>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back at UI path forward to five. This is Dave Ante with Dave Nicholson. Derek Mu is here. He's automation product line lead for Merck. Thank you, by the way, for, you know, all you guys do, and thank you Dave for having in the, in the, in the vaccine area, saving our butts. And Bill Engel is back on the cube. He's the director at cgi. Guys, good to see you again. >>Good to see you. Thank >>You. So Merrick, Wow, it's been quite a few years for you guys. Take us through Derek, what's happening in sort of your world that's informing your automation strategy? >>Well, Dave, I mean as you know, we just came out of the pandemic. We actually have quite a few products like Gabriel Antiviral Pill. Obviously we worked, you know, continue to drive our products through a difficult time. But, you know, is during these can last few years that, you know, we've accelerated our journey in automation. We're about four years plus in our journey, you know, so just like the theme of this conference we're we're trying to move towards, you know, bigger automations, transformational change, continue to drive digital transformation in our company. >>Now Bill, you've been on before, but CGI tell people about the firm. It's not computer graphics imaging. >>Sure. No, it's, it's definitely not. So cgi, we're a global consultancy about 90,000 folks across the world. We're a, we're both a product company and a services company. So we have a lot of different, you know, software products that we deliver to our clients, such as CGI Advantage, which is a state local government EER P platform. And so outside of that, we, my team does automation and so we wrap automation around R IP and deliver that to our clients. >>So you guys are automation pros, implementation partners, right? So, so let's go back. Yep. Derek said four years I think. Yep. Right, You're in. So take us through what was the catalyst, how did you get started? Obviously it was pre pandemic, so it's interesting, a lot of companies pre pandemic gave lip service to digital transformation. Sounds like you guys already started your journey, but I'll come back to that. But take us back to the Catalyst four years ago. Why automation? We'll get into why UI path, >>Right. So I, I would say it started pretty niche in our company. Started first in our finance area. Of course, you know, we were looking in technology evaluating different companies, Blue Prism, ui P. Ultimately we chose UI p did it on-prem to start to use automation in sort of our invoice processing, sort of our financial processes, right? And then from there, after it was really when the pandemic hit, that's when sort of we all went to remote work. That's when the team, the COE continued to scale up, especially during pandemic. We were trying to automate more and more processes given the fact that more and more of our workers are remote, they reprocesses. How, how do you do events? You know, part of our livelihood is, is meeting with engaging with customers. Customers in this case is, are doctors and physicians, right? How do you engage with them digitally? How do you, you know, you know, a lot of the face to face contact now have to kind of shift to more digital, digital way. And so automation was a way to kind of help accelerate that, help facilitate that. >>You, you, I think you mentioned COE as in center of excellence. Yep. So, so describe your approach to implementing automation. It's, that sounds like when you say center, it sounds like something is centralized as, as opposed to a bunch of what we've been hearing a lot about citizen developers. What does that interaction >>Look like? We do have both. I would say in the beginning was more decentralized, but over time we, over the few years as, as we built more and more bots, we're now at maybe somewhere between four to 500 bots. We now have sort of internal to the company functional verticals, right? So there's an animal health, we have an animal health function. So there's, there's a team building engaging with the animal health business to build animal health box. There's human health, which is what I work on as well as hr, finance, manufacturing, research. And so internally there's engagement leads, one of the engagement leads that interact with the business. Then when there's an engineering squads that help build and design, develop and support and maintain those as well as sort of a DevOps team that supports the platform and maintains all the bot infrastructure. >>So you started in finance common story, right? I'm sure you hear this a lot Belt, How did you decide what to target? Was it, was it process driven decision? Was it, was it data oriented? Like some kind of combination? How did you decide, Do you remember? Or do you, could you take >>Us back to Oh yeah. So for, for cgi how we started to engage with MER is, you know, we, we do a lot of other business with Merck. We work on all their different business lines and we, we understand the business process. So we, we knew where there was potential for automation. So we brought those ideas to Merck and, and really kind of landed there and helped them realize the value from automation from that standpoint. And then from there the journey just continued to expand, you know, looking for those use cases that, that, you know, fit the mold for, for, for RPA to start. And now the evolution is to go to broader hyper automation. >>And, and was it CFO led into the finance department and then, or was it sort of more bottoms >>Up? Yeah, so, so I think it started in, in finance and, and, but we actually really started out in the business line. So out in regulatory clinical, that's, that's where we, we have the life science expertise that are embedded. And so I partnered with them to come up with, hey, here's a real solution we could do to help streamline, say submission archiving. So when, when submissions come back from the fda, they need to be archived into, you know, the, their system of record. So that's, those are the types of use cases that, that we helped automate. >>Okay. Cause you're saying a human had to sort physically archive that and you were able to sort of replicate that. Okay. And you started with software robots, obviously rpa and now you're expanding into, we we're hearing from UI this the platform message. How does that coincide Derek, with what you guys are doing? Are you sort of adding platform? What aspects of the platform are, are you adding? >>Yeah, no, I mean we are, we are on-premise, right? So we have the platform, but some of the cool things we just had, another colleague of mine presented earlier today. Some of the cool things we're, we're doing ephemeral infrastructure. So infrastructure as code, which essentially means instead of having all these dedicated bot machines, that that, you know, cuz these bots only in some cases run 10 minutes and they're done. So we're, we're soon of doing all on demand, you know, start up a server, run the bot when it's finished, you know, kill the server. So we only pay for the servers that we use, which allows us to save a whole >>Lot of money. Serverless bots. So you, but you're doing that OnPrem, so you >>No, >>No, but >>That's >>Cloud. We, >>We, we we're doing it OnPrem, but our, our bot machines that actually run the, let's say SAP process, right? We spin that machine up, it's on the cloud, it runs it finish, Let's say it's processed in one hour and then when it's done, we kill that machine. So we only play for that one hour usage of that bot machine. >>Okay. So you mentioned SAP earlier you mentioned Blue Prism when you probably looked at other competitors too. You pull the Gartner Magic quadrant, blah, blah, you know, with the way people, you know, evaluate technology, but SAP's got a product. Why UI path mean? Is it that a company like SAP two narrow for their only sap you wanted to apply it other ways? Maybe they weren't even in the business that back then four years ago they probably weren't. Right? But I'm curious as to how the decision was made for UiPath. >>Well, I think you hit it right on the nail. You know, SAP sort of came on a little later and they're specific to sort of their function, right? So UiPath for us is the most flexible tool can interact by UI to our sales and marketing systems, to, to workday, to service Now. It's, it cuts across every function that we have in the company as well as you're the most mature. I mean, you're the market leader, right? So Right. Definitely you, you continue to build upon those capabilities and we are exploring the new capabilities, especially being announced today. >>And what do you see Bill in the marketplace? Are you, are you kind of automation tool agnostic? Are you more sort of all in on? I >>Would say we are, we are agnostic as a company, but obviously as part of a, as an automation practice lead, you know, I want to deliver solutions to my clients that are gonna benefit them as a whole. So looking at UI path, you know, that this platform is, it covers the end to end spectrum of, of automation. So I can go really into any use case and be able to provide a solution that, that delivers value. And so that's, that's where I see the value in UI path and that's why CGI is, is a customer as well. We automate our internal processes. We actually have, we just launched probably SALT in the, in the market last week, expanded partnership with UiPath. We launched CGI, Excel 360. That's our fully managed service around automation. We host our clients whole UI path infrastructure and bots. It's completely hands off to them and they just get the value outta >>Automation. Nice, nice. Love >>It. Derek, you mentioned, you mentioned this ephemeral infrastructure. Yeah. Sounds like it's also ethereal possibility possibly you're saying, you, you're saying you have processes that are running on premises, right? But then you reach out to have an automation process run that's happening off pre and you're, and you're sort of, >>It's on the cloud, so, so yeah, so we have a in-house orchestrator, so we don't, we're not using your sort of on the cloud orchestrator. So, so we brought it in-house for security reasons. Okay. But we use, you know, so inside the vpn, you know, we have these cloud machines that run these automations. So, so that's, that's the ephemeral side of the, of the >>Infrastructure. But is there a financial angle to that in terms of when you're spinning these things up, are you, is it a, is it a pay by the drink or by the, by the CPU >>Hours, if you can imagine like we, you know, like I mentioned where somewhere between four to 500 bots and every bot has a time slot to run and takes a certain amount of time. And so that's hundreds and hundreds of bot machines that we in the old days have to have to buy and procure and, you know, staff and support and maintain. So in this new model, and we're just beginning to kind of move from pilot into implementation, we're moving all, all of bots this in ephemeral infrastructure, right? So these, okay, these machines, these bot machines are, you know, spun up. They run the, they, they run their automation and then they spin >>Down. But just to be clear, they're being spun up on physical infrastructure that is in your >>Purview and they spun up on aws. Yeah. Okay. And then they spin down. Okay, got >>It. Got it. Interesting. Four >>To 500 bots. You know, Daniel one point play out this vision of a bot chicken in every pot, I called it a bot for every employee. Is that where you're headed or is that kind of in this new ephemeral world, not necessary, it's like maybe every employee has access to an ephemeral bot. How, how are you thinking about that? >>That's a good question. So obviously the, the four to 500 is a mix of unattended bonds versus attended bonds, right? That, that we also have a citizen developer, sort of a group team. We support that as well from a coe. So, you know, we see the future as a mix. There's, there's a spectrum of, we are the professional development team. There's also, we support and nurture the personal automation and we provide the resources to help them build smaller scale automations that help, you know, reduce the, you know, the mundaneness and the hours of their own tasks. But you know, for us, we want to focus more and more on building bigger and bigger transfer transformational automations that really drive process efficiencies and, and savings. >>And what's the, what's the business impact been? You mentioned savings and maybe there's other sort of productivity. How do you measure the benefit, the ROI and, and >>Quantify that we, you know, I, I don't, I don't profess I don't think we have all the right answers, but yeah, simple metrics like number of hours saved or other sort of excitement sort of in like an nps, internal NPS between the different groups that we engage. But we definitely see automation demand coming from our, our functional teams going up, driving up. So it's, it's continued to be a hot area and hopefully we, we can, you know, like, like what the key message and theme of this, of this conference. Essentially we want to take and build upon the, the good work that we've done in terms of rpa and we want to drive it more towards digital transformation. >>So Bill, what are you seeing across the, your customer base in terms of, of, of roi? I'm not looking for percentages there. I'm sure they're off the charts, but in terms of, you know, you can optimize for fast payback, you know, maybe lower the denominator, you know, or you can optimize for, you know, net benefit over time, right? You know, what are you seeing? What are customers after they want fast payback and little quick hits? Or are they looking for sort of a bigger enterprise wide impact? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's the latter. It's that larger impact, right? Obviously they, you know, they want an roi and just depending upon the use case, that's gonna vary in terms of the, the benefits delivered. And a lot of our clients, depending on the industry, so in in life sciences it may be around, you know, compliance like GXP compliance is huge. And so that may may not be much of a time saver, but it ensures that they're, they're running their processes and they're being compliant with, you know, federal standards. So that's, that's one aspect to it. But you know, to, you know, a bank, they're looking to reduce their overall costs and and so on. But yeah, I think, I think the other, the other part of it is, you know, impacting broader business processes. So taking that top down approach versus kind of bottom up, you know, doing ta you know, the ones you choose the tasks is not as impactful as looking at broader across the entire business process and seeing how we can impact >>It. Now, Derek, when you guys support a citizen developer, how does that work? So, hey, I got this task I want to automate, I'm gonna go write a, you know, software robot. I'm gonna go do an automation. Do I just do it and then throw her to the defense? You guys, you guys send me a video on how to do it. Hold my hand. How's that work? >>Yeah, I mean, good question. So, so we obviously direct them to the UI path Academy, get some training. We also have some internal training materials to how to build a bot sort of internal inside Merck. We, we go through, we have writeups and SOPs on using the right framework for automations, using the right documentation, PDD kind of materials, and then ultimately how do we deploy bot inside the MER ecosystem. But I, I, maybe I'll just add, I think you asked the point about ROI before. Yeah. I'll also say because we're, we're a pharmaceutical company. I think one of the other key metrics is actually time saved, right? So if, if, if we have a bot that helps us get through the clinical process or even the getting a, a label approved faster, even if it's eight days saved, that's eight days of a product that can get out to the market faster to, to our patients and, and healthcare professionals. And that's, that, that's immeasurable benefit. >>Yeah, I bet if you compress that ELAP time of, of getting approval and so forth. All right guys, we've gotta go. Thanks so much. Congratulations on all the success and appreciate you sharing your story. Thank >>You so much. Appreciate it. You're welcome. >>Appreciate it. All right. Thank you for watching this Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson, The cubes coverage, two day coverage. We're here in day one, UI path forward, five. We'll be right back right after the short break. Awesome. >>Great.

(inspiring music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from the Venetian in Las Vegas, the first Discover since 2019. I really think this is my 14th Discover, when you include HP, when you include Europe. And I got to say this Discover, I think has more energy than any one that I've ever seen, about 8,000 people here. Really excited to have one of HPE's longstanding partners, Veeam CTO, Danny Allen is here, joined by David Harvey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, good to see you again. It was just earlier, let's see, last month, we were together out here. >> Yeah, just a few weeks ago. It's fantastic to be back and what it's telling us, technology industry is coming back. >> And the events business, of course, is coming back, which we love. I think the expectations were cautious. You saw it at VeeamON, a little more than you expected, a lot of great energy. A lot of people, 'cause it was last month, it was their first time out, >> Yes. >> in two years. Here, I think people have started to go out more, but still, an energy that's palpable. >> You can definitely feel it. Last night, I think I went to four consecutive events and everyone's out having those discussions and having conversations, it's good to be back. >> You guys hosted the Storage party last night, which is epic. I left at midnight, I took a picture, it was still packed. I said, okay, time to go, nothing good happens after midnight kids. David, talk about the alliance with HPE, how it's evolved, and where you see it going? >> I appreciate it, and certainly this, as you said, has been a big alliance for us. Over 10 years or so, fantastic integrations across the board. And you touched on 2019 Discover. We launched with GreenLake at that event, we were one of the launch partners, and we've seen fantastic growth. Overall, what we're excited about, is that continuation of the movement of the customer's buying patterns in line with HPE's portfolio and in line with Veeam. We continue to be with all their primary, secondary storage, we continue to be a spearhead position with GreenLake, which we're really excited about. And we're also really excited to hear from HPE, unfortunately under NDA, some of their future stuff they're investing in, which is a really nice invigoration for what they're doing for their portfolio. And we see that being a big deal for us over the next 24 months. >> Your relationship with HPE predates the HP, HPE split. >> Mmm. >> Yes. >> But it was weird, because they had Data Protector, and that was a quasi-competitor, or really not, but it was a competitor, a legacy competitor, of what you guys have, kind of modern data protection I think is the tagline, if I got it right. Post the split, that was an S-curve moment, wasn't it, in terms of the partnership? >> It really was. If you go back 10 years, we did our first integration sending data to StoreOnce and we had some blueprints around that. But now, if you look what we have, we have integrations on the primary side, so, 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, all their top-tier storage, we can manage the snapshots. We have integration on the target side. We integrate with Catalyst in the movement of data and the management of data. And, as David alluded to, we integrate with GreenLake. So, customers who want to take this as a consumption model, we integrate with that. And so it's been, like you said, the strongest relationship that we have on the technology alliance side. >> So, V12, you announced at VeeamON. What does that mean for HPE customers, the relationship? Maybe you guys could both talk about that. >> Technology side, to touch on a few things that we're doing with them, ransomware has been a huge issue. Security's been a big theme, obviously, at the conference, >> Dave: Yeah, you bet. and one of the things we're doing in V12 is adding immutability for both StoreOnce and StoreEver. So, we take the features that our partners have, immutability being big in the security space, and we integrate that fully into the product. So a customer checks a box and says, hey, I want to make sure that the data is secure. >> Yeah, and also, it's another signification about the relationship. Every single release we've done has had HPE at the heart of it, and the same thing is being said with V12. And it shows to our customers, the continual commitment. Relationships come and go. They're hard, and the great news is, 10 years has proven that we get through good times and tricky situations, and we both continue to invest, et cetera. And I think there's a lot of peace of mind and the revenue figures prove that, which is what we're really excited about. >> Yeah I want to come back to that, but just to follow up, Danny, on that immutability, that's a feature that you check? It's service within GreenLake, or within Veeam? How does that all work? >> We have immutability now depending on the target. We introduced the ability to send data, for example, into S3 two years ago, and make it immutable when you send it to an S3 or S3 compatible environment. We added, in Version 11, the ability to take a Linux repository and make it, and harden it, essentially make it immutable. But what we're doing now is taking our partner systems like StoreOnce, like StoreEver, and when we send data there, we take advantage of an API flag or whatever it happens to be, that it makes the data, when it's written to that system, can't be deleted, can't be encrypted. Now, what does that mean for a customer? Well, we do all the hard work in the back end, it's just a check box. They say, I want to make it immutable, and we manage how long it's immutable. Because if you made everything immutable forever, that's hugely expensive, right? So, it's all about, how long is that immutable before you age it out and make sure the new data coming in is immutable. >> Dave: It's like an insurance policy, you have that overlap. >> Yes. >> Right, okay. And then David, you mentioned the revenue, Lou bears that out. I got the IDC guys comin' on later on today. I'll ask 'em about that, if that's their swim lane. But you guys are basically a statistical tie, with Dell for number one? Am I getting that right? And you're growing at a faster rate, I believe, it's hard to tell 'cause I don't think Dell reports on the pace of its growth within data protection. You guys obviously do, but is that right? It's a statistical tie, is it? >> Yeah, hundred percent. >> Yeah, statistical tie for first place, which we're super excited about. When I joined Veeam, I think we were in fifth place, but we've been in the leader's quadrant of the Gartner Magic- >> Cause and effect there or? (panelists laughing) >> No, I don't think so. >> Dave: Ha, I think maybe. >> We've been on a great trajectory. But statistical tie for first place, greatest growth sequentially, and year-over-year, of all of the data protection vendors. And that's a testament not just to the technology that we're doing, but partnerships with HPE, because you never do this, the value of a technology is not that technology alone, it's the value of that technology within the ecosystem. And so that's why we're here at HPE Discover. It's our joint technology solutions that we're delivering. >> What are your thoughts or what are you seeing in the field on As-a-service? Because of course, the messaging is all about As-a-service, you'd think, oh, a hundred percent of everything is going to be As-a-service. A lot of customers, they don't mind CapEx, they got good, balance sheet, and they're like, hey, we'll take care of this, and, we're going to build our own little internal cloud. But, what are you seeing in the market in terms of As-a-service, versus, just traditional licensing models? >> Certainly, there's a mix between the two. What I'd say, is that sources that are already As-a-service, think Microsoft 365, think AWS, Azure, GCP, the cloud providers. There's a natural tendency for the customer to want the data protection As-a-service, as well for those. But if you talk about what's on premises, customers who have big data centers deployed, they're not yet, the pendulum has not shifted for that to be data protection As-a-service. But we were early to this game ourselves. We have 10,000, what we call, Veeam Cloud Service Providers, that are offering data protection As-a-service, whether it be on premises, so they're remotely managing it, or cloud hosted, doing data protection for that. >> So, you don't care. You're providing the technology, and then your customers are actually choosing the delivery model. Is that correct? >> A hundred percent, and if you think about what GreenLake is doing for example, that started off as being a financial model, but now they're getting into that services delivery. And what we want to do is enable them to deliver it, As-a-service, not just the financial model, but the outcome for the customer. And so our technology, it's not just do backup, it's do backup for a multi-tenant, multi-customer environment that does all of the multi-tenancy and billing and charge back as part of that service. >> Okay, so you guys don't report on this, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. You're number one now, let's call you, let's declare number one, 'cause we're well past that last reporting and you're growin' faster. So go another quarter, you're now number one, so you're the largest. Do you spend more on R&D in data protection than any other company? >> Yes, I'm quite certain that we do. Now, we have an unfair advantage because we have 450,000 customers. I don't think there's any other data protection company out there, the size and scope and scale, that we have. But we've been expanding, our largest R&D operation center's in Prague, it's in Czech Republic, but we've been expanding that. Last year it grew 40% year on year in R&D, so big investment in that space. You can see this just through our product space. Five years ago, we did data protection of VMware only, and now we do all the virtual environments, all the physical environments, all the major cloud environments, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, we're launching Salesforce. We announced that at VeeamON last month and it will be coming out in Q3. All of that is coming from our R&D investments. >> A lot of people expect that when a company like Insight, a PE company, purchases a company like Veeam, that one of the things they'll dial down is R&D. That did not happen in this case. >> No, they very much treat us as a growth company. We had 22% year-over-year growth in 2020, and 25% year-over-year last year. The growth has been tremendous, they continue to give us the freedom. Now, I expect they'll want returns like that continuously, but we have been delivering, they have been investing. >> One of my favorite conversations of the year was our supercloud conversation, which was awesome, thank you for doing that with me. But that's clearly an area of focus, what we call supercloud, and you don't use that term, I know, you do sometimes, but it's not your marketing, I get that. But that is an R&D intensive effort, is it not? To create that common experience. And you see HPE, attempting to do that as well, across all these different estates. >> A hundred percent. We focus on three things, I always say, our differentiators, simplicity, flexibility, and reliability. Making it simple for the customers is not an easy thing to do. Making that checkbox for immutability? We have to do a lot behind the scenes to make it simple. Same thing on flexibility. We don't care if they're using 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, whatever you want to choose as the primary storage, we will take that out of your hands and make it really easy. You mentioned supercloud. We don't care what the cloud infrastructure, it can be on GreenLake, it can be on AWS, can be on Azure, it can be on GCP, it can be on IBM cloud. It is a lot of effort on our part to abstract the cloud infrastructure, but we do that on behalf of our customers to take away that complexity, it's part of our platform. >> Quick follow-up, and then I want to ask a question of David. I like talking to you guys because you don't care where it is, right? You're truly agnostic to it all. I'm trying to figure out this repatriation thing, cause I hear a lot of hey, Dave, you should look into repatriation that's happened all over the place, and I see pockets of it. What are you seeing in terms of repatriation? Have customers over-rotated to the cloud and now they're pullin' back a little bit? Or is it, as I'm claiming, in pockets? What's your visibility on that? >> Three things I see happening. There's the customers who lifted up their data center, moved it into the cloud and they get the first bill. >> (chuckling) Okay. >> And they will repatriate, there's no question. If I talk to those customers who simply lifted up and moved it over because the CIO told them to, they're moving it back on premises. But a second thing that we see is people moving it over, with tweaks. So they'll take their SQL server database and they'll move it into RDS, they'll change some things. And then you have people who are building cloud-native, they're never coming back on premises, they are building it for the cloud environment. So, we see all three of those. We only really see repatriation on that first scenario, when they get that first bill. >> And when you look at the numbers, I think it gets lost, 'cause you see the cloud is growing so fast. So David, what are the conversations like? You had several events last night, The Veeam party, slash Storage party, from HPE. What are you hearing from your alliance partners and the customers at the event. >> I think Danny touched on that point, it's about philosophy of evolution. And I think at the end of the day, whether we're seeing it with our GSI alliances we've got out there, or with the big enterprise conversations we're having with HPE, it's about understanding which workloads they want to move. In our mind, the customers are getting much smarter in making that decision, rather than experimenting. They're really taking a really solid look. And the work we're doing with the GSIs on workplace modernization, data center transformation, they're really having that investment work up front on the workloads, to be able to say, this works for me, for my personality and my company. And so, to the point about movement, it's more about decisive decision at the start, and not feeling like the remit is, I have to do one thing or another, it's about looking at that workflow position. And that's what we've seen with the revenue part as well. We've seen our movement to GreenLake tremendously grow in the last 18 months to two years. And from our GSI work as well, we're seeing the types of conversations really focus on that workload, compared to, hey, I just need a backup solution, and that's really exciting. >> Are you having specific conversations about security, or is it a data protection conversation still, (David chuckles) that's an adjacency to security? >> That's a great question. And I think it's a complex one, because if you come to a company like Veeam, we are there, and you touched on it before, we provide a solution when something has happened with security. We're not doing intrusion detection, we're not doing that barrier position at the end of it, but it's part of an end-to-end assumption. And I don't think that at this particular point, I started in security with RSA and Check Point, it was about layers of protection. Now it's layers of protection, and the inevitability that at some point something will happen, so about the recovery. So the exciting conversations we're having, especially with the big enterprises, is not about the fear factor, it's about, at some point something's going to occur. Speed of recovery is the conversation. And so for us, and your question is, are they talking to us about security, or more, the continuity position? And that's where the synergy's getting a lot simpler, rather than a hard demark between security and backup. >> Yeah, when you look at the stock market, everything's been hit, but security, with the exception of Okta, 'cause it got that weird benign hack, but security, generally, is an area that CIOs have said, hey, we can't really dial that back. We can maybe, some other discretionary stuff, we'll steal and prioritize. But security seems to be, and I think data protection is now part of that discussion. You're not a security company. We've seen some of your competitors actually pivot to become security companies. You're not doing that, but it's very clearly an adjacency, don't you think? >> It's an adjacency, and it's a new conversation that we're having with the Chief Information Security Officer. I had a meeting an hour ago with a customer who was hit by ransomware, and they got the call at 2:00 AM in the morning, after the ransomware they recovered their entire portfolio within 36 hours, from backups. Didn't even contact Veeam, I found out during this meeting. But that is clearly something that the Chief Information Security Officer wants to know about. It's part of his purview, is the recovery of that data. >> And they didn't pay the ransom? >> And they did not pay the ransom, not a penny. >> Ahh, we love those stories. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on all the success. Love when you guys come on, and it was such a fun event at VeeamON. Great event here, and your presence is, was seen. The Veeam green is everywhere, so appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and Lisa Martin. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from Las Vegas. (inspiring music)

we're back at vemma in 2022 we're here at the aria hotel in las vegas this is thecube's continuous coverage we're day two welcome to the cxo session we have ceo cto cso chief strategy officer brett diamond is the ceo justin jardina is the cto and dante orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11 11 systems recently named i guess today the impact cloud service provider of the year congratulations guys welcome thank you welcome back to the cube great to see you again thank you great likewise so okay brett let's start with you tell give us the overview of 11 1111 uh your focus area talk about the the the island acquisition what that what that's all about give us the setup yeah so we started 11-11 uh really with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business which are cloud connectivity and security bring them together into one platform allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on uh the three main drivers of the business uh which you know have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform okay so so justin cloud connectivity and security they all dramatically changed in march of 2020 everybody had to go to the cloud the rather rethink the network had a secure remote worker so what did you see from a from a cto's perspective what changed and how did 11 respond sure so early on when we built our cloud even back into 2008 we really focused on enterprise great features one of which being uh very flexible in the networking so we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time so if you fast forward from 2008 until today we still see that as a main component for iaz and draz and the ability to start taking into some of the things brett talked about where customers may need a point-to-point circuit to offload data connectivity to us or develop sd-wan and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud in my opinion it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008 and to couple that with the security um if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape now you have multiple clouds you have different ingress and egress points you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base so what does that mean specifically for your customers because i mean we saw obviously a rapid move toward endpoint um cloud security uh identity access you know people really started thinking rethinking that as opposed to trying to just you know build a moat around the castle right um what does that mean for for your customer you take care of all that you partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service how does that work right it does and that's a great analogy you know we have a picture of a hamburger in our office exploded with all the components and they say a good security policy is all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said so to answer your question yes we have all that baked in the platform we can offer managed services around it but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data whether it's a ui or api so dante i know you talk to a lot of customers all you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that you say okay the pandemic drove all these but but when you talk to csos and customers a lot of things are changing permanently first of all they were forced to march to digital when previously they were like we'll get there i mean a lot of customers were let's face it i mean some were serious about it but many weren't now if you're not a digital business you're out of business what have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes what are they telling you well i think we go through this for ourselves right the business continues to grow you've got tons of people that are working remotely and that are going to continue to work remotely right as much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that some folks are like hey i've worked it out i'm working out great from home right and also i think what justin was saying also is we've seen time go on that operating environment has gotten much more complex you've got stuff in the data center stuff it's somebody's you know endpoint you've got various different public clouds different sas services right that's why it's been phenomenal to work with veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists but when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about we're helping those csos you get better visibility better control and take proactive action against the infrastructure um when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when when something does happen right and i think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors right but how do you tie it all together into a single solution right with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things they're more strategic to the business i was talking to jim mercer at um red hat summit last week he's an idc analyst and he said we did a survey i think it was last summer and we asked customers to your point about there's no shortage of security tools how do you want to buy your security and you know do you want you know best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it now surprisingly they said platform provider the the problem is that's aspirational for a lot of platforms providers so they've got to look to a managed service provider so brett talk about the the island acquisition what green cloud is how that all fits together so we acquired island and green cloud last year and the reality is that the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions they were the foundational pieces to eleven eleven uh obviously the things that justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective uh at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways as well so those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint not only throughout the us but globally uh have a security product that was given to us from from the green cloud acquisition of cascade and add-on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one all three pillars so i like 11 11 11 is near and dear to my heart i am so where'd the name come from uh everybody asked me this question i think five times a day so uh growing up as a kid everyone in my family would always say 11 11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock and uh during coven we were coming up with a new name for the business my daughter looked at the microwave said dad it's 11 11. make a wish the reality was though i had no idea why i'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination derivation of the word uh it means the time of day when everything's in line um and when things are complex especially with running all the different businesses that we have aligning them so that they're working together it seemed like a perfect man when i had the big corner office at idc i had my staff meetings at 11 11. because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was nobody could forget the time so they gave him 11 minutes to be there now you'll see it all the time even when you don't want to so justin we've been talking a lot about ransomware and and not just backup but recovery my friend fred moore who you know coined the phrase backup is one thing recovery is everything and recovery time network speeds and and the like are critical especially when you're thinking cloud how are you architecting recovery for your clients maybe you could dig into that a little bit sure so it's really a multitude of things you know you mentioned ransomware seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time especially in our business with backup and dr it's very singular you know people protecting against host nodes now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment land and expand actually delete backups target backup vendors so the ransomware point i guess um trying to battle that is a multi-step process right you need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective from a networking perspective you need to think about how your workloads are protected and then when you think about backups i know we're at veeam vmon now talking about veeam there's a multitude of ways to protect that data whether it's retention whether it's immutability air gapping data so while i know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data it's really that hamburg analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection so how do you provide services i mean you say okay you want immutability there's a there's a line item for that um you want faster or you know low rpo fast rto how does that all work for as a customer what what am i buying from you is it just a managed service we'll take care of everything platinum gold silver or is it if if you don't mind so i'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us years ago his team actually built the ip because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with veeam that how do we take all the intelligence that we have in his team and all of our solution architects and scale it so they actually developed a tool called catalyst and it's a pre-sales tool it's an application you download it you install it it basically takes a snapshot of your environment you start to manipulate the data what are you trying to do dave are you trying to protect that data are you backing up to us are you trying to replicate for dr purposes um you know what are you doing for production or maybe it's a migration it analyzes the network it analyzes all your infrastructure it helps the ses know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do so nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community as well as the customer they're working with real data so we can get past all the garbage and get right to what's important for them for the outcome yeah that's huge who do you guys sell to is it is it more mid-sized businesses that maybe don't have the large teams is it larger enterprises who want to complement to their business is it both well i would say with the two acquisitions that we made the go-to-market sales strategies and the clientele were very different when you look at green cloud they're selling predominantly wholesale through msps and those msps are mostly selling to smbs right so we covered that smb market for the most part through our acquisition of green cloud island on the other hand was more focused on selling direct inbound through vars through the channel mid enterprise big enterprise so really those two acquisitions outside of the ip that we got from the systems we have every single go-to-market sale strategy and we're aligned from smb all the way up to the fortune 500. i heard a stat a couple months ago that that less than 50 of enterprises have a sock it blew me away and you know even small businesses need one they may not be able to afford but certainly a medium size or larger business should have some kind of sock is it does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace 100 if that's true the need for a managed service like this is just it's going to explode it is exploding yeah i mean 100 right there is zero unemployment in the cyberspace right just north america alone there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600 000 open wrecks just in north america right so earlier we talked about no shortage of tools right but the shortage of head count is a significant challenge big time right most importantly the people that you do have on staff they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have that's why you're seeing this massive insurgence in the managed security services provider lack of talent is number one challenge for csos that's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that and it's you know another tool and and it's amazing because you see security companies popping up all the time billion dollar evaluations i mean lacework did a billion dollar raise and so so there's no shortage of funding now maybe that'll change you know with the market but i wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning you guys got some serious love up on stage um there was a demo uh it was a pretty pretty cool demo fast recovery very very tight rpo as i recall it was i think four minutes of data loss is that right was that the right knit stat i was happy it wasn't zero data loss because there's really you know no such thing uh but so you got to feel good about that tell us about um how that all came about your relationship with with veeam who wants to take it sure i can i can take a step at it so one of the or two of the things that i'm um most excited about at least with this vmon is our team was able to work with veeam on that demo and what that demo was showing was some cdp-based features for cloud providers so we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the veeam platform it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication cdp replication on-prem backup cloud backup immutability air gap the list goes on and on and in our opinion having a singular software vendor that can provide all that through you know with a cloud provider on prem or not is really like the icing on the cake so for us it's very exciting to see that and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that veeam's doing in the sas space right so again having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases i'll tell you if you guys can get a that was a very cool demo if we can get a youtube of that that that demo i'll make sure we put it in the the show notes and uh of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it um so so how you guys feel i mean this is a new chapter for you very cool with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main mainspring of your strategy so the first veeam on in a couple years so what's the vibe been like for you what's the nighttime activity the customer interaction i know you guys are running a lot of the back end demos so you're everywhere what's the what's the vibe like at veeamon and how does it feel to be back look at that one at dante as far as yeah you got a lot of experience here yeah let me loose on this one dave i'm like so excited about this right it's been it's been far too long to get face to face again and um veeam always does it right and i think that uh for years we've been back-ending like all the hands-on lab infrastructure here but forget about that i think the part that's really exciting is getting face-to-face with such a great team right we have phenomenal architects that we work with at veeam day in and day out they put up with us pushing them pushing and pushing them and together we've been able to create a lot of magic together right but i think it's you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for for the last two years but the vibe's always fantastic at veeam if you're going to be around tonight i'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that veeam love with you at the after party yeah that's well famous after parties we'll see if that culture continues i have a feeling it will um brett where do you want to take 11 11. a new new phase in all of your careers you got a great crew out here it looks like i i love that you're all out and uh make some noise here people let's hear it all right let's see you this is the biggest audience we've had all week where do you want to take 11 11. i think you know if uh if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of green cloud and ireland obviously the integration is a key piece we're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars we've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible ip like i said earlier that just and his team have created on those front ends the user experience but you know we made two large acquisitions obviously mna is a is a key piece for us we're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security and i think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one when the when the cloud started to hit the steep part of the s-curve kind of early part of the last decade people thought oh wow these managed service providers are toast the exact opposite happened it created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services we've seen it all across the stack so guys wish you best of luck congratulations on the acquisitions thank you uh hope to have you back soon yeah thank you around the block all right keep it right there everybody dave vellante for the cube's coverage of veeamon 2022 we'll be right back after this short break

(pleasant music) >> We're back at Veeamon 2022. We're here at the Aria hotel in Las Vegas. This is theCube's continuous coverage. We're in day two. Welcome to the CXO session. We have CEO, CTO, CSO, chief strategy officer. Brett Diamond is the CEO, Justin Giardina is the CTO, and Dante Orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11:11 Systems recently named, I guess today, the impact cloud service provider of the year. Congratulations, guys. Welcome to theCube. Welcome back to theCube. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Great. >> Likewise. >> Thanks for having us. Okay, Brett, let's start with you. Give us the overview of 11:11, your focus area, talk about the Island acquisition, what that's all about, give us the setup. >> Yeah, so we started 11:11, really, with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business, which are cloud, connectivity, and security, bring them together into one platform, allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on the three main drivers of the business, which, you know, have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform. >> Okay, so Justin, cloud connectivity and security, they all dramatically changed in March of 2020. Everybody had to go to the cloud, had to rethink the network, had to secure remote workers. So what did you see, from a CTO's perspective, what changed and how did 11:11 respond? >> Sure, so early on, when we built our cloud, even back into 2008, we really focused on enterprise grade features, one of which being very flexible in the networking. So we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time. So if you fast forward from 2008 until today, we still see that as a main component for IaaS and DRaaS and the ability to start taking into some of the things Brett talked about, where customers may need a point to point circuit to offload data connectivity to us, or develop SD-WAN and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud. In my opinion, it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008. And to couple that with the security, if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape, now you have multiple clouds, you have different ingress and egress points, you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds, so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base. >> So what does that mean specifically for your customers? Because, I mean, we saw obviously a rapid move toward end point, cloud security, identity access. You know, people really started rethinking that as opposed to trying to just, you know, build a moat around the castle. >> Right. >> What does that mean for your customer? You take care of all that? You partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service? How does that work? >> Right. It does and that's a great analogy. You know, we have a picture of a hamburger in our office, exploded with all the components and they say, a good security policy has all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said. So to answer your question, yes. We have all that baked in the platform. We can offer managed services around it, but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data, whether it's a UI or API. >> So Dante, I know you talked to a lot of customers. All you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that and you say, okay, the pandemic drove all these, but when you talk to CISOs and customers, a lot of things are changing permanently. First of all, they were forced to march to digital when previously, they were like, eh, we'll get there. I mean, a lot of customers were. Let's face it. I mean, some were serious about it, but many weren't. Now, if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. What have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes? What are they telling you? >> Well, I think, you know, we go through this ourselves, right? The business continues to grow. You've got tons of people that are working remotely and they are going to continue to work remotely, right? As much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that, some folks are like, hey, I've worked it out. I'm working out great from home, right? And also, I think what Justin was saying also is, as we've seen time go on, that operating environment has gotten much more complex. You've got stuff in the data center, stuff in somebody's, you know, endpoint, you've got various different public clouds, different SAS services, right? That's why it's been phenomenal to work with Veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists. But when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about, we're helping those CSOs, you know, get better visibility, better control, and take proactive action against the infrastructure when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when something does happen, right? And I think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors, right? But how do you tie it all together into a single solution, right, with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things that are more strategic to the business? >> I was talking to Jim Mercer at Red Hat Summit last week. He's an IDC analyst and we did a survey, I think it was last summer, and we asked customers to your point about, there's no shortage of security tools. How do you want to buy your security? And, you know, do you want, you know, best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it? Now surprisingly, they said platform provider. The problem is, that's aspirational for a lot of platform providers, so they got to look to a managed service provider. So Brett, talk about the Island acquisition, what Green Cloud is, how that all fits together. >> So we acquired Island and Green Cloud last year and the reality is, the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions. They were the foundational pieces to 11:11. Obviously, the things that Justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways, as well. So, those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint, not only throughout the US but globally, have a security product that was given to us from the Green Cloud acquisition of Cascade, and add on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one, all three pillars in one. >> So I like 11:11. 11:11 is near and dear to my heart. So where'd the name come from? >> Everybody asked me this question, I think, five times a day. So growing up as a kid, everyone in my family would always say 11:11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock. And during COVID, we were coming up with a new name for the business. My daughter looked at the microwave, said, dad, it's 11:11, make a wish. The reality was though, I had no idea why I'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination, derivation of the word, it means the time of day when everything's in line and when things are complex, especially with running all the different businesses that we have, aligning them so that they're working together, it seemed like the perfect thing >> So when I had the big corner office at IDC, I had my staff meetings at 11:11. >> Yep. >> Because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was, nobody could forget the time. So they gave me 11 minutes to be there, so they were never late. >> And now you'll see it all the time, even when you don't want to. (chuckles) >> So Justin, we've been talking a lot about ransomware and not just backup, but recovery. My friend, Fred Moore, who, you know, coined the phrase backup is one thing, recovery is everything, and recovery time, network speeds and the like are critical, especially when you're thinking cloud. How are you architecting recovery for your clients? Maybe you could dig into that a little bit. >> Sure. So it's really a multitude of things. You know, you mention ransomware. Seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time, especially in our business with backup NDR, is very singular, you know, people protecting against host nodes. Now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment, land and expand, actually delete backups, target backup vendors. So the ransomware point, I guess, trying to battle that is a multi-step process, right? You need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective, from a networking perspective, you need to think about how your workloads are protected, and then when you think about backups, I know we're at Veeamon now talking about Veeam, there's a multitude of ways to protect that data, whether it's retention, whether it's immutability, air gapping data. So, while I know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data, it's really that hamburger analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection. >> So how do you provide services? I mean, do you say, okay, do you want immutability? There's a line item for that. You want low RPO, fast RTO? How does that all work as a customer? What am I buying from you? Is it just a managed service? We'll take care of everything, platinum, gold, silver, or is it? >> If you don't mind, so I'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us. Years ago, his team actually built the IP because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with Veeam that, how do we take all the intelligence that we have and his team and all of our solution architects and scale it? So they actually developed a tool called Catalyst, and it's a pre-sales tool. It's an application. You download it, you install it. It basically takes a snapshot of your environment. You start to manipulate the data. What are you trying to do, Dave? Are you trying to protect that data? Are you backing up to us? Are you trying to replicate it for DR purposes? You know, what are you doing for production, or maybe it's a migration? It analyzes the network. It analyzes all your infrastructure. It helps the SEs know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do. So, nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community, as well as the customer, they're working with real data. So we can get past all the garbage, you get right to what's important for them for the outcome. >> Yeah, that's huge. Who do you guys sell to? Is it more mid-size businesses that maybe don't have the large teams? Is it larger enterprises who want to compliment to their business? Is it both? >> Well, I would say with the two acquisitions that we made to go to market sales strategies and the clientele were very different, when you look at Green Cloud, they're selling predominantly wholesale through MSPs and those MSPs are mostly selling to SMBs, right? So we covered that SMB market for the most part through our acquisition of Green Cloud. Island, on the other hand, was more focused on selling direct, inbound, through VARs through the channel, mid-enterprise, big enterprise. So really, those two acquisitions outside of the IP that we got from the systems, we have every single go to market sales strategy and we're aligned from SMB all the way up to the Fortune 500. >> I heard a stat a couple months ago that less than 50% of enterprises have a SAQ. That blew me away. And, you know, even small businesses need one. They may not be able to afford, but there's certainly a medium size or a larger business should have some kind of SAQ. Does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace? >> A hundred percent. >> If that's true, the need for a managed service like this, it's going to explode. It is exploding, I mean. >> Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent, right? There is zero unemployment in the cyberspace, right? Just North America alone, there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600,000 open recs just in North America, right? So earlier, we talked about no shortage of tools, right? But the shortage of headcount is a significant challenge, big time, right? Most importantly, the people that you do have on staff, they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have. That's why you're seeing this massive surgence in the managed security services provider. >> Lack of talent is number one challenge for CISOs. That's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that. And it's, you know, another tool and it's amazing 'cause you see security companies popping up all the time. I mean, billion dollar valuations, I mean, Lacework did a billion dollar raise. And so, there's no shortage of funding. Now, maybe that'll change, you know, with the market but I wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning. You guys got some serious love up on stage. There was a demo. It was a pretty cool demo, fast recovery, very tight RPO, as I recall. It was, I think, four minutes of, of data loss? Is that right? Is that the right stat? I was happy it wasn't zero data loss 'cause there's really, you know, no such thing, but so you got to feel good about that. Tell us about how that all came about, your relationship with Veeam. Who wants to take it? >> Sure, I can take a stab at it. So two of the things that I'm most excited about, at least with this Veeamon, is our team was able to work with Veeam on that demo, and what that demo was showing was some CDP based features for cloud providers. So we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the Veeam platform, it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication, CDP replication, on-prem backup, cloud backup, immutability air gap, the list goes on and on. And in our opinion, having a singular software vendor that can provide all that, you know, with a cloud provider on-prem or not is really like, the icing on the cake. So for us, it's very exciting to see that, and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that's Veeam's doing in the SAS space, right? So again, having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases. >> I'll tell you, that was a very cool demo. If you can get a YouTube of that demo, I'll make sure we put it in the show notes of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it. So, how do you guys feel? I mean, this is a new chapter for you. Very cool, with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main spring of your strategy, so the first Veeamon in a couple years. So what's the vibe been like for you? What's the nighttime activity, the customer interaction? I know you guys are running a lot of the backend demos, so you're everywhere. What's the vibe like at Veeamon and how does it feel to be back? >> I'll give that one to Dante as far as the vibes, so far. >> Yeah, yeah, you got a lot of experience. >> Yeah, let me loose on this one, Dave. I'm like, so excited about this, right? It's been far too long to get face to face again and Veeam always does it right. And I think that for years, we've been back ending like, all the hands on lab infrastructure here, but forget about that. I think the part that's really exciting is getting face to face with such a great team, right? We have phenomenal architects that we work with at Veeam day in and day out. They put up with us, pushing them, pushing them, pushing them and together, we've been able to create a lot of magic together, right? But I think you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for, for the last two years. But the vibe's always fantastic at Veeam. If you're going to be around tonight, I'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that Veeam love with you at the after party. >> Yeah, well, famous after parties. We'll see if that culture continues. I have a feeling it will. Brett, where do you want to take 11:11? New phase in all of your careers. You got a great crew out here, it looks like. I love that you're all out and, make some noise here, people. Let's hear it! (audience cheering) You see, this is the biggest audience we've had all week. Where do you want to take 11:11? >> I think, you know, if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of Green Cloud and Island, obviously the integration is a key piece. We're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars. We've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible IP, like I said earlier, that Justin and his team have created on those front ends, the user experience. But, you know, we made two large acquisitions, obviously M and A is a key piece for us. We're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well, to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security. And I think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one. >> When the cloud started to hit the steep part of the S-curve, kind of early part of last decade, people thought, oh wow, these managed service providers are toast. The exact opposite happened. It created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services. We've seen it all across the stacks. So guys, wish you best of luck. Congratulations on the acquisitions, >> Thank you. >> And hope to have you back soon. >> Absolutely, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Dave Vellante for theCube's coverage of Veeamon 2022. We'll be right back after this short break. (pleasant music)

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

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

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

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

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for live from Las Vegas. We're here at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave a long time, very excited to have in-person events back ish. I'll say we're going to be talking about automation as a boardroom imperative. We have two guests joining us here, James Matras here consulting principal. America's intelligent automation leader at UI and Irv. Dennis retired EA partner, and former CFO of HUD gentlemen. Welcome to the program. Exciting topic automation as a boardroom imperative, James says COO and start with you. How do you discuss the value of automation as being a key component and driver of transformation? >>That's a great question. I think what we've seen in the last couple of years is the evolution of what automation used to be. Two is going nine. And we've seen the shift from what we call generation one, which is very RPA centric type automation to more generation two, which is the combined integration of multiple technologies. It can target an intern process and it's quite important that you understand the pivotal shift because it's not enabling us to move from a task micro top agenda to a macro agenda actually impacts an organization at a strategic level. The ability to be able to look at processes more deeply to automate them in an end to end process collectively and use these different technologies in a synergistic manner truly becomes powerful because it shifts the narrative from a micro process agenda into more systemic area. >>So gen zero is an Emmanuel gen one is RPA point tools that individual maybe getting their personal productivity out. And then now you're saying gen three is across the enterprise. Where are we in terms of, you know, take your experience from your practical experience? Where do you think the world is? It's like probably between zero and one still. Right. But the advanced folks of thinking about gen three, w what's your, >>Yeah, it's a great question. And, um, when you and I, I can do the comparison being private and public sector on this because I was 37 years with E Y then went into retirement and CFL at HUD CFO. Ed was, was a HUD was nowhere. They had to just do all the intelligence digitalization, um, throughout, uh, from scratch. The private sector is probably five or six years ahead of them. But when you think about James talks about the gen one, two and three, the private sector is probably somewhere between two and three. And I know we're talking about the board in this conversation. Um, boards probably have one and two on their radar. Some boards may have three, some may not, but that's where the real strategic focus for boards needs to be is looking forward and, and getting ahead. But I think from a public sector standpoint, lot to go private sector, more to go as well. But, uh, there's a, there's a bit of a gap, but the public sector is probably only about three or four years behind the private sector >>To be okay. Let's look at the numbers, look at, look at the progress for the quarter. And now it's like discussion on cyber discussion on digital discussion on automated issue. It really changed the narrative over the last decade. >>Yeah, I think when you think of boards today, the lots of conversation on cyber that that conversation has been around for a while. A lot of conversation on ESG today, that conversation is getting, getting very popular. But I think when you think of next three, a Jen talks that bear James talks about, um, that's got to start elevating itself if it's not within the boardroom right now, because that will be the future of the company. And the way I think of it from a board's conversation is if a company doesn't think of themselves as a technology company in all aspects, no matter what you do, you are a technology company or you need to be. And if you're not thinking along that way, you're gonna, you're gonna lose market share and you're going to start falling behind your competitors. >>Well, and how much acceleration did the pandemic bring to just that organizations that weren't digital forward last year are probably gone? >>I think it certainly has shifted quite a lot. There's been a drive, the relevance of technology and hard plays for us in the modern workforce in the modern workplace has fundamentally changed the pandemic. We reimagine how we do things. Technology has progressed in itself significantly, and that made a big difference for, for all the environments as a result of that. So certainly is one of the byproducts of the pandemic has been certainly a good thing for everybody. >>Where does automation fit in the board? Virginia? You've got compensation committee. You've probably, I mean, there's somebody in charge of cyber. You got ESG now there's automation part of a broader digital agenda. Where's what's the right word. >>You know, I, I would personally put it in a enterprise risk management from a standpoint that if you're not focused on it, it's going to be a risk to the enterprise. And, um, when you think of automation and intelligent automation and RPA, uh, I think boards have a pretty good sense of how you interface with your customers and your vendors. I think a big push ought to be looking internally at your own infrastructure. You know, what are you, what are you doing in the HR space? What are you doing in a financial statement, close process? What are you doing your procurement process? I suspect there's still a lot of very routine transactions and processing within those, that infrastructure that if you just apply some RPA artificial intelligence, that data extraction techniques, you can probably eliminate a lot of man hours from the routine stuff. And, and the many man hours is probably not the right way to think of it. You could elevate people's work from being pushing numbers around to being data analyzers. And that's where the excitement is for people to see. >>It's not how it's viewed at organizations. We're not eliminating hours. Well focusing folks on much more strategic down at a test. >>Yes. I would say that that's exactly right now in the private sector, you're always going to have the efficiency play and profitability. So there will be an element of that. I know when at HUD we're, we're focused, we were not focused on eliminating hours because we needed people and we focused on creating efficiencies within the space and having people convert from, again, being Trent routine transactions, to being data analyzers and made the jobs, I'm sure. Fund for them as well. I mean, this is a lot of fun stuff. And, and if, uh, uh, companies need to be pushing this down through their entire infrastructure, not just dealing with our customers and the third parties that they deal with >>Catalyst or have been public sector. So you mentioned they may be five or six years behind, but I've seen certain public sector organizations really lean in, they learn from, from the private sector. And then even when you think about some of the military, how advanced they are absolutely. You know, the private could learn from them and if they could open it up. But >>So, yeah, I think that's, that's well said I was in this, you know, the that's the civilian part with, with the housing and urban development. I think the catalyst is, uh, bringing the expertise in, uh, I know when I, when I came, I went to HUD to elevate their financial infrastructure. It was, it was probably the worst of the cabinet agency. The financials were a mess. There was no, there was a, uh, there was not a clean audit opinion for eight years. And I was there to fix that and we fixed it through digitalization and digital transformation, as well as a financial transformation. The catalyst is just creating the education, letting people know what is, what, what technology can do. You don't have to be a programmer, but it's like driving a car. Anybody can drive a car, but we can't mechanic, you know, work as a mechanic on it. >>So I think it's creating education, letting people know what it can do. And at HUD, for example, we did a very simple, I was telling James earlier, we did a very simple RPA project on an, an, a financial statement, close process. It was 2,600 hours, six months. Once we implemented the RPA, brought that down to 70 hours, two weeks, people's eyes exploded with it. And then all of a sudden, I said, I want everyone to go back and come back with, with any manual process, any routine process that can convert to an RPA. And I got a list of a hundred, then it came then became trying to slow everything down. We're not going to do it overnight. Yeah, exactly. >>So, but it was self-funding. It was >>Self-funded. Yes. >>And, and how do you take that message to customers that it could be self-funding how how's that resonating >>Very well. And I think it was important. I always like to say, it's a point of differentiation because you look at, uh, mentioned earlier that organizations are basically technology companies. That's what they are. But now if you look across that we no longer compete at the ERP level without got SAP, Oracle, it's not a point of differentiation. We don't compete the application layer where they've got service. Now, black line, how we use them is helpful. We competed the digital layer and with automation is a major component of that. That's where your differentiation takes place. Now, if you have a point of differentiation, that is self-funding, it fundamentally changes the game. And that's why it's so important for boards to understand this, because that risk management, if you've not doing it, somebody is getting ahead of the game much faster than you are. >>Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned ERP and it, and it triggered something in my mind. Cause I, I said this 10 years ago about data. If in the nineties, you, you couldn't have picked SAP necessarily as the winner of ERP. But if you could have picked the companies that were using ERP could have made a lot of money in the stock market because they outperform their peers. And the same thing was true with data. And I think the same thing is going to be true with automation in the coming decade. >>Couldn't agree more. And I think that's exactly the point that differential acceleration happening this. And it's harder because of the Europeans. Once you knew what it was, you can put the boundaries on it. Digital, the options are infinite. It's just continuous progress as are from there. >>I've got a question for you. You talked about some great stats about how dramatically faster things were took far less time. How does that help from an adoption perspective? I know how much cultural change is very difficult for folks in any organization, but that sort of self-serving how does that help fuel adoption? >>Well, it's interesting. Um, it's, it is a, we're actually going to talk about this tomorrow. It is a framework and it's got to start at the leadership has got to start with governance. It's got to start with a detailed plan. That's executable. And it's got to start with getting buy-in from not only your, the, the organization, but the people you're dealing with outside the organization. Um, it's, it's, uh, I think that's absolutely critical. And when you bring this back to the boardroom, they are the leaders of the companies. And, and I, James, I talked about this as we're getting ready for tomorrow's session. I think the number one thing a board can do today is an own personal self assessment. Do they understand automation? Do they understand what next generation three is? Do they understand what the different components can do? And do they understand how the companies are implementing it? And if I was a board member, uh, on our boards, I say, we need to understand that or else this is nothing's going to happen. We're going to be here at the reliance of the CEO and the CFO strategy, which may or may not include or be thinking about this next three. So leadership at the top is going to drive this. And it's so critical. >>We were talking about catalyst before. And you mentioned education and expertise. I'm always curious as to what drew you to public sector because it's, yeah, I mean, very successful, you know, you're, you're with one of the global SIS directly, you can make a lot more money and that side. So what was it did, was it a desire to it's a great country? Was it >>Take one for the team and I'm going to do a selfish plug here. I just actually wrote a book in this whole thing called transforming a federal agency. What's the name of the book transforming and federal agency. And it's, uh, I spent my time at E Y for 37 years, fully retired. I wanted to give back and do meaningful work. And we lived in Columbus, Ohio, as I was talking about earlier, I was going to go teach and I got a call from the president's personnel office to see if I wanted to come. And these, the CFO at HUD with secretary Carson and change turn the agency around, uh, that took me a little while to say yes, because I wasn't sure I wanted something full time. It was a, it was in DC. So I'd be in a commuting role back and forth. My family's in Columbus. >>Um, but it was, uh, I did it and I loved it. It was, uh, I would pray, I would ask anyone that's has the ability to go into public service at any point in their career to do it. It's it was very rewarding. It was one of my favorite three years of life. And to your point, I didn't have to do it, but, uh, if I wanted to do something and give back and that met the criteria and we were very successful in turning it around with the digital transformation and a lot of stuff that we're talking about today gave me the ability to talk about it because I helped lead it >>For sharing that and did it. So did it start with the CFO's office? Because the first time I ever even heard about our RPO RPA was at a CFO conference and I started talking to him like, oh, this is going to be game changing. Is that where it started? Is that where it lands today? >>From an infrastructure standpoint, the CFO has the wonderful ability to see most processes within a company and its entire lifestyle from beginning to end. So CFO has that visibility to understand where efficiencies can happen in the process. And so the CFO plays a dramatically important role in this. And you think about a CFO's role today versus 20 years ago, it's no longer this, the bean counter rolling up numbers that become a business advisors to the board, to the CEO and to the executive suite. Um, so the CFO, I think has probably the best visibility of all the processes on a global basis. And they can see where the, the efficiencies and the implementation of automation can happen. >>So they can be catalysts and really fueling the actual >>Redesign of work. Yes, they, they, they probably need to be the catalyst. And as a board member, you want to be asking what is the CFO's strategic imperative for the next year? And if it doesn't include this, it's just got to get on the agenda. >>Well, curve ball here is his CFO question and you know, three years or two years ago, you wouldn't have even thought, I mean, let me set it up better. One of the industries that is highly automated is crypto. Yeah. You wouldn't even thought about crypto in your balance sheet a couple of years ago, but I'm not sure it's a widespread board level discussion, but as a CFO, what do you make of the trend to put Bitcoin on balance sheets? >>Yeah, I'm probably not the right person to ask because I'm a conservative guy. >>If somebody supported me and he said, Hey, why don't we put crypto on the balance sheet? >>I would get much more educated. I wouldn't shut it down. I would put it into, let's get more educated. Let's get the experts in here. Let's understand what's really happening with it. Let's understand what the risks are, what the rewards are. And can we absorb any sort of risk or reward with it? And when you say put it on the balance sheet, you can put it on in a small way to test it out. I wouldn't put the whole, I wouldn't make the whole balance sheet for Dell on day one. So that's why I would think about it. Just tell, tell me more, get me educated. How did you think about it? How can it help our business? How can I help our shareholders? How does it grow the bottom line? And then, then you start making decisions. >>Cause CFOs, let me find nature often conservative and most CFOs that I talked to just say no way, not a chance, but you're, maybe you're not as conservative as you think. Well, >>No, but I will never say go away on anything. I mean, cause I want to learn. I want to know. I mean, um, if you like all this stuff, that's new, it's easy to say go away, right? Yeah. But all of a sudden, three years later, the go away, all your competitors are doing it at a competitive advantage. So never say go away, get yourself educated before you jump into it. >>That's good advice. Yeah. In any walk of life question for you, or have you talked about the education aspect there? I'm curious from a risk mitigation perspective, especially given the last 18, 19 months, so tumultuous, so scary for all those organizations that were very digital, they're either gone or they accelerated very quickly. How much of an education do you have to provide certain industries? And are you seeing certain industries? I think healthcare manufacturing, financial services as being leaders in the uptake? >>Well, I think the financial service industries, for sure, they, they, they get this and then they need to, uh, cause they, you know, they're, they're a transaction and based, uh, industry. Uh, so they get it completely. Um, you know, I think maybe some manufacturing distribution, some of the old line businesses are, you know, they may not be thinking of this as progressively as they should. Um, but they'll get there. They're going to have to get there eventually. Um, you know, when you think about the education, my, I thought you were gonna ask a question about the education of the workforce. And I think as a board member, I would be really focused on, uh, how am I educating my workforce of the future? And do I have the workforce of the future today? Do I have to educate them to have to bring in hiring for it? Do I have to bring third-party service providers to get us there? So as a board member really focus on, do I have the right workforce to get us to this next stage? And if not, what do I need to do to get there? Because >>We'll allocate a percentage of their budgets to training and education. And the question is where do they put it >>In? Is it the right training and education, right? >>Where do they focus though? Right now we hear you iPad talking about they're a horizontal play, but James, when you and Lisa, we were asking about industry, when you go to market, are you, are you more focused on verticals? Are you thinking, >>No, it's on two things. So which often find is regardless of the sector with some nuanced variation, the back office functions are regionally the procure to pay process as the same fundamentals, regardless of the sector where the differentiation comes in at a sector of service is when you start going to the middle of the front office, I mean a mining has only one customer. They sold their product to image the retailer has an endless number of them. So when you get to the middle and front office and really start engaging with a customer and external vendors, then a differentiation is very unique and you'd have a lot of sort of customers having sector specific nuances and variations in how you use the platform. And that's where the shift now is happening as well is the back office functions that are largely driven by the CFO. If now getting good, robust value out of it, there's pivot to make it a differentiator in the market, comes in the front and middle office. And that's where we starting to say, sector specific genres solutions, nuances really come to the fall >>Deep industry expertise. Do you think digital at all changes that the reason I ask it because I see Amazon as a retail and then they're in cloud and they're in grocery other in content Apple's in, in financial services and you're seeing these internet giants with a dual agenda, they're disrupting horizontal technology and then there's disruptive industries. And my premise is it's because of data and digital. Do you ever see that industry specialization changing that value chain >>Without a doubt? And I think it's happens initially. It starts off. When people have started looking at the process, they realize there's such key dependencies on the upstream and downstream components of the value chain that they want to control it. So they actually start bridging out of what the core practices or the core business to own a broader agenda. And with digital, you can do it. You can actively interact more systemically that installs triggering, well, maybe I have a different product offering. Maybe I can own this. Could I monetize the information I had at my disposal today in a completely new line. And that really what gets truly innovative and starts creating a revenue increase as opposed as the cost saving. And that's what they're really going after. It's how do I, >>The vertical integration is not new. The plenty of ended up Koch industries, Tyson foods, but now it's digital. So presumably you can do it faster with greater greater scale >>Without a doubt. And you don't have to move your big ERP and things like that. Cause that's the only way it takes five years to move my technology backbone with digital. I can do the interaction tomorrow and we can build up enough to be able to sustain that in the short term. >>Right. And speaking of speed, unfortunately, guys, we are out of time, but thank you. Fantastic conversation automation as a board imperative guys, that's been great James or >>Thank you for your time. Thank you so much >>For Dave a long day. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue. We are live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at UI path forward for stick around Dave and I will be right back. Okay.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay. We're here with Thomas Scheibe, who's the vice president of Product Management, aka VP of all things Data Center Networking, STN, cloud, you name it in that category. Welcome Thomas, good to see you again. >> Hey, same here. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay. Let's get right into observability. When you think about observability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring, problem resolution across the network, how does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >> Yeah. (scoffs) Yeah. Visibility as always is very, very important and it's quite frankly, it's not just, it's not just the networking team, it's actually the application team too, right? And as you pointed out, the the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the, the data center is wherever the data is, and I think we said this a couple years back. And really what happens the, the applications are going to be deployed in different locations, right? Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on-prem and they're built differently, right? They're built as micro servers, so they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need, as an operator as well as actually a user, a better visibility, "where are my pieces?", and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is, that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge why the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's, that's really the problem statement. What, what we're trying to go after with observability. >> Okay. Let's, let's double click on that. So, so a lot of customers tell me that you got to stare at log files until your eyes bleed, then you've got to bring in guys with lab coats who have PhDs to figure all this stuff out. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> So you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time, you have to simplify things. So how, how are you doing that? >> Correct. So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that is called ThousandEyes. And so what this does is basically (chuckles) as the name which I think is a fantastic, fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere and you can have a good correlation on links between if I run a from a site to a site, from a site to a cloud, from the cloud to cloud. And you basic can measure what is the performance of these links? And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of the ThousandEyes agent, right? Instead of just having a, an inversion machine of clouds we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices, right? We announced this was the Catalyst 9000. And we're extending this now to our 8000 Catalyst product line for the for the SD-WAN products, as well as to the data center products, in Nexus line. And so what you see is, is you know, a half a thing, you have ThousandEyes. You get a million insights and you get a billion dollar off improvements for how your applications run. And this is really the, the power of tying together the footprint of what a network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >> I see. So, okay. So as the cloud evolves, it expands, it connects, you're actually enabling ThousandEyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location but out to the network across clouds, et cetera. >> Thomas: Correct. >> Wherever the network is you're going to have a ThousandEyes sensor and you can bring this together and you can quite frankly pick, if you want to say, Hey I have my application in public cloud provider A domain one, and I have another one in domain two I can do monitor that link. I can also monitor, I have a user that has a campus location or a branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the, let's say, corporation's data center or headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just the, have visibility in saying, Hey, if there's a performance I know where the issue is. And then I obviously can use all the other tools that we have to address those. >> All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us that, you know, it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of ROI. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and DevOps to this world of hybrid and specifically, how is Cisco enabling IT organizations to move to a cloud operating model as that cloud definition expands? >> Yeah, no, that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observability. So it really, really what we're seeing, and this is going on for, I want to say couple of years now it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team, more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider, right? This is really around the networking team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model, right? Where this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public cloud is operating it like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for a while. So one of the examples um that we have, we're moving some of the control software assets that customers today can deploy on-prem to an instance that they can deploy in a, in a cloud provider and just basically instantiate things there and then just run it that way. Right? And so the latest example for this is what we have, our Identity Service Engine that is now unlimited availability, available on AWS and will become available mid this year, both on AWS and Azure, as a service. You can just go to Marketplace, you can load it there and now increase. You can start running your policy control in the cloud managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus, wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our Customers Network Operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically deploying their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >> Dave: So >> What's the scope of I, I hope I'm saying it right, ISE, right? I.S.E, I think it's um, you call it ISE. What's the scope of that? Like for instance, to an effect my, or even, you know address, simplify my security approach? >> Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is, a lot of people talking about is, how do I get to a Zero Trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure, again, whether this was only campus access as well as the data center and ISE helps you there. You can use it as a pawn to define your policies and then inter-connect from there, right. In this particular case, we would, instead of ISE in a cloud as a software, alone, you now can connect and say, Hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center or my campus going to the respective controller, whether it's DNA Center for campus or whether it's the, the ACI policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage ,in one place, "what is my policy", and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure. >> Yeah. Zero Trust. It was..Pre pandemic it was kind of a buzzword, now it's become a mandate. I, I wonder if we could talk about- >> Thomas: - Yes >> Yeah, right. I mean, so- >> Thomas: -Pretty much. >> I wondered if we could talk about cloud native apps. You got all these developers that are working inside organizations, they're maintaining legacy apps they're connecting their data to systems in the cloud. They're sharing that data. These developers, they're rapidly advancing their skillsets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud native, making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >> Yeah. So you were going to the talk we saw was the visibility. We talked about the operating model how our network operates actually want to use tools going forward. Now the next step to this is, it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools? Or how they interact with this tools? As well as quite frankly, as how let's say, a DevOps team, or application team or a cloud team also wants to take advantage of the programmability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right. Which has really two angles. So it's the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure, right? And so what we have done is we're A, putting in place the on-ramps between clouds, and then on top of it, we're exposing for all these tools APIs that can be used and leveraged by standard cloud tools or cloud-native tools, right? And one example or two examples we always have. And again, we're on this journey for a while, is both Ansible script capabilities that access from RedHat as well as Hashi Terraform capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure automation. And what, what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the app team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically instantiation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools, right. Whether this is ISE, what I just mentioned, whether this is our DCN controllers in the data center whether these are the controllers in the, in the campus for all of those, we have cloud-native interfaces. So operator or a DevOps team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives on the cloud or with everything how they built the application. >> Yeah, this is key. You can't even have the conversation of of Op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on-prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's, that's very important. Last question, Thomas, are customers actually using this? You made the announcement today. Are there, are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >> We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the path and using the Cisco High-performance Infrastructure both on the compute side, as well as on the Nexus side. One of the costumers, and this is like an interesting case, is Rakuten. Rakuten is a large telco provider, a mobile 5G operator in Japan and expanding, and as in different countries. And so people, some think, "Oh cloud" "You must be talking about the public cloud provider" "the big three or four". But if you look at it, there's a lot of the telco service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with Rakuten and help them build high performance data center infrastructure based on HANA Gig and actually for a gig to drive their deployment to its 5G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is where the whole the whole world, which frankly is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility together with the High-performance infrastructure becoming a reality on delivering actually, services. >> Yeah, some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, they're enormous but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds telcos that are either proximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper-scalers may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So, so that's a great case study. Thomas.Hey, great having you on. Thanks much for spending some time with us. >> Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in tech event coverage. (upbeat music)

>>mhm, mm. All right. Mhm. Mhm, mm mm. Mhm. Yeah, mm. Mhm. Yeah, yeah. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mm. Yeah, Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Welcome to future cloud made possible by Cisco. My name is Dave Volonte and I'm your host. You know, the cloud is evolving like the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace. No longer is the cloud. Just a remote set of services, you know, somewhere up there. No, the cloud, it's extending to on premises. Data centers are reaching into the cloud through adjacent locations. Clouds are being connected together to each other and eventually they're gonna stretch to the edge and the far edge workloads, location latency, local laws and economics will define the value customers can extract from this new cloud model which unifies the operating experience independent of location. Cloud is moving rapidly from a spare capacity slash infrastructure resource to a platform for application innovation. Now, the challenge is how to make this new cloud simple, secure, agile and programmable. Oh and it has to be cloud agnostic. Now, the real opportunity for customers is to tap into a layer across clouds and data centers that abstracts the underlying complexity of the respective clouds and locations. And it's got to accommodate both mission critical workloads as well as general purpose applications across the spectrum cost, effectively enabling simplicity with minimal labor costs requires infrastructure i. E. Hardware, software, tooling, machine intelligence, AI and partnerships within an ecosystem. It's kind of accommodate a variety of application deployment models like serverless and containers and support for traditional work on VMS. By the way, it also requires a roadmap that will take us well into the next decade because the next 10 years they will not be like the last So why are we here? Well, the cube is covering Cisco's announcements today that connect next generation compute shared memory, intelligent networking and storage resource pools, bringing automation, visibility, application assurance and security to this new decentralized cloud. Now, of course in today's world you wouldn't be considered modern without supporting containers ai and operational tooling that is demanded by forward thinking practitioners. So sit back and enjoy the cubes, special coverage of Cisco's future cloud >>From around the globe. It's the Cube presenting future cloud one event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >>We're here with Dejoy Pandey, a VP of emerging tech and incubation at Cisco. V. Joy. Good to see you. Welcome. >>Good to see you as well. Thank you Dave and pleasure to be here. >>So in 2020 we kind of had to redefine the notion of agility when it came to digital business or you know organizations, they had to rethink their concept of agility and business resilience. What are you seeing in terms of how companies are thinking about their operations in this sort of new abnormal context? >>Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think what what we're seeing is that pretty much the application is the center of the universe. And if you think about it, the application is actually driving brand recognition and the brand experience and the brand value. So the example I like to give is think about a banking app uh recovered that did everything that you would expect it to do. But if you wanted to withdraw cash from your bank you would actually have to go to the ATM and punch in some numbers and then look at your screen and go through a process and then finally withdraw cash. Think about what that would have, what what that would do in a post pandemic era where people are trying to go contact less. And so in a situation like this, the digitization efforts that all of these companies are going through and and the modernization of the automation is what is driving brand recognition, brand trust and brand experience. >>Yeah. So I was gonna ask you when I heard you say that, I was gonna say well, but hasn't it always been about the application, but it's different now, isn't it? So I wonder if you talk more about how the application is experience is changing. Yes. As a result of this new digital mandate. But how should organizations think about optimizing those experiences in this new world? >>Absolutely. And I think, yes, it's always been about the application, but it's becoming the center of the universe right now because all interactions with customers and consumers and even businesses are happening through that application. So if the application is unreliable or if the application is not available is untrusted insecure, uh, there's a problem. There's a problem with the brand, with the company and the trust that consumers and customers have with our company. So if you think about an application developer, the weight he or she is carrying on their shoulders is tremendous because you're thinking about rolling features quickly to be competitive. That's the only way to be competitive in this world. You need to think about availability and resiliency. Like you pointed out and experience, you need to think about security and trust. Am I as a customer or consumer willing to put my data in that application? So velocity, availability, Security and trust and all of that depends on the developer. So the experience, the security, the trust, the feature, velocity is what is driving the brand experience now. >>So are those two tensions that say agility and trust, you know, Zero Trust used to be a buzzword now it's a mandate. But are those two vectors counter posed? Can they be merged into one and not affect each other? Does the question makes sense? Right? Security usually handcuffs my speed. But how do you address that? >>Yeah that's a great question. And I think if you think about it today that's the way things are. And if you think about this developer all they want to do is run fast because they want to build those features out and they're going to pick and choose a piece and services that matter to them and build up their app and they want the complexities of the infrastructure and security and trust to be handled by somebody else is not that they don't care about it but they want that abstraction so that is handled by somebody else. And typically within an organization we've seen in the past where this friction between Netapp Sec ops I. T. Tops and and the cloud platform Teams and the developer on one side and these these frictions and these meetings and toil actually take a toll on the developer and that's why companies and apps and developers are not as agile as they would like to be. So I think but it doesn't have to be that way. So I think if there was something that would allow a developer to pick and choose, discover the apis that they would like to use connect those api is in a very simple manner and then be able to scale them out and be able to secure them and in fact not just secure them during the run time when it's deployed. We're right off the back when the fire up that I'd and start developing the application. Wouldn't that be nice? And as you do that, there is a smooth transition between that discovery connectivity and ease of consumption and security with the idea cops. Netapp psych ops teams and see source to ensure that they are not doing something that the organization won't allow them to do in a very seamless manner. >>I want to go back and talk about security but I want to add another complexity before we do that. So for a lot of organizations in the public cloud became a staple of keeping the lights on during the pandemic but it brings new complexities and differences in terms of latency security, which I want to come back to deployment models etcetera. So what are some of the specific networking challenges that you've seen with the cloud native architecture is how are you addressing those? >>Yeah. In fact, if you think about cloud, to me that is a that is a different way of seeing a distributed system. And if you think about a distributed system, what is at the center of the distributed system is the network. So my my favorite comment here is that the network is the wrong time for all distribute systems and modern applications. And that is true because if you think about where things are today, like you said, there's there's cloud assets that a developer might use in the banking example that I gave earlier. I mean if you want to build a contact less app so that you get verified, a customer gets verified on the app. They walk over to the ATM and they were broadcast without touching that ATM. In that kind of an example, you're touching the mobile Rus, let's say U S A P is you're touching cloud API is where the back end might sit. You're touching on primary PS maybe it's an oracle database or a mainframe even where transactional data exists. You're touching branch pipes were the team actually exists and the need for consistency when you withdraw cash and you're carrying all of this and in fact there might be customer data sitting in salesforce somewhere. So it's cloud API is a song premise branch. It's ass is mobile and you need to bring all of these things together and over time you will see more and more of these API is coming from various as providers. So it's not just cloud providers but saas providers that the developer has to use. And so this complexity is very, very real. And this complexity is across the wide open internet. So the application is built across this wide open internet. So the problems of discovery ability, the problems of being able to simply connect these apis and manage the data flow across these apis. The problems of consistency of policy and consumption because all of these areas have their own nuances and what they mean, what the arguments mean and what the A. P. I. Actually means. How do you make it consistent and easy for the developer? That is the networking problem. And that is a problem of building out this network, making traffic engineering easy, making policy easy, making scale out, scale down easy, all of that our networking problems. And so we are solving those problems uh Francisco. >>Yeah the internet is the new private network but it's not so private. So I want to go back to security. I often say that the security model of building a moat, you dig the moat, you get the hardened castle that's just outdated now that the queen is left her castle, I always say it's dangerous out there. And the point is you touched on this, it's it's a huge decentralized system and with distributed apps and data, that notion of perimeter security, it's just no longer valid. So I wonder if you could talk more about how you're thinking about this problem and you definitely address some of that in your earlier comments. But what are you specifically doing to address this and how do you see it evolving? >>Yeah, I mean, that's that's a very important point. I mean, I think if you think about again the wide open internet being the wrong time for all modern applications, what is perimeter security in this uh in this new world? I mean, it's to me it boils down to securing an API because again, going with that running example of this contact lists cash withdrawal feature for a bank, the ap wherever it's it's entre branch SAs cloud, IOS android doesn't matter that FBI is your new security perimeter. And the data object that is trying to access is also the new security perimeter. So if you can secure ap to ap communication and P two data object communication, you should be good. So that is the new frontier. But guess what software is buggy? Everybody's software not saying Cisco software, everybody's Softwares buggy. Uh software is buggy, humans are not reliable and so things mature, things change, things evolve over time. So there needs to be defense in depth. So you need to secure at the API layer had the data object layer, but you also need to secure at every layer below it so that you have good defense and depth if any layer in between is not working out properly. So for us that means ensuring ap to ap communication, not just during long time when the app has been deployed and is running, but during deployment and also during the development life cycle. So as soon as the developer launches an ID, they should be able to figure out that this api is security uses reputable, it has compliant, it is compliant to my to my organization's needs because it is hosted, let's say from Germany and my organization wants appears to be used only if they are being hosted out of Germany so compliance needs and and security needs and reputation. Is it available all the time? Is it secure? And being able to provide that feedback all the time between the security teams and the developer teams in a very seamless real time manner. Yes, again, that's something that we're trying to solve through some of the services that we're trying to produce in san Francisco. >>Yeah, I mean those that layered approach that you're talking about is critical because every layer has, you know, some vulnerability. And so you you've got to protect that with some depth in terms of thinking about security, how should we think about where where Cisco's primary value add is, I mean as parts of the interview has a great security business is growing business, Is it your intention to to to to add value across the entire value chain? I mean obviously you can't do everything so you've got a partner but so has the we think about Cisco's role over the next I'm thinking longer term over the over the next decade. >>Yeah, I mean I think so, we do come in with good strength from the runtime side of the house. So if you think about the security aspects that we haven't played today, uh there's a significant set of assets that we have around user security around around uh with with do and password less. We have significant assets in runtime security. I mean, the entire portfolio that Cisco brings to the table is around one time security, the secure X aspects around posture and policy that will bring to the table. And as you see, Cisco evolve over time, you will see us shifting left. I mean, I know it's an overused term, but that is where security is moving towards. And so that is where api security and data security are moving towards. So learning what we have during runtime because again, runtime is where you learn what's available and that's where you can apply all of the M. L. And I models to figure out what works what doesn't taking those learnings, Taking those catalogs, taking that reputation database and moving it into the deployment and development life cycle and making sure that that's part of that entire they have to deploy to runtime chain is what you will see. Cisco do overtime. >>That's fantastic phenomenal perspective video. Thanks for coming on the cube. Great to have you and look forward to having you again. >>Absolutely. Thank you >>in a moment. We'll talk hybrid cloud applications operations and potential gaps that need to be addressed with costume, Das and VJ Venugopal. You're watching the cube the global leader in high tech coverage. Mhm >>You were cloud. It isn't just a cloud. It's everything flowing through it. It's alive. Yeah, connecting users, applications, data and devices and whether it's cloud, native hybrid or multi cloud, it's more distributed than ever. One company takes you inside, giving you the visibility and the insight you need to take action. >>One company >>has the vision to understand it, all the experience, to securely connect at all on any platform in any environment. So you can work wherever work takes you in a cloud first world between your cloud and being cloud smart, there's a bridge. Cisco the bridge to possible. >>Okay. We're here with costume does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco. And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product Management for cloud compute at Cisco. KTV. J. Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave to be here. >>Katie, let's talk about cloud you And I last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud and I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper Scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no that's that's that's a perfect question to start with. Dave. So yes. So the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um There's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift. In fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers they're saying well how do I in the context of my business implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DEVOPS and really harnessed that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me, and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud and that platform. Uh It's inter site we've been investing in. Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today that were closer today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud. Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any, any version of that, whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs, super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently and then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners. The streets of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective. And it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. Just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets and then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh we'll talk about some more of those day. >>Great, thank you, Katie VJ. Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCIi corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha, she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream? You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment. Smaller organizations can take advantage. But if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? Mhm. >>Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and computer group. Right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers and applications team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers and inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh As you rightly said, harsher car is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with harsher card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed i E C. To be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russian government shutdown. >>Yeah, Terra form gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there. The inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps, uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend? What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now, Cloud Native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for A. Ks. And this just geared a little over one month ago. Now, what interstate kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and clog native to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we are today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager, the Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to the KS are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of, of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we've done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud and we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mesh manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you. BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So, couple of things to close on, first of all, um Inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I close with is um, we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation, we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale, is everything they're doing to innovate superfast, All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world, including Cisco, How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thank thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you >>Dave in a moment. We're gonna come back and talk about disruptive technologies and futures in the age of hybrid cloud with Vegas Rattana and James leach. You're watching the cube, the global leader in high tech coverage. >>What if your server box >>wasn't a box at >>all? What if it could do anything run anything? >>Be any box you >>need with massive scale precision and intelligence managed and optimized from the cloud integrated with all your clouds, private, public or hybrid. So you can build whatever you need today and tomorrow. The potential of this box is unlimited. Unstoppable unseen ever before. Unbox the future with Cisco UCS X series powered by inter site >>Cisco. >>The bridge to possible. Yeah >>we're here with Vegas Rattana who's the director of product management for Pcs at Cisco. And James Leach is the director of business development for U. C. S. At the Cisco as well. We're gonna talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen. Great to see you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you because let's start with you and talk about a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving. They're supporting new data intensive and other workloads especially as high performance workload requirements. What's this guy's point of view on all this? I mean specifically interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >>Sure. First of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric that's writers that drives the processing power, the Golden city all have been evolving just an amazing place and the peace will only pick up further. But ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications leverage those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values. Very, very exciting time step. We're talking about the impact on the customers. Well, these innovations have helped them very positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with the point product based approach of delivering these platforms, innovations to the applications. What has happened is uh, these innovations today are being packaged as point point products to meet the needs of a specific application and as you know, the different applications have no different needs. Some applications need more to abuse, others need more memory, yet others need, you know, more course, something different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is very common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know, several different form factors want you to you purpose built servers. The variety of, you know, a blade form factor, you know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system, a cool music device for listening to the music. A phone device for making a call camera for taking the photos right? And we were all excited about it. It's when a smart phones the right that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient and easy to consume through one device. And you know, I could uh, that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers were benefiting from these innovations to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to go to that. >>And I like to look, it's always been about the applications. But to your point, the applications are now moving in a much faster pace. The the customer experience is expectation is way escalated. And when you combine all these, I love your analogy there because because when you combine all these capabilities, it allows us to develop new Applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's that I always say the next 10 years, they ain't gonna be like the last James Public Cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and and and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone we were swooning about low cost standard off the shelf servers in storage devices, but it quickly became obvious that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyper scale, Is how are they filtering into on prem infrastructure and maybe, you know, maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. >>Absolutely. So I'd say, first of all, quite frankly, you know, public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume, compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment, they've gotten used to or, you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application focused view, a services focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application, they wanna move outward, Right? So this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know, we're taking a different approach. We're we've decided that we're not going to chase this single pane of glass view of the world, which, frankly, our customers don't want, they don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get at the public with the public cloud, but they wanted across all of their cloud options they wanted across private cloud across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services. They want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation Orchestration, but they also need kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services, They may need terror form workload optimization. All of these services have to be available, um, from within the operating model, a consistent operating model. Right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud anywhere where the application lives. It doesn't matter what matters is that we have a consistent model that we think about it from the application out. And frankly, I'd say this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right. This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X series and inter site as that operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen >>is acute. First, first time technology vendor has ever said it's not about a single pane of glass because I've been hearing for decades, we're gonna deliver a single pane of glass is going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and, and it's just not reality. So can we stay in the X series for a minute James? Uh, maybe in this context, but in the launch that we saw today was like a fire hose of announcements. So how does the X series fit into the strategy with inter site and hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? >>Right. So I think it goes hand in hand, right. Um the two pieces go together very well. So we have uh, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems of the cost was talking about before we need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models are different sets of benefits when you want infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications. And then, you know, the operating model is very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure so that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about is the data center is not centered right? It's no longer centered applications live everywhere. Infrastructure lives everywhere. And you know, we need to have that consistent operating model but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage. Right? So we want all the sas benefits um, of a Ci CD model of, you know, the inter site can bring, we want all that that proactive recommendation engine with the power of A I behind it. We want the connected support experience went all of that. They want to do it across the single infrastructure and we think that that's how they tie together, that's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem. But both together, that's why we're here. That's why we're super excited. >>So Vegas, I make you laugh a little bit when I was an analyst at I D C, I was deep in infrastructure and then when I left I was doing, I was working with application development heads and like you said, uh infrastructure, it was just a, you know, roadblock but but so the target speakers with Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business and it wasn't until I dug in then I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure, deployment and management and change them all. I was like, okay, I got that wrong uh but but so let's talk about the the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there, X series, how does it fit into this, this converged infrastructure business that you've, you've built and grown with partners, you got storage partners like Netapp and Pure, you've got i SV partners in the ecosystem. We see cohesive, he has been a while since we we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live hopefully next year, but tell us what's happening in that regard. >>Absolutely, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year. You know, they have absolutely you brought up a very good point. You see this is about the ecosystem that it brings together, it's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can, you know, go off and running pretty quick. The converse infrastructure has been one of the corners 2.5 hour of the strategy, as you pointed out in the last decade. And and and I'm I'm very glad to share that converse infrastructure continues to be a very popular architecture for several enterprise applications. Seven today, in fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications where performance resiliency latency are the critical requirements there almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualized and business critical data bases and so forth with X series with our partnerships with our Stories partners. Those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition as a hybrid cloud world, so we are now bringing in the benefits of canvas in infrastructure uh to the world of hybrid cloud will be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CIA infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with the Stories partners to deliver the same benefits to the new ways applications as well. >>Yeah, that's what customers want. They want that cloud operating model. Right, go ahead please. >>I was going to say, you know, the CIA model will continue to thrive. It will transition uh it will expand the use cases now for the new use cases that were beginning to, you know, say they've absolutely >>great thank you for that. And James uh have said earlier today, we heard this huge announcement, um a lot of lot of parts to it and we heard Katie talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean I like that because it shows some vision and you've got a road map that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just uh, you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >>Sure. You know that's a great question. Number one. Number two, um I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for for customers in general for our customers customers in general because if you look at what's in the market, right, these rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2000 and nine when we brought you C. S to market these are what we're seeing over and over and over again. That's that's not really going to work anymore frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually put in the market. We rethought this from the ground up because frankly future proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even you're not even today proved. So we re thought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay. If you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like management inside the chassis. That's a great example, daisy chaining them together >>like who >>needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is first of all, it's ridiculous. Um, second of all, um, if you want to manage across clouds, you have to do it from the cloud, right. It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact your entire domain, your world, which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here. Right. So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you talk about the mid plane is a great example. You know, the mid plane and a chastity is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple. Just get rid of it. Like we just we took it out, right. It's not no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So, as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling or maybe we need to take advantage of some new, high performance, low latency fabrics. We can do that with almost. No problem at all. Right, So, we don't have any forklift upgrades. Park your forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade gradually. You can move along as technologies come into existence that maybe don't even exist. They they may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of. But I like to think of these technologies, they're really important to our customers. These are, you know, we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves. Right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy to consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability flexibility and and future proofing. >>I like I like that phrase True hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years and but to me this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You can support the mission critical applications. You can you can develop on the system and you can support a variety of workload. You're not locked into one narrow stovepipe and that does have legs, Vegas and James. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >>Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. >>When we return shortly thomas Shiva who leads Cisco's data center group will be here and thomas has some thoughts about the transformation of networking I. T. Teams. You don't wanna miss what he has to say. You're watching the cube. The global leader in high tech company. Okay, >>mm. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. >>Mhm. Yes. Yeah. Okay. We're here with thomas Shiva who is the Vice president of Product Management, A K A VP of all things data center, networking STN cloud. You name it in that category. Welcome thomas. Good to see you again. >>Hey Sam. Yes. Thanks for having me on. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, let's get right into observe ability. When you think about observe ability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring problem resolution across the network. How does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >>Yeah. Yeah, visibility as always is very, very important. And it's quite frankly, it's not just it's not just the networking team is actually the application team to write. And as you pointed out, the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the data center is where the data is. And I think we set us a couple years back and really what happens the applications are going to be deployed uh in different locations, right. Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on prayer, uh, and they are built differently right there, built as microservices, they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need as an operator as well as actually a user better visibility. Where are my pieces and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge while the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's that's really the problem statement. What what we're trying to go afterwards, observe ability. >>Okay, and let's double click on that. So a lot of customers tell me that you gotta stare at log files until your eyes bleed and you gotta bring in guys with lab coats who have phds to figure all this stuff out. So, so you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time you have to simplify things. So how how are you doing that, >>correct? So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that that is called 1000 Ice. And so what this does is basically as the name, which I think is a fantastic fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere. Um, and you can have a good correlation on uh links between if I run from a site to aside from a site to a cloud, from a cloud to cloud and you basically can measure what is the performance of these links. And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of these thousands agent. Right? Instead of just having uh inversion machine clouds, we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices. Right? We announced this with the catalyst 9000 and we're extending this now to our 8000 catalyst product line for the for the SD were in products as well as to the data center products the next line. Um and so what you see is is, you know, half a saying, you have 1000 eyes, you get a million insights and you get a billion dollar of improvements uh for how your applications run. And this is really uh, the power of tying together the footprint of where the network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >>I see. So okay. So as the cloud evolves and expands it connects your actually enabling 1000 eyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location, but out to the network across clouds, et cetera, >>correct. Wherever the network is, you're going to have 1000 I sensor and you can't bring this together and you can quite frankly pick if you want to say, hey, I have my application in public cloud provider, a uh, domain one and I have another one domain to, I can't do monitor that link. I can also monitor have a user that has a campus location or branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the let's say corporations that data centre, our headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just we have visibility and saying, hey, if there's a performance, I know where the issue is and then I obviously can use all the other foods that we have to address those. >>All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of R. O. I. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and devops to this world of of hybrid and specifically how is Cisco enabling I. T. Organizations to move to a cloud operating model? Is that cloud definition expands? >>Yeah, no that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observe ability. So really, really what we're seeing and this is going on for uh I want to say a couple of years now, it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider. Right? It's really around the network team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model. Right? But this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public club is operating and like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for why? So one of the examples uh then we have removing some of the control software assets, the customers that they can deploy on prayer uh to uh an instance that they can deploy in a cloud provider and just busy, insane. She ate things there and then just run it that way. Right. And so the latest example for this is what we have our identity service engine that is now limited availability available on AWS and will become available in mid this year, both in Italy as unusual as a service. You can just go to market place, you can load it there and now you create, you can start running your policy control in a cloud, managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our customers network operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically employing their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >>So what's the scope of, I hope I'm saying it right. Ice, right. I see. I think it's called ice. What's the scope of that like for instance, turn in effect my or even, you know, address simplify my security approach. >>Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is that there's a lot of people talking about else. How do I get to zero trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure. Again, whether this is only campus X as well as a data center and Ice help today, you can use this as a point to define your policies and then any connect from there. Right. In this particular case we would instant Ice in the cloud as a software load. You now can connect and say, hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center on my campus, going to the respective control over this DNA Center for campus or whether it is the A. C. I. Policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage in one place. What is my policy and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure? >>zero. Trust that, you know, it was pre pandemic. It was kind of a buzzword. Now it's become a mandate. I wonder if we could talk about right. I mean I wonder if you talk about cloud native apps, you got all these developers that are working inside organizations. They're maintaining legacy apps. They're connecting their data to systems in the cloud there, sharing that data. I need these developers, they're rapidly advancing their skill sets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud? Native making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >>Yeah. So, you know, we're going to the top of his visibility, we talked about the operating model, how how our network operators actually want to use tools going forward. Now, the next step to this is it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools, how they, how they interact with these tools as well as quite frankly as how, let's say, a devops team on application team or Oclock team also wants to take advantage of the program ability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right? Which is really two angles, that is the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure. Right? And so what we have done is we're a putting in place the on ramps between clouds and then on top of it we're exposing for all these tools, a P I S that can be used in leverage by standard uh cloud tools or uh cloud native tools. Right. And one example or two examples we always have and again, we're on this journey for a while is both answerable uh script capabilities that exist from red hat as well as uh Ashitaka from capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure, automation and what what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the ap team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically in situation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools. Right. Whether it's this ice that I just mentioned, whether this is our D. C. And controllers in the data center, uh whether these are the controllers in the in the campus for all of those, we have cloud native interfaces. So operator or uh devops team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives in the cloud, with everything how they brought the application. >>This is key. You can't even have the conversation of op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's that's very important. Last question, thomas our customers actually using this, they made the announcement today. There are there are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >>We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the past and using the D. D. Cisco high performance infrastructure, but also on the compute side as well as on an exercise one of the customers. Uh and this is like an interesting case. It's Rakuten uh record and is a large tackle provider, a mobile five G. Operator uh in Japan and expanding and is in different countries. Uh and so people something oh, cloud, you must be talking about the public cloud provider, the big the big three or four. But if you look at it, there's a lot of the tackle service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with with Rakuten and help them building a high performance uh, data and infrastructure based on hard gig and actually phone a gig uh to drive their deployment to. It's a five G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is uh where the whole the whole world where traffic is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility uh together with the high performance infrastructure becoming reality and delivering actually services, >>you have some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, your enormous, but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds. Telcos that are either approximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper scholars may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So so that's a great case study uh thomas, hey, great having you on. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. >>Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >>I'd like to thank Cisco and our guests today V Joy, Katie VJ, viscous James and thomas for all your insights into this evolving world of hybrid cloud, as we said at the top of the next decade will be defined by an entirely new set of rules. And it's quite possible things will evolve more quickly because the cloud is maturing and has paved the way for a new operating model where everything is delivered as a service, automation has become a mandate because we just can't keep throwing it labor at the problem anymore. And with a I so much more as possible in terms of driving operational efficiencies, simplicity and support of the workloads that are driving the digital transformation that we talk about all the time. This is Dave Volonte and I hope you've enjoyed today's program. Stay Safe, be well and we'll see you next time.

>> From "The Cube studios" in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This, is a cube conversation. >> Welcome to this Cube Virtual conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm excited to be talking to one of our cube alumni again, very socially distant, Derek Manky joins me the chief security insights and global for alliances, Fortinet's FortiGuard labs, Derek it's great to see you, even though virtually >> Yep, better safe better safe these days, right? But yeah, it's great to see you again and um I'm really looking forward to a great conversation, as always. >> Yeah! So Wow Has a lot changed since I last saw you? I-I think that's an epic understatement.. But each year we talk with you about the upcoming What's coming up in the threat landscape, what you guys are seeing Some of the attack trends. What are some of the things that you've seen in this very eventful year since we last spoke? >> Yeah.. a lot of a lot of things.. um.. Obviously.. uh.. with the pandemic there has been this big shift in landscape, right? So particularly uh Q3 Q4. So the last half of the year uh now we have a lot of things that were traditionally in corporate safeguards um you know, actual workstations, laptops that were sitting within networks and perimeters of-of organizations, that have obviously moved to work from home. And So, with that, comes a lot of new a-attack opportunities Um We track as, you know, threat until at 40 minutes, so 40 guard labs on a daily basis. And.. uh.. we are clearly seeing that and we're seeing a huge rise in things like um IOT targets, being the number one attacks, so consumer grade routers, um IOT devices, like printers and network attached storage. Those are um some of the most, favorite attack vehicles that cyber criminals are using to get into the-those devices. Of course, once they get in those devices, they can then move, laterally to compromise the..uh corporate laptop as an example. So those are-are very concerning The other thing has been that email that traditionally has been our number one um Another favorite attack platform always has! It's not going away but for the first time this year in.. um in about September, the second half, we saw a web based attacks taking priority for attackers and that's because of this new working environment. A lot of people I'm serving the websites from Again, these devices that were, not, were previously within Um you know, organizations email security is centralized a lot of the times but the web security always isn't. So that's another another shift that we've seen. We're now in the full-blown midst of the online shopping season um action and shopping season is almost every day now (laughter) since this summer >> Yep.. Yep.. >> And we've clearly seen that And we- Just from September up to October we saw over a trillion, not a billion, but a trillion new flows to shopping websites uh In just one month Um So that can- than number continues to rise and continues to rising quickly. >> Yeah. So the- the expanding threat landscape I've talked to a number of Companies the last few months that we're in this situation where it's suddenly It was a maybe 100% onsite workforce now going to work from home taking uh either desktops from uh their offices or using personal devices and that was a huge challenge that we were talking about with respect to endpoint and laptop security But interesting that you- you're seeing now this web security, I know phishing emails are getting more personal but the fact that um That website attacks are going up What are some of the things that you think, especially yo-you bring up a point we are we are now and maybe even s- more supercharged e-commerce season. How can businesses prepare a-and become proactive to defend against some of these things that, since now the threat surface is even bigger? >> Yeah. Multi-pronged approach. You know, Lisa, like we always say that, first of all, it's just like we have physical distancing, cyber distancing, just like we're doing now on this call. But same thing for reuse. I think there's always a false sense of security, right? When you're just in the home office, doing some browsing to a site, you really have to understand that these sites just by touching, literally touching it by going to the URL and clicking on that link you can get infected that easily. We're seeing that, there's a lot of these attacks being driven So, education, there's a lot of free programs. We have one on Fortinet information security awareness training. That is something that we continually need to hone the skills of end users first of all, so that's an easy win I would say, to my eyes in terms of organizations, but then this multi-pronged approach, right? So things like having EDR endpoint detection response, and being able to manage those end users while they're on on their devices at home Being able to have security and making sure those are up to date in terms of patches. So centralized management is important, two factor authentication, or multi-factor authentication Also equally as important. Doing things like network segmentation. For end users and the devices too. So there's a lot of these Things that you look at the risk that's associated The risk is always way higher than the investment upfront in terms of hours, in terms of security platforms. So the good thing is there's a lot of Solutions out there and it doesn't have to be complicated. >> That's good because we have enough complication everywhere else. But you bring up a point, you know, about humans, about education. We're kind of always that weakest link, but so many of us, now that are home, have distractions going on all around. So you might be going, "I've got to do some bill pay and go onto your bank" without thinking that that's that's now a threat landscape. What are some of the things that you're seeing that you think we're going to face in 2021, which is just around the corner? >> Yeah so So we're just talking about those IOT devices They're the main culprit right now. They can continue to be for a while We have this new class of threat emerging technology, which is edge computing. So people always talked about the perimeter of the perimeter being dead in other words, not just building up a wall on the outside, but understanding what's inside, right? That's been the case of IOT, but now edge computing is the emerging technology The main difference You know, we say, is that the edge devices are virtual assistant is the best example I could give, right? That, that users will be aware of in-home networks. Because these devices, traditionally, have more processing power, they handle more data, they have more access and privilege to devices like things like security systems, lights, as an example Beyond home networks, these edge devices are also As an example, being put into military and defense into critical infrastructure, field units for oil and gas and electricity as an example. So this is the new emerging threat, more processing power, more access and privilege, smarter decisions that are being made on those devices Those devices, are going to be targets for cyber criminals. And that's something, I think next year, we're going to see a lot of because it's a Bigger reward to the cyber criminal if they can get into it. And So targeting the edge is going to be a big thing. I think there's going to be a new class of threats. I'm calling these, I haven't heard this coined in the industry yet, but I'm calling these or "EAT"s or "Edge Access Trojans" because that's what it is, they compromise these devices. They can then control and get access to the data. If you think of a virtual assistant, and somebody that can actually compromise that device, think about that data. Voice data that's flowing through those devices that they can then use as a cleverly engineered, you know, attack a social engineering attack to phish a user as an example. >> Wow! I never thought about it from that perspective before Do you think, with all the talk about 5G, and what's coming with 5G, is that going to be an accelerator of some of these trends? Of some of these "EAT"s that you talk about? >> Yeah, definitely. Yeah So 5G is just a conduit. It's an accelerator. Absolutely um Catalyst called, if you will, It's here. Um, it's been deployed, not worldwide, but in many regions, it's going to continue to be 5G is all about, um, speed.. Um right? And so if you think about how swiftly these attacks are moving, you be abl- you need to be able to keep up with that from a defense standpoint, um Threats move without borders, they move without Uh, uh, Unfortunately, without restriction a lot of the time, right? Cyber crime has no borders. Um, the-they don't have rules, or if they have, they don't care about rules (laughter) So break those rules. So they are able to move quickly, right? And that's th- the problem with 5G, of course, is that these devices now can communicate quicker, they can launch even larger scale things like "DDOS", "Distributed Denial Of Service attacks". And That is, is a very big threat. And it also allows the other thing about 5G, Lisa, is that it allows.. um.. Peer to peer connectivity too. Right? So it's like Bluetooth, Um, Bluetooth's um enhanced in a sense, because now you have devices that interact with each other as well, by interacting with each other Um that also uh, you know, what are they talking about? What data are they passing? That's a whole new security inspection point that we need to And that's what I mean about this.. Um that's just It reconfirms that the.. Perimeters that. >> Right. Something we've been talking about, as you said for a while, but That's some pretty hard hitting evidence that it is, indeed, a thing of the past Something that we've talked to you about - with you in the past is Swarm attacks. Ho- What's, What's going on there? How are they progressing? >> Yeah, so this is a real threat, but there's good news, bad news. The Good news is this is a long progressing threat, which means we have more time to prepare. Bad news is we have seen developments in terms of weaponizing this, It's like anything.. Swarm is a tool. It can be as good.. DARPA, as an example, has invested a lot into this from military research, it's all around us now in terms of good applications things like for redundancy, right? Robotics, as an example, there's a lot of good things that come from Swarm technology, but.. There's use for If it's weaponized, It can have some very scary prospects. And that's what we're starting to see. There's a new botnet that was created this year. It is called the "HTH" this is written in Golang. So it's a language that basically allows it to infect any number of devices. It's not just your PC Right? It's the same, it's the same virus, but it can morph into all these different platforms, devices, whether it's a, an IOT device, an edge device But the main, characteristic of this is that it's able to actually have communication. They built a communication protocol into it. So the devices can pass files between each other, talk to each other They don't have a machine learning models yet, so in other words, they're not quote-in-quote "smart" yet, but that's coming. Once that intelligence starts getting baked in, then we have the weaponized Swarm technology And what this means, is that you know, when you have those devices that are making decisions on their own, talking to each other >> A: they're harder to kill. You take one down, another one takes its place. >> B: um They are able to move very swiftly, especially when that piggybacking leveraging on things like 5G. >> So . the I'm just blown away at all these things that you're talking about They are so So talk about how companies, and even individuals, can defend against this and become proactive. As we know one of the things we know about 2020 is all the uncertainty, we're going to continue to see uncertainty, but we also know that we- there's expectation.. globally, that a good amount of people are going to be working from home and connecting to corporate networks for a very long time. So, how can companies and people become proactive against these threats? >> Yes People process procedures and technology. So, we talked, as I really looked at this as a stacked approach, first of all, threats, as it is said, they're becoming quicker, the attack surface is larger, you need threat intelligence visibility This comes down to security platforms from a technology piece. So a security driven networking, AI driven security operations Centers These are new. But it's, it's becoming, as you can imagine, when we talked about critical, to fill that gap, to be able to move as quickly as the attackers you need to be able to use intelligent technology on your end. So people are just too slow. But we can still use people from the process, you know, making sure You know, Trying to understand what the risk is. So looking at threat intelligence reports, we put out weekly threat intelligence briefs as an example of as Fortiguard Labs, to be able to understand what the threats are, how to respond to those, how to prioritize them and then put the proper security measures in place. So, there are absolutely relevant technologies that exist today, And in fact now I think is the time to really get those in deployment before this becomes worse, as we're talking about. And then as I said earlier, there's also free things that can be just part of our daily lives, right? So we don't have this false sense of security. So understanding that that threat is real following up on the threat and being on doing education There's phishing services Again, phishing can be a good tool when it's used in a non-malicious way, to test people's skills sets as an example. So all of that combined is But the biggest thing is definitely relying on things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, to be able to work at speed with these threats. >> Right. So, you also have global threat alliances under your portfolio. Talk to me about how 40 net is working with global Alliance partners to fight this growing attack surface. >> Yeah. So this is the ecosystem. Every, every organization, whether it's private or public sector, has a different role to play in essence, right? So you look at things in the public sector, you have law enforcement, they're focused on attribution, so when we look at cyber crime, and if we find It's the hardest thing to do, but if we find out who these cyber criminals are, we can bring them to justice. Right? Our whole goal is to make it more expensive for the cyber criminals to operate, So by doing this, if we work with law enforcement and it leads to a successful arrest and prosecution, because we've done it in the past, that takes them off line to hit somewhere it hurts Law enforcement will typically work with intelligence leads to freeze assets, as an example from maybe ransom attacks that are happening. So that's one aspect, but then you have other things like working with national computer emergency response. So disrupting cyber crime, we work with national series. If we know that, you know, the bad guys are hosting stolen data or communication infrastructure in public, you know, servers, we can work with them to actually disrupt that, to take those servers offline. Then you have the private space. So this, you know Fortinet we're a founding member of the Cyber Threat Alliance. I'm on the steering committee there. And this is working with even competitors around in our space where we can share quickly up-to-date intelligence on, on attackers. We remain competitive on the technology itself, but, you know, we're working together to actually share as much as we know about the bad guys. And recently we're also a founding member of the "Center for Cyber Security", "C for C" with World Economic Forum. And This is another crucial effort that is basically trying to bridge all of that. To mend all of that together, right? Law enforcement, prosecutors, security vendors, intelligence organizations, all under one roof because we really do need that. It's an entire ecosystem to make this an effective fight. So it's, it's interesting because a lot of people, I don't think see what's happening behind the scenes a lot of the times, but there is a tremendous effort globally that's happening between all the players. So that's really good news. And the industry piece is something close to my heart. I've been involved in a lot of time and we continue to support. >> That's exciting. And that's something that is, you know, unfortunately, so very, very needed and will continue to be as emerging technologies evolve and we get to use them for good things. And to your point, that bad actors also get to take advantage of that for nefarious things as well. Derek it's always great to have you on the program, any particular things on the 40 net website that you would point viewers to to learn more about like the 20, 20 front landscape? >> Sure. You can always check out our blogs, So it's on blogged@fortynet.com, under "Threat Research", As I said on 40 guard.com, we also have our playbooks on there. We have podcasts, we have our updated threat intelligence briefs too. So those are always great to check out and just be rest assured that, you know, everything I've been talking about, we're doing a lot of that heavy lift on the backend. So by having working with managing security service providers and having all this intelligence baked in, organizations don't have to go and have a huge OPEX by you know, hiring, you know, trying to create a massive security center on their own. I mean, it's about this technology working together and that's that's what we're here for, its we can ask what do you guard lapse? >> Awesome Derek, thank you so much for joining me today in this Cube Conversation. Lots of exciting stuff going on at 40 net and 40 guard labs as always, which we expect, it's been great to have you. Thank you. >> It's a pleasure. Thanks Lisa. >> For Derek Manky. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Virtual Cube.

>> Hi, and welcome to Data Cloud Catalyst, Women in Tech Round Table Panel Discussion. I am so excited to have three fantastic female executives with me today who have been driving transformation through data throughout their entire career. With me today is Lisa Davis, SVP and CIO of Blue Shield of California. We also have Nishita Henry, who is the Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte and Theresa Briggs, who is on a variety of board of directors, including our own very own Snowflake. Welcome, ladies. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So I'm just going to dive right in. You all have really amazing careers and resumes behind you. I'm really curious, throughout your career, how have you seen the use of data evolve throughout your career? And, Lisa, I'm going to start with you. >> Thank you. Having been in technology my entire career, technology and data has really evolved from being the province of a few in an organization to frankly being critical to everyone's business outcomes. Now every business leader really needs to embrace data analytics and technology. We've been talking about digital transformation probably the last five, seven years, we've all talked about disrupt or be disrupted. At the core of that digital transformation is the use of data. Data and analytics that we derive insights from and actually improve our decision making by driving a differentiated experience and capability into market. So data has involved as being, I would say, almost tactical in some sense over my technology career, to really being a strategic asset of what we leverage personally in our own careers, but also what we must leverage as companies to drive a differentiated capability to experience and remain relative in the market today. >> Nishita, curious your take on how you've seen data evolve? >> Yeah, I agree with Lisa. It has definitely become the lifeblood of every business, right? It used to be that there were a few companies in the business of technology, every business is now a technology business. Every business is a data business. It is the way that they go to market, shape the market and serve their clients. Whether you're in construction, whether you're in retail, whether you're in healthcare it doesn't matter, right? Data is necessary for every business to survive and thrive. And I remember at the beginning of my career, data was always important but it was about storing data. It was about giving people individual reports, it was about supplying that data to one person or one business unit in silos. And it then evolved right over the course of time into integrating data and to saying, all right, how does one piece of data correlate to the other and how can I get insights out of that data? Now, let's go on to the point of how do I use that data to predict the future? How do I use that data to automate the future? How do I use that data not just for humans to make decisions, but for other machines to make decisions, right? Which is a big leap. And a big change in how we use data, how we analyze data and how we use it for insights in evolving our businesses. >> Yeah, it's really changed so tremendously just in the past five years. It's amazing. So Teresa, we've talked a lot about the Data Cloud, where do you think we're heading with that? And also, how can future leaders really guide their careers in data, especially in those jobs where we don't traditionally think of them in the data science space? Curious your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, well, since I'm on the Snowflake board, I'll talk a little bit about the Snowflake Data Cloud. Now we're getting your company's data out of the silos that exists all over your organization, we're bringing third party data in to combine with your own data, and we're wrapping a governance structure around it and feeding it out to your employees so that they can get their jobs done. And is as simple as that. I think we've all seen the pandemic accelerate the digitization of our work. And if you ever doubted the future of work is here, it is here. And companies are scrambling to catch up by providing the right amount of data, collaboration tools, workflow tools for their workers to get their jobs done. Now, it used to be as prior people have mentioned that in order to work with data you had to be a data scientist. But I was an auditor back in the day and we used to work on 16 columns spreadsheet. And now if you're an accounting major coming out of college joining an auditing firm, you have to be tech and data savvy because you're going to be extracting, manipulating, analyzing and auditing data, that massive amounts of data that sit in your client's IT systems. I'm on the board of Warby Parker, and you might think that their most valuable asset is their amazing frame collection, but it's actually their data, their 360 degree view of the customer. And so if you're a merchant or you're in strategy, or marketing or talent or the co-CEO, you're using data every day in your work. And so I think it's going to become a ubiquitous skill that anyone who's a knowledge worker has to be able to work with data. >> Yeah, I think it's just going to be organic to every role going forward in the industry. So Lisa, curious about your thoughts about Data Cloud, the future of it, and how people can really leverage it in their jobs from future leaders? >> Yeah, absolutely. Most enterprises today are, I would say, hybrid multi cloud enterprises. What does that mean? That means that we have data sitting on prem, we have data sitting in public clouds through software as a service applications, we have a data everywhere, most enterprises have data everywhere. Certainly those that have owned infrastructure or weren't born on the web. One of the areas that I love that Data Cloud is addressing is the area around data portability and mobility. Because I have data sitting in various locations through my enterprise, how do I aggregate that data to really drive meaningful insights out of that data to drive better business outcomes? And at Blue Shield of California, one of our key initiatives is what we call an experienced cube. What does that mean? It means how do I drive transparency of data between providers, members and payers? So that not only do I reduce overhead on providers and provide them a better experience, or hospital systems or doctors, but ultimately, how do we have the member have it their power of their fingertips the value of their data holistically, so that we're making better decisions about their health care? One of the things Teresa was talking about was the use of this data, and I would drive to data democratization. We got to put the power of data into the hands of everyone, not just data scientists. Yes, we need those data scientists to help us build AI models to really drive and tackle these tougher challenges and business problems that we may have in our environments. But everybody in the company, both on the IT side, both on the business side, really need to understand of how do we become a data insights driven enterprise. Put the power of the data into everyone's hands so that we can accelerate capabilities, right? And leverage that data to ultimately drive better business results. So as a leader, as a technology leader, part of our responsibility, our leadership is to help our companies do that. And that's really one of the exciting things that I'm doing in my role now at Blue Shield of California. >> Yeah, it's really, really exciting time. I want to shift gears a little bit and focus on women in tech. So I think in the past five to 10 years, there has been a lot of headway in this space. But the truth is women are still underrepresented in the tech space. So what can we do to attract more women into technology quite honestly. So Nishita, curious, what your thoughts are on that? >> Great question. And I am so passionate about this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is I have two daughters of my own. And I know how important it is for women and young girls to actually start early in their love for technology, and data and all things digital, right? So I think it's one very important to start early, start an early education, building confidence of young girls that they can do this, showing them role models. We at Deloitte just partnered with Ella the Engineer to actually make comic books centered around young girls and boys in the early elementary age to talk about how heroes and tech solve everyday problems. And so really helping to get people's minds around tech is not just in the back office coding on a computer, tech is about solving problems together that help us as citizens, as customers, right? And as humanity. So I think that's important. I also think we have to expand that definition of tech, as we just said. It's not just about, right? Database design. It's not just about Java and Python coding, it's about design. It's about the human machine interfaces. It's about how do you use it to solve real problems and getting people to think in that kind of mindset makes it more attractive and exciting. And lastly, I'd say look, we have absolute imperative to get a diverse population of people, not just women, but minorities, those with other types of backgrounds, disabilities, etc involved. Because this data is being used to drive decision making, and if we are not all involved, right? In how that data makes decisions, it can lead to unnatural biases that no one intended but can happen just 'cause we haven't involved a diverse enough group of people around it. >> Absolutely. Lisa, curious about your thoughts on this. >> I agree with everything Nishita said. I've been passionate about this area, I think it starts with first we need more role models. We need more role models as women in these leadership roles throughout various sectors. And it really is it starts with us and helping to pull other women forward. So I think certainly, it's part of my responsibility, I think all of us as female executives that if you have a seat at the table to leverage that seat at the table to drive change, to bring more women forward, more diversity forward into the boardroom and into our executive suites. I also want to touch on a point Nishita made about women, we're the largest consumer group in the company yet we're consumers, but we're not builders. This is why it's so important that we start changing that perception of what tech is. And I agree that it starts with our young girls. We know the data shows that we lose our young girls by middle school. Very heavy peer pressure, it's not so cool to be smart, or do robotics, or be good at math and science. We start losing our girls in middle school. So they're not prepared when they go to high school and they're not taking those classes in order to major in the STEM fields in college. So we have to start the pipeline early with our girls. And then I also think it's a measure of what your boards are doing. What is the executive leadership and your goals around diversity and inclusion? How do we invite more diverse population to the decision making table? So it's really a combination of efforts. One of the things that certainly is concerning to me is during this pandemic, I think we're losing one in four women in the workforce now, because of all the demands that our families are having to navigate through this pandemic. The last statistic I saw in the last four months is we've lost 850,000 women in the workforce. This pipeline is critical to making that change in these leadership positions. >> Yeah, it's really a critical time. And now we're coming to the end of this conversation, I want to ask you Teresa, what would be a call to action to everyone listening, both men and women since its needs to be solved by everyone, to address the gender gap in the industry? >> I'd encourage each of you to become an active sponsor. Research shows that women and minorities are less likely to be sponsored than white men. Sponsorship is a much more active form than mentorship. Sponsorship involves helping someone identify career opportunities and actively advocating for them in those roles, opening your network, giving very candid feedback. And we need men to participate too. There are not enough women in tech to pull forward and sponsor the high potential women that are in our pipelines. And so we need you to be part of the solution. >> Nishita real quickly, what would be your call to action to everyone? >> I'd say look around your teams, see who's on them and make deliberate decisions about diversifying those teams. As positions open up, make sure that you have a diverse set of candidates, and make sure that there are women that are part of that team. And make sure that you are actually hiring and putting people into positions based on potential not just experience. >> And real quickly Lisa, will close it out with you, what would your call to action be? >> Well, it's hard to... What Nishita and what Teresa shared I think were very powerful actions. I think it starts with us. Taking action at our own table, making sure you're driving diverse panels and hiring, setting goals for the company. Having your board engaged and holding us accountable and driving to those goals, will help us all see a better outcome but with more women at the executive table and diverse populations. >> Great advice and great action for all of us to take. Thank you all so much for spending time with me today and talking about this really important issue. I really appreciate it. Stay with us.

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're still on our Palo Alto studios, we're still getting through COVID and we're still doing all of our remotes, all of our interviews via remote and I'm really excited to have a guest we had around a long time ago. I looked it up is 2016, April 2016. She's Coco Brown, the founder and CEO of the Athena Alliance. Coco, it's great to see you. >> It's great to see you as well. We actually formally started in April of 2016. >> I know, I saw, I noticed that on LinkedIn. So we were at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, I remembers was a really cool conference, met a ton of people, a lot of them have turned out that are on your board. So yeah, and you formally on LinkedIn, it says you started in May. So that was right at the very, very beginning. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So for people that aren't familiar with the at the Athena Alliance give them the quick overview. >> Okay. Well, it's a little different that it was four years ago. So Athena first and foremost is a digital platform. So you literally log in to Athena. And we're a combination of community access to opportunity and learning. And so you can kind of envision it a little bit like a walled garden around the LinkedIn, meets Khan Academy for senior executives, meets Hollywood agency for women trying to get into the boardroom and senior level roles in the c-suite as advisors, et cetera. And then the way that we operate is you can have a self-service experience of Athena, you can have a concierge experience with Athena with real humans in the loop making key connections for you and you can add accelerators where we build brand packages and BIOS and give you executive coaching. So... >> Wow. >> Kind of a... >> You've built out your services portfolio over the last several years. But still the focus >> yes, we have. is boards, right? Still the focus is getting women on public boards, or is that no longer still the focus? >> No, that's a big piece of it for sure. I mean, one of the things that we discovered, that was the very first mission of Athena, was to bring more women into the boardroom. And as we were doing that we discovered that once you get into a senior realm of leadership in general, there's more things that you want to do than just get into the boardroom. Some of it may be wanting to be an investor or an LP in a fund or become a CEO, or certainly join outside boards but also be relevant to your own inside board. And so we started to look at Athena as a more holistic experience for senior leaders who are attempting to make sure that they are the best they can be in this very senior realm of overarching stewardship of business. >> Awesome. and have you seen, so obviously your your focus shifted 'cause you needed to add more services based on the demand from the customers. But have you seen the receptiveness to women board members change over the last four years? How have you seen kind of the marketplace change? >> Yeah, it's changed a lot, I would say. First of all I think laws like the California law and Goldman Sachs coming out saying they won't take companies public unless they have diverse board data. The statements by big entities that people are paying attention to made the boardroom dynamics a conversation around the dinner table in general. So it became more of a common conversation and common interest as opposed to just the interest of a few people who are trying to get in there. And so that's created a lot of momentum as well as sort of thoughtfulness from leaders and from employees and from larger stakeholders to say the diversity at the top business has to mimic the demographics of society as a whole. And that's become a little bit more accepted as opposed to grudgingly sort of taken in. >> Right. So one of the big problems always it's like the VC problem, right? Is the whole matchmaking problem. How do you, how do qualified people find qualified opportunities? And I wonder if you can speak a little bit as to how that process has evolved, how are you really helping because there's always people that are looking for quality candidates, and there's great quality candidates out there that just don't know where to go. How are you helping bridge kind of that kind of basic matchmaking function? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of different ways to go about it. One is certainly to understand and have real connections into the parts of the leadership ecosystem that influences or makes the decision as to who sits around that table. So that would be communities of CEOs, it's communities of existing board directors, it's venture capital firms, its private equity firms, and as you get really entrenched in those organizations and those ecosystems, you become part of that ecosystem and you become what they turn to to say, "Hey, do you know somebody?" Because it still is a "who do yo know" approach at the senior most levels. So that's one way. The other mechanism is really for individuals who are looking for board seats who want to be on boards to actually be thinking about how they proactively navigate their way to the kinds of boards that they would fit to. I like in a very much to the way our children go after the schools that they might want to when it's time for university. You'll figure out who your safeties, your matches, your reaches are, and figure out how you're going to take six degrees of separation and turn them into one through connections. So those are that's another way to go about it. >> You know, it's interesting, I talked to Beth Stewart from True Star, they also help place women on boards. And one of the issues is just the turnover. And I asked that just straight up, are there formal mechanisms to make sure that people who've been doing business from way before there were things like email and the internet eventually get swapped out. And she said, that's actually a big part of the problem is there isn't really a formal way to keep things fresh and to kind of rotate the incumbents out to enable somebody who's new and maybe has a different point of view to come in. So I'm curious when someone is targeting their A-list and B-list and C-lists, how do they factor in kind of the age of the board composition of the existing board, to really look for where there's these opportunities where a spot opens up, 'cause if there's not a spot open up clearly, there's really not much opportunity there. >> Yeah, I mean, you have to look at the whole ecosystem, right? I mean, there's anything from let's say series A, venture backed private companies all the way up to the mega cap companies, right? And there's this continuum. And it's not, there's not one universal answer to what you're talking about. So for example, if you're talking about smaller private companies, you're competing against, not somebody giving up their seat, but whether or not the company feels real motivation to fill that particular independent director seat. So the biggest competition is often that that seat goes unfilled. When you're talking about public companies, the biggest competition is really the fact that as my friend Adam Epstein of the small cap Institute will tell you, that 80% of public companies are actually small cap companies. And they don't have the same kinds of pressures that large caps do to have turnover. But yeah, it takes a big piece of the challenge is really boards having the disposition collectively to see the board as a competitive advantage for the business as a very necessary and productive piece of the business and when they see that then they take more proactive measures to make sure they have a evolving and strong board that does turnover as it needs to. >> Right. So I'm curious when you're talking to the high power women, right, who are in operational roles probably most of the time, how do you help coach them, how should they be thinking, what do they have to do different when they want to kind of add board seats to their portfolio? Very different kind of a role than an operational role, very different kind of concerns and day to day tasks. So, and clearly, you've added a whole bunch of extra things to your portfolio. So how do you help people, what do you tell women who say, "Okay, I've been successful, "I'm like successful executive, "but now I want to do this other thing, "I want to take this next step in my career"? What usually the gaps and what are the things that they need to do to prepare for that? >> Well, I'm going to circle in then land a little bit. Autodesk was actually a really great partner to us back when you and I first met. They had a couple of women at the top of the organization that were part of Athena, specifically because they wanted to join boards. They are on boards now, Lisa Campbell, Amy Bunszel, Debbie Clifford. And what they told us is they were experiencing everything that we were offering in terms of developing them, helping them to position themselves, understand themselves, navigate their way, was that they simply became better leaders as a result of focusing on themselves as that next level up, irrespective of the fact that it took them two to three years to land that seat. They became stronger in their executive role in general and better able to communicate and engage with their own boards. So I think, now I'm landing, the thing that I would say about that is don't wait until you're thinking oh, I want to join a board, to do the work to get yourself into that ecosystem, into that atmosphere and into that mindset, because the sooner you do that as an executive, the better you will be in that atmosphere, the more prepared you will be. And you also have to recognize that it will take time. >> Right. And the how has COVID impacted it, I mean, on one hand, meeting somebody for coffee and having a face to face is a really important part of getting to know someone and a big part of I'm sure, what was the recruitment process, and do you know someone, yeah, let's go meet for a cup of coffee or dinner or whatever. Can't do that anymore, but we can all meet this way, we can all get on virtually and so in some ways, it's probably an enabler, which before you could grab an hour or you didn't have to fly cross-country or somebody didn't have to fly cross-country. So I'm kind of curious in this new reality, which is going to continue for some time. How has that impacted kind of people's ability to discover and get to know and build trust for these very very senior positions. >> HBR just came out with a really great article about the virtual board meeting. I don't know if you saw it but I can send you a link. I think that what I'm learning from board directors in general and leaders in general is that yes, there's things that make it difficult to engage remotely, but there's also a lot of benefit to being able to get comfortable with the virtual world. So it's certainly, particularly with COVID, with racial equity issues, with the uncertain economy, boards are having to meet more often and they're having, some are having weekly stand ups and those are facilitated by getting more and more comfortable with being virtual. And I think they're realizing that you don't have to press flesh, as they say, to actually build intimacy and real connection. And that's been a hold up, but I think as the top leadership gets to understand that and feel that for themselves, it becomes easier for them to adopt it throughout the organization that the virtual world is one we can really embrace, not just for a period of time. >> It's funny we had John Chambers on early on in this whole process, really talking about leadership and leading through transition. And he used the example, I think had been that day or maybe a couple days off from our interview where they had a board meeting, I think they were talking about some hamburger restaurant, and so they just delivered hamburgers to everybody's office and they had the board meeting. But that's really progressive for a board to actually be doing weekly stand ups. That really shows a pretty transformative way to manage the business and kind of what we think is the stodgy old traditional get together now and then, fly and then get some minutes and fly out, that's super progressive. >> Yeah. I mean, I was on three different board meetings this week with a company I'm on the board of in Minnesota. And we haven't seen each other in person in, I guess since January. (woman laughs) >> So final tips for women that want to make this this move, who, they've got some breathing space, they're not homeschooling the kids all day while they're trying to get their job done and trying to save their own business, but have some cycles and the capabilities. What do you tell them, where should they begin, how should they start thinking about, kind of taking on this additional responsibility and really professional growth in their life? >> Well, I mean, I think something very important for all of us to think about with regard to board service and in general as we get into a very senior level point in our careers at a managing and impact portfolio. People get into a senior point and they don't just want to be an executive for one company, they want to have a variety of ways that they're delivering impact, whether it's as an investor or as a board member or as other things as well as being an operator. And I think the misnomer is that people believe that you have to add them up and they, one plus one plus one equals three, and it's just not true. The truth is that when you add a board seat, when you add that other thing that you're doing it makes you better as a leader in general. Every board meeting I have with [Indistinct] gives me more than I bring back to Athena as an example. And so I think we tend to think of not being able to take on one more thing and I say that we all have a little more space than we think we have to take on the things we want to do. >> Right? That's a good message to me. It is often said if you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person in the room. It's more likely to get it done 'cause you got to be efficient and you just have that kind of get it done attitude. >> That's right. >> All right, Coco. Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts. >> Congratulations, so I guess it's your four year anniversary, five year anniversary [Indistinct] about right? >> Yes, four. >> That's terrific. And we look forward to continuing to watch the growth and hopefully checking in face to face at some point in the not too distant future. >> I would like that. >> All right. Thanks a lot Coco. >> Great talking to you. >> Already. >> She's Coco, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe its the Cube, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HPE's Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience the Cube. The Cube has been virtualized We like to say Am very happy to welcome in Neil McDonalds, he's the General Manager for Compute at HPE. Great to see you again Neil, wish we were face to face, but this will have to do. >> Very well, it's great to see you Dave. Next time we'll do this face to face. >> Next time we have hopefully next year. We'll see how things are going, but I hope you're safe and your family's all good and I say it's good to talk to you, you know we've talked before many times you know, it's interesting just to know the whole parlance in our industry is changing even you know Compute in your title, and no longer do we think about it as just sort of servers or a box you guys are moving to this as a service notion, really it's kind of fundamental or, poignant that we see this really entering this next decade. It's not going to be the same as last decade, is it? >> No, I think our customers are increasingly looking at delivering outcomes to their customers in their lines of business, and Compute can take many forms to do that and it's exciting to see the evolution and the technologies that we're delivering and the consumption models that our customers are increasingly taking advantage of such as GreenLake. >> Yes so Antonio obviously in his Keynote made a big deal in housing previous Keynotes about GreenLake, a lot of themes on you know, the cloud economy and as a service, I wonder if you could share with our audience, you know what are the critical aspects that we should know really around GreenLake? >> Well, GreenLake is growing tremendously for us we have around a thousand customers, delivering infrastructure through the GreenLake offerings and that's backed by 5,000 people in the company around the world who are tuning an optimizing and taking care of that infrastructure for those customers. There's billions of dollars of total contract value under GreenLake right now, and it's accelerating in the current climate because really what GreenLake is all about is flexibility. The flexibility to scale up, to scale down, the ability to pay as you use the infrastructure, which in the current environment, is incredibly helpful for conserving cash and boosting both operational flexibility with the technology, but also financial flexibility, in our customer's operations. The other big advantage of course at GreenLake is it frees up talent most companies are in the world of challenges in freeing up their talent to work on really impactful business transformation initiatives, we've seen in the last couple of quarters, an even greater acceleration of digital transformation work for example and if all of your talent is tied up in managing the existing infrastructure, then that's a drain on your ability to transform and in some industries even survive right now, so GreenLake can help with all of those elements and, with all of the pressure from COVID, it's actually becoming even more consumed, by more and more customers around the world it's- >> Yeah right I mean that definitely ties into the whole as a service conversation as well I mean to your point, you know, digital transformation you know, the last couple of years has really accelerated, but I feel yeah, I feel like in the last 90 days, it's accelerated more than it has in the last three years, because if you weren't digital, you really had no way to do business and as a service has really played into that so I wonder if you could talk about yours as a service, you know, posture and thinking. >> Well you're absolutely right Dave organizations that had not already embarked on a digital transformation, have rapidly learned in our current situation that it's not an optional activity. Those that were already on that path are having to move faster, and those that weren't are having to develop those strategies very rapidly in order to transform their business and to survive. And the really new thing about GreenLake and the other service offerings that we provide in that context is how it can accelerate the deployment. Many companies for example, have had to deal with VDI deployments in order to enable many more of their workforce to be productive when they can't be in the office or in the facility and a solution like GreenLake can really help enable very rapid deployment and build up but not just VDI many other workloads in high performance Compute or in SAP HANA for example, are all areas that we're bringing value to customers through that kind of as a service offering. Yeah, a couple of examples Nokia software is using GreenLake to accelerate their research and development as they drive the leadership and the 5G revolution, and they're doing that at a fraction of the cost of the public cloud. We've got Zanotti, which has built a private cloud for artificial intelligence and HPC is being used to develop the next generation of autonomous software for cars. And finally, we've got also Portion from Arctic who have built a fully managed hybrid cloud environment to accelerate all the application development without having to bear the traditional costs of an over-provisioned complex infrastructure. So all of our customers are relying on that because Compute and Innovation is just at the core of the digital transformations that everybody is embarked on as they modernize their businesses right now and it's exciting to be able to be part of that and to be able to do there, to help. >> So of course in the tech business innovation is the you know the main spring of growth and change, which is constant in our industry and I have a panel this week with Doctor Go talking about swarm learning in AI, and that's some organic innovation that HPE is doing, but as well, you've done some, M&A as well. Recently, you guys announced and we covered it a pretty major investment in Pensando Systems. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what, that means to the Compute business specifically in, HPE customers generally. >> So that partnership with Pensando was really exciting, and it's great to see the momentum that its building in delivering value to our customers, at the end of the day we've been successful with Pensando in building that momentum in very highly regulated industries and the value that is really intrinsic to Pensando is the simplifying of the network architecture. Traditionally, when you would manage an enterprise network environment, you would create centralized devices for services like load balancing or firewalls and other security functionality and all the traffic in the data center would be going back and forth, tromboning across the infrastructure as you sought to secure your underlying Compute. The beauty of the Pensando technology is that we actually push that functionality all the way out to the edge at the server so whether those servers are in a data center, whether they're in a colocation facility, whether they're on the edge, we can deliver all of that security service that would traditionally be required in centralized expensive, complex, unique devices that were specific to each individual purpose, and essentially make that a software defined set of services running in each node of your infrastructure, which means that as you scale your infrastructure, you don't have a bottleneck. You're just scaling that security capability with the scaling of your computer infrastructure. It takes traffic off your core networks, which gives you some benefits there, but fundamentally it's about a much more scalable, responsive cost-efficient approach to managing the security of the traffic in your networks and securing the Compute end points within your infrastructure. And it's really exciting to see that being picked up, in financial services and healthcare, and other segments that have you know, very high standards, with respect to security and infrastructure management, which is a great complement to the technology from Pensando and the partnership that we have with Pensando and HPE. >> And it's compact too we should share with our audience it's basically a card, that you stick inside of a server correct Neil? >> That's exactly right. Pensando's PCIe card together with HPE servers, puts that security functionality in the server, exactly where your data is being processed and the power of that is several fold, it avoids the tromboning that we talked about back across the whole network every time you've got to go to a centralized security appliance, it eliminates those complex single purpose appliances from the infrastructure, and that of course means that the failure domain is much smaller cause your failure demands a single server, but it also means that as you scale your infrastructure, your security infrastructure scales with the servers. So you have a much simpler network architecture, and as I say, that's being delivered in environments with very high standards for security, which is a really a great endorsement of the Pensando technology and the partnership that HPE and Pensando will have in bringing that technology to market for our customers. >> So if I understand it correctly, the Pensando is qualified for Pro-Lite, Appollo and in Edgelines. My question is, so if I'm one of those customers today, what's in it for me? Are they sort of hopping on this for existing infrastructure, or is it part of, sort of new digital initiatives, I wonder if you could explain. >> So if you were looking to build out infrastructure for the future, then you would ask yourself, why would you continue to carry forward legacy architectures in your network with these very expensive custom appliances for each security function? Why not embrace a software defined approach that pushes that to the edge of your network whether the edge are in course or are actually out on the edge or in your data centers, you can have that security functionality embedded within your Compute infrastructure, taking advantage of Pensandos technologies. >> So obviously things have changed is specifically in the security space, people are talking about this work from home, and this remote access being a permanent or even a quasi-permanent situation. So I wonder if we could talk about the edge and specifically where Aruba fits in the edge, how Pensando compliments. What's HPE's vision with regard to how this evolves and maybe how it's been supercharged with the COVID pandemic. >> So we're very fortunate to have the Aruba intelligent edge technology in the HPE portfolio. And the power of that technology is its focus on the analysis of data and the development of solutions at the site of the data generated. Increasingly the data volumes are such that they're going to have to be dealt with at the edge and given that, you need to be building edge infrastructure that is capable enough and secure enough for that to be the case. And so we've got a great compliment between the, intelligent edge technology within the Aruba portfolio, with all of the incredible management capabilities that are in those platforms combined with technologies like Pensando and our HPE Compute platforms, bring the ability to build a very cohesive, secure, scalable infrastructure that tackles the challenges of having to do this computer at the edge, but still being able to do it in both a secure and easily managed way and that's the power of the combination of Aruba, HPE Compute and Pensando. >> Well, with the expanded threat surface with people working from home organizations are obviously very concerned about compliance, and being able to enforce consistent policies across this sort of new network, so I think what you're talking about is it's very important that you have a cohesive system from a security standpoint you're not just bolting on some solution at the tail end, your comments. >> Well security, always depends on all the links in the chain and one of the most critical links in the chain is the security of the actual Compute itself. And within the HPE compliant platforms, we've done a lot of work to build very differentiated and exclusive capability with our hardware, a Silicon Root of Trust, which is built directly into Silicon. And that enables us to ensure the integrity of the entire boot chain on the security of the platform, drones up in ways that can't be done with some of the other hardware approaches that are prevalent in the industry, and that's actually brought some benefit, in financial terms to our customers because of the certifications that are enabled in the, Cyber Catalyst designations that we've earned for the platforms. >> So we also know from listening to your announcements with Pensando just observing security in general, that this notion of micro-segmentation is very important being able to have increased granularity as opposed to kind of a blob, maybe you could explain why that's important you know, the so what behind micro-segmentation if you will. >> Well it's all about minimizing the threat perimeter on any given device and if you can minimize the vectors through which your infrastructure will interact on the network, then you can provide additional layers of security and that's the power of having your security functionality right down at the edge, because you can have a security processor sitting right in the server and providing great security of the node level you're no longer relying on the network management and getting all of that right and you also have much greater flexibility because you can easily in a software defined environment, push the policies that are relevant for the individual pieces of infrastructure in an automated policy driven way, rather than having to rely on someone in network security, getting the manual configuration of that infrastructure, correct to protect the individual notes. And if you take that kind of approach, and you embed that kind of technology in servers, which are fundamentally robust in terms of security because of the Silicon Root of Trust that we've embedded across our platform portfolio whether that's Pro-line or Synergy or BladeSystem or Edgeline, you get a tremendous combination, as a result of these technologies, and as I mentioned, the being Cyber Catalyst designation is a proof point of that. Last year there we're over 150 security products, put forward for the Sovereign Capitalist designation, and the only a handful were actually awarded I think 17, of which two were HPE Compute and Aruba. And the power of is that many organizations are not having to deal with insurance for Cybersecurity events. And the Catalyst designation can actually lead to lower premiums for the choice of the infrastructure that you've made to such as HPE Compute, has actually enabled you to have a lower cost of insuring your organization against cybersecurity issues, because infrastructure matters and the choice of infrastructure with the right innovation in it is a really critical choice for organizations moving forward in security and in so many other ways. >> Yeah, you mentioned a lot of things there software defined, that's going to enable automation and scale, you talked about the perimeter you know, the perimeter of the traditional moat around the castle that's gone the perimeter, there is no perimeter anymore, it's everywhere so that whole you know, weakest link in the chain and the chain of events. And then the other thing you talked about was the layers you know very important when you're talking to security practitioners you know, building layers in so all of this really is factoring in security in particular, is factoring into customer buying decisions. Isn't it? >> Well security is incredibly important for so many of our customers across many industries. And having the ability to meet those security needs head on is really critical. We've been very successful in leveraging these technologies for many customers in many different industries, you know, one example is we've recently won multiple deals with the Defense Intelligence Systems Agency, who you will imagine have very high standards for security, worth hundreds of millions of dollars of that infrastructure so there's a great endorsement, from the customer set who are taking advantage of these technologies and finding that they deliver great benefits for them in the operational security of their infrastructure. >> Yeah what if I could ask you a question on the edge. I mean, as somebody who is you know, with a company that is really at the heart of technology, and I'm sure you're constantly looking at new companies, M&A you know et cetera, you know inventing tech, but I want to ask you about the architectures for the edge and just in thinking about a lot of data at the edge, not all the data is going to come back to the data center or the cloud, there's going to be a lot of AI influencing going on in real time or near real time. Do you guys see different architectures emerging to support that edge? I mean from a Compute standpoint or is it going to be traditional architectures that support that. >> It's clearly an evolving architectural approach because for the longest time, infrastructure was built with some kind of hub you know, whether or not some data center or in the cloud, around all of the devices at the edge would be essentially calling home, so edge devices historically have been very focused on connectivity on acquisition of data, and then sending that data back for some kind of processing and action at some centralized location. And the reality is that given the amount of data being generated at the edge now given the capability even of the most modern networks, it's simply not possible to be moving those kinds of data volumes all the way back to some remote processing environment, and then communicating a decision for action all the way back up to the edge. First of all, the networks kind of handle the volume data's involved if every device in the world was doing that, and secondly, the latencies are too slow. They're not fast enough in order to be able to take the action needed at the edge. So that means that you have to countenance systems at the edge that are not actually storing data, that are not actually computing upon data, and in a lot of edge systems historically, they would evolve from very proprietary, very vertically integrated systems to Brax PC controller based systems with some form of IP connectivity back to, some central processing environment. And the reality is that if you build your infrastructure that way, you finish up with a very unmanageable fleet, you finish up with a very fragmented, disjointed infrastructure and our perspective is that companies that are going to be successful in the future have to think themselves as an edge to cloud approach. They have to be pursuing this in a way that views, the edge, the data center, and the cloud as part of an integrated continuum, which enables the movement of data when needed you heard about the swarm learning that you talked about with my colleague Doctor Go, where there's a balance of what is computed, where in the infrastructure, and so many other examples, but you need to be able to move Compute to where the data is, and you need to be able to do that efficiently with a unified approach to the architecture. And that's where assets like the HPE Data Fabric come into play, which enable that kind of unification across the different locations of equipment. It also means you need to think differently about the actual building blocks themselves, in a lot of edge environments, if you take a Classic 19 interact mode Compute device, that was originally designed for the data center it's simply not the right kind of infrastructure. So that's why we have offerings like the Edgeline portfolio and the HPE products there, because they're designed to operate in those environments with different environmentals than you find the data center with different interfaces to systems of action and systems of control, than you'd typically find in a data center environment yet still bringing many of the security benefits and the manageability benefits that we've talked about earlier in our conversation today Dave. So it's definitely going to be an evolving, a new architectural approach at the edge, and companies that are thoughtful about their choice of infrastructure, are going to be much more successful than those that take a more incremental approach, and we were excited to be there to help our customers on that journey. >> Yeah Neil it's a very exciting time I mean you know, much of the innovation in the last decade was found inside the data center and in your world a lot of times you know, inside the server itself but what you're describing is this, end-to-end system across the network and that systems view, and then there's going to be a ton of innovation there and we're very excited for you thanks so much for coming on the Cube it was great to see you again. >> It is great to be here and we're just excited to be here to help our customers, and giving them the best volume for the workloads whether that's taking advantage of GreenLake, taking advantage of the innovative security technologies that we've talked about, or being the edge to cloud platform as a service company that can help our customers transform in this distributed world from the edge to the data center to the cloud. Thanks for having me Dave. >> You very welcome, awesome summary and its always good to see you Neil. Thank you for watching everybody this David Vellante, for the Cube our coverage of the HPE Discover 2020 Virtual Experience, will be right back to the short break. (soft upbeat music)