision requires some type of manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough, like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I don't want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for anybody that can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to it and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, who achieved it when incentive was secondary, they just wanted to have the bragging rights, like yeah, I beat Eric. Right? >>Right. Absolutely. No, it's a, it's it, you know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well, but I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media means, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So I, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are a bubble, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and do their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I, and I believe the status, this, and I'll probably get number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a, in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kind of gotten out of the fog of, of, of war for our fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that our customers, that people are happier working from home, people are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent and some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay in there in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to, to travel and, and check into a hotel and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part time as, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium, our, our local general manager has a virtual effort. TIF every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four, five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really, really grown and, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really about the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, uh, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of, of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. Uh, we're seeing really people dive into that and customers, um, co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology >>Can provide, but also how it impacts people. Has it been discussed and redefines process? >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it is, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and it's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the end, the, it lexicon as being that critical or that poor critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with them in another program, ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? And I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>All right. Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for, for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and, and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, mob bell must be happy because the old mother's day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power, that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners. And he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's businesses transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want to way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along the step in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. >>Right. That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that's the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. A new Cisco has pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional form. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. >>You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in this definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, in, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to bring it all together. It's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now, everything is cloud native. We have the ability to, to better, to better adjust, to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something ups to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. >>Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. Right. >>Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other side, >>Cloud multicloud >>Public cloud, you know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective in helping customers work through this, cause still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses, how are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. >>But you know, aside from, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of, uh, operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry, and the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. In that thing. You used to know what that was. Now you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. >>You really need to understand what's going on. And the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path there, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of that. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're on, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about in a dev net, really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some, you know, non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a, as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the doublet that gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they've built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology case that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes that the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here from around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with Devin brought to you by Cisco. >>When I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net, with Cisco, and we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos, where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into, you know, IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called street from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with Devon it in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube that in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. >>It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that creativity. So today you're going to hear from a number of experts. For example, TK key Anini is a distinguished engineer and a security pro. He's going to join us, his colleagues, Thomas Scheiber and Joe Vaccaro. They're going to help us understand how to apply automation to your data center networks, cloud, and security journeys. Cisco's Eric nip and Coon Jacobs will also be here with a look into Cisco's marketplace shifts. We'll also hear from dev net partners. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe. It's the cube presenting >>Decelerating automation with damnit >>Brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX, all that great stuff. Any Wade Lee, who's the director, a senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first, then we don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net, create all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme, accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X, a AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as well, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the covert hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business to stay alive and to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, uh, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and you know, you guys got some acquisitions youth about thousand eyes. Um, um, you got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game and security, Kubernetes, all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation of the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they had to build it. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home, how many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>I know you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. >>Well, you've been following, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got dev net created right around the corner of virtual unfortunate. Won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie is about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network automation, which Susie >>Mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your, what's your role? >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We committed very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite date that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the dev net site. And then my team also looks after community, such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dev net space as well, and are helping people with that servicer. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. >>So you mentioned, uh, observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we needed? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me all days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up, um, this accelerated automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, um, only can imagine the enablement that's gonna name, uh, create, can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with, at and T up dev net create Mandy we'll start. Yeah. >>Yes. I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, that's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the dev community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with creative this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. >>So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much, God, man, you can add, add one more thing. >>I'm just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is it it's happening in three regions and um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. Yeah. >>I was just gonna close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Yeah. >>The cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment say virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching Jeffrey here with the cube. Uh, we have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev net event. It's really accelerating with automation and programmability in the new normal, and we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So we're excited to have our next guest he's Thomas Sheba. He is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. >>Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light moment, which was, >>You know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you've got the kids home, you've got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >>Well, good point, Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls to zoom calls, but you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it was 2000, he still West, as we say on the data center. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. Right. >>You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. Can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends in the way I look at this trends as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your, your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we, we, we prep was, are normal, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little plot, a little, little, uh, Bret before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw her March. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. >>Yeah, I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend as public cloud, um, and cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might've played some clients reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your things. And so I think in the end, what, uh, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed, but the logic context section, which we see in the, um, last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions, I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focusing and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's a good point. And it said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which has in most of the infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just a foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? Right? >>And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. Uh, and that's a whole range, right? This is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use normal tools that they have in a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for it further and saying, I want to integrate this with like some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pieces saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration was relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see, uh, giving us, I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer or you, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just to say, sit, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they to actually structure the operation. Right. One of the nice things around this or automation plus a tool integration to an integration is you actually opened us up, not a sole automation train, not just to the network operations personnel. Right. You also open it up and can use this for the SecOps person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional process you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I gotta hand over the sec ups team and they can directly call, uh, these, these API is right, or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>Interesting. You know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And, and I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those, none of this is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it's just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes from saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI dcnm controller or our multi-site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she from Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is the emotion we're in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little clock. And I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at those, whether you're a net ops person or a dev ops person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly, then that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation where, and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily, right? >>That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and it can make the changes and then opening it up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the it's as application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of change the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I, to operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's just automation. I think we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing. What, what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment was a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this, Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>It's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting because we, we started on a Cisco data center. So we started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on, on these products, >>They have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them >>Good times for you, because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and social media, right? What what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. And I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeves, you know, the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah. And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So I say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. >>Okay. I look forward to that as well. >>All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>TK Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred. >>Uh, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side, a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what is that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, uh, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business? Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. Right? >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, or our survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the datasets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help, you know, simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical. What are you doing? You're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines is the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threat model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything has code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as, um, human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a communities, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>That's a good point. When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to the text-based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time, and I'm this old curmudgeon in the back of the room. Um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems it'd be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you putting on? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high-performance businesses. >>No, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all you can talk later is go over here. All your bass players go over there. I'm like, what happened to the band? >>That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says doing my part to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the cube. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>Come back to the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual will not face to face the cubes. Been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is BC vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multicloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area. It's converging multiple theaters in technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you. But first thousand nine was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talk programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers, you know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, home of the conference book talk track, we'll get to in a second, but exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe, maybe it's way. And maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running along for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was early simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. When you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level of level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you have to then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, I was getting to some of these high scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're gonna look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. You're first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right aside, you know, data alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the, of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen with our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as their employees, >>Classic policy based activities. And you take it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I gotta ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams are really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their safety VPN infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device and the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and we're in the past, you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need nibbling, that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization, but it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. >>They're having to work collaboratively with the different ISP that they're appearing with with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it, teams, um, and see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talked about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your balance, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same SC land-based rollout, where you're looking to seek benchmark and confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ISP within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights, the classic financial model ROI, you get baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you'd look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only processing gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>You know, ultimately I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network gets connected to, and then ultimately the user and the stance of that user, if I leveraging a thousand eyes and being able to then integrate that into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on today. >>I appreciate it. Thanks for having me >>Vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. >>You really have to automate your human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got >>Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Kuhn, >>Thank you for having me >>And joining him as Eric nappy is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute, because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was Coon. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them is when a flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic, the just overall the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers. Um, and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic, uh, is, is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>Yeah. And then, and then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the S you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CICB pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. Um, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, uh, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's, it's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. Uh, you know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book, and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book and, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no I'm so, wow. Cocoon is that you, you found that book on the I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So, uh, I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the I, you know, it's estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis. >>And primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guise of, or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data in the context, what data is being accessed. >>And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable, undercurrent, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave runs and on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, can really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, cause five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data, just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they'd be able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, uh, bringing on board, uh, those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>Right. >>Right. So Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT and the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an engineer and a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So of itself was a, was a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean obviously if you look back to the very early days of our vision, right, it was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, you were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to meet programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that decision is automated, or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody that can get there before me, maybe there's a little incentive tied to the incentive. Although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, uh, who achieved it when incentive was secondary. They just wanted to have the bragging rights, like, yeah, I beat Eric, right. >>You know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why, you know, you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media meme, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all, all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are. Uh, but, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I believe the stat is this, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I, you know, leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kinda gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that are customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent in some estimates, put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to >>Stay in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part-time right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally going to work from home, unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration, uh, that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events space where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and, and check into a hotel and, and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part-time as, as Eric also explain, but a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team, or, you know, even here in Belgium, our local general manager has a virtual effort, TIF every Friday, obviously skip the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four or five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but it has really, really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really >>About the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes the relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to us. We've seen really people dive into that and customers co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and redefines process >>That the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it's, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and there's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place in the end, the it lexicon as being that critical or that critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one, another program ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. Right. >>Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, my bell must be happy because the old mother's problem is finally solved. And when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the dub net certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just >>Like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what, what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. >>You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was a, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, >>Right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not >>Scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to, to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud multicloud, public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. >>And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, because still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like, what did he still look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. >>And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to, to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right. You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. >>It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit, cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the dev that specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with their vertical and working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes. If the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion, that's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. It happens happy to be here >>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco. What I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net with Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event, hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at dev net create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open for demos where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called straight from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite, um, advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by >>Cisco We're back. This is Dave Volonte and TK Kia Ninis here he's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK My friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, way saw this thing coming, But we didn't see it coming this way, did we? >>No, I have. No one did, but yeah, it, uh that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird, right? I mean, we were you know, we it was in the back of our minds in January. We said Barcelona hasn't really been hit yet. Looked like it was really isolated in China. But But wow, what a change. And I guess I guess I'd I'd start with that. We're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden, these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred on it. It feels like these changes are permanent or semi permanent. What are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't I don't think anybody thinks the world's gonna go back the way it waas. Um, to some degree, it's it's changed forever. Um, you know, I I do a lot of my work remotely on bond. And so, you know, being a remote worker isn't such a big deal for me. But for some, it was, ah, huge impact. And like I said, you know, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on Thea opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah, And when you see that you know that work from home pivot I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner GTR. About 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to co vid, and now it's, you know, north to 70% plus and and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge. But people essentially, except expect that to the you know, at least double that 16% you know, going forward and definitely So what is that? What kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and and how? How organizations are approaching security. >>Yeah, I just think from a mindset standpoint, you know what Waas optional? Uh, maybe, uh, last year, eyes no longer optional. And I don't think it's going to go back. I think I think a lot of people have changed the way you know they live and the way they work. Um and they're doing it in ways. Hopefully that, you know, in some cases, yield more productivity again. Um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works Justus Well, for the bad guys. And so that's That's the balance we need to keep. Which is we need Thio be extra diligent on how we go about securing infrastructure, how we go about securing even our our social channels. Because remember all our social channels now our digital so that's has become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember the line you shared with me in the Cube one time. Is it the adversary is highly capable of sort of the phrase that you used And essentially the way you describe it is you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guys, return on investment, you know, increase their cost, increase the numerator. But as as works just from home, Yeah, I'm in my house, you know, by my wife, I and my you know, router with my you know, dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me. Thio, increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah, I mean, it is It is truly when you think when you get into the mind of the adversary and, uh, you know, cybercrime out there, there, honestly, there, like any other business they're trying toe, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is you know, it's not just our kids are online in school, and our work is online, but all the groceries we order, You know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season Ah, lot more online shopping is going to take place. Eso you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is you know how How do we up our game there so that, um we can go about our business effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary toe operate on take care of their business because it's nasty stuff. I want to >>ask you about automation, you know, generally and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyper scale er's. And of course, they really attacked the I t labor problem. We learned a lot from that, and an I T organizations have applied much of that thinking and the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace that technology scales today. How does that apply to security? And specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it z the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like ai and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand on operate at machine scale. Now. I mean that for for businesses. I mean that for, you know, education and everything else. Now, so are the adversaries, right. So it's expensive for them to operate at human scale, and they are going to machine scale, go into machine scale. A necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines work on your behalf, Have the machines carry your intent. Andi, when you do that, you can do it, uh, safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should. You wanna make sure that, frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's a tricky thing because, you know, when you take the phrase you know, how do we How do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of of securing the automation first. >>Yeah, we talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that you know, the bad guys, the adversaries essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because they're hiding in plain sight. Right there >>is a, um Well, there's they're clever, Given that, you know, there's this phrase that they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and and being detected. You know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, ah, higher degree of evading your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob who's already been credential and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not, you know, marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become, ah, Paramount. But also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to minimize their effectiveness. Um, without e mean ideally without human interaction, because you just can you move faster, you move quicker. Andi, I say that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly you're just making their job or effect. >>I wonder if I could talk about the market a little bit. Uh, it's, I mean, security space cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which, by the way, it's just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that It that massive, uh, GDP. But guys, I wonder if you could bring up the the chart. Because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them what you're what, your biggest challenge to say, lack of talent and and so what? This chart shows this is from e T. R R R survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum. On the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence. Pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here I wanted toe put forth to our audience and then get your reaction. So you see Cisco I highlighted in red. Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the on the conference call, and so you can see on the horizontal axis you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere. But you're right there, Um, in that in that data set and then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. The other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here, and that just adds to the complexity. This is, of course, only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is, how can Cisco help you simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it? You know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions, and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left There it z, I had a customer, you know, Tell me once that you know, I I came to this trade show looking for transportation, and these people are trying toe Selmi car parts. That's the frustration customers have, you know? And I think What Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Because, ultimately that's that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think I think security in general has just year over year been just written with. You need to be an expert. You need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think I think those days are behind us. But particularly as as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business. We're not selling to the, you know, T shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about Cloud. People think I put my data in the cloud. I'm safe. But you know, of course, we know it's a shared responsibility model, so I'm interested in your your thoughts on that. Is it really? Is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say no state of security is great in the cloud where, as you know, many of us out there saying, Wow, it z not so great. Eso What are your thoughts on that? That whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think. Cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible? Um, you know, no, no data center required. No, this Dr required, you just get storage. You know, it Z all of those things that are again closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud to is it's really been It's really punctuated the way we go about building systems, um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before when I write code and I think about what computer is it going to run on? Are you know what servers are gonna Is it gonna run on those? Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire Internet shows up the system, you know, works without fail. And on Wednesday Onley North America shows up, you know, so what? But there's no way you could staff that right. There is just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff. Is, um, it really is the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure is code, and that applies to you know, security is code. That's what you know definite is really all about. I've said many times. I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only that really has figured out. You know that developer angle because it's practical. You're not trying to force your way into developers. But, you know, I wonder if you could you could talk a little bit about that trend. Andi, where you see it going? >>Yeah. No, that is That is truly the trend. Every time I walk into Devon yet, um, the big halls at at Cisco Live it is Cisco as code. Everything about Cisco is being presented through an A P I. It is automation ready, and and frankly, that is that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's machines. It's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the I think I think necessary maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What? What's also necessary Eyes thio to secure if infrastructure is code. Therefore, um what what secure what security methodologies do we have today that we used to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I when I talk about how do you do automation securely, You do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you threat model, you say, You know, Ken, my adversary exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intended to go. Eso all of those practices apply. It's just everything as code these days. >>Today I've often said that security and privacy or sort of two sides of the same coin and I wanna ask you a question and it's really you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco, and companies like companies like Cisco is responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you could help. And of course, this this, you know, Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies air appropriating our data, tell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, etcetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy. And I mean, it's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're, you know, social media user. I love tic tac. I don't care, but but But they sort of laid out This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And, you know, can Cisco play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy? I mean, beyond GDP R and California Consumer Privacy Act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah, um, I'll give you my You know, my humble opinion is you you fix social problems with social tools, you fix technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, that needs to be rectified. You know, um, we we weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. Just It's just pretty wrong. So, yeah, that that that that serious did really kind of wake up a lot of people. It is. It is. You know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw um but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we we overcome it or we we compensate by what number one? Just being aware that is happening. Um, number two. You know how you go about solving it. I think maybe come down Thio an individual or even a community's solution And what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's it's It's almost I think if I could, you know, play back. What I heard is is yeah, technology, Maybe got us into this problem. But technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic A I bought is going to solve this. It's gonna be, you know, society has to really, really take this on. Is your premise good one? >>When I when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and moos. I did a talk it at m i t one time and this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social process that we had modeled in our game and this and that, and this guy just gave us the Smackdown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, You know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy that completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared. If somebody can decide in a minute what is good for the community, it two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community, so it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting. You know, you read the Lincoln historians, and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions. But, you know, ultimately, when he acted, he acted with with confidence. So to that point, but So what else you working on these days? That is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience anything. It's really super exciting for you or you. >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, trying, trying to make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's Ah general theme making it simpler for the common person to use tools again. You know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity. It's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale and we can do things. That machine scale and kind of working those two together is it's sort of the magic recipe. Um, it's not easy, but but it is. It is fun So that's that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing I wonder if you see it. Just sort of Ah, obviously a heightened organization awareness. But I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, You know, it used to be the SEC ops team in an island. Okay, it's your problem. You know, the CSO cannot report into the to the CEO, because that's like the fox in the hen house. A lot of those structures are are changing, it seems, and becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what do >>you know? It's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums. Everybody knows their role, and you create something that's larger than you know, some of all parts. And so that that analogy, I think is coming to, you know, way saw it. Sort of with Dev ops where, you know, the developer doesn't just throw their quote over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They moved together as a band. And and that's what I think organizations air seeing is that you know why? Why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just. Here's the product. And here's the rest of the business s. Oh, that's that's That's pretty awesome. I think we see a lot of those patterns, particularly for the highly high performance businesses, >>you know, In fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually seeing that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of, uh and I know sometimes you guys, you know, I don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you gotta leadership structure. Now, I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah. No. And you, you Almost as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, Okay, all you guitar players go over here. All you bass players go over there like what happened to the band s. So that's that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I was I always, uh, feel better after talking to you. You know? I remember. I remember Art. Coviello used to put out his, uh, his letter every year. And I was reading I get depressed. Yeah, we spend all this money now, we're less secure. But when I talked to you, t k I I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cubits. It's awesome to have you as a guest. >>Right on. I love these. I love these sessions, So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. >>And I miss you. You know, hopefully you know, next year's we could get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird like the sign says >>doing my part. >>All right, T k. Kennedy. Thanks so much for coming in the queue. We we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte. We've right back with our next guest right after this short break.

(Techno music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Presenting, Accelerating Automation, with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco (Techno music ends) >> We're back, this is Dave Vellante, and TK Keanini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco. TK, my friend good to see you again. >> How are you? >> Good, I mean you and I were in Barcelona in January, and yeah, we saw this thing coming but we didn't see it coming this way, did we? >> No, no one did. But yeah, that was right before everything happened. >> Well, it's weird. I mean, it was in the back of our minds in January, we started, "Well, Barcelona hasn't really been hit yet." It looked like it was really isolated in China, but wow, what a change. And I guess I'd start with, we're seeing really a secular change in your space, in security; identity, access, management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent. What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. To some degree, it's changed forever. I do a lot of my work remotely, and so being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, remote work, remote education, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect, and the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >> Yeah, and when you see that work from home pivot, I mean, our estimates along with our partner, DTR, about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID, and now it's north of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months, we'll see what happens with the fall surge. But people essentially expect that to at least double, that 16% going forward indefinitely. So what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how organizations are approaching security? >> Yeah, I just think from a mindset standpoint, what was optional maybe last year is no longer optional. And I don't think it's going to go back. I think a lot of people have changed the way they live and the way they work, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases yield more productivity. Again, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is, it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's the balance we need to keep, which is, we need to be extra diligent on how we go about securing infrastructure how we go about securing even our social channels. Because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's become the new norm. >> You've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in theCUBE one time is that the adversary is highly capable, I'll sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you described it is, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guys' return on investment, increase their costs, increase the numerator. But as work shifts from home, I'm in my house. My Wi-Fi and my router, with my dog's name is the password. It's much much harder for me to increase that denominator at home. So (chuckles) how can you help? >> Yeah, I mean, it is truly, when you get into the mind of the adversary and the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business. They're trying to operate with high margins. And so if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll frankly go find something else to do. And again, the shift we experience day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school, and our work is online, but all the groceries we order, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate and take care of their business? 'Cause it's nasty stuff. >> I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the IT labor problem. We learned a lot from that, and IT organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace that technology scales today. How does that apply to security, and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >> Yeah, it's the topic these days. Businesses, I think realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for businesses, I mean that for education, and everything else now, so are the adversaries. So it's expensive for them to operate at human scale, and they are going to machine scale. Going to machine scale, a necessity is that, you're going to have to harness some level of automation; have the machines work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. And when you do that you can do it safely, or you could do it dangerously. (chuckles) And that's really kind of your choice. Just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should. You want to make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's a tricky thing because, when you take the phrase, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of securing the automation first. >> Yeah, we talked about this in Barcelona where you were explaining that, the the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially weaponizing, using your own tooling which makes them appear safe. Because they're hiding in plain sight. >> Right? >> That's scary. >> Well, they're clever, (chuckles) I'll giving them that. There's this phrase that they they always talk about, called, living off the land. There's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools, and being detected. If they can use the tools that's already there, then they have a higher degree of evading your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed, and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, having the detecting methods available to find their behavioral anomalies, and things like that, become a paramount, but in also having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to minimize their effectiveness, I mean, ideally without human interaction. 'Cause you move faster, you move quicker. And I say that with an asterisk, because if done wrong, frankly, you're just making their job more effective. >> I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit. I'm mean, the security space, cybersecurity, 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infinitesimal component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive GDP. But guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart, because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, "What's your biggest challenge?" They'll say, "Lack of talent." And so what this chart shows, this is from ETR, our survey partner. And on the vertical axis is net score, and that's an indication of spending momentum, on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here, I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. So you can see Cisco highlighted in red. Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter, it's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the conference calls. And so you can see on the horizontal axis you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere. But you're right there in that data set. And then you've got, for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here, and that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is, how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? You guys have done some really interesting token acquisitions, and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there, it's... I had a customer tell me once that, "I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts." That's the frustration customers have. And I think what Cisco has done really well is, to really focus on outcomes. What is the customer outcome? 'Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. There might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think security in general has just year over year have been just ridden with, "You need to be an expert." "You need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself." And I think those days are behind us, but particularly as security becomes more pervasive. and we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the T-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >> Well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud. People think, "I'll put my data in the cloud I'm safe," but of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Really is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way say, "Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud." Whereas many of us out there saying, "Wow, it's not so great." So what are your thoughts on that whole narrative, and what's Cisco's play in cloud? >> I think cloud, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. No data center required, no distract required, you just get storage. It's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud too is, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems, again, at machine scale. Before, when I write code and I think about "Oh, what computers are going to run on, what servers is it going to run on?" Those thoughts never cross my mind anymore. I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do, and the machines then figure it out. So for instance on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, the system works without fail. And on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you have so much. But there's no way you could staff that. There's just no human-scale approach that gets you there. And that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, it really is the next level of how we do computer science. >> So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code, that's what DevNet is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco, of the the large established enterprise companies, is one of the few if not the only, that really has figured out that developer angle. Because it's practical, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >> Yeah, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into DevNet, the big halls at Cisco Live, it is Cisco as code. Everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation-ready, and frankly, that is the love language of the cloud. It's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So it is the, I think necessary maybe not sufficient, but necessary for doing all the machine scale stuff. What's also necessary is to secure, if infrastructure is code, therefore, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? Well we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I talk about how do you do automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code. You test it, you threaten-model you say, "Can my adversary exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go?" So all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >> TK, I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question, and it's really to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma, I don't know if you've had a chance to see it, but that basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads, and creating own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy, and that means good from the standpoint of awareness, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love TikTok, I don't care. But they sort of laid out, this is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that, and can Cisco play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy? I mean, beyond GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act, what do you think? >> Yeah, my humble opinion is, you fix social problems with social tools. You fix technology problems with technology tools. I think there is a social problem that needs to be rectified. We weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. (chuckles) It's just pretty wrong. So yeah that series did really kind of wake up a lot of people, it's probably every day I hear, somebody ask me if I saw it. But I do think it also, with that level of awareness, I think we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Number two, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's solution. And what might be right for one community might be not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >> Yeah, so it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah, technology maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's going to be, society has to really take this on, is your premise. It's a good one. >> When I first started playing online games, I mean going back to the text-based adventure stuff like MUDs and MOOs, I did a talk at MIT one time and this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, we were talking about democracy, and we were talking about the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. Then this guy just gave us the smack-down. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, "You know all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes." He says, "Democracy is completely the opposite which is, you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? If two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic." And that was super interesting to me. >> That's really interesting, you read the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted, he acted with confidence. So to that point. But so what else are you working on these days that is interesting, that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you, are you... >> Yeah, generally speaking, I'm trying to make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme, making it simpler for the common person to our use tools. Again, all of these security tools no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user, so that they can thrive at human scale, and we can do things at machine scale. And kind of looping those two together is sort of the magic recipe. It's not easy, but it is fun. So that's what keeps me engaged. >> I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it, this sort of obviously a heightened organizational awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. It used to be a SecOps team in an Island, "Okay, it's your problem." The CSO can not report into the to the CIO because that's like the fox in the henhouse, a lot of those structures are changing it seems, this responsibilities is becoming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there- >> Yeah, I know, and it's so familiar to me, because I started out as a musician. So, bands are a great analogy, you play bass, I play guitar, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role, and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that analogy I think is coming to, we saw it sort of with DevOps where the developer doesn't just throw their code over the wall and it's somebody else's problem, they move together as a band. And that's what I think organizations are seeing is that, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business, not just, "Here's the product, and here's the rest of the business." (chuckles) That's pretty awesome. I think we see a lot of those patterns, particularly for the high-performance businesses. >> In fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco. You're seeing sort of, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now, I've talked to many of them, they seem to really be more focused on how they're connecting across organizations, and it's increasingly critical in this world of silo busters, isn't it? >> Yeah, no, I mean, as you move further and further away, you can see how ridiculous it was before, it would be like acquiring a band and say, "Okay, all you guitar players, go over here. All you bass players over there. Then I'm like, "What happened to the band?" (both laughing) So that's what I'm talking about. All of those disciplines moving together, and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together, is just so awesome. >> Well, I always feel better after talking to you. I remember Art Coviello used to put out this letter every year, I would read it and I'd get depressed. (chuckles) We spent all this money, now we're less secure. But when I talk to you TK, I feel much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on theCUBE. It's awesome to have you as a guest. >> I love this session, so thanks for inviting me. >> And I miss you, hopefully next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird, like the sign says. >> (talks faintly) Bring my product. >> TK Keanini, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. We really appreciate it, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest, after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality symposium brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the MIT CDOIQ 2020 event. Of course, it's gone virtual. We wish we were all together in Cambridge. They were going to move into a new building this year for years they've done this event at the Tang Center, moving into a new facility, but unfortunately going to have to wait at least a year, we'll see, But we've got a great guest. Nonetheless, Doug Laney is here. He's a Business Value Strategist, the bestselling author, an analyst, consultant then a long time CUBE friend. Doug, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave, great to be with you again as well. So can I ask you? You have been an advocate for obviously measuring the value of data, the CDO role. I don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like the last 150 days have done more to accelerate people's attention on the importance of data and the value of data than all the great work that you've done. What do you think? (laughing) >> It's always great when organizations, actually take advantage of some of these concepts of data value. You may be speaking specifically about the situation with United Airlines and American Airlines, where they have basically collateralized their customer loyalty data, their customer loyalty programs to the tunes of several billion dollars each. And one of the things that's very interesting about that is that the third party valuations of their customer loyalty data, resulted in numbers that were larger than the companies themselves. So basically the value of their data, which is as we've discussed previously off balance sheet is more valuable than the market cap of those companies themselves, which is just incredibly fascinating. >> Well, and of course, all you have to do is look to the Trillionaire's Club. And now of course, Apple pushing two trillion to really see the value that the market places on data. But the other thing is of course, COVID, everybody talks about the COVID acceleration. How have you seen it impact the awareness of the importance of data, whether it applies to business resiliency or even new monetization models? If you're not digital, you can't do business. And digital is all about data. >> I think the major challenge that most organizations are seeing from a data and analytics perspective due to COVID is that their traditional trend based forecast models are broken. If you're a company that's only forecasting based on your own historical data and not taking into consideration, or even identifying what are the leading indicators of your business, then COVID and the economic shutdown have entirely broken those models. So it's raised the awareness of companies to say, "Hey, how can we predict our business now? We can't do it based on our own historical data. We need to look externally at what are those external, maybe global indicators or other kinds of markets that proceed our own forecasts or our own activity." And so the conversion from trend based forecast models to what we call driver based forecast models, isn't easy for a lot of organizations to do. And one of the more difficult parts is identifying what are those external data factors from suppliers, from customers, from partners, from competitors, from complimentary products and services that are leading indicators of your business. And then recasting those models and executing on them. >> And that's a great point. If you think about COVID and how it's changed things, everything's changed, right? The ideal customer profile has changed, your value proposition to those customers has completely changed. You got to rethink that. And of course, it's very hard to predict even when this thing eventually comes back, some kind of hybrid mode, you used to be selling to people in an office environment. That's obviously changed. There's a lot that's permanent there. And data is potentially at least the forward indicator, the canary in the coal mine. >> Right. It also is the product and service. So not only can it help you and improve your forecasting models, but it can become a product or service that you're offering. Look at us right now, we would generally be face to face and person to person, but we're using video technology to transfer this content. And then one of the things that I... It took me awhile to realize, but a couple of months after the COVID shutdown, it occurred to me that even as a consulting organization, Caserta focuses on North America. But the reality is that every consultancy is now a global consultancy because we're all doing business remotely. There are no particular or real strong localization issues for doing consulting today. >> So we talked a lot over the years about the role of the CDO, how it's evolved, how it's changed the course of the early... The pre-title days it was coming out of a data quality world. And it's still vital. Of course, as we heard today from the Keynote, it's much more public, much more exposed, different public data sources, but the role has certainly evolved initially into regulated industries like financial, healthcare and government, but now, many, many more organizations have a CDO. My understanding is that you're giving a talk in the business case for the CDO. Help us understand that. >> Yeah. So one of the things that we've been doing here for the last couple of years is a running an ongoing study of how organizations are impacted by the role of the CDO. And really it's more of a correlation and looking at what are some of the qualities of organizations that have a CDO or don't have a CDO. So some of the things we found is that organizations with a CDO nearly twice as often, mention the importance of data and analytics in their annual report organizations with a C level CDO, meaning a true executive are four times more often likely to be using data, to transform the business. And when we're talking about using data and advanced analytics, we found that organizations with a CIO, not a CDO responsible for their data assets are only half as likely to be doing advanced analytics in any way. So there are a number of interesting things that we found about companies that have a CDO and how they operate a bit differently. >> I want to ask you about that. You mentioned the CIO and we're increasingly seeing lines of reporting and peer reporting alter shift. The sands are shifting a little bit. In the early days the CDO and still predominantly I think is an independent organization. We've seen a few cases and increasingly number where they're reporting into the CIO, we've seen the same thing by the way with the chief Information Security Officer, which used to be considered the fox watching the hen house. So we're seeing those shifts. We've also seen the CDO become more aligned with a technical role and sometimes even emerging out of that technical role. >> Yeah. I think the... I don't know, what I've seen more is that the CDOs are emerging from the business, companies are realizing that data is a business asset. It's not an IT asset. There was a time when data was tightly coupled with applications of technologies, but today data is very easily decoupled from those applications and usable in a wider variety of contexts. And for that reason, as data gets recognized as a business, not an IT asset, you want somebody from the business responsible for overseeing that asset. Yes, a lot of CDOs still report to the CIO, but increasingly more CDOs you're seeing and I think you'll see some other surveys from other organizations this week where the CDOs are more frequently reporting up to the CEO level, meaning they're true executives. Along I advocated for the bifurcation of the IT organization into separate I and T organizations. Again, there's no reason other than for historical purposes to keep the data and technology sides of the organizations so intertwined. >> Well, it makes sense that the Chief Data Officer would have an affinity with the lines of business. And you're seeing a lot of organizations, really trying to streamline their data pipeline, their data life cycles, bringing that together, infuse intelligence into that, but also take a systems view and really have the business be intimately involved, if not even owned into the data. You see a lot of emphasis on self-serve, what are you seeing in terms of that data pipeline or the data life cycle, if you will, that used to be wonky, hard core techies, but now it really involving a lot more constituent. >> Yeah. Well, the data life cycle used to be somewhat short. The data life cycles, they're longer and they're more a data networks than a life cycle and or a supply chain. And the reason is that companies are finding alternative uses for their data, not just using it for a single operational purpose or perhaps reporting purpose, but finding that there are new value streams that can be generated from data. There are value streams that can be generated internally. There are a variety of value streams that can be generated externally. So we work with companies to identify what are those variety of value streams? And then test their feasibility, are they ethically feasible? Are they legally feasible? Are they economically feasible? Can they scale? Do you have the technology capabilities? And so we'll run through a process of assessing the ideas that are generated. But the bottom line is that companies are realizing that data is an asset. It needs to be not just measured as one and managed as one, but also monetized as an asset. And as we've talked about previously, data has these unique qualities that it can be used over and over again, and it generate more data when you use it. And it can be used simultaneously for multiple purposes. So companies like, you mentioned, Apple and others have built business models, based on these unique qualities of data. But I think it's really incumbent upon any organization today to do so as well. >> But when you observed those companies that we talk about all the time, data is at the center of their organization. They maybe put people around that data. That's got to be one of the challenge for many of the incumbents is if we talked about the data silos, the different standards, different data quality, that's got to be fairly major blocker for people becoming a "Data-driven organization." >> It is because some organizations were developed as people driven product, driven brand driven, or other things to try to convert. To becoming data-driven, takes a high degree of data literacy or fluency. And I think there'll be a lot of talk about that this week. I'll certainly mention it as well. And so getting the organization to become data fluent and appreciate data as an asset and understand its possibilities and the art of the possible with data, it's a long road. So the culture change that goes along with it is really difficult. And so we're working with 150 year old consumer brand right now that wants to become more data-driven and they're very product driven. And we hear the CIO say, "We want people to understand that we're a data company that just happens to produce this product. We're not a product company that generates data." And once we realized that and started behaving in that fashion, then we'll be able to really win and thrive in our marketplace. >> So one of the key roles of a Chief Data Officers to understand how data affects the monetization of an organization. Obviously there are four profit companies of your healthcare organization saving lives, obviously being profitable as well, or at least staying within the budget, depending upon the structure of the organization. But a lot of people I think oftentimes misunderstand that it's like, "Okay, do I have to become a data broker? Am I selling data directly?" But I think, you pointed out many times and you just did that unlike oil, that's why we don't like that data as a new oil analogy, because it's so much more valuable and can be use, it doesn't fall because of its scarcity. But what are you finding just in terms of people's application of that notion of monetization? Cutting costs, increasing revenue, what are you seeing in the field? What's that spectrum look like? >> So one of the things I've done over the years is compile a library of hundreds and hundreds of examples of how organizations are using data and analytics in innovative ways. And I have a book in process that hopefully will be out this fall. I'm sharing a number of those inspirational examples. So that's the thing that organizations need to understand is that there are a variety of great examples out there, and they shouldn't just necessarily look to their own industry. There are inspirational examples from other industries as well, many clients come to me and they ask, "What are others in my industry doing?" And my flippant response to that is, "Why do you want to be in second place or third place? Why not take an idea from another industry, perhaps a digital product company and apply that to your own business." But like you mentioned, there are a variety of ways to monetize data. It doesn't involve necessarily selling it. You can deliver analytics, you can report on it, you can use it internally to generate improved business process performance. And as long as you're measuring how data's being applied and what its impact is, then you're in a position to claim that you're monetizing it. But if you're not measuring the impact of data on business processes or on customer relationships or partner supplier relationships or anything else, then it's difficult to claim that you're monetizing it. But one of the more interesting ways that we've been working with organizations to monetize their data, certainly in light of GDPR and the California consumer privacy act where I can't sell you my data anymore, but we've identified ways to monetize your customer data in a couple of ways. One is to synthesize the data, create synthetic data sets that retain the original statistical anomalies in the data or features of the data, but don't share actually any PII. But another interesting way that we've been working with organizations to monetize their data is what I call, Inverted data monetization, where again, I can't share my customer data with you, but I can share information about your products and services with my customers. And take a referral fee or a commission, based on that. So let's say I'm a hospital and I can't sell you my patient data, of course, due to variety of regulations, but I know who my diabetes patients are, and I can introduce them to your healthy meal plans, to your gym memberships, to your at home glucose monitoring kits. And again, take a referral fee or a cut of that action. So we're working with customers and the financial services firm industry and in the healthcare industry on just those kinds of examples. So we've identified hundreds of millions of dollars of incremental value for organizations that from their data that we're just sitting on. >> Interesting. Doug because you're a business value strategist at the top, where in the S curve do you see you're able to have the biggest impact. I doubt that you enter organizations where you say, "Oh, they've got it all figured out. They can't use my advice." But as well, sometimes in the early stages, you may not be able to have as big of an impact because there's not top down support or whatever, there's too much technical data, et cetera, where are you finding you can have the biggest impact, Doug? >> Generally we don't come in and run those kinds of data monetization or information innovation exercises, unless there's some degree of executive support. I've never done that at a lower level, but certainly there are lower level more immediate and vocational opportunities for data to deliver value through, to simply analytics. One of the simple examples I give is, I sold a home recently and when you put your house on the market, everybody comes out of the woodwork, the fly by night, mortgage companies, the moving companies, the box companies, the painters, the landscapers, all know you're moving because your data is in the U.S. and the MLS directory. And it was interesting. The only company that didn't reach out to me was my own bank, and so they lost the opportunity to introduce me to a Mortgage they'd retain me as a client, introduce me to my new branch, print me new checks, move the stuff in my safe deposit box, all of that. They missed a simple opportunity. And I'm thinking, this doesn't require rocket science to figure out which of your customers are moving, the MLS database or you can harvest it from Zillow or other sites is basically public domain data. And I was just thinking, how stupid simple would it have been for them to hire a high school programmer, give him a can of red bull and say, "Listen match our customer database to the MLS database to let us know who's moving on a daily or weekly basis." Some of these solutions are pretty simple. >> So is that part of what you do, come in with just hardcore tactical ideas like that? Are you also doing strategy? Tell me more about how you're spending your time. >> I trying to think more of a broader approach where we look at the data itself and again, people have said, "If you tortured enough, what would you tell us? We're just take that angle." We look at examples of how other organizations have monetized data and think about how to apply those and adapt those ideas to the company's own business. We look at key business drivers, internally and externally. We look at edge cases for their customers' businesses. We run through hypothesis generating activities. There are a variety of different kinds of activities that we do to generate ideas. And most of the time when we run these workshops, which last a week or two, we'll end up generating anywhere from 35 to 50 pretty solid ideas for generating new value streams from data. So when we talk about monetizing data, that's what we mean, generating new value streams. But like I said, then the next step is to go through that feasibility assessment and determining which of these ideas you actually want to pursue. >> So you're of course the longtime industry watcher as well, as a former Gartner Analyst, you have to be. My question is, if I think back... I've been around a while. If I think back at the peak of Microsoft's prominence in the PC era, it was like windows 95 and you felt like, "Wow, Microsoft is just so strong." And then of course the Linux comes along and a lot of open source changes and low and behold, a whole new set of leaders emerges. And you see the same thing today with the Trillionaire's Club and you feel like, "Wow, even COVID has been a tailwind for them." But you think about, "Okay, where could the disruption come to these large players that own huge clouds, they have all the data." Is data potentially a disruptor for what appear to be insurmountable odds against the newbies" >> There's always people coming up with new ways to leverage data or new sources of data to capture. So yeah, there's certainly not going to be around for forever, but it's been really fascinating to see the transformation of some companies I think nobody really exemplifies it more than IBM where they emerged from originally selling meat slicers. The Dayton Meat Slicer was their original product. And then they evolved into Manual Business Machines and then Electronic Business Machines. And then they dominated that. Then they dominated the mainframe software industry. Then they dominated the PC industry. Then they dominated the services industry to some degree. And so they're starting to get into data. And I think following that trajectory is something that really any organization should be looking at. When do you actually become a data company? Not just a product company or a service company or top. >> We have Inderpal Bhandari is one of our huge guests here. He's a Chief-- >> Sure. >> Data Officer of IBM, you know him well. And he talks about the journey that he's undertaken to transform the company into a data company. I think a lot of people don't really realize what's actually going on behind the scenes, whether it's financially oriented or revenue opportunities. But one of the things he stressed to me in our interview was that they're on average, they're reducing the end to end cycle time from raw data to insights by 70%, that's on average. And that's just an enormous, for a company that size, it's just enormous cost savings or revenue generating opportunity. >> There's no doubt that the technology behind data pipelines is improving and the process from moving data from those pipelines directly into predictive or diagnostic or prescriptive output is a lot more accelerated than the early days of data warehousing. >> Is the skills barrier is acute? It seems like it's lessened somewhat, the early Hadoop days you needed... Even data scientist... Is it still just a massive skill shortage, or we're starting to attack that. >> Well, I think companies are figuring out a way around the skill shortage by doing things like self service analytics and focusing on more easy to use mainstream type AI or advanced analytics technologies. But there's still very much a need for data scientists and organizations and the difficulty in finding people that are true data scientists. There's no real certification. And so really anybody can call themselves a data scientist but I think companies are getting good at interviewing and determining whether somebody's got the goods or not. But there are other types of skills that we don't really focus on, like the data engineering skills, there's still a huge need for data engineering. Data doesn't self-organize. There are some augmented analytics technologies that will automatically generate analytic output, but there really aren't technologies that automatically self-organize data. And so there's a huge need for data engineers. And then as we talked about, there's a large interest in external data and harvesting that and then ingesting it and even identifying what external data is out there. So one of the emerging roles that we're seeing, if not the sexiest role of the 21st century is the role of the Data Curator, somebody who acts as a librarian, identifying external data assets that are potentially valuable, testing them, evaluating them, negotiating and then figuring out how to ingest that data. So I think that's a really important role for an organization to have. Most companies have an entire department that procures office supplies, but they don't have anybody who's procuring data supplies. And when you think about which is more valuable to an organization? How do you not have somebody who's dedicated to identifying the world of external data assets that are out there? There are 10 million data sets published by government, organizations and NGOs. There are thousands and thousands of data brokers aggregating and sharing data. There's a web content that can be harvested, there's data from your partners and suppliers, there's data from social media. So to not have somebody who's on top of all that it demonstrates gross negligence by the organization. >> That is such an enlightening point, Doug. My last question is, I wonder how... If you can share with us how the pandemic has effected your business personally. As a consultant, you're on the road a lot, obviously not on the road so much, you're doing a lot of chalk talks, et cetera. How have you managed through this and how have you been able to maintain your efficacy with your clients? >> Most of our clients, given that they're in the digital world a bit already, made the switch pretty quick. Some of them took a month or two, some things went on hold but we're still seeing the same level of enthusiasm for data and doing things with data. In fact some companies have taken our (mumbles) that data to be their best defense in a crisis like this. It's affected our business and it's enabled us to do much more international work more easily than we used to. And I probably spend a lot less time on planes. So it gives me more time for writing and speaking and actually doing consulting. So that's been nice as well. >> Yeah, there's that bonus. Obviously theCUBE yes, we're not doing physical events anymore, but hey, we've got two studios operating. And Doug Laney, really appreciate you coming on. (Dough mumbles) Always a great guest and sharing your insights and have a great MIT CDOIQ. >> Thanks, you too, Dave, take care. (mumbles) >> Thanks Doug. All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, our continuous coverage of the MIT Chief Data Officer conference, MIT CDOIQ, will be right back, right after this short break. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Coming to you today from our Palo Alto studios. It's COVID is still going on. So, there's still no shows, but the good news is we've got the technology we can reach out to the community, and bring them in from far, far away. So today joining us from Virginia across the country is Dave Scott. He is the director of Product Management for Veritas, Dave, great to see you. >> Thanks Jeff, great to be here. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. You guys have been about backup and recovery for years and years and years, but oh my goodness, how the landscape continues to evolve between, you know, public cloud and you know, all the things happening with Amazon and Google, and Microsoft. And then now, of course big push for Hybrid. And, you know, we're the workloads, and kind of application centric infrastructure. You guys still got a backup and secure all this things. I wonder if you can give us a little bit of your perspective on, you know, kind of the increasing complexity of the computing environment, has all these different kind of pieces of the puzzle, are kind of gaining traction at the same time. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm on the compliance side of the company. So I'm more on looking after requirements around collection of content preparation for litigation, making sure you're adhering to compliance regulations in different parts of the world. And, I mean that's a constantly evolving space. One of the, so basically the products I look after are Enterprise Vaults, Enterprise Vault.cloud, and eDiscovery platform. And, as you say, I mean, one of the biggest challenges is that customers are starting to move, you know, customers are looking for flexibility in how they deploy our solutions. We've had a product in market with enterprise vault for about 20 years. And so, we have a lot of customers that have a lot of data on premise, and now they're starting, you know, they've got cloud mandates, they want to move that content to the cloud. So we have gotten very aggressive at building out our SaaS, archiving solution, Enterprise Vault.cloud. But we also provide other options. Like if you want to move enterprise vault from your data center on premise, to your tenant in Azure, Amazon, we fully support that. In fact, we're taking advantage of cloud services to make that a much more viable option for our customers. >> So let's get into the regulation and the compliance, 'cause that's a big piece of the motivation beyond just, you know, making sure that the business can recover, that the regulation and compliance thing is huge. You know, the GDPR, which has been around now for a couple of years, California protection act. And I think what I find interesting from your perspective is you have this kind of crazy sea of regulations that are different by country, by industry, by data type, and they're evolving all the time. So, that's got to be a relatively complex little grid you got to keep track of. >> Yeah, it makes the job interesting. But it also is a huge competitive advantage for us. We have a team that researches data privacy regulations around the world, and it's been a competitive advantage in that we can be incredibly nimble in creating a new policy. We had some opportunities come up in Turkey, there's a regulation there that mirrors GDPR called KVKK or KVKK I think they call it locally. And it's, a joke that it's kind of like GDPR, but with jail time for noncompliance. So there's a lot more motivation on the part of an IT department, to make sure they're meeting that requirement. But it has to do with dealing with, you know, data privacy again, and ensuring the safety of the continent. That's proliferating throughout the world. You mentioned California Consumer Privacy Act, many other States are starting to follow what the California Consumer Privacy Act. And I'm sure, it won't be long before we have a data privacy act in the US, that's nationwide instead of at the state level. In other industries that we serve, like the financial services industry. There's, you know, there's always been a lot of regulation around SEC and FINRA in the US, that's spreading to other countries now, you know, MiFID II in the European union has been huge. And that dictates you need to capture all voice conversations, all text conversations, instant messages, everything that goes on between a broker and the end customer, has to be captured, has to be supervised, and has to be maintained on warm storage. So that's a great segment for us as well. That's an area we play very well in. >> So it's interesting. 'Cause in preparing for this, I saw some of the recent announcements around the concept of data supervision. So I think a lot of people are familiar with backup and recovery, and continuity, but specifically data supervision. What does that really mean? How is that different than kind of traditional backup and recovery, and what are some of the really key features or attributes to make that a successful platform? >> Yeah, no, it is really outside of the realm of backup and recovery. Archiving is very different from backup and recovery. And then archiving is about preserving the communication, and being able to monitor that communication, for the purposes of meeting compliance regulations. So, in the case of our solution, Veritas advanced supervision, It sounds a bit big brotherish, if I'm being honest, but it is a requirement for the financial service community that you sample a subset of those communications looking for violations. So you're looking for insider trading, you're looking for money laundering. In some companies, at the HR departments, or even just trying to ensure that their employees are being compliant. And so you may sample a subset of content. But it's absolutely required within the financial services community. And we're starting to see a lot of other industries, you know, leveraging this technology just to ensure compliance with different regulations, or compliance with their own internal policies. Ensuring a safe work place, ensuring that there's not any sexual harassment, or that type of thing going on through office communications. So it is a way of just monitoring your employees communications. >> So it's while I remember when, when people used to talk about messaging, and kind of the generic sense, like I could never understand why, you know, it's an email, it's a text. I mean, little did I know that every single application is now installed on every single device that I have, has a messaging app, you know, has a direct messaging feature. So, I mean the complexity and, and I guess the, the variability in the communication methods, across all these applications and, you know, probably more than half of them, that most of us work on are SaaS as well, really adds a ton of complexity to the challenge that you were just talking about. >> Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm old. You know, when I started, all of my communications were on a Microsoft mail server, all my files were in the file, you know, the server room down the hall. Now I've got about 20 different ways to communicate on my phone. And, the fragmentation of communication does make that job a lot more, more challenging. You know, now you need to take a voice conversation, convert it to text. With COVID and with, you know, the dawn of telemedicine, or at least the rapid growth, and telemessaging, telemedicine sorry. There is a whole new potential market for this kind of supervision tool. Now you can capture every doctor patient interaction that takes place over Zoom or over a Team's video, transcribe that content, and there's a wealth of value in that conversation. Not only can you tell if the doctor is responding to the patient, if the interaction is positive or negative, is the doctor helping to calm the patient down? Do they have good quality of interaction? That sort of thing. And so there's incredible value in capturing those communications, so you can learn from the... you know learn best practices, I guess. And then, feed that into a broader data lake, and correlate the interaction with patient outcomes, who are your great doctors? who are your, you know, that type of thing. So that's an area that we're very excited about going forward. >> Wow, that's pretty interesting. I never kind of thought that through, because I would have assumed that, you know, kind of most of the calls for this type of data were based on some type of a litigation. You know, it was some type of an ask or a request, that I was going to ask you, now how does that actually work within the context of this sea of data, that you have. Is it usually around a specific individual, who's got some issues and you're kind of looking at their ecosystem of communications, or is it more of a pattern, or is it potentially more of a keyword type of thing that's triggering, You know, kind of this forensics into this tremendous amount of data that's in all these enterprises. >> Yeah, it's a little bit of everything. Like, so first of all, we have the ability to capture a lot of different native content sources. But we also leverage partners to bring in other content sources. We can capture over 80 different content sources, all the, you know, instant messaging, social media, of course email, but even voice communications and video communications. And to answer your question as far as litigation, I mean, it really depends on the incident right? in the past, in the old days, any kind of litigation resulted in a fire drill where you're trying to find every scrap of evidence, every piece of information related to the case. By being a little bit proactive and capturing your email, and your communication streams into immutable storage in an archive, you're ready for that litigation event. And you've already indexed that content, you've already classified that content. So you can find the needle in the haystack. You can find the relevant content to prove your innocence, or at least to comply with the request for information. Now that has also led to solving similar issues for public sector. US federal, with the Freedom of Information Act. They're getting all kinds of requests for right now for COVID related communications. And that could be related to lawsuits. it could be related to just information around how stimulus funds are being spent. And they've got to respond to these requests very, very quickly. Our team came up with a COVID-19 classification policy, where we can actually weed out the communications related to COVID-19. To allow those federal agencies, and even state and local agencies, to quickly respond to those types of requests. So that's been an exciting area for us. And then there's still the SEC requirements to monitor broker dealers and conversations with end users, to ensure they're not doing anything, they shouldn't be doing like insider trading, >> Right. Which is so different, than kind of a post event, you know, kind of forensics investigation, and then collecting that data. So I'm curious, you know, how often are you having to update policies and update, you know, kind of the sniffers and the intelligence that goes behind the monitoring to trigger a flag, And then that just go into their own internal kind of compliance reg and set off a whole another chain of events? I would imagine. >> Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things we can do with our classification policies. And like, in the case of the COVID policy, we just kind of crowd source that internally, and created a policy, in about a week, really. That we, you know, we shaped the basic policy and then kept refining it, refining it, testing it. And we were able to go from start to finish, and have it publicly available within about a week and a half. It was really a great effort. And we have that kind of ability to be very nimble, to react to different types of regulations as they become, you know, get out there. And then there's also a constant refining of even data privacy for every country that we support. You know, we have data privacy regulations for the entire European union and for most countries around the world, obviously the US, Canada, Australia, and so on. And, you can always make those policies better. So we've introduced feedback loops where our customers can give us feedback on what works and what isn't working, and we can tweak the policies as needed. But it is a great way to respond to whatever's going on in the world, to help our customer base, which, you know, is largely the financial verticals, the public sector verticals, but even healthcare is becoming more important for us. >> So Dave, I wonder if there's some other use cases that people aren't thinking about, where you guys have seen value in this type of analytics. >> Yeah, I mean, definitely the one thing that I think is just starting to emerge as the value that's inherent in communications. So I mentioned earlier the telemedicine idea, and, you know, can you learn from doctor-patient interactions if you're capturing them over telemedicine vehicles, you know again, Video Chat, Zoom, and that sort of thing. But similarly, if you've captured communications for a long time, as many of our customers have, what can you do with that data? And how can it feed into a broader data lake to give you new insights? So for example, if you want to gauge whether a major deal is about to close, you know, you can rely on your sales reps to populate the CRM and give you an indication it's 10% complete, it's 50% complete, whatever. But you're dependent on all the games that salespeople play. It would be far better to look at the pattern of a traditional deal Closing. You know, first you start out with one person at your company talking, to one person at the target customer that leads to meetings, that leads to calendar invites, that leads to emails being sent back and forth. You can look at the time of response, how quickly does the target customer respond to the sales rep? How often are they interacting? How many people are they interacting with? Is it spanning different GEOS? Is it spanning different groups within the company? Are there certain documents being sent back and forth, like, a quote for example. All of this can give you a higher confidence that that deal is going to close, or that deals failing. You don't really know. You can also look at historical data, and compare the current account manager to his predecessor. You know, does the current account manager interact with his customer as much as the former rep did? And is there a correlation in their effectiveness? You know, based on kind of their interactions, and their just basic skills. So I think that's an exciting field, and it shines a new light on the data that you have to collect, to comply with regulations, the data you have to collect for litigation and other reasons. Now there's other value there. >> Right. That's a fascinating story. So the reason that you guys would be involved in this, is because you're sitting on, you're sitting all that comms data, because you have to, for the regulation. I mean, what you're describing sounds like a perfect, you know, kind of sales force. Plug in. >> Absolutely. >> With a much richer dataset, versus as you said, relying on the sales person to input the sales force, information which would require them to remember their password, which gets reset every three weeks. So the chances of that are pretty slim. (laughs) >> Yeah. There's a fact, I think I've read a stat recently that about, you know, only 10% of information is actually captured in a CRM. You know, contact information and that sort of thing. But if you're looking at their emails, if you're looking at their phone calls and their texts, and that sort of thing, you get a rich set of data on contacts and people that you're interacting with at a target customer, and, you know, sales. More than any other job, I think sales has high turnover. And so you need that record of, you know, off the counter. One account rep leaves, you don't want to lose all their contacts and start over again. You want a smooth handover to the next person. >> Right. >> If you capture all that content from their communications into CRM, you're in great shape. >> Dave, I want to get your take on something that's happening now, because you're so dialed into policy, and policy and regulations, which are such a giant determinant of what people can and should and should not do, with data. When you take something like COVID and the conversations about people going back to work, and contact tracing. To me it's like, Wow! You know, it's kind of this privacy clash against HIPAA, and, you know, that's medical information. And yet it's like this particular disease has been deemed such that it kind of falls outside the traditional, you know, kind of HIPAA rules. They're not going to test me for any other ailments before I come in the door at work, but they, you know, eventually we're going to be scanning people. So, you know, the levels of complexity and dynamicism, if that's even a word, around something like that, that's even a one off, within a specific, you know, kind of medical data is got to be, you know, I guess, interesting and challenging, but from a policy perspective and an actual handling of that information, that's got to be a crazy challenge. >> Yeah. I mean, we do expect that COVID it's going to lead to all kinds of litigation and Freedom of Information Act request. And that's a big reason why we saw the importance very quickly, that we need a classification policy to highlight that content. So what we can do in this case is we can, first of all, identify where that content is stored. We have a product called data insight that can monitor your file system and quickly locate. If you've got a document that includes, you know, patient data or anything related to COVID-19, we can find that. And now as we bring in the communications, we can flag communications, as we archive them and say, this is related to COVID-19. Then when a litigation happens, you can look, you can do a quick search and you can filter on the COVID-19 tag. And the people you're concerned with, and the date range you're concerned with, you can easily pull in all of the communications, all of the file content, anything related to COVID-19. And this is huge for, again, for public sector, where there are subject to finance, you know, sorry, Freedom of Information Act request. But it's also going to affect every company, because like, it's going to be litigation around, when a company decided that they would work from home, and did they wait too long. You know, and did someone get sick because they weren't aggressive enough. There's going to be frivolous lawsuits, there's going to be more tangible lawsuits, and, there's going to be all kinds of activity around how stimulus funds were spent and that sort of thing. So, yeah. That's a great example of a case where you've got to find the content quickly and respond to requests very quickly. Classification go a long way there. >> Yeah. That's the lawyers have hardly gotten involved in this COVID thing yet. And, to your point, it's going to be both frivolous as well as justified. And did people come back too early? Did they take the right steps? It's going to be messy and sloppy, but it sounds like you're in a good position to help people get through it. So, you know, just kind of your final thoughts you've been in this business for a long time. The rate and pace of change is only increasing the complexity of veracity, stealing some good, old, big data words. Velocity of the data is only increasing, the sources are growing exponentially. You know, as you kind of sit back and reflect obviously, a lot of exciting stuff ahead, but what do you think about what gets you up in the morning beyond just continuing to race to keep up with the neverending see of changing regulatory environment? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think we have a great portfolio that can really help us react to change, and to take advantage of some of these new trends. And that is exciting, like telemedicine, the changes that come with COVID-19, what we could do for telemedicine rating doctors gauging their performance. We could do the same sort of thing for tele-education. You know, like I have two kids that have had, you know, homeschooling for the last three months, and, probably are going to face that in the fall. And, there might be some needs to just rate how the teachers are doing, how well are the classes interacting, and what can we learn from best practices there. So I think that's interesting and interesting space as well. But what keeps me going is the fact that we've got market leading products in archiving, eDiscovery, and supervision. We're putting a lot of new energy into those solutions. They've been around a long time. We've been archiving since 1998 I think, and doing supervision and discovery for 20 years. And, it's strange, the market's still there, it's still expanding, it's still growing. And, it's kind of just keeping up to change and, trying to find better ways of surfacing the relevant human communications content that said that's kind of the key to the job, I think. >> Right. Well yeah, Finding that signal amongst the noise is going to get increasingly... >> Exactly. >> More difficult than has been kind of a recurring theme here over the last 12 weeks or 15 weeks, or however long it's been. As you know, this kind of light switch moment on digital transformation is no longer, when are we going to get to it, or we're going to do a POC or let's experiment a little bit, you know, here and there it's, you know, ready, set, go. Whether you're ready or not, whether that's a kindergarten teacher, that's never taught online, a high school teacher running a big business. So nothing but a great opportunity. (laughs) >> Absolutely. >> All right. >> Absolutely. I mean, it's a very, a changing world and lots of opportunity comes with that. >> All right. Well Dave, thank you for sharing your insight, obviously regulation compliance, and I like that, you know, data supervision is not just backup and recovery is much, much bigger opportunity, in a lot higher value activity. So congrats to you and the team. And thanks for the update. >> All right. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for the time. >> All right. He's Dave and I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston gets the Q covering IBM thing brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to our coverage of IBM think 2020 the digital version of IBM. Thank, my name is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cube. Hillary Hunter is here. She's the vice president and CTO of IBM cloud and also an IBM fellow. Hillary, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >>Thanks so much for having me today. >>All right, let's get really, let's get into it. We want to focus on security and compliance. It's a key, obviously a key aspect and consideration for customers. But I have to start by asking you, there's this sort of the age old conflict between being secure and then having the flexibility and agility and speed that business people need. How does IBM clouds sort of square that circle? >>Yeah, you know, it's, it's really interesting because cloud itself is detained, um, designed to deliver agility, um, and speed. And that's everything from the release cadence to being able to consume things as APIs. And so when we say cloud and security, it's about the things that we implement as a cloud provider and the services that we stand up. And all of that is API driven. Um, all of that is intended to enable, you know, data protection through API APIs intended to enable security monitoring through PIs and dashboards and other things like that. And so actually when delivered as cloud services, security functions can actually even go more quickly and can facilitate that speed and agility in and of themselves. So it's really interesting that the means of delivering cloud capabilities actually can facilitate that agility in the security area. >>Yeah, I mean I think it's, especially in these times with COBIT 19 a lot of why is that? We're talking, you were saying, Hey, yeah, we're really going harder, uh, for the cloud because the downturns have been actually pretty good for them. For the cloud. I presume you're sort of seeing the same thing, but if you think about the cost of a breach, it's millions of millions of dollars on average. And think about the time it takes for an organization to identify when there's been an infiltration. Mmm. I know small companies like ours, we feel good that we can tap into, you know, cloud infrastructure. what are your thoughts? Oh, on sort of that whole notion cloud essentially maybe even having better security in a way, but however you define better. >>Yeah. You know, I, I actually agree with those statements and I think it's played out in many of our client engagements. Um, because when you are talking about cloud and you're talking about security, we have the opportunity to present to you a proactive approach, right? Where we're saying, okay, leverage this type of technology in order to do your key management or data encryption. It is up by us already fully as a service. You consume it API driven. Um, and so we are able to say that this will enable you to have end to end data encryption or corruption according to some standard or key management, um, where the keys remained in your hands or you know, use these things that are security services so that there isn't, um, there doesn't have to be, um, as detailed of a conversation. Um, as you often have to have in your solution, in your own it. >>You can say, okay, what's the objective we're trying to get to what is the net security and compliance posture? And we as a cloud provider can be proactive and telling you, Hey, therefore then use this combination of services and use them in this following way and that will enable you to reach those outcomes. And so moving past, um, you know, being fully self service where you have to configure hundreds and hundreds of things yourselves. To me being more prescriptive and proactive and goal oriented and outcome oriented, um, is an opportunity that we have in cloud where we're standing up Janning up capabilities. And so we really tried to talk to clients about, okay, what's the, what are you trying to accomplish? Are you concerned about control over your it? Are you concerned about meeting particular documentation on particular regulatory compliance? What's the point? And then how does that relate into a conversation about data compute, networking, et cetera, and then what does that matter too in terms of how you should then use certain cloud capabilities. >>I want to follow up on that, Hillary, because I want to see it. If I can discern, maybe there's some difference in the way IBM approaches this. I've often said in the cube that bad user behavior trumps good security every time. And of course you've got multiple layers, you've got IBM securing, you know it's infrastructure and it's cloud. You've got it in whatever role there and you've got the end user now. Yeah. Somebody fishes the end user or end user admin. Okay. There are things you can do fine. Hmm. But there's also the, it kind of in the middle you mentioned managed services is IBM's approach, you know, somewhat different >>no >>cloud suppliers. Maybe you could elaborate on that. >>Yeah. So, you know, we really look to protect the services that we're standing up, whether it's infrastructure services, where it's yeah, networking, whether or not it's container service or you know, other services that we're providing. We're looking to protect it, those, you know, down to the core of what that service is and how it works and, and how it provides security and then the technologies that that service integrates into. Right? So services seamlessly integrating into bring your own key and our, um, FIPs one 40 dash two level four baths, um, keep your own key, et cetera. So, so we take other things for our clients and then in doing so, we enable end to end the client to understand both what the status of the service itself is as well as, um, you know, how they use it in order to take into account other security considerations. >>And, and I think it is a fundamentally different, um, approach then one takes for, you know, your own it, you're responsible end to end for everything. In this case, you know, we a secure what we're doing. And then we enable through things like our security advisor, um, to do configurations in such that, that governed the developer behavior and ensure that overall together between us and the client, the posture, even of what the developers and such is understood and can be monitored and ensured that it is secure and compliant. Okay. So I just want to take an example of that. So you are responsible for let's say, securing the object store as an example, but yet at the same time the clients it organization policies that map to the edict of their organization. So they've got flexibility sort of a partnership. Okay. Am I understanding that correctly? >>Yeah, absolutely. And the question is then that it organization that's taken policies, um, we then enable our clients to use tools, everything from things that can be integrated into the dev sec ops pipeline of red hat, you know, and initiatives that are going on. We had CNCF and NIST and other places like that. Yeah. So how can they translate their risk, insecurity, postures into concrete tools? That's that we deliver, right? Everything from dev, sec ops and OpenShift. So then tools and dashboards that we have, like security advisor, um, so that they can then most effectively implement the entirety of what constitutes security on in public cloud environment with confidence. Yeah. So security in compliance slash privacy or sort of two sides of the same coin. So I want to understand, Oh, IBM cloud is approaching, Oh, compliance, obviously GDPR, yeah, yeah. Whatever. They may have, I guess 2018 in terms of the fines. >>Oh, the, the California consumer privacy act. Everybody sort of has their own little GDPR now States and regions and countries, et cetera. How is IBM supporting clients in regard to Oh, compliance such initiatives? Yeah. You know, and this is an area where, you know, again, we are working to make it as easy as possible for our clients to not only see our status on certain compliance areas, which is visible through our website on compliance, but also to achieve compliance is where there is some joint or shared responsibility. So for example, in Europe with the European banking 30, we have kind of an industry unique position and enabling clients you achieve, um, what is needed. And so we provide proactive, you know, guidance. I'm on European banking authority or a PCI DSS or other things like that. So we really are trying to take a very proactive approach to Mmm, uh, providing the guidance that clients need and meeting them in that journey over all. >>We, in addition have a specific program for financial services, um, where we announced our partnership back in November with the bank of America for financial services for a very significant control setting compliance, um, that is not just a of a bunch of little existing things, but it really is a tailored control set for the financial services industry. Um, that acknowledges the fact that, you know, getting compliance in that space can be particularly, ah, particularly challenging. So we are, are taking a very proactive approach, do helping our clients across different doctors, um, deal with those changing, you know, postures and internally as a cloud organization. Um, we are advised also by IBM Promitory, which, um, it has extensive background over 70 jurisdictions globally, changes in all these postures and in compliance and rules and such like that, that they consistently and continuously monitor. Um, and help us design the right cloud moving forward. Cause is compliance as you said is it's very much a dynamic and changing landscape. >>You know, when you talk to chief information security officers and ask them what their biggest challenges, they'll tell you. Yeah. The lack of skills. Uh, and so they're looking to automation. It really helped close that gap. And clearly cloud is sort of all about automation. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what you're seeing with regard to automation generally, but specifically how it's helping, you know, close that skills gap. >>Yeah, you know, it, the, the, the topic of automation is so interesting when it intersects security because I really view this, um, transition to cloud and the use of cloud native and the use of containers and such actually is an opportunity again, yet again to improve security and compliance posture. Um, because cloud, um, and uh, the dev ops and CICB pipelines, um, and all of that of, of a cloud native build and a containerized build give you a certain opportunity both to prevent a bunch of behaviors as well as to collect certain information that may become useful later on. Um, I think actually called modernization because of the automation it brings, um, is a really, really topic for both CSOs and risk officers right now because it can not just improve the agility that you started with as a motivation to go to cloud, but it can also improve visibility into what's going on with all your workloads. >>You know, to know that a developer used a particular library and then you see, oops, maybe there's a concern about that library and you instantly know where across the entirety of your IOT that that's been deployed. That's a tremendous amount of knowledge. Um, and you can take either, you know, immediate action on that or you can through automation push out changes and things like that. Um, we use internally as a cloud provider the best of SRE and automation practices to keep our estate patched and other things like that. And that can also then translate into people's own workloads, which I think is a really exciting opportunity of cloud. >>You know, we're out of time, but I want to close and asking you sort of what we should look at 42, we had a great conversation earlier, well with Jamie Thomas about, about quantum and she talked about ideas. You get that on the IBM what what should we look forward to sort of in the coming months and even years in IBM cloud. >>Yeah. You know, we're really excited about that agility, that cloud itself for us as a company and provides, right? Like you said with quantum, it is the place that we can bring out the latest and greatest things, um, in, you know, uh, for our clients to use and experiment with and adopt their algorithms and such juice. So you're going to continue to see us taking a very aggressive posture in turning the latest and open source and technologies into cloud delivered fully managed services. Um, and so, you know, everything from what we've done already with, um, Istio is a service and can native as a server, a service and quantum as a service, et cetera. Um, you'll continue to see us take that approach that, um, you know, we want to be a fresh and vital environment for developers to consume the latest and greatest that's out there. Um, but yet as an enterprise focused company and a company, you know, very much focused on security and compliance, you'll continue to see us back those things with our own efforts to secure and then enable security, um, on our environment. >>Well, Hillary, thanks so much for coming on the cube. It's always great to have experts like yourself, uh, share with, uh, with our community. Appreciate it. >>Great. Thank you so much for having me. >>And so we're seeing cloud acceleration as a result of covert 19, but it's always been a, a real wave for the last 10 years. We're just seeing it again, accelerate even faster. This is Dave Volante for the cube. You're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of IBM thing, digital thing, 2020 people right there, but right back, right after this short, >>right.

>> Narrator: Live from Denver, Colorado it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we're wrapping up close-- Wrapping up our coverage of two days at Commvault Go in Colorado and we're excited to welcome a new gust to theCUBE. We have Tim Carben, Principle Systems Engineer for Storage and Data Protection at Mitchell, a Commvault customer. Tim, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> Lisa: First question. >> Yes. >> Are you ready for the interview? (Tim shows off his shirt) >> I came ready. >> Lisa: You were born ready! >> Yes. (Lisa laughs) >> So for those of you who weren't here, the get ready, be ready is a big theme of the event. So, Tim, first of all, before we get into what Mitchell is doing with Commvault, tell our audience who Mitchell is, what types of products and services do you deliver? >> Well, Mitchell is a little known name, but we are a technology company that provides smart solutions, or smart insurance solutions. (Tim sighs) I'm sorry, we provide smart technology solutions for insurance companies in the area of property and casualty. >> Okay. That's a big, that's a-- >> That's a mouth full. >> It is a mouth full, but you did really well. So based here in the US? >> Tim: Yes in San Diego. >> Oh, that's right, Sunny San Diego. We were just talking about the scooter problem. How could I forget? So, you came onboard there, you said around five or so years ago? >> Tim: Yes, about five and a half years. >> If I think of like, insurance. (Lisa cringes) The data volume growing, right, must be, you're wincing, exponential. Talk to us about the data strategy and the importance of data to Mitchell and what you're doing with Commvault to protect it, get that visibility and use it to deliver stellar services. >> Well that's exactly it. It's, we see growth and, year over year and making sure that we keep that data protected is the most important thing. We have to be able to provide that back to our customers, in an instant and keep it available. That's number one is keeping everything available. So, of course I'm going to choose Commvault. I always look into everything that's in the market and I talk with everyone. I mean, I've had conversations with everyone from Rupert to Veritas and I agree with Forrester in saying that Commvault's the best product for the data protection. >> Lisa: Why? >> Mainly, because we're seeing them move forward faster than anyone else. They're able to-- Or I'm able to, I guess I should say, utilizing Commvault, microtune my environment to be able to provide the fastest level of backup and recovery. Rather than buying blocks and putting these blocks together. And even when it comes to the hyperscale product, it's a Red Hat server cluster. So it's not a black box you can't see inside of, you understand what's going on underneath it and it is a tried and true methodology for doing what you're trying to do and it's... I guess for lack of better words, just really resilient, I love it. >> Great, so Tim, you said you've looked at a lot of solutions, you've been on Commvault for quite a while. Talk to us a little bit about that usability of the product, you know? Some of the questions we have is, you know how simple it actually is to use, you know how much your team needs to study up and get on it and just, kind of, the cadence of change that you're seeing coming from Commvault. >> Now, my team's really good. You know we've been-- They've been with Commvault since version six they know how to use the Java console. So, it's not so much as, they are learning something new, but what's happening and what I've noticed with Commvault, from within the Java console to the command center, is they're making everything else a lot easier. So, they're not changing the way I'm doing my mature backups of, say Oracle, or, you know file system, things like that, but they are making it a lot easier for me to start and recover and I guess, change configuration of the VMware backups. They're making it easier of me to manage my storage and with the command center or with the web console, I should say, they're making it so much easier to report. Anyone that's utilized the CommNet from back in the day, the old reporting tool, versus the new centralized metrics reporting tool, knows that there's no comparison whatsoever. And I can point all of my CommCells to one reporting system and provide reports that go over everything from storage utilization to, you know, just resource utilization all the way down to chargeback, based upon any given criteria I want. >> You have full visibility? >> Full visibility. >> You mentioned that you've been a Commvault customer for a while, not just at Mitchell, but your previous company, you also said before we started that you've done a lot of speaking on behalf of Commvault, your use case, other challenges that you had, the business outcomes. I would love to get your perspective on being one of those customer champions, what are some of the things that you're hearing from prospective Commvault customers? Are they asking you for your advice, like hey, we had this kind of compelling event, Tim, what would you recommendation be? >> A lot of it is specifics and I think that's, you know, they'll be asking questions based upon who they're talking to and I'm the guy that you talk to when you want to talk the details. So they'll come to me and say hey, what about this hyperscale configuration and I'll say, well rather than go with the larger environment, go with the smaller nodes and spread it wider, that way you can transfer more data in. But... It's a lot of just how is it working for you? And even into the newer environments where we're looking at the, you know, 0365 being backed up by SaaS is, how easy is it to configure? And that is quite possibly the easiest thing to configure that I've ever run across. >> Wow. Ever? >> Ever. Well, like I said, they keep making things better and in the past I've used, you know, Veritas backup Exec, as everyone has back in the day. I mean, we've done data transfer on tapes, I've used TSM for seven years, so everything's going to be easier than that and even a lot of testing of different backup applications and when you look at what we're doing with cloud configuration and Commvault SaaS model, Commvault really takes a lot of the configuration out that you would need to do and they have their own CommCell administrator that takes care of it. I was talking with Justin not too long back, he's here I was so happy to get to meet him and he manages all that for us. We enter in the specifics as far as configuration and it's done. >> So you guys-- Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> So, Tim, you know, what I'm curious about is the feedback loop that you have with Commvault. Obviously you're quite happy with the product, you've seen the maturation over time. Are there things you're asking for, or things that you're seeing on their roadmap or maybe things that were announced this week, that are exciting you or things that you would love to help be doing things even better than what you're doing today? >> I don't know, this may be the thing that the sales people don't like about me. Is I don't hold back when I see something that I want to see different and I've done this with different storage manufacturers that I've worked with, as well as, of course with Commvault and the one things that I always come back to and this is one thing I joked with my previous sales person on is, if you're going to call it Commvault Complete, why doesn't it include orchestrate and activate? You could just call it Commvault and then give us another Commvault Complete that actually contains everything in it, because, I wish I could run the activate in-house. The problem is, is I've priced it out, I've provided that data to my upper management and they just will not buy off on it. >> And what was Commvault's response to that feedback? 'Cause they're very pro-listening to their customers, we've heard that resoundingly. >> They are and there really wasn't anything. They said they're hand things up the channel and what's interesting about it is in talking to the activate people today, or, yes, either way. During the show, I found out that they added another plan that would allow you to buy activate by the terabyte and not by the user. So that may be something that could help drop the price if we isolate specific environments to what we would use the activate for and that would be (Tim nods) workable, I guess I should say. >> So, speaking of activate, data governance, insights, the California Consumer Privacy Act, CCPA is around the corner. >> Yes. >> You're based in San Diego. Where is Mitchell in terms of its readiness for that and how is Commvault, ar they part of that solution to get ready? >> As far as-- I can speak to the data protection side of it, because that's where I'm at. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And I have everything in place for us to be ready by the time everything comes through. And it is utilizing Commvault. I mean, that's the backbone of being able to keep us protected. At that level and all levels, I should say. >> Tim, as we mentioned before, you've been speaking, you've been quite busy at the show, give us, you know, some of the highlights that you've had and, you know, what brings you to Go and how many of them have you been to? >> Well, I went to the first two Florida and DC. I skipped out on the last one, I wanted to send my coworkers there. So my coworkers that I work with, I made it a point I said I'm staying at the office, I'll take care of everything, go and-- No pun intended. >> Lisa: I was going to say that was good. >> Yes. (Lisa and Tim laughing) And then I came back to this one. The big thing is learning. This is an opportunity for me to talk to industry experts, to talk to customers who have done things that I'm planning on doing in the future, to help out customers who haven't done things that I've already done and let 'em know hey look out for this or look out for that. But, with this one a big part of it is looking at the workflows, looking at the automation. Utilizing or being able to utilize all the other features that I have available to me that I'm not using right now. >> Last question in the last few seconds of the time we have left, lots of announcements from Commvault in the last nine months a lot of change, a lot of leadership change, reps to market change, new ventures. Some of your perspective of what you're seeing with this new Commvault? >> Well, it's exciting when you look at it. At first I wondered about the Hedvig acquisition. I mean, it's a step into the primary storage market and some people say that a lot of the companies that are partners with Commvault could see that as overstepping boundaries, but when I learn what they're doing and what they're planning on doing and utilizing it as more of a data protection multicloud strategy, this really could push them a little bit further along than anyone else than the data protection market is. So, the changes look to be, for lack of better words, really good for the company and in turn really good for us, the consumer. And making sure that we can do everything that we need to do and we're ready to move forward. >> 'Course you are, you have the shirt. >> Tim: That's right, we're ready >> Well Tim, Tim thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon. Sharing with us what's going on at Mitchell and you perspectives on knowing Commvault as long as you have. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go '19. (upbeat tune)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering the RSA Conference 2019. Brought to you by ForeScout. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at RSA at Moscone at downtown San Francisco. We're in the ForeScout booth, our first time in the ForeScout booth, we're really excited to be here and we're talking about cyber security, I don't know what the official number is this year, probably 45 thousand professionals walkin' around, talkin' about security. And we've got our next guest on, he is Russell Jones, partner on cyber risk services for Deloitte. Russell, great to meet you! >> Same to meet you as well. >> So, I asked him before we turned on, what's getting you excited these days and he said, everything! So, this is a crazy busy space. What have you been working on lately, what's kind of your take away from the first couple days at the show? >> Yeah, it is a crazy, busy space and if you look at the cyber landscape, everything's moving at the speed of the internet, so it's this cat and mouse game in terms of attackers trying to find new ways to get into systems that is driving the industry. When you talk about health care though, the issue is these systems, like medical devices, often times are connected to people. >> Right. >> And so, the implications of a hack against, let's say, a MRI machine or a fusion pump, could be devastating to an actual person connected to it. And that's really what's driving a lot of innovation in terms of some of the technologies you see, like ForeScout, and also, a lot of what's going on from a regulatory perspective, and also the hospitals and the health care system themselves. >> Right. >> Trying to solve that problem, managing cyber risk as it relates to clinical technology. >> And a lot of that stuff wasn't connected before, right? There weren't IP addresses on every MRI machine or all these pump machines or, you know, you have a pacemaker, all these things. How are they looking at kind of the risk reward from a connected device that gives you all kinds of benefits-- >> Yeah. >> but it does open up this attack surface that previously had maybe an air gap there? >> That's a great point, bottom line is the life saving, life extending attributes of these medical technologies and medical devices far outweighs the risk of cyber, however, we got to be smart about managing that risk. So, we're going to see more connectivity, not less. Train's left the station, in terms of what's coming and in the future of the healthcare, connecting more of, not only the medical devices, but the information in them and being able to share that and then bring it together and aggregate it in ways that, you know, with analytics on top of it allows doctors and researchers in the clinical community to connect dots in ways that solve cancer, solve some different maladies that have plagued us forever. >> Right. >> So I think, on the one hand, it's great, this connectivity is extending healthcare out to people in rural locations and it's also bringing together a lot of different data from everything from your Fitbit to your pacemaker to apps that you have on your phone in a way that's going to benefit us. >> Right, right, so, one of the things about healthcare is they're way out in front of, kind of, not healthcare in terms of regulations. >> Yeah. >> You know, and HIPAA's been around for a long time, GDPR just went into place in Europe last year, so when you look at it from a regulatory environment, which people have to consider, there's not only the complexity of the machines, there's not only the complexity of the security, but you also have regulatory environment. >> Yeah. >> How is the cyber security in healthcare, with their very unique regulations, kind of impacting the way people should think about the problem, the way they should implement solutions? >> That's a good question, I think we've thought about, in the cyber community, forever. We talk about confidentiality, integrity, availability, right, the triangle. When you think about healthcare and clinical technology and medical devices, you need to flip that triangle upside down and the focus is integrity and availability, those things together equal patient safety. So, in other words, as we're connecting more of these devices to each other, to electronic health record systems, to the cloud, the integrity of the information in there, which is being used by doctors and other folks to make decisions about treatment, about surgical procedures, about medicines, it's crucial that that information and the integrity of it is maintained. And then the availability of the device is critical, right? If you're going in to get an MRI and it's down because it's been hacked, there's usually not a spare MRI and so there's a profound impact for patients that are scheduled back to back to back to back to go get that procedure, that MRI that's going to be used by a doctor to do some surgery or some other kind of a treatment plan >> Right. >> So integrity and availability are huge in the cyber world. And, if you look at the regulations, depending on which one we're talking and which part of the world, right? You mentioned HIPAA, we've got security and privacy, you've got GDPR, you've got the FDA that have guidance around what they want the manufacturers to do, building security into the devices. >> Right. >> They all have an impact on cyber and how it's going to be addressed, how we're going to manage cyber risk in the healthcare world. >> Right. >> In that environment. >> And then there's this whole new thing, I went to the Wall Street Journal Health Conference a couple weeks back, I don't know if you were there, but there was two people up where you now you can take your genetic footprint, right? >> Yeah. >> You can take your 23andMe results and after you figure out where your family's from, you can actually sell it back into a research market-- >> Yeah. >> so that doctors and clinicians and people doing trials on new drugs can now take your data in kind of a marketplace, back into a whole nother application so it's kind of outside of the core healthcare system, if you will. >> That's right. >> But I mean, it's basically, it's me, right? (laughs) In the form of my DNA footprint. >> Yup. >> It's crazy, crazy amounts of strange data that now is potentially exposed to a hack. >> That's right, and so the implications there, obviously, privacy, right? That's a huge issue, I think, that we're going to have to address and that's why you see GDPR and that's why you see the California Consumer Privacy Act. >> Right. >> There's a recognition that, again, the train's left the station, there's a lot of good things that come out of sharing data and sharing information, there's a lot benefits that can come out of it for the consumers, patients. There's a dark side as well and that has to be managed. That's why we have the privacy regulations that we have, we're probably going to see more, probably going to see more things like the California Consumer Privacy Act. >> Right. >> More states and eventually-- >> Right. >> probably a federal act for the US. >> Do you think that the healthcare industry is better equipped to deal with GDPR and the California Healthcare Act because of things like HIPAA and they kind of come from that world? Or is this just a whole new level of regulation that they now have to account for? >> I think it's probably a mixed bag. On the one hand, healthcare has been dealing with privacy for a long time, even before HIPAA, right. And then HIPAA has very specific requirements around how you have to manage that information and consent and notifying the patient of their rights. On your other hand, you look at some of the new things, like GDPR, it goes way beyond HIPAA, and I think-- >> It goes way beyond HIPAA? >> Goes way behind HIPAA, like for example, this whole notion of the right to be forgotten. >> Right. >> Right, that's a requirement on the GDPR. That means, me as a patient, if I tell my doctor, I want you to get rid of all my medical records, everything in your system everywhere about me, I want it gone. Not that it makes sense-- >> Right, right. >> but, at least in Europe, if they ask to do that, you have to be able to comply. From a technology perspective and a medical device perspective, some of these devices are very complex, ecosystem of devices, components that make up the product. >> Right >> That's a very difficult thing to do. There's no one delete button-- >> Right. >> that you hit that can delete you from all different instances, downstream from where you came into the healthcare system. >> Right. >> And so, when you think about it from a cyber perspective, it gets to be very challenging. >> The other thing, right, is health care's always under tremendous kind of price pressure from the insurers and the consumers and a bad medical event can wipe-- >> Yeah. >> people out, right? >> Yeah. >> Especially when they're later in life and they're not properly insured, when they're making kind of an ROI analysis on cyber investments versus all the other things they can spend their money on, and they can't spend it all on security, that's not possible, how are they factoring in kind of the cyber investment, it's kind of this new layer of investment that they have to make because all these things are invested versus just investing in better beds and better machines and better people? >> That's the million dollar question. (laughs) I would say, some hospitals and health systems are doing it better than others, so maybe a little bit more further along and mature about thinking about the total cost of ownership and also, the patient factor, right? What has to be balanced, obviously, is not just the costs, but at the end of the day, what's best for the patient. And you hear this term, patient centricity, a lot today. And there's a recognition from all the players in the echo system, it's all about the patient. >> I'm so glad you say that 'cause I think a lot of people probably think that the patient sometimes gets lost in this whole thing, but you're saying no. >> There is an acknowledgement over the last few years and it's called patient centricity, it's an acknowledgement that the way we're going into the future of healthcare and the kinds of medical devices and technology and cloud solutions that are becoming part of the healthcare fabric, they're all being built and geared towards the patient being the center of the equation, not the doctor, not the hospital, it's the patient. >> Right, right, right, that's good to hear. >> And so, to answer your original question, we're in early days and really trying to balance the patient and patient centricity versus we've got vulnerabilities in our environment that could impact the patient and we've only got limited people and costs. >> Right, right. >> Making decisions that kind of balance all of those things. >> Right, alright Russell, last question, we're sitting here in the ForeScout booth. >> Yes. >> Obviously you have a relationship with them, talk about kind of what their solution adds to some of the stuff that you're workin' on. >> So, ForeScout, one of the reasons that we're working closely with ForeScout, their solution, really, they've taken an approach that's holistic around these issues that we're talking about, right, managing cyber risk, complex environment, a lot of different devices that are connected to each other and to the cloud and to the internet. They have built a solution that focuses on ability to have visibility into those devices that are on your network, some of which you may not even know exists, and then being able to kind of build an asset inventory around that visibility that allows you to do things like detect, based on policy, activity that suggests that you might be hacked or there might be some internal processes or players that are doing things that are going to put patients at risk or have you in non-compliance with GDPR, HIPAA and the rest. >> Right. >> And then their solution goes beyond ability to kind of visibility and detect, but to actually do something actionable, right? Security controls and orchestration with other technologies, like Simp Solutions and SOAR Solutions. Being able to orchestrate, hey, I know that I detected some activity on this infusion pump that suggests that we may being hacked, let me send an alert out, but then let me also, maybe, quarantine that part of the network. So, it's the ability to orchestrate between different security technologies that exist in a hospital environment, that's what we like about ForeScout. >> I'm just curious, when they run their first kind of crawl, if you will-- >> Yeah. >> are people surprised at the results of what's on there, that they had no clue? >> I mean, yes and no. >> Yes and no, okay. >> I think, most of the big hospitals that we work with, they know that, what they don't know, and especially when-- >> They know what they don't know. >> you're talkin' about a health system that maybe has a 100 thousand connected medical devices across the health system, they know what they don't know. They're looking for solutions to help them better manage and understand the things that they don't know, that they don't know. >> Right. >> Versus what they do know about. >> Right. >> And I think that's what we bring to the table in terms of kind of cyber risk services Deloitte brings, and then that's what ForeScout brings with their solution to be able to kind of help solve those problems. >> Well Russell, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to share those stories, super-- >> Thank you. >> super important work, you know, it's one thing to steal a few bucks out of the bank account, like you said. >> Yeah. >> It's another thing to start taking down machines at the hospital, not a good thing. >> Not a good thing. >> Alright >> Thank you. >> He's Russell, I'm Jeff, you're watchin' theCUBE, we're at RSA in Moscone in the ForeScout booth, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)