>>live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners >>back. This is the Cube's coverage >>of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, doing about three and 1/2 days of wall to wall coverage here. Stew Minimum. My co host for this segment is Dave Volante. John Furrier is also here, scaring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program. Two first time guests. I believe so. Uh, Derek is the product manager of product marketing for Cloud Computing with Cisco, and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson, who's director of product development, also with the Cisco Cloud Group. David here from Boston. Matt is also from the Boston area, and customers is coming over from London. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so obviously, cloud computing something we've been talking about many years. We've really found fascinating relationship. Cisco's had, with its customers a zealous through the partner ecosystem, had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week. Maybe start a little bit, you know, Cisco's software journey and positioning in the cloud space right now. >>So it's a really interesting dynamic when we started transitioning to multi cloud and we actually deal with Cloud and Compute coming together and we've had whether you're looking at three infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the APS up operations or whether you're looking at, you know, your DEV environment, your security operations. Each organization has to deal with their angle, which they view, you know, multi cloud. Or they view how they actually operate within those the cloud computing context. And so whether you're on the infrastructure side, you're looking at compute. You're looking at storage. You're looking at resources. If you're on an app operator, you're looking at performance. You're looking at visibility assurance. If you are in the security operations you're looking at, maybe governance. You're looking at policy, and then when you're a developer, you really sort of thinking about see I CD. You're talking about agility, and there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective. All those various angles >>of multi cloud >> is definitely a lot of pieces. Maybe up level it for us a little bit. There's so many pieces way talk for so long. You know you don't talk to any company that doesn't have a cloud. Strategy doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time. And it means every company's got a known positioning. But talk about the relationship Cisco has with its customers and really the advisory condition that you want to have with >>its actually a very relevant question. To what? To what Matt is talking about, because Wei talked a lot about multi cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at computing data centers and then expanding to different clouds. You know, public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities. And if you think about it, the it goes back to what Matt said about I t ops and development kind of efforts. Why is this happening? Really, there's There's the study that we did with with an analyst, and there was an amazing a shocking stats around how within the next three years, organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now. And we have been trying to test this, that our events that made customer meetings etcetera, that is a lot of a lot of change for organizations. So if you think about why are they use, why do they need to basically let go and expand to those clouds? Is because they want to service. I T ops teams want to servers with capabilities, their developers faster, right? And this is where you have within the I T ops kind of theme organization. You have the security kind of frame through the compute frame, the networking where, you know Cisco has a traditional footprint. How do you blend all this? How do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual unique application modernization efforts? I think that's what we're hearing from customers in terms of the feedback. And this is what influences our >>strategy to converts the different business units. And it's an area engineering effort, right? >>I want to poke at that a little bit. I mean, a couple years ago, I have to admit I was kind of a multi cloud skeptic. I always said that I thought it was more of a symptom that actually strategy a symptom of shadow I t and different workloads and so forth, but now kind of buying in because I think I t in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene. I often say so I think it is becoming a strategy. So if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy towards multi cloud and how Cisco it was mapping into that, >>yeah, so So when we talk to customers, it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem. And, like you said, that shadow I t. Has been probably around for longer than anybody want, cares to admit, because people want to move faster. Organizations want to get their product out to market sooner. And so what? What really is we're having conversations now about, you know, how do I get the visibility? How do I get you know, the policies in the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for, that I need that connectivity. So I get the bandwidth, and so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is going. I realized that this is going on now I actually have to Now put some governance and controls around. That is their products is their solutions, is there? You know, they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey. Because as much as we talk about cloud and you know, companies that were born in the cloud cloud native there is a tremendous number of I see organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems. >>Yeah, I agree. And they're starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to Okay, we got this thing. But if you think about the competitive landscape, it's kind of interesting. And I want to try to understand where Cisco fits because again, you initially had companies that didn't know in a public cloud sort of pushing multi cloud. You say? Well, I guess they have to do that. But now you see, and those come out with Google, you see Microsoft leaning in way. Think eventually aws is gonna lead in. And then you say I'm kind of interested in working with some of these cloud agnostic not trying to force Now, now Cisco. A few years ago, you didn't really think about Cisco as a player. Now this goes right in the middle. I have said often that Cisco's in a great position John Furrier as well to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength, making a strong argument that we have the most cost effective, most secure, highest performance networks to connect clouds. That seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours. And does that essentially summarize your strategy? And And how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market? >>I would say that I can I can I can take that. Yeah, for sure. It's chewy question for hours. So I was thinking about satellite you mentioned before. Like Okay, that's, you know, the world has turned around completely way seem to talk about Target satellite Is something bad happening? And now, suddenly we completely forgot about it, like let let free, free up the developers and let them do whatever they want. And basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market. So all of the solutions you mentioned in the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least our offering out there. Certainly the Big Three have differences have their strengths on. And I think those things are closer to the developer environment. Basically, you know, if you're looking into something like AI ml, there's one provider that you go with. If you're looking for a mobile development framework, you're gonna go somewhere else. If you're looking for a D, are you gonna go somewhere else? Maybe not a big cloud, but your service provider. But you've been dealing with all this all this time, so you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for. So where does Cisco come in? You know, we're not a public cloud provider way offer products as a service from our data centers and our partners data centers. But at the the way that the industry sees a cloud provider a public cloud like AWS Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, etcetera, we're not that we don't do that. Our mission is to enable organizations with software hardware products SAS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity, security, visibility, observe ability, and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clubs. So way kind of way kind of moved to a point where we flip around the question, and the first question is, Who is your club provider? What? How many? Tell us the clouds you work with, and we can give you the modular pieces you can put we can put together for you. So these, so that you can make the best out of >>your club. Being able to do that across clouds in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent, that represent the edicts of your organization, no matter where your data lives, that's sort of the vision and the way >>this is translated into products into Cisco's products. You naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider networking. That's that's really sort of our, you know, go to in what we're also when we have a significant computing portfolio as well. So connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geography is point A to point B. In the natural routing and switching world, there's connectivity between applications between compute and so this week. You know, the announcements were significant in that space when you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform, that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from an experience journey map so you can actually know where problems might occur in the application domain. You can actually, then go that next level down into the infrastructure level and you can say, Okay, maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource, whether it's compute resource, whether it's memory, whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on Prem, or whether it's in the public cloud, that you have that application residing and then, quite candidly, you have the actual hardware itself. So inter site. It has an ability to control that entire stack so you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer. >>I'm glad you brought up some of the applications. I wonder if we could stay there for a moment. Talk about some of the changing patterns for customers. A lot of talk in the industry about cloud native often gets conflated with micro services, container ization and lots of the individual pieces there. But when one of Our favorite things have been talking about this week is software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces. So help us understand what you're hearing from customers and how you're helping them through this transition to cost. You're saying, Absolutely, there's going to be lots of new applications, more applications and they still have the old stuff that they need to continue to manage because we know in I t nothing ever goes away. Yeah, >>that's that's definitely I was I was thinking, you know, there's there's a vacuum at the moment on and there's things that Cisco is doing from from a technology perspective to fill that gap between application. What you see when it comes to monitoring, making sure your services are observable. And how does that fit within the infrastructure stack, You know, everything upwards of the network layer. Basically, that is changing dramatically. Some of the things that matter touched upon with regards to, you know, being able to connect the networking, the security and the infrastructure of the compute infrastructure that the developers basically are deploying on top. So there's a lot of the desert out of things on continue ization. There's a lot of, in fact, it's one part of the off the shelf inter site of the stack that you mentioned and one of the big announcements. Uh huh. You know that there's a lot of discussion in the industry around. Okay, how does that abstract further the conversation on networking, for example? Because that now what we're seeing is that you have a huge monoliths enterprise applications that are being carved down into micro services. Okay, they know there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native? Is it related to containers? Different kind of things, right? But containers are naturally the infrastructure defacto currency for developers to deploy because of many, many benefits. But then what happens between the kubernetes layer, which seems to be the standard and the application? Who's going to be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying? You know, things like service mesh, network service mess? How is the never evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications? So there's so many things happening at the same time where Cisco has actually a lot of taking a lot of the front seat. Leading that conversation >>is where it gets really interesting. Sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned kubernetes is the de facto standard, but it's a defacto standard that's open everybody's playing with. But historically, this industry has been defined by a leader comes out with a de facto standard kubernetes, not a company. It's an open standard, so but there's so many other components than containers. And so history would suggest that there's going to be another defacto standard or multiple standards that emerge. And your point earlier. You got to have the full stack. You can't just do networking. You can't just do certain if you so you guys are attacking that whole pie. So how do you think this thing will evolve? I mean, you guys obviously intend to put out a stat cast a wide net as possible, captured not only your existing install basement attract, attract others on you're going aggressively at it as a czar. Others How do you see it shaking out? You see you know, four or five pockets, you see one leader emerging. I mean, customers would love all you guys to get together and come up with standards. That's not going to happen. So where it's jump ball right now? >>Well, yeah. You think about, you know, to your point regarding kubernetes is not a company, right? It is. It is a community driven. I mean, it was open source by a large company, but it's community driven now, and that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving. There is so much coming at I t organizations from a new paradigm, a new software, something that's, you know, the new the shiny object that sort of everybody sort of has to jump onto and sort of say, that is the way we're gonna function. So I t organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them and every angle. And I think what starting toe happen is the management and the you know that Stack who controls that or who is helping i t organizations to manage it for them. So really, what we're trying to say is there's elements that have to put together that have to function, and kubernetes is just one example Docker, the operating system that associated with it that runs all that stuff then you have the application that goes right sides on top of it. So now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week. Hx AP the application platform for a check so you have the Compute cluster, but then you have the stack on top of that that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security that's looking at the the actual making opinions about what should go in the stack and managing that for you. So you don't have to deal with that because you just focus on the application development. Yeah, >>I mean, Cisco's in a strong position to do. There's no question about it. To me, it comes down to execution. If you guys execute and deliver on the products and services that you say, you know, you announced, for instance, this weekend previously, and you continue on a road map, you're gonna get a fair share of this market place. I think there's no question >>so last topic before we let you go is love your viewpoint on customers. What's separating kind of leaders from you know, the followers in this space, you know, there's so much data out there. And I'm a big fan of the State of Dev Ops report Help separate, You know, some not be not. Here's the technology or the piece, but the organizational and, you know, dynamics that you should do. So it sounds like you like that report also, love. What do you hear from customers? How do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space? >>Yeah, The State of Dev Ops report was fascinating. I mean, they've been doing that for a number of years now. Yeah, exactly. And really what? It's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or the third paradigm shift. Our journey we're going through, there's the technology side for sure, and so that's getting more complex. You have micro services, you have application explosion. You have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up. But then it's really about the human aspect of human elements, the people about it. And that's really I think, what separates you know, the elites that are really sort of, you know, just charging forward and ahead because they've been able to sort of break down the silos because really, what you're talking about in cloud Native Dev Ops is how you take the journey of the experience of the service from end end from the development all the way to production. And how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain their data, set their operations and then have to translate that or have to sort of you have another conversation with another organization that that doesn't look at that, That has no experience of that? So that is what we're talking about, that end and view. >>And in addition to all the things we've been talking about, I think security's a linchpin here. You guys are executing on security. You got a big portfolio and you've seen a lot of M and A and a lot of companies trying to get in, and it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out. But that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint, and they build out >>Yeah, absolutely. If you follow Dev ops methodologies, security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to 100% gone after anything, just give you the final word. >>I was just a follow up with You. Got some other model was saying, There's so many, there's what's happening out there Is this democracy around? Standards with is driven by communities and way love that in fact, Cisco is involved in many open sores community projects. But you asked about customers and just right before you were asking about you know who is gonna be the winner. There's so many use cases. >>Uh huh. >>There's so much depth in Tim's off. You know what customers want to do with on top of kubernetes, you know, take Ai Ml, for example, something that we have way have some, some some offering services on there's cast. A mother wants to ai ml their their container stuck. Their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else, is doing something just hosting. And there's always going to be a SAS provider that is niche servicing some oil and gas company, you know, which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that instead of just going to a public cloud provider that is more agnostic. Does that make sense? Yeah. >>Yeah. There's relationships that exist that are just gonna get blown away. That add value today. And they're not going to just throw him out. Exactly. >>Well, thank you so much for helping us understand the updates where your customers are driving super exciting space. Look forward to keeping an eye on it. Thanks so much. Alright, there's still lots more coming here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona. People are standing watching all the developer events, lots going on the floor and we still have more. So thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah.