(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From Barcelona, Spain. It´s theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco Veeam and theCUBE´s ecosystem partners. >> Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE´s exclusive live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain with Cisco´s Live 2018 Europe. I was going to say DevNet, but we´re on the DevNet zone. I´m John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon.com . Our next guest is Susie Wee, who´s Vice-President, CTO of DevNet. Susie, CUBE alumni, welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Great to see you, welcome to Barcelona. >> John: Thank you for having us, we´re in the hot section of the Devnet Zone, the signs, cause it´s a big part of the hallway here. And it´s really where the action is. >> Susie: It is. >> You guys have continued to do a great job and we´re psyched to be on the ground where the action is. Thanks for inviting us. >> Great, I´m glad that you´re here. There´s so much going on. >> Okay, so Devnet is this renaissance going on at Cisco. But it´s also not just a Cisco phenomenon, the world of software development is seeing an explosion. I mean, from the edge of the network, and crazy fringe of cryptocurrency, blockchain, all the way into app development and then under the hood DevOps. Some really great things are happening, you have it featured here, DevOps, at Devnet. What´s going on at the DevNet zone? >> Yeah, it´s really interesting because what happens is here at Cisco live and here in the DevNet zone, we have basically people who deployed network and Compute Infrastructures, around Europe. And so, it´s pretty amazing that we have the people who are like feet on the street, working in those networks, deploying them, digitizing Smart Cities, putting up new buildings, putting up new infrastructure everywhere. And, what´s really cool is, they´re all interested in learning about APIs and software. And, so, that´s not easy, right? That´s something that´s a big shift in, like, I´m running a network infrastructure, and I´m ready to learn about software and deep-dive into APIs. So, our new products are coming out, which actually have built-in programmability. Like, the network now has APIs, it´s getting built into the network. And whereas you could always like take a Compute Infrastructure and manage it virtually, use, you know, CICD pipelines and everything there with DevOps. But the thing is, now the Network has APIs and you can now kind of flexibly deploy your network in that same way of DevOps but using Net DevOps, and that´s kind of what it´s all about. >> Yeah, Susie, I wonder, there was so much hype for a bunch of years about like, software to find networking. (Susie laughs) But, under the covers, like behind the scenes, you know, it´s the API economy. That´s where the actions happen, it doesn´t seem like it´s gotten quite the attention, you have some interesting things about where Net and Dev go together. What do people miss out there, that, you know, kind of the industry watchers, that, you know, aren´t here, aren´t seeing the people that are, you know, been spending days already doing stuff here. >> Susie: Yeah. >> And obviously you´re really excited. >> Well there was all the kind of excitement and hype, you know, it kind of went through it´s hype curve of what software-defined networking was and would be and could be. But the thing that we have to remember is that there´s like real mission critical networks operating all around the world and people who are out there, who deploy them and run them and manage them. And so, what happens is, you need to do more than just like put out a new protocol or put out a new innovation. You need to kind of bring the community along and kind of still make those revolutions, but, by evolving, right, having the evolutions and the folks who are deploying and making all the right thing happen. So, what happens is, just SDN is now becoming a reality. Because, it took more than just putting a controller on top of an existing network, like, that´s good, that´s an important part of it. But, it´s also just building programmability into the network elements themselves. And then, being able to get that really kind of rapid responses. You´re, you know, deploying new configuration, setting policy, incorporating security, you know. And so, now, just SDN is becoming real and the real world here, all of these folks are picking it all up. >> So I have to ask you, you mentioned Net DevOps, cause, you, we love, we´ve talked about DevOps all day long, Stu and I, with all the shows and, you know, we´re hop the trot for DevOps. But you said Net DevOps. >> Susie: Yeah. >> What is that? (Susie laughs) >> Can you explain? >> Yeah, it´s really awesome, it´s just basically the fact that, you know, with DevOps you´re taking your applications, cloud applications, deploying them fast, right? Rapidly, CICD, using this infrastructure-as-code type of thinking. Well now, it´s not only the Compute but the network plays in that too. So, basically, if you picture underneath that network is a bunch of network devices, a bunch of security, you know, products, all of these things are coming together to really connect everything. And, that´s becoming programmable. And what happens is now with Net DevOps you can create and treat the network as code. So, you want to deploy changes in your network, you´ll do it with a software configuration update. You know, you want to like, add new devices into the network. You want to add new users and set new policies for security, control how apps are done, how cloud, you know, applications are running. You can actually roll that out as software changes. So, what happens is suddently, it´s not only Compute that works in a DevOps pipeline, but the network is also participating in this Net DevOps pipeline. >> You know, I love this new trend, Net DevOps, because it´s kind of like, the old days was you moved up the stack. Now you see the movement down the stack from the applications, to DevOps, now moving lower to NetOps, Net DevOps. >> Susie: Yes. >> But the question is, that makes still no sense, by the way, but I need to ask. Who´s writing that code? The network guys? So, in DevOps, we knew who the DevOps guys were, it was the operators and the developers kind of coming together. >> Susie: Yeah. >> Yeah, pushing code, real agile. Who does that, the same guys doing DevOps? Or is it the network guys, a combination oh both? Would you... >> Oh, my God. >> A lot of people. (says in foreign language) >> Yeah, it´s really exciting the way that it´s evolving. So, what you see is, you know, in Cisco Live, we have a huge kind of community, just people who come to Cisco Live to get trained, to get their certifications on how to deploy the latest networking technologies and operate, manage them. They get certified and their running those networks around the world. They´re now here, picking up the software skills and learning to use these, the new software products, and being able to deploy in Net DevOps. So, they´re all here to learn about how can I put built-in automation. You know, once you have that programmability and automation you can scale and work things out in really big ways. How can I put applications performance monitoring into my network? You know, and make sure that it´s operating properly and we´re getting the right assurance that it´s performing well. So, the network operators, are picking up those skills. But, in addition, there´s actually the app developers, who are coming in and app developers who are writing, for example, management or DevOps or even, you know, Docker, Kubernetes. Folks who are in that, who need the network. And basically now they´re like "the network has APIs, I can actually use that, so that, if I, you know, for Docker and for Kubernetes, you know, we´re working with Google on stuff. Our developers are actually now writing tools to make sure that, as you´re optimizing your microservices, the placement of them, you´re taking the network into account as well. >> So you kind of get both. >> So it´s interesting, and Kubernetes plays an interesting role because you can actually run those functions >> Susie: Yes. >> On Kubernetes, can´t you? >> Susie: Yes. >> So that´s kind of a new trend. >> Susie: Yeah. >> Who´s, I mean, so they´re writing code in here, in DevNet Zone? Or is that, the network operators are coming in banging out code? >> So, network operator are here banging out code. There´s app developers who are coming in and banging out code as well. And this whole thing of like, you know, the infrastructure guys, the app developer guys. And then, the DevOps. There´s this DevOps professional, kind of like the IT folks that are moving on to embrace DevOps and they´re kind of emerging in the middle of here to use all of these tools that are created in open source. >> So you´re appealing to all constituency stakeholders of software. >> We are, we are, yeah. (laughs) >> We are, and actually I that some... >> Is that why DevNet´s so popular? (laughs) >> I think that people have a need, they see a need and (laughs), and basically what I think, like the trend that´s going on that´s kind of making this stuff happen, is that, we know there´s so much exciting, excitement in applications and cloud and all of the developments there, and the internet of things. These applications need the network more than ever before. So, before, they only used the network for connectivity, but now they need the network for security. They need it for scale. They do need more bandwidth, they need good performance. And, so... >> John: And they need to program that too. >> And they need to program it, exactly. And so, that´s what the new network APIs, the fact that you have a programmable network is what´s letting those guys play. And not just say, you know, before it was "here´s your network, like, just do the most you can, given the performance of the network", right? >> So Susie, first of all... >> But now it´s programmable. >> Congratulations on, you know, the DevNet Zone here is awesome. >> Susie: Thank you. >> And, we know it´s challenging to bring developers in and to, you know, pull this community in where, they might not have been before, there´s retraining everything, but, I was wondering if you can give us a little inside into Cisco. So, Cisco, you know, has been around for decades. Networking company. Software has been a piece of it for a long time, I mean, it´s, you know, even when it´s, you know, "hey, we spent a lot of money on building this chip out there", I was who´s what drove that. Software´s a large piece but, the whole developer angle, getting Cisco behind this, give us a little bit of inside as for what kind of transformation, you know, your team has driven inside to get more of Cisco onboard. I mean, you know, people that are used to selling boxes, and things that, you know, the networking industry is about ports and cables and speeds and feeds and, you know, apps are very different. >> It is, it is very different and it´s, um, it was actually really great. So we´ve built DevNet over the last four years. And it was one thing to kind of have a strategy, like, we knew that the products were going to software, that SDN was emerging. And that, the only way it could actually become real is for Cisco to also participate in it, right? Just cause there´s so much network out there that is Cisco. And so, the entire industry has made that become more real. But, you need to build an ecosystem around it, right? The only reason that it´d have software, like, there´s many reasons, but one of the main reasons is actually to make sure that the ecosystem is participating in the innovation. So, yeah, we created DevNet to, not just focus on our internal development but to provide and kind of catalyze the industry to participate and really innovate and build software on top using all the new APIs. So, um, so yeah, it´s been, it´s been amazing to see the growth and what´s interesting is, over the last 4 years, it´s the community. So, from our first DevNet Zone we had a lot of people who are interested. You know, they´re all like, ah! You know, my day job´s been networking. I coded a long time ago, let me get back into it. But now we see that audience, plus much more. Like, if you look at here at how engaged all of these kind of networkers and developers are, is, they´re right in there. They´re just hungry saying, you know, I have applications that I need to deploy. Applications are hitting the infrastructure. My network can make a difference in how well these new applications run. They´re all in. >> Susie, you´ve done this you´ve done this a number of times, now. Do you have like, kind of the hero numbers as to a what percentage of the attendees you know, spend a bunch of time in the DevNet zone, how much code or applications get written? Just, kind of order of magnitude. >> Susie: Oh. >> Kind of the engagement. >> You mean like, kind of like, from before til now? >> Yeah, well, pr just, you know, what expectations... >> Yeah. >> For this show, what you´ve seen at some of the previous events. >> Yeah, well, kind of what´s funny is, what happened is, the DevNet Zone, like having a developer conference within Cisco Live, it kind of grew as like a "What´s going on there?". And people where immediately interested, it was full. But we have just kind of grown and grown it to have learning labs, to have ISV partners in here, to have just kind of, like, you know, resellers. People who are solutions providers, they are kind of all here. This has, actually turned into the busiest area of Cisco Live. >> Yeah, and you´ve got your own events, too. >> Yes, yes, that´s right. And on top of like having the DevNet Zone here, our developer conference within Cisco Live, what other Cisco audience comes in, right? A huge ecosystem. But also have DevNet Create. So, when we´re going out, app developers are also interested in network APIs. So, it´s not just networkers. And, so, we actually have DevNet Create, which is just the dedicated developer conference for IOT, cloud developers, app developers. And they´ve shown big interest in all of this as well. >> And this is a whole new constituency, but it´s kind of the same game, though, right? It´s like, you offering the programmable network to a whole another net new Cisco community? Is that kind of like you guys look at it? >> It is, and, exactly. And like, we´ve gone outside, we´re offering the network. And what we´re doing is, we´re actually, you know, when you´re a real networking geek, like a networking expert. >> John: Like us. >> You can do network talk, right? And you´re talking network, and you´re kind of getting into all of that. And before app developers were like, we don´t care about that, like, just, we need to write our apps. We shouldn´t have to worry about the network. But, now that those APIs are coming too, and again, their apps are dependent on network performance, they´re dependent on security they can get from the network. It turns out that once we express the value proposition to them, like, this is what a network API can do for you. They´re really interested. >> And even though that we´ve observed that there´s a separation between app developers who just want to write apps >> Susie: Yep >> And software engineering, which is under the hood they still need to be involved in the network because of microservices. >> Susie: Yes. >> So now they have the ability to use APIs that they´re comfortable with, they know ABIs. And, make unique changes to the app, based upon unique network characteristics they can tap into. >> Yeah. >> John: This seems to be the glue in the crossover point for you guys. >> It is. >> John: Did I get that right? >> It is, it is. So, what happens is, there will always be a set of app developers, who of course, are not going to use the network. They´re going to write their app, they´re going to want it to deploy everywhere, of course. I mean, that´s what everybody wants. But you´ve already seen it. As someone writes a cloud app, right? They write a cloud service or a cloud app, and it scales, and they´re deploying their app across different clusters and >> They are learning a lot >> John: They´re going to write >> About what´s going on >> John: They´re going to write policy. >> They´re going to write policies >> Yeah >> They have to decide what countries am I going to spin up my servers in, you know. >> Yeah. >> So, actually, they do a lot of that. So, what happens is, this set of kind of cloud developers, and specially as they moved to microservices as you said, their applications are going to a microservices-based architecture. Things can spin up in different places and then it becomes more critical of, you know, how do these different containers talk to each other? What´s the networking policy for what data can go in and out? What´s the security policy? And, you need to build that in. So, the network matters to them. >> Well, a beautiful thing about what you guys are doing is, you´re catering to a whole new generation of developers who are slinging APIs on one end, but also potentially writing Node.js code. And so, the´re very familiar with IO. >> Susie: Exactly, yes. >> So, microservices is like fish to water. And so, you´re just making it easier >> Susie: Yes. >> for them. That´s the, that´s the angle on the app side. >> That´s right, and then we´re just giving them that tool. And they had so much pain with it before because a lot of times people would be like writing their app, right? They´re doing it in their cluster, then they push it to production. Boom, it goes out. And then, it doesn´t work anymore. And a lot of times it´s because the network is not set up properly in their new thing. So they blame the network and the blame... But, once you start to open up the APIs, you can start to move these things and do it, you know... >> Well, Susie, you´ve got a great group. It´s the biggest story here. We believe, we´ve been reporting DevNet Zone. You know, theCUBE, we´re always on the best trends and the best waves, you´re on it. >> By the way, have you seen the security challenge over here? >> The blackhat >> So,the blackhat, white hat security challenge? It´s actually pretty interesting. (John laughs) >> It shows... >> John: Well, we´ll have to go test our chops, too. >> That´s right, that´s right. >> John: Dust off those coding hands. >> That´s right. (laughs) >> We´ll go over there. Well, I love the tagline, all around these classrooms. Learn, code, inspire and connect. >> Yes. >> Great motto, cause you´re building community in one end, and educating on the other spectrum. So, education to community, great spectrum. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Susie Wee, Vice-President and CTO of DevNet, here at Cisco, doing a great job. This is where the action is. This is the transformation of Cisco. It´s becoming software and network DevOps. New term, Net DevOps, heard here on theCUBE. I´m John Furrier and Stu Miniman. We´ll be back with more live coverage, in Barcelona, Spain after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's The Cube. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and The Cube's ecosystem partner. >> Hey welcome back, everyone. This is The Cube live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE co-host of The Cube with my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Riaz Raihan, who's the global VP and general manager of Cisco IoT, Internet of Things Division. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, John. >> Great to see you. New to Cisco, IoT, I was commenting on the keynote to Stu today, I mean Cisco got it right ten years ago in their initial vision. And it's now happening in real time in front of our eyes. We see cars, we see connected people, we see connected everything. Everything's connected with an IP address or some connection point with power. That is IoT world, it's massive. You're in charge. Are you having fun yet? >> Absolutely. I mean, I joined in May last year, and I can tell you it's been an eventful eight and a half months. Cisco has a huge commitment to its IoT. They've made a massive investment, of people, of funds, and of intent. I mean, this is one of the top strategies for the company. Right from our CEO Chuck Robbins down, everyone's really committed to IoT. We've made a few important changes. We're making it real. And as you said, IoT today is ubiquitous. So it's very important for Cisco, as a leader in this field, to demonstrate that leadership, and I'm honored to be leading the charge. >> So define what's happening at Cisco. If you could put a stake in the ground right now, as someone who's coming in fresh, and, again, you've inherited a good position. As we say in the NASCAR business, whole position. What are you doing? How do you look at it and how would you explain Cisco's view of IoT, because everyone seems to have a different view of how they're attacking IoT. What's the strategy for Cisco? How are you going after it? >> You're right. I mean, IoT means different things to different people. But the one common thing is that it's very context-based. Right? IoT within the context of manufacturing, as an example, is different from within a context of roadways and transportation. So we've done a couple of things to get that context right. First of all, we've defined how we're going to go after the market. So we've got two platforms. We've got Jasper, which was acquired by Cisco, which is IoT for everything to do with cellular networks. So if you're on a public cellular network, Jasper is the platform you'll use. And then we've got Kinetic, which is our platform for IT and OT networks. So first we defined our strategy around product. Next, we've defined which industries we'll go after. And there's five key verticals that we've decided are crucial for Cisco. Number one is cities. We have full position in that. Number two is manufacturing. Number three is energy, which includes both oil and gas as well as utilities. Number four is transportation. That includes roadways as well as fleet. And number five is retail. So that's really our go-to market strategy. We are kind of focusing on specific use cases and specific industries. >> And you view the network, we were talking before we went on camera, there's certainly cloud, which is not competitive to you guys, or are they? But how do you, is the network more important than the edge, is the edge where the action is? Cause a device on the network technically is a device, it's a thing. The internet of things, people are things. Machines are things. >> Absolutely. >> John: So where is the edge, scent or does it matter? Your philosophy on this. >> So, you know, IoT, the "T" stands for "things." And everything is connected to something, right? And that's where the data's coming from. So whether it's a machine, whether it's a moving vehicle, whether it's a vending machine, or a side center, they're all things. Cisco has owned the network for a long time, right? And a lot of these things that we talk about are the last point of a network, and they're connected to some network in some capacity. So we approach IoT from the bottom up. We have, I believe, a great position to approach IoT from. We understand the network, we understand what's on the network, we've got visibility to the techs on the network, we have secured the network, and it gives us a great perspective on how to approach IoT. To your other point around cloud, we are not competitive at all with the cloud business. As a matter of fact, we are complementary. We work with all the big guys out there. We have figured out how best to work with them, because at the end of the day, their mission is to drive as much data to the cloud as possible. Our mission is to help extract data from difficult to extract places. So it's actually a pretty good marriage. >> And what's the best way to work with them? You said you've figured out the best way to work with the clouds, what is that best way? >> So you mentioned the edge. I think the edge is where we had to define clear rules of engagement. Our theory on the edge is that we will bring data, as I said, from difficult to extract places, and compute it at the edge, right? And then we'll actually transport it to wherever the customer wants it to go. And, as you heard in the keynotes today, we live in a multi-cloud world. Very few customers are with one cloud. They either have, you know, two more more of the big puppet cloud guys, or they have their own private clouds, or they have a combination thereof. So in that sense, we'll do all the edge compute, and then when the data has to be transferred or moved to the cloud, that's when we'll kind of help figure out what the customer wants to do, and then move it to where the customer wants it to be. >> So Riaz, your background's software, and I want you to give us a little bit of insight as to where we are with IoT today. Specifically, think about go to market and sales cycle. Some of the things I've heard is there's a lot of customers interested, but it's really early. And there's a lot of consultative activity there, it's not to the point where, you know, oh okay, you're this industry, this is the solution, let's shrink-wrap it and go sell it. So it takes a little bit longer. Where are we, how are we along that maturity cycle, and how does that fit into Cisco's selling model and partners? >> You're absolutely right, Stu. IoT is still very nascent. Customers are still trying to figure out not just how to do things, but what to do. And I think Cisco has a leadership role, because of our legacy and because of our brand, and frankly because of our top leadership. While I come from the software world, I recognize that Cisco has had great leadership in the networking area, great leadership in security, and great leadership in software. We are transitioning into becoming a software company, we've had great strength in software, our CEO has often said that 80% plus of our engineers are software engineers. With that said, what we are doing for customers is we are helping define what we call "industry solutions." Let me give you an example. If you're talking to a manufacturing customer, who's trying to connect a number of their machines, both green field and brown field, to sensors, these are actual devices that we partner with and that we install for customers, and then extract data from those sensors onto an edge compute device, there's software involved, but equally there's networking hardware involved in making this happen. And then there's of course virtualization and connection to the cloud, as we just talked about. So to make all that, to make that value chain come to life, we are doing two things. Number one, we are defining what that data flow looks like, and number two, we are defining for the customer what the end-to-end solution looks like, because we think that's critical. And in all the verticals that I've mentioned, we've actually gone down to the level of use case. So if you look at manufacturing, to stick with that example, we have got a use case for equipment health monitoring, we've got a use case for energy monitoring, we've got a use case for track and trace, and each use case has a combination of software, networking, hardware, security, and services. So Cisco's taking a leadership position in defining that, by industry. >> So, you mentioned Kinetic was an acquisition? No, no, Jasper was. >> Riaz: Jasper was, yes. >> Okay, Kinetic was for IT OT, information technology and operational technology. We've reported, and we've observed, the culture clash between OT and IT. OT guys, they're like IT, get out of my face, I don't want an IT connection anywhere near my hardened system. Usually around industrial IoT. How is Cisco bringing those worlds together? 'Cause it feels like dev ops again, is it a collision, is it smooth? Your view? Does it matter? How are you seeing that? >> It's evolving. Going back to Jasper, which Cisco acquired a couple of years ago. And by the way, a very successful acquisition, the device growth has grown from about 20 million devices to 60 billion plus today, in just over eighteen months, and continues to grow rapidly. Jasper, most of Jasper's go-to-market motion was focused at the business user. What you would call OT. Jasper, one of the big verticals in Jasper is the connected car. All of the big, they do a lot of different verticals, they empower a lot of different industries, and anything to do with cellular IOT is served by Jasper. >> And that's mostly sensors. >> Riaz: That's mostly sensors. >> So you're saying, the OT's kind of covered with the Jasper side. >> Riaz: Yeah, yeah. >> So you win at both sides. >> Yeah, we have a lot of OT coverage with Jasper. And there's a lot of great skills that Jasper brought into Cisco. It's not just the technology and the massive user base, there's a lot of great skills as well. Now, coming to Kinetic, this one's interesting, because when we've worked with, going back to manufacturing as an example, we have to work with the OT guys. This is a good thing for Cisco, 'cause it gives us a completely new set of buyers in the corporate world to interact with, and by definition we're actually bringing IT into a lot of these OT conversations. Now, some of them - >> Well they've got the data, too. You've got to bring it back home, right? >> Yeah, but there's also minor other things like security to deal with, right? So we've got to kind of bridge that gap, and OT and IT are kind of playing a big role in defining that. >> You mentioned the key word that I'm surprised it took us so long to get to. Security. Talk about the ever-expanding attack radius. In the keynote this morning they talked about all the new agents are in there, IoT's huge risk out there. What's Cisco's role there, what's the ecosystem partner? How does Cisco maintain a leadership position in this place? >> So let me start by saying something that could be quite sobering. IoT devices are some of the most hackable devices on the planet, right? Research study after research study bears this out. That said, Cisco's point of view is very simple. Security is something we start with, it is not an afterthought. So to that end, we have integrated security into our strategy, but more importantly into our products. Let me give you two examples. Jasper is one of the most secure IoT platforms on the planet, if not the most secure. Jasper is delivered through our service provider network, that we call JPO, so Jasper Partner Operators. In the US it happens to be AT&T, globally we've got about fifty partners to do this. And we work with them to make that rock solid and robust. We also offer additional security offerings on top of what comes with Jasper. Now, coming to the OT IT side, that's a big challenge as well. If you guys had gone to the Walder Solutions, which you probably did, you would have seen that we have a specific offering called IoT Tech Defense. We take this very seriously. We've baked this into our architecture right when are designing the starter solutions, and then we also stress test our solutions as those solutions grow. >> I can see the OT being very secure, end-to-end, enclosed, I should say first licensed spectrum with cellular, and then an end-to-end endpoint. Cool, I can lock that down. Here's the problem. A wifi device as a light bulb, it's got a computer in it, it's got multi-threaded processes, I mean computers are this big. That's going to require a policy on the network. It's an IP device. This is where the threat factor is. This is an area you guys can help. So this is more on the IT side, because that wifi light bulb in my house, which has processes, could be hacked, and actually spawn a lot of malware from there. So how do you take that dumb device, that wants to be a little bit smart, that's too smart right now with all this processing power? >> Too smart and - >> I mean it's a dumb device, all it needs to do is just flash lights, it's got to be on and off. You know what I'm saying? So when is that going to be throttled back? Can you guys help with the network layer? >> You know, we recognize the volatibility of some of these devices, and as David Goeckeler mentioned in his keynote today, security for us is a massive business, but it's also something we think about constantly. Like, going back to your example, what we can bring is the IT security depth that we have. Whether it's wifi, a wired connection, or a combination thereof. I think we've got the network chops and the security chops to secure those devices, and we're doing that. The important thing is we're doing that, baking it into our project strategy. >> I just want to get philosophical for a second with you, because it's a great conversation and IoT's certainly important. Let's kind of zoom out, kind of go in the clouds a little bit, no pun intended, and look down at the industry. Architecturally there's a debate, and we've said that the data center's going to get shrunk down so small that the edge device is going to be a data center some day. How do you see that? Because that changes the data equation, we all know the cost of moving data around the network. So ultimately you have to have a lot of compute at the edge. Your thoughts? How does that play out architecturally, how should customers grok that and think about it? Is it too early? >> So I've seen a shift happening in this as recently as the last twelve months. The emphasis on edge, I know it's very topical, it's been in the business press for a long time, but I think if you look at the ground reality, it is true. A lot of the data consumed by customers today is consumed very close to the point of generation. A classic industry that does this repeatedly is manufacturing. One of the studies indicated that almost 72% of the data generated on the shop floor in an IoT context is consumed in the shop floor. So a lot, a lot of this is going to the cloud. There's other industries, but a lot of data is going to the cloud. But the reality is the edge is getting more and more important. Compute, as you said, is going to the edge. This is trend we'll see, that will continue to happen. It's not going to lessen, it's probably going to deepen. And from Cisco's perspective, I think we're well-positioned to take advantage of this, and to serve our customers as this trend evolves. >> Awesome. Well, so much. Thanks so much for spending the time with The Cube. We really appreciate it. It's illuminating for the folks watching. What's your mission as you head up the division? What's your marching orders to the troops? Honestly, you've got to look at it and reign things in, double down where it's working, and evolve with this wave that's coming, that's here. You've got decentralized apps down, out in the road. You've got immutable block chain entries potentially. Crazy stuff happening. How do you look at this? How do you motivate the team? What's your marching orders? What are your top goals? >> So we've got three key objectives, right? Number one, we want to get to a billion connected devices. And Jasper is really helping drive that charge. We're at 60+ million, growing to a hundred million in this calendar year. We want to get to a billion, because once you get to that level of scale, you become the de facto standard in many ways. So that's number one. Number two, on the Kinetic side, we want it to be ubiquitous. We want to have Kinetic in all of those industries that I've mentioned, and then some. We want to own the use case. And number three, we want to make sure that we're leading with IoT and helping drive great growth for the company, 'cause that's Cisco's number one imperative. >> Awesome. Riaz, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Great conversation about IoT. Great thought leadership at the helm at IoT. A confusing but massively growing opportunity. It's a connected world, this is what we live in today, it's pervasive and software's going to be running it, and it's going to be secure. And of course The Cube's breaking it down for you here, we are secured in Barcelona with The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: From Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube covering Cisco live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veem and The Cube's ecosystem partner. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is The Cube live in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube with my co-host this week, Stu Miniman, the coupon analyst. Our next guest is Denny Trivette, who's the Vice President of Ecosystem Sales Acceleration Global Partner Organization at Cisco. Denny welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much glad to be here. >> So you have a good job. You have to on the business side look at commercializing all this great technology everyone's learning. It's important because there's big numbers, billions of dollars involved in the businesses. Depending on who you talk to, this vendor does a billion dollars with Cisco. This vendor does a billion dollars with supplies at Cisco so a lot of happy customers, but an evolving ecosystem. What's the business outlook from your stand point? Obviously there's change happening, positive change at Cisco. What's going on in the business side? Is it bumpy, is it smooth? Give us the weather report. >> Yeah I think first point though you said I have a good job for Cisco? I have a great for Cisco. I love what we do cause our job is all about how do we leverage the full power of the Cisco partner ecosystem to really build new connections that will drive and accelerate our solutions to all kinds of customers. When you say bumpy areas, absolutely. >> Yeah >> There's always going to be trends and different moves in the market or what have you. For us, what we're able to do is expand the opportunity that Cisco is focused on. We're not just selling products, technologies, and architectures into an IT buying center. Now we're opening up buying centers for our good friends at App D or getting into the line of business and engaging in new conversations that unlock real value. >> You guys have always been a company that has a heritage of enabling technologies. You enable other people to create value and speeds and fees and great tech. The question for you is you mentioned in your title sales acceleration, you can't be in a more pressing time now where words like time to value are faster. Customers want more value up front faster than ever before. So that kind of puts the pressure on the business front. How do you get that done? Is there a certain business model that you guys evolved to? Is it tried and true? Can you explain the business model of how you get to that value faster with partners? >> I think it's a very important point because back in the day we used to celebrate successes, and a success was hey we just launched a new joint integration. That was a success, and we'd celebrate that. In the end nobody monetized that, so in the end that doesn't matter. Now what we're trying to figure out is how do we truly unlock the power of these relationships? There's two transformations we've driven. One is how we engage multiple partners in new sales motions. We've never done that effectively as an industry quite frankly and we've launched things like ACES and it stands for accelerating Cisco ecosystem sales. Which is a fully built framework for better engaging multiple partners so that we can actually do all of the things that we all know we need to do as a business to drive and accelerate success, but we do it highly effectively. There's multiple steps to it. >> John: And multiple stake holders too. >> A lot of stake holders yeah. And by the way a big part of it is make sure you actually have agreement from the executive decision makers from the different partners that we're going to go down these paths in the first point. So very very important. >> Soon you can automate that away, it's like deb ops culture, right? >> Actually no that's so real. We work with this one partner who built out the whole ACES framework. Then they built out ACES two dot oh, sorry ACES at scale. Now they just said hey Denny we're building out ACES at hyper scale where we're going to automate this whole process so that we can drive path the revenue plans with close loop selling etcetera. So it's a game changer for us. >> So this is a real, this is actually happening. >> This is actually happening, and when we engage like this with our partners two things happen we accelerate the whole time to revenue. We actually get the sales teams better aligned. We get executive commitment. We engage customers sooner and then we can sell more effectively. For our customers, they love it because now we're bringing the power of the ecosystem in an organized fashion. They see hey these guys really understand my business issues and they're committed to solving those problems with us. >> And they probably make more money too because when you have that efficiency that drops right to the bottom line. >> Yeah that's important for us and them. And by the way part of the business model transformation that we're driving that's important is I also realized we can no longer live in a siloed world. We use to silo all of our resources. We had big teams on this partner, that partner, this technology, this architecture and what we did is we moved our sales acceleration team into a shared tool model. So now we can dynamically allocate talent to whatever the next big thing is. So a hyper flex, the latest launch, or whatever, great. We can dynamically move the right talent to engage the right partners in the right sales motions. >> That's very elastic, very cool. >> Denny, you know we've been watching Cisco's transformation for years. Obviously, networking is still at the core but security, we go to so many shows. We see Cisco in the container space, lots of open stores. Software acquisitions, how's that transformation of Cisco changing and proliferating the various ecosystem models that you have to build? >> This is one of those things that we struggle with in certain days cause if Cisco moves into a new space where we acquire a new company, not only does the sales motion sometimes change and who we sell to change. It's maybe a new buying center an applications dev ops cloud development, but also the ecosystem changes. So we have to get smart about who we bring in. So for instance back in the day Cisco and a reseller we could go sell to the networking buying center, the data center buying center, but now all of a sudden if we want to have a conversation around dev ops and then bring in the line of business, IT and these other dev ops, Cisco and our resellers we can't really sit at the table and bring as much value there. So there's different vendors, like consultancies out there. Companies like Zentars that can actually come to the table and help build the bridge between IT and the line of business, facilitate and drive that conversation. So to your question, we're engaging new partners like that. They don't resell anything but they're a key influence there to connect the multiple different buying centers. There helping Cisco and our resellers generate opportunities we wouldn't have gotten before. >> To follow up on the channel I remember back when converge infrastructure started. There were Cisco channel partners that built whole data center practices. All new lines of business when they were building it. How do you help build that kind of multiply effect for some of your partners to help really accelerate them, drive new businesses? Think about there are so many new areas that Cisco is tapping into. How do you help move that change? People are resistant to change. They're worried about cloud. They're worried about oh you're taking away some of my existing lines of business. Will I make money? >> Actually when you think about digital transformation there's the cloud, there's analytics, there's security. There's so many technologies that come into play. Our resellers have to think about how do I build a practice that includes all of those different foundations. Working with one of my peers in Rob's organization he's got this person Andre Sintez. We're partnered up with them to build out this new model where we can actually help assess our partners to see where they are against all these critical foundational pieces, and then build the training around it. It's not just training because a reseller has an option. If they're going to move into whatever this dev ops cloud space, whatever it happens to be, they have an option to build, buy, or partner. They can build the capability. Train there people, hire new people, etc. Buy a company that does that already, or partner with one of those consultancies or boutique systems integrator. That's where we're spending our time, is building those new connections. >> I'm wondering if you can comment on service providers too. Obviously it's been a big customer for Cisco before, also there's many times we've said the service provider can be the new channel for both Cisco and the partners. Do you look at that very differently than you do the enterprise? >> Service provider as a channel is a big motion without a doubt because they are in those accounts. They're selling in many cases what our customers want to consume in the consumption model that they want. It is critical that we play with them and that we play with them effectively. What's interesting is sometimes based on the verticals or the industries or the segments it's a different set of solutions. So sometimes it's not the motion that my team does by engaging the right ecosystem partners with them. The motion doesn't change as much, what changes is which customer or segment you're going after. Which partners really make sense and can they be delivered in the consumption model that you're looking at? So we might have to pick the right partners and the right solutions to drive. But once we do, we can still leverage a lot of the same practices. So ACES, sales blitzes, overdrives, vertical value plays, all these cool things that we do today could fit with a service provider or any other client. >> Do you guys just flex those resources and go wherever you need to go? Very elastic kind of like a cloud model. >> Absolutely. >> I got to ask you on the organizational front, do you guys have like a big pow wow with your partners? Is it like an annual summit that you do at Cisco live? How do you get your partners together? Is there like a >> Yes, yes, and yes to all of it >> How do you guys handle the partner relationships? >> Each event is a little bit different. Cisco live and here at Cisco live Barcelona, the incredible thing about this event is we have all the people in the world of solutions. The sponsors, the hardware vendors, software vendors, those vendors are here. Our resellers are here. Our sales teams are here. So this type of event we actually have a separate track. Here at Cisco live called the partner experience. Wendy Mars kicked it off this morning. In the room we had resellers, software vendors, hardware vendors, a bunch of different partner types in the room. Then we break out into different tracks. I just left the solution partner forum where it was no resellers, it was software vendors and all these folks. We had an intimate conversation with them about how we're going to accelerate our business together with them as ecosystem partners. >> So you do the big tent events during the lives. You do your own little events with them as well probably with your own teams like a sales kick off? >> Yup and then probably the most popular events is when we regionalized it and do things like partner connections. So like show Shark Tank, we can bring in four or five of these ecosystem partners and any one particular vertical or architecture and have them pitch to a roomful >> Can we film it? >> Yeah we should. I would love to. >> That would be great Cube action. >> That would be awesome. >> You're really on the front lines, super innovation. I love this notion of codifying and putting frameworks around the systems cause that essentially makes it more efficient and you can then flex for these unique situations cause not every deploy is different. A partner might have different vertical requirements. So you can't boiler plate this. It's really one of those things where complexity you have to address at the field level. >> You do exactly. To your point if we can have certain frameworks, so say like a sales blitz. Real actionable item. A sales blitz is where we do a lunch and learn, a cold calling blitz, then we have basically day two support where we can follow up on leads that come from it. We built a sales blitz originally with a partner like a live action, that plays with us in SD Win. Then we said hey this works in data protection. Lets leverage it for a calm vault or veeam. Hey this also works in a healthcare application. So as we build out these best practices we build them in a way so that they can be scaled across any architecture or any partner or any solution type. We also build it so it can be high touched where I use resources of my own to manage it, low touched we just coach em on how to do it, or no touch here it is it's in a box you take it and you go build it yourself. All the best practices are there. >> So this must have a real impact on personnel. Have you seen higher attainments and retention with sales people? It sounds motivating. >> What's so funny and this is a fact, I just heard last week, one of my teams came up and they said hey Denny I talked to one of our new hires, they came into Cisco early in career first and they were on one of these flex teams and they've already done three different projects in three different areas. In the past they would've been hired in the hyper flex team or whatever. Now they've done whatever, hyper flex, the network intuitive launch, and then they did something around the Apple launch. How cool is that from an experience... >> So the old waterfall model of group to group to group now they can essentially go wherever the agile needs are. >> Exactly. >> Denny I know it's tough to choose favorites, but what's buzzing in your partner ecosystem? What's the area where they're seeing big opportunity, customers are getting excited about? >> A lot of the stories that tell the best are these customer experience stories. If I think of a partner called Local Measure for instance, they're a software vendor. They play in retail and other areas. These stories get exciting. Let me tell you real quick. First of all when we partner with these folks we take a customer in approach. We don't go in there and pitch product like, Local Measure by the way works with Marakey and Spark. We don't go into that line of business fire and pitch Marakey and Spark. It probably doesn't come up until later in the conversation. We really start about hey, what's your true business issue, and typically in a retailer they might want to do two things. They might want to accelerate or increase the engagement of the customers so they get better loyalty and repeat buyers. They want people to come back to their amusement park or their retailer or whatever it happens to be, and ultimately the way Local Measure can do that, they can say hey we can change the engagement in the store. For instance if you go into a shoe store and you send out a tweet that says hey the service stinks at this shoe store, they intercept that through Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram and then they can correlate that information with location from a Marakey network and then send it to the store and say hey store associate via Spark message. There's a person, they're in your New York City store. They're standing right in this spot right now. They just sent out this tweet. Here's their profile. Go talk to them, they want help. That engagement is very different than other types of engagements, but when we tell those stories people see the importance of connecting technologies together, cause it's multiple technologies, but also bridging the conversation between the line of business, that retails store person, and IT. You can't do it either or, you got to bring em together and deliver that type of outcome. >> Well, we're always looking for some good stories on The Cube so if you've got any great stories to tell with customers we'd love to see these cases that can really point to the future. >> For things like this, events like this we collected 23 different win stories here and Europe from a small set of ecosystems and partners. So we can bring some of these guys on and have them tell their stories directly to you. >> We love those tech athletes. They're out making it happen every day. Denny great to see you and (unintelligible) the Cube and taking the time. I know you have big partner kick off meetings over there. >> Yes >> We appreciate your time coming on The Cube. >> Yeah thank you. >> Live coverage here with The Cube in Barcelona Spain. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, more coverage after this short break. Day one of two days of wall to wall coverage. You're watching The Cube, we'll be right back. (lively music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> We're back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in the DEVNET Zone at Cisco Live 2018, beautiful Barcelona. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Mike Bundy who is the head of Global Strategic Alliances with Pure Storage, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> As a first time guest, give us a little bit about your background, you're relatively new to Pure, but you know this ecosystem quite well. >> Absolutely, so, relatively new with Pure. Spent 21 years at Cisco leading various technology groups in the company. Most recently from there led the Global Enterprise Data Center sales force, so a lot of background, experience around cloud, virtualization, automation in the data center space, so very excited to be at Pure. >> When you talk about Pure, here at the Cisco show, I know it's FlashStack, but give us a little bit of the kind of the breadth and the depth of the relationship there. You hear a lot of themes talked about at this show, everything from IoT, just the future of where all these technologies are going, so where is the intersections? >> Yeah, so FlashStack is a partnership that Cisco and Pure have to deliver converged infrastructure in the marketplace. What differentiates us is really our ability to derive high, high performance. You'll definitely see value as you deploy just about any database application. It drives a much more economical, valuable solution to the customer base as a result of that. And we're poised to capture new trends in the marketplace with explosion of IoT, intelligence, whether it's deep learning, neural networks, or business intelligence, with the likes of SAP or various other applications deployed on Hadoop infrastructure. >> Want to unpack some of those, because you said a lot there. Our research from Wikibon coming into 2018, data's at the center of it all. I mean, talk to Cisco, data, majorly important. Not just moving it things, but how do I get value out of the data. Start with IoT, you mentioned in there, how does a company, I think a pure storage company, how does Pure have an impact in relationship on the IoT discussion. >> Right, so, IoT in itself is driving a huge explosion in terms of the amount of data. In two years, according to IDC, it'll be 20 times the amount of capacity on the internet will be the amount of data that's created, so for us, deploying a platform that allows you to really take data and look at it as a platform and how you use it is really one of our strengths of the company. Our software set is called Pure1 and it really takes a look and helps you handle and manage that data very differently than any of the other traditional storage solutions that have been in the marketplace. But it was all built on the foundation of Flash, so you get the scale and you get the performance that Flash brings at the same time. Very, very powerful, and we're glad to see trends driven by IoT to drive that explosion for us. >> FlashStack, talk a little bit about it. What is interesting to customers these days? The trend of converged infrastructure now has gone on for over eight years. There's the buzz of hyperconverge, there's cloud is kind of front and center, why is converged infrastructure in general, and FlashStack specifically so important today? >> If you break down the market in terms of where converged infrastructure fits, it's both in the hybrid cloud and the private cloud side of things. There's still tremendous growth in the private cloud world where we see a lot of deployments there. If you look at the solution, it's very cohesive with what Cisco has, from a UCS standpoint. It's a stateless platform, it's very simple to manage, it's very scalable, you can get 10 times the rack density from a storage and compute perspective with a FlashStack than you can the competitors'. So it's really an innovative, modernized, converged infrastructure stack. As you said, CI's been around for eight years, this FlashStack's been in the marketplace about two years and has had tremendous growth in that timeframe as a result. We continue to try to drive simplification, automation, a different consumption model, how you maintain it, from a cost perspective is different, so it has a very unique value proposition compared to other CIs in the marketplace. >> One of the founders of Wikibon, David Floyer, when the Flash wave started he said to companies, it's database, database, database, there's so much opportunity to really transform both the economics as well as the business productivity. It wasn't the first-use case that happened in converged infrastructure, but definitely somewhere Pure's focus has been. Talk about what are some of the results, what did customers see when they moved to CI for business-critical applications like database. >> If you look at the timing that it takes to develop an application, a lot of that is how easy are you able to grab the data, create a usable format of that, do your development test cases, and then move it back into production. So the way that the FlashStack and the Pure Flash arrays allow you to take that data, you don't have to necessarily copy it and create replicas, it's very fast and easy and we've seen developers cut down 25-30% of the development time on an SAP database or an Oracle database, right? So it's drastically different than what they've been used to in the past. >> Mike, you lived for years on the Cisco side of the equation and now you're partners. What's it like to be a Cisco partner these days? They've got dozens of partnerships on the storage side, so how do they make Pure feel special yet understand kind of the cooperative nature of our industry. >> I think what we're trying to make sure we do here is focus on the customer outcome, right? So we are really working day-in and day-out to make sure that whatever we do drives business value to the customer. And that is what separates the partnership from others. When you take a look at that, it's given us the ability to grow the amount of resources that Cisco and Pure can contribute into the marketplace. It also has allowed us to help develop new lines of business for some of our other partners in the ecosystem. It's very competitive, as you call out, but there's still a great partnership here and Cisco's been very supportive of our growth. >> It's been a few years since I've attended a Cisco Live myself, but feels that the attendees and the focus of the show has gone through a bit of a transformation. We're sitting here in the DEVNET Zone, lots of people here coding. I walked through the World of Solutions, it's not just networking, you know, networking's a big piece. What have you seen changing over the few years? How does that impact Pure and just personally, what do you look at this ecosystem? >> Going back to what I said earlier, it's all about driving value for the outcome of the customer. What is the business challenge you're solving, what is the opportunity they're seizing and how can we develop a more agile platform that allows their software teams to really take advantage of that. So really that's what we're focused on, is what can we build horizontally that makes the platform more cloud-friendly, more automated, and then you can drive down to specific vertical value propositions within that, whether it's automotive industry, airline industry, healthcare industry, et cetera. That's really where I've seen a transition from, it's not as much about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure, it's about the higher-level outcome for the customer business. >> When it comes to Pure's business in general, and FlashStacks specifically, any differences here in the European geographies compared to the United States that you could comment on? >> Not really. I think from a Flash adoption period, the adoption rate has been higher for all Flash arrays in the United States. As you move to Europe, we're seeing an acceleration of that here. What we saw, probably about two years ago in the United States, so there's actually a ton of excitement here now, in terms of the opportunity for the FlashStack and what Flash can do for that. >> It's interesting you mention for Flash, and even for converged infrastructure, there's still a large percentage of the market that hasn't kind of dove in. >> Correct. >> Any commentary as to what's holding people back or you know, some "aha" moments that you've had customers that, those that haven't gone for the simplicity of converged or hyperconverged, that they should get on board? >> I think if you look at Flash in general, it was focused on high IOPS, input/output performance requirements initially, virtualization, virtual desktops were very big, and then your higher-performance applications now. Now that you've seen what we've been able to drive in terms of full functionality across the platform, it's not just about Flash and performance, it actually is about a storage platform now. And the economics of the entire support are making it more palatable now to move other workloads. I think you'll continue to see this expansion, I think Gartner and IDC talk about the next three to five years, you'll see a much greater greater density of applications moving onto Flash versus what it was in the past. We're actually releasing very soon and we'll be integrating into FlashStack other platforms that we have around FlashBlade, which is real focused on unstructured data. Things that wasn't necessarily rows and columns from a block storage perspective. And I think you'll see that help drive some of this disruption and transition in that space. >> Mike, as we look into 2018, what should customers look to find from the Pure and Cisco partnership? >> Absolutely. We'll continue to drive more tools with FlashStack that allow you to more easily and rapidly deploy the system itself. We will also be looking toward new-use cases that are very relevant in this space. To capture the demands of the customer, so things around business intelligence, things around artificial intelligence, we'll scale that out. And you'll also look at seeing us drive toward more scalable, foundational elements of a storage platform. So those are some of the things that you'll definitely see from us moving forward. >> All right, well Mike Bundy, really appreciate all the updates on Pure, on FlashStack, and your partnership with Cisco. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live Europe 2018 in Barcelona, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (bright poppy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCube. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage at Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE with my partner in crime this week, Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon.com. Also, cohost at all the events we go to, most of the events I should say. Our next guest is Ashutosh Malegaonkar, who's the Principal Engineer at Cisco DevNet, involved in a lot of the great projects in Sandbox we're going to talk about. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thank you for having me, John. >> Thanks for coming on. >> One of the exciting stories here is the DevNet momentum continues. Congratulations to your team. >> Ashutosh: Thank you. But you're involved in a couple cool parts of the projects that we notice was getting a lot of traction, co-create a sandbox. >> Ashutosh: Yes. >> First, take a minute to talk about what that project is and why is it so popular. >> Yeah, so as you know DevNet is becoming the key core for Cisco and one of the things that we did in DevNet is like, it's a strategic initiative where we said that we are going to call it co-creations. And what that means is we are co-creating with Cisco's strategic partners, that's one. The second is that we are taking our customers, like our top 10 customers, our top 100 customers, our partners, and our developers. So we are looking at each of these three categories and saying, how can we actually help and take that to the next level with DevNet. >> So you're sharing a lot of resource. Is is the same project? Do people bring their own project to the table? How does it work? >> Yeah, so it's both. So for example, first let's talk about strategic initiatives where ... a strategic partner sorry. And in there we have Apple and Google as our strategic partners. With Apple, what we have done is we have actually created a Fast Lane Validation program and what that does is, with Fast Lane as a product, what we are doing is any app developer who wants to use application quality of service, we actually help them validate that application in DevNet. And one of the things that we noticed is app developers really don't understand quality of service, QOS, and as soon as we say quality of service they freak out. And so we have to actually handhold them, let them understand what it means and then we actually help them take their application on the path. >> I mean there's a lot of things in networks that are like that. Deep packet inspection, people freak out and QOS, but QOS is a very important feature. >> Ashutosh: It is. >> Big time. >> It is and that's one thing that we are basically saying how can network be the platform where you can use performance as a building block? And if you heard Susie and her keynote, that's what she was stressing on, right? We want to have that as a building block for developers. >> Yeah, really interesting points. One of the things we've been digging in the last few days is kind of the changing partner ecosystem. There's some partners that have been with Cisco for decades, networking, infrastructure, but Apple, not a traditional Cisco partner. The other one, you mentioned Google. >> Ashutosh: I did, yeah. >> So I believe Google's here doing some presentations. John and I have been digging in to all the C and SEF projects so what's Google doing here. >> Yeah, so with Google, what Cisco has done is we are coming up with our hybrid or multi-cloud strategy and in the hybrid cloud strategy what we are doing is there things where, if I'm an app developer, on-prem app developer and I want to access services which are in the cloud. Now what the partnership does is we have our security services all the way from on-prem to the cloud deployed in the Google Cloud system and as an app developer I can do my services on-prem but access some services which are in the cloud. So that's one application. Second is that if I'm an app developer working only in the cloud but I want to access some of the services which are on-prem, than how do I do it? And that's what this partnership is also helping out. >> Great. How's the reaction been of the Cisco Live audience here? How many people are lining up to come listen to Google talk about Istio? >> Yeah, so Istio is one part, but Kubernetes, like if you look at our sandbox, like it's becoming one our most popular sandbox in DevNet and Kubernetes is part. And with the Google partnership we are also working with Google on Istio. It's an open source project and what we have done is we have created a sandbox for Istio and that is also it's kind of an industry first, where developers are able to go through a learning lab to actually understand what it means. >> Yeah, absolutely. John and I were at the KubeCon show. We interviewed Lou from the Cisco team, heavily involved in the open source. But yeah, one of those things, how do we simplify it, how do we help people get the on-ramp? Sandbox is a great way for people to get started. >> Ashutosh: That's correct, that's correct. >> One of the things that we're excited about and this something that we're going to be doing, digging into all year is the impact of Kubernetes. And the sandboxing points to the trend of how people are partnering. I think you guys struck a really interesting form in this co-creation model because if you look at what service meshes are doing in markets is that the more that you can make it easier for developers and at the same time enabling the engineering side of it, getting down and dirty. We're talking about QOS, we're talking about plumbing stuff. There's still a lot of automation being done under the hood. This is the network opportunity, this is where we're seeing automation around provisioning and configuration management and all that good stuff. That needs to get done but it has to be addressable for true programmability. We're not there yet, but we're almost there. >> Ashutosh: We're getting there, yes. >> What's your reaction to that, a 19-year veteran at Cisco? Cisco has an inherent advantage having the network, so looking up, that's been enabling, but now you have people who want to look down and program into you. Kind of new dynamic. >> It is, it is. >> How are you guys looking at this? >> So the way I look at it, as you said, I've seen Cisco grow. I mean, I've grown up in the company and one of things, Cisco being the expert in networking, we have experts now which are getting to doing everything, in a sense. Like the edge is where a lot of stuff is happening and when you deploy edge services you also need stuff that needs to be done in the cloud. So for example, one of the examples I like to do is let's take machine learning as a good example, where I want to download some models, machine learning models onto the edge but the traffic is actually all at the edge, so I'm taking all the inputs from the edge, taking at the edge, calculating things, and then the models are being built in the cloud because I can't build those at the edge. So that's the thing that is happening now and what we see here is that Cisco is in the midst of both edge as well as cloud. >> And IoT was going to be very instrumental. If you talk to the pure networking nerds and geeks out there, they're going to say, "Edge? "We've been doing edge of the network for years." But now the edge is extending, right? To IoT so it's not a new concept for Cisco at all, is it? >> Its not. It's not new at all. Because as I said, something very similar to what we are doing for the Apple Fast Lane, as I told you before, like now the app developer has the ability to give QOS right at the app level. It's the same thing like with IoT. It's like all the devices are connected to Cisco. >> And this is what's going to be- it's fun to watch because you guys now have compute to throw at the edge, you have cloud that you can connect to the edge, but this going to change the nature of programming. Stateful and stateless applications become a really interesting dynamic. What's your reaction to that trend of as developers start to really start thinking about state? >> Sure, so one of the things that ... Again I go back to the edge thing where like if you have a tunnel and then there are cars passing by, you are actually looking at the cars as, let's say a stream of dots. Now that state you cannot be giving and storing it somewhere so you basically keep it at the edge, you figure out what's happening, compute, and take some actions there itself. >> That' where the action is. Ashutosh, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing your knowledge, appreciate it. Congratulations on the co-creation Fast Lane service you guys have, among other things. The collaboration model is the future. Cisco's really demonstrating that in the DevNet zone so props to the team. It's theCUBE, we always collaborate, sharing the best content here live in Barcelona with you. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live coverage, day two of our two days wall to wall live coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. This is theCUBE. Be right back with more after this short break. (electronic music)

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. Day two. We're wrapping up the show here at Cisco Live 2018, in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain. The past two days we've been here. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, talking to the most important people at Cisco, the top executives, some developers, and really kind of getting the lay of the land. It's the first time theCUBE has been at Cisco Live in its existence, so it's great to be here. Stu, Cisco Live, a lot of smart people. So it's great to have theCUBE. The Cube fits beautifully with Cisco Live because you've got people sharing, you have great, smart networking guys, but they are also doing applications. This is really an awesome opportunity because this is like the perfect storm for Cisco. This is an opportuity to galvanize their base, grow them into the new talent to move forward in this cloud edge world, where the network needs to be more intelligent. This is your wheelhouse. You have been covering this for a long time. >> So, John, yeah, I was looking forward to this. It's been years since I've attended Cisco Live in person. There is a term we haven't talked about a lot this week, but I think it fits. It's the digital transformation. And Cisco is in the midst of this transformation. I said in our open on day one, my barometer was going to be, look how is Cisco doing becoming a software company? Of course, things like IOS have been in the guts of what they did from networking, but being here in the DevNet Zone. DevNet, Susie Lee's team, really helping to drive some of that transformation. We had a great conversation with Rowan talking about the future. Talking about apps. Talking about so many of the different things that Cisco is doing to not just be boxes and ports. Hardware still an important piece. >> Yep. >> I'm actually concerned that maybe they have a little bit of that hardware holding them back a tiny bit because Cisco has skills there. They have lots of expertise. It might be mostly software, but even when they talk about things like collaboration there is hardware underneath a lot of that. >> Stu, Rowan Trollope, who is the SVP, general manager of the applications team, is the rising star. He is being promoted, and watch. This is a signal from Cisco. They recognize it. So, we heard from Andy Jassy at AWS re:Invent, there is the old guard meaning, they are talking about Oracle, and then the new guard, trying to obviously position themselves as the new guard to carry customers into the future. Rowan Trollope, on his keynote yesterday, who the big story cause the CEO wasn't here. He was the lead dog. So he's getting promoted. He was telling about the future. So the question I have for you is, as an analyst, is Cisco an old guard, or are they a new guard? Or, are they moving to be a new guard? What is your opinion? >> Yeah, too soon to say. Cisco was one of the four horsemen of the internet era. Absolutely, they should have a place going forward. But look, they're not one of the big public cloud providors. They don't sell a lot to the hyper-scale players. But, they have a very strong position in a lot of places. Still dominant in traditional networking. Do very well in collaboration. Have a lot of software pieces. They have made a number of acquisitions. The telecompany we had tracked before doing well inside of Cisco. AppD, lot of buzzwords going on. We got to learn a bunch about Spark this week, John. Heck, even little tidbits I got. There is these two colored globes sitting behind you. It's like, oh, it's Alexa apps. And there's been people doing developer labs this entire week. So Cisco, part of helping to educate and do that transformation. Other companies, like Pivotal, is a partner. Lots of partnerships. And not just the traditional infrastructure companies, but we heard about what they are doing with Google, with Apple, and others. So, I'm not ready to anoint Cisco as a winner in the new world. But, if multi-cloud, which I'd love to get your take on, What you think with the multi-cloud strategy is. But, Cisco at least has a right to be at the table. They've got strong customer relationships. Strong in the enterprise. Strong in service providers. >> But if Oracle is an old guard, then why isn't Cisco? I mean, Oracle is plumbing. They have these database deals. They're not going anywhere soon. So, you can make an argument that Oracle is not going to be displaced anytime soon, cause they have the massive deals. But a lot of people will say, and we even said, that Oracle's relevance is waning with new database growth happening outside the proprietary database. So, is Cisco relevant? >> Yeah, John. It's a good question. So for one piece, if you say okay how are they doing on the transition to becoming recurring revenue rather than boxes, they still have quite a ways to go. They are not far enough along that journey. But, my measuring stick was how much are they a software company? How much are they an infrastructure company? They're kind of straddling the line. They are moving up the stack. More than some of the other initiatives in the past. It's taken hold. Thousands of people, so I give them good marks, John. What's your take? >> I mean, I don't know. I think, here's my take on Cisco. Cisco knows the networking. You can't, like I was saying with Oracle, they're not going anywhere. No one is going to rip out Cisco and replace it. There's nothing else to replace it with. I mean, there is no other competition, really. The competition to Oracle, I mean Cisco, is not being on the right side of history. So to me, I think Cisco should be worried about one thing, making the bet wrong on architecture. So, they own the network. The other thing that people don't know about Cisco, that is a competitive advantage is, they know the edge of the network. They have been doing edge computing since it existed. So, okay sending it out to IOT is not a big deal, in my opinion. I think that is going to be an easy get for Cisco. Extending it to wireless, they have that with their deal with Jasper. That's interesting. That's going to be a game changer. But that's not going to be their problem. Wireless, human, cars, that's the new edge. That's just an extension for Cisco. That is a major advantage. So competitively speaking, I think that is a real point that they are going to really nail home that a lot of people don't understand. The second thing is that their DevNet program is showing that they're upgrading and advancing their capabilities up the stack and bringing along with them their entire developer consistencies, which were essentially network engineers. So, they were once the rock stars, those network engineers, of any enterprise. You go into any enterprise you say, the network engineers, they ran the show. Now, the threat is coming from alpha perspective from developers. So now you have this kind of dynamic going on Stu, where the network engineers need to move up the stack to meet the new developers, and that is where the rubbing is going on, right. That's where the action is. That's what DevNet's doing. They're doing a masterful job, in my opinion. They are not over driving, not overplaying their hand. They are in the cloud native rule with DevNet Create. So I think their best move is to just continue to march down that path, but they got to own the IOT edge. Without the IOT edge, Cisco could crumble. >> Yeah, so a couple comments on that, John. One, IOT, Cisco started messaging IOT really early, and they've gone through a couple of iterations, so that what they're talking about IOT wasn't what they were talking about a few years ago. I like their story much better today. Absolutely, both from a wireless standpoint, they have got the hardware gear like Meraki, they talked on stage. From the software standpoint, like Jasper. One of the areas we got feedback from the community, John, they are talking about containers and Kubernetes, sure. They're not involved with serverless yet. And that is a blindness. Is it something that the big public cloud's are going to do there? >> Well I have an opinion on that. >> They're, I'm sorry? >> I have an opinion on that. >> Okay. >> Cisco is running billion dollar partnerships. They're doing billions of dollars in revenue. So I think you can't really judge them there by their participation in these open source projects yet. I think they've got to bring something to the party quickly. I think it's too early to tell, I would agree with you on that point. On this piece, they've got to go to open source. And they've got to figure out a way to do it in a way that is not distracting from the core mission. If I am Cisco, if I'm advising the CEO, I'm like, march with the network as the value, maximize the software play, and don't blow off open source. They cannot blow off open source. Are they brilliant at open source right now? Outside of Lew Tucker, who do we see? >> Look, no. I mean, from a network standpoint, Cisco has been involved across lots of projects, not just open stack containers. We've talked about what they are doing with Kubernetes and Istio. >> Give them a grade, open source, give them a grade. A, B, C, or D, or F? >> You know, I tell you at least a strong B. >> Okay, that's decent. >> Yeah, I mean look, they are not monetizing open source. They're not rallying around the flag. They are doing great with developers, which John, I guess we say, is it contributing for contributing sake or how does it fit in the business model? We did a couple of interviews here where it said, no open source, we're not negative on it. They're not pushing against public cloud. They're not against these things. It just doesn't fit as much into their environment. >> I think the multi-cloud thing, well getting back to you're question about containers. So containers are being commoditized. Red Hat just bought Core OS. Docker's Docker. Docker's got a business model challenge. We've reported on that, Stu. And we're doing a feature report on it now. And so what are they going to do? But still, container is a goodness. People like containers. Is it super complicated? Not really. Is Kubernetes strategic and important? Yes, that's obvious. So the service mesh is interesting to me. And I think the net devops positioning that they announced here, Cisco is bringing this devops culture to the networking world. They are kind of creating a new devops ethos at a networking layer. I think that's going to be a really, really big deal. And that is either going to be a go big or go home situation. It is either going to work like a charm, or it's going to fail miserably. So, what do you think? I mean the smell, it lines up with Istio, it lines up with Service Mesh, programmable infrastructures, managing micro services. I mean, it kind of hangs together, Stu. What do you think? >> Yeah, I mean, John, it goes along with the whole trend we have been seeing. The people that were managing the network can't be managing devices, or even groups of devices. Intent based networking is one of the big items coming into here. It's how do I let the machine learning, the programmability help me in this environment because it is only going to get more complicated. The edge you talked about is critical. IOT keeps growing. And it's not something that people alone can do, it needs to be people plus machines. And I've seen nice maturation of how Cisco does this. Cisco, to be critical on Cisco for the last decade, is thy have thrived in complexity. And I think they are trying to get over that some and shift their model to more of a softer model. >> Well, Stu, I think you nailed that this. So here's my take. Software model allows them to scale. With machine learning, they can do what Facebook and Google has done. So if you go to Google, for instance, how they manage their data center, they have site reliability engineers. They have changed the IT model to scale the number of machines that they have. The number of devices that are coming on the network cannot be physically managed by people. So this means machine learning and software has to automate. That is Cisco's opportuity. I'm not seeing it clearly right now, but if that's what they're talking about, that to me will be the tell sign. If Cisco can create a site reliability engine, like what Google did for networks, that's a game changer. Alright Stu, final thoughts. Let's go through, let's riff on what we saw here. Obviously Barcelona great city. The weather's been phenomenal. It's been really great. Good food, good tapas. But Cisco, good vibe. Cube in the DevNet Zone, it's been really interesting to watch. People love the labs. It's very chill and relaxed, but very active. The keynote looking forward, not looking back. Notable point, the CEO wasn't here. So that to me-- >> It's the end of the quarter and he was just at Davos, and there is a bunch there. He didn't come last year either. >> John: Okay. >> But Chuck will be at the Orlando show. Hoping we'll have him on theCUBE when we go there. We're going to be at the Orlando show. We've got theCUBE at the DevNet Create show again. And John, chill I think was the right word. And part of me is wondering, is it because we are here in Barcelona and it is just a relaxed atmosphere of a city. I've really enjoyed it this week. Or, network people, it used to be a little bit uptight. I mean, it's the risk and fear are things that kind of ruled in networking before. And people seemed a little bit more chill here. >> Pros and cons, Stu. Or observations that were good and not so good? Observations to me were, on the good side, was a lot of activity in the DevNet Zone. A lot of energy in the hallway, and in Barcelona wise. There was a lot of European flavor. The signal I thought was good was the keynote was packed. You and I thought it might be empty, right. But people strolled in. They packed every seat. The other area is that you can just tell people were interested in the new direction. The critical analysis to me would be, I didn't hear enough data driven. I want to see more data driven, but I didn't want to hear AI is changing the world. I want to see real, practical examples of data-driven impact to data center and I wanted to see more meat on the bone on multicloud. Because I didn't really see much there, I just heard about it. It was almost like a, "we're going there," not a lot of data driven, not a lot of multicloud. Outside of that, I thought it was really, really a great conference. >> And John, we had some phenomenal guests here. So on the data driven piece, Michelle Dennedy, the Chief Privacy Officer, really good piece and she said, oh, you guys are missing it if you didn't hear the data-driven. And she drove home in the interview with us how Cisco is involved there. So, John, there is a lot going on. Cisco is a big company. Big show. There is a lot we are not going to be able to get. Reaz Rehan, got the IOT piece, seeing some new players. Really helping to shift along this transition. Love Susie Lee's discussion about the four year transformation that we are talking. And Rowan, strong executive, good bench at Cisco. Stock has been up, like most of the tech stocks the last few months. >> I mean, we forgot to mention that, good point, Stu. New sheriff in town on IOT, that was a great interview. Again, Susie's at DevNet's hit a home run here. She's got a great group she's developing. Awesome stuff. >> So last thing, John. If Chuck Robbins gave you a call and said, Hey John, I've got that 10, 20, 30 billion dollars that I might be able to play with. Any final advice for him? >> I would really sure up the collab stuff. I think there is a distraction there from the sense of that I get why its developing. But if you use WebEx or all these tools, you're biased. You don't understand, it's the tools you use. You're just going to use it. I think that is a great data. And I think that the collab apps, if you look at it not as a software play, but as an IOT edge device, data-driven device. That's a good play. So I like the direction. I would throw a lot of dough at the collab and make that an IOT edge feature. Cause they can cross connect great data from WebEx to Spark. And I think Spark feels like an app. I want to see, it's not an app. It's a platform. >> Look, it's a messy space. Who leads in those spaces tends to be a lot more the consumer companies that did this. Cisco killed most of their consumer stuff. Then they did, after they had Flip in the set top boxes. So very different Cisco. What assets do they have? >> But to answer your question, Stu, what I would say, I would say Chuck, own the edge. This is a strategic imperative. I would throw the kitchen sink at owning the edge of the network. That means from the core to the edge, and I'd push that edge all the way to the wearables. All the way to the implants in your brain in the future. Own it end to end. Lock that down. Make it dynamic. Make it programmable. That is a holy grail moment and to me, lock it down. And everything will fall into place. You'll have cloud traction. You'll have app traction. Everything will happen. >> And they don't need to be the owner of the public cloud to be successful in what you said, John. So good strategy, I like that. >> Alright, theCUBE, with all the strategy for the CEO, Chuck Robbins, who's watching. Chuck, good to see you. Thanks for having us at Cisco Live. Stu, great analysis. I want to thank all the guests, thank the crew here. Tony Day and the team, and Brendan and Brian, great job. And all the people back home at theCUBE network and theCUBE network operating center in Palo Alto and Boston. This is live coverage. This is our wrap-up from Barcelona, Spain. Cube is calling it a day here at Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. it's The Cube covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and The Cube's Ecosystem Partner. (upbeat music) (people chatting in background) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is The Cube exclusive coverage live in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-host of The Cube here all week, two days of live wall-to-wall coverage in the DevNet Zone where all the action's at. It's the biggest story at Cisco Live is the impact of the DevNet and the developer network that's been growing leaps and bounds. Of course, we covered DevNet Create earlier last year, which is a Cloud Native event. Kind of bring in two communities together from Cisco and of course, we can't talk about developers without talking about experiences that developers need and want and expect and also, you know, how to operate in those environments. We have two great guests. Mandy Whaley's been on before, The Cube Alumni Director of Developer Experiences at Cisco, and Tom Davies, who's the Senior Manager of the DevNet Sandbox. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you again. >> Excited to be here. Yeah, good to see you, too. >> So congratulations. >> DevNet is again booming. It's the hot part of the show. It's one of the top stories here in Barcelona. >> Yes. >> It's been great. Our workshops, where we're doing the hands-on coding, have been extremely full even early in the morning and late into the evening, and it's great to see people really diving in, laptops open, getting their hands on, and doing some coding. >> That's great stuff, congratulations. And, you know, the Sandbox is interesting because now you guys are completely open. Love the motto: learn, code, inspire, and connect. That's the motto here. You got to have a place for people to do this. >> You do. >> What is this Sandbox thing that you guys are rollin' out? It's pretty interesting. >> Yeah, so the Sandbox is completely open to everyone, and the idea behind it is if you like, if you can go to developer.cisco.com/sandbox, you can hit our catalog and start playing with our technology within minutes by just clicking on the technology you want to cover. We'll spin you up that environment, and you can start playing it as a developer really quite quickly. >> Alright, take me through a progression example, because let's just say I hit that website, developer.cisco.com/sandbox, >> Yeah. what do I do? I mean, what are people doing? Is it like, you know, Hello World or what are they coding? What are they learning? I mean, what's goin' on there? >> It just depends on the technology that they choose. So we go to developer.cisco.com/sandbox, hit Catalog, it comes out with a bunch of titles, and in that catalog, you can choose Networking, you could choose Security, you could choose Data Center, Cloud, Open Source, any different technology that that developer might be interested in or want to integrate into, and then from there they click on that title and say, "Right, I want to reserve say APIC-EM. "I'm interested in Networking and control of Networking." From there, we spin that environment up for them, completely secure, send them the details of how it's connect, they connect to it, and then they are free to start coding within minutes on, say, a APIC-EM controller solution, figure out what the latest release provides them, >> Yeah. how they integrate into it, and how they can start innovatin' in a really easy way over the top. >> So they can, it's a playground. They can do mash-ups. >> It's a playground, yeah. >> It is. >> I can sling API's around, test stuff, break stuff. >> If they're breaking somethin', they're probably doin' something right so we encourage it. >> Yeah (laughs) >> Yeah. >> It's brilliant. >> Yeah. >> The other thing that's really cool about the Sandbox is that Tom takes a lot of time and care to make sure we put together fully, you know, environments where you can actually build things with the Cisco gear plus open source projects that are relevant to those pieces of the Cisco technology portfolio, so it's not just the environment. It's sample code, it's open source you can use, it's traffic generations, it's really a full working environment. >> Yeah, that brings up a good point I wanted to ask you, as we had some other guests on. We couldn't get to it. You're startin' to see with Kubernetes and well, first docker containers and now all containers. Really interesting. I mean, Red Hat just bought CoreOS yesterday. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's big news. >> They did, they did. >> Big news, yeah. >> In Europe, you miss all the action. The State of the Union. (Tom laughs). >> I know. >> It was a big story on the New York Times on Sunday. I'm like, "Ah, I'm missin' all the late news." But that's a signal. Containers are commoditized. You're seeing that be the now abstraction layer for moving work loads around and program around it. >> We do. >> Kubernetes gives an orchestration opportunity that now allows you to bring this service mesh concept to the table. >> It does. >> This is becoming a really interesting developer dream, because now I could provision >> Yes. microservices and start doing network services with those microservice at the app layer. >> Yeah. >> This to me is a really, really big trend. I know you guys have kind of quietly put it out there, a term called "Net DevOps," >> Yes. which I think will be a very big thing. >> Yep. (Mandy laughs) >> Because it's DevOps the whole stack. >> It is. >> That's right, yeah. >> But really usin' the network more, so for the people who are power users of network services, this could become a very big DevOps movement. >> Yes, yes. >> Can you explain this concept of the Net DevOps, and does that relate to like SDO and some of the service mesh stuff out there? What's your-- >> Yeah, do you want to start with service mesh and then I'll dive into the lower parts or, yeah? >> We can do that. >> Go for it. >> Jump right in. >> Yeah. >> Share the information. >> Yeah, sure. >> The term service mesh is actually fairly new, and it's common because as people use microservices more, their understandin' that they just perforate like crazy, and it's actually really quite hard to understand which microservices talk to which microservices, are they doin' it securely? Are they within policy? Are they talkin' to the right thing? And that's where SDO comes in. It's really providin' a proxy for that traffic so you can easily talk between microservice A and microservice B, understand it, see observability between that traffic, and then control that traffic, and SDO is takin' really the abstraction away, takin' the pain away from that huge service. >> Just talk about the quantify that time savings, because this is like, I think this really kind of was the minds get blown. That example you just laid out, without that, what would you have to do? I have to build a proxy, I have to test it. >> You do. >> I mean, just take me through it. >> Yeah. The comparisons A to B. >> Well, normally when you have >> Real quick. a microservice, you probably have about 15 other services around them all. Like if you had a ton of microservices, you probably have 15 different subserving services around it. With SDO, it takes 15 away so you don't have to manage or operate all those, and it brings you down to one, and that's really super key, 'cause it makes it so much easier to deal with microservices >> Yeah. then to bail them out. >> And then I boil it down, and then I tell people when Amazon launched Lambda, which essentially the serverless trend, 'cause they're always >> Yeah. just services. Never really serverless. (Mandy laughs) I know the Cisco people debate this all the time, and now there's, it's true. This server's behind it. >> Of course. They just take this abstraction away. They're really enabling this notion of a mindset for the developer where this gets into the user experience, user expectation. >> Right. >> Yes. >> If I want infrastructure as a code and I don't want to dive into the network services, I want the one not the 15 to deal with. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> I'm essentially programming the infrastructure at that point, so this is a big, effin' deal. >> This is a big deal, >> It is. and then even what we're seeing is that the expectations are set by DevOps practices, and now that our network devices are opening up APIs, and we have the really strong assurance and analytics pieces that we saw in the Cisco keynotes, we can extend those DevOps concepts to managing network devices. So something very traditional, networking task, like out of VLAN. Let's say you want to do that, but you want to do that in a network as code manner. So you want to take that through a build pipeline, something that would be familiar to a developer or somebody who manages their infrastructure in a DevOps way, but now you can do it for a networking device. And you can take it through build and test just like you would code, and all of your network configurations are source controlled so you have your version control around it, and that's a big mind shift for the network developers. But in DevNet, we have the application developers, the ops engineers, and the net workers, and then what we're tryin' to do is share those practices across because that's the only way we'll get to the scale, the consistency, the level of automation that we need. >> Alright, so here's a question for you guys. Put you on the spot. DevOps has been great. It's going mainstream. Some are called CloudOps, whatever, but DevOps is great, great movement. >> Yes. >> That's been goin' on for a while, you know. Hey. >> Yeah. You know, pat each other on the back. (Mandy laughs) But DevOps means automation. >> Yes, yes. >> Right? >> And the old rule is you got to do it twice automated. This scares people. So what is being automated away in the Net DevOps model? >> So I wouldn't know that it's being automated away, but the idea is that is if we're managing infrastructure, traditionally you would do it in a sequential and manual way, right? But we need to do it in a parallel and automated way. So moving towards that automation helps us do that. I think we see some network engineers who think, "I have to learn a lot of new skills to do this." >> Mm-hmm. >> And that is true, but you don't have to be the level of an application developer who's writing applications to do some automation and scripting, and DevNet's really working to put the tools out there to lead them down that path and get them moving in that direction. It's also a little bit more, I mean, DevOps is definitely the automation in the tools. There's also the culture of bringing Dev and Ops together. So the same thing happens there as well. >> Totally agree, and also the process as well, repeatability in what we're doin'. So once you've done one >> Yes. and that process works for you, you can repeat that process for the next set of configuration you're deploying. >> Yeah, definitely. >> What's interesting. >> Super slick. >> Rowan showed on stage the future titles of what it'll be like in 2030 or 2050. I forget which year it was. >> Yes, yes. I joked, it says the LinkedIn on that. Might not even be around, might be around then, either. (Mandy laughs) This is a new field, right? >> Yes. >> And successful companies, the ethos was hire the smartest person because the jobs that are coming haven't been invented yet, so there's no right experience there. So this kind of reminds me of what's going on with DevOps where, you know, Network guys, they're not dumb. I mean, they're smart, right? >> Super smart. >> You know? >> Yeah. >> And it used to be that you were the rock star if you ran the network. >> That's right, that's right. >> Okay, now the rock stars are more the app developers and the developers on the Dev Op side. So these would be easy, and we're seeing that it's easy for those guys to jump in to some of these coding and/or agile mindsets. >> Yes. >> 'Cause they are gunslingers, they are rock stars. >> They are, it's incredible how fast they're picking it up. I mean, they are, just from the ones that we met from last year to this year who were here came to like their first coding class. This year they're here, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I totally get this build pipeline. "I'm doing this in my organization." We're seeing 'em pick it up incredibly fast. >> And so they obviously see a path to other jobs. What patterns are you guys seeing in terms of things that they're doing on the Sandbox and/or some of the user expectations that they have as they're now fresh, young, or/and middle age >> Yeah. or old students >> Right? in the new world. What are some of the patterns? >> Yeah. >> What are they kickin' tires on? What's the, what are they gravitating towards? >> Everythin', but they yeah, literally everythin', but they're always like quite interested in containers and what's happenin' in the container world and how that applies >> Yes. to networkin', especially because as we touched on it earlier, there's a lot of networkin' to be had in the container world, and it's not just one layer of (mumbles) of the service mesh. There's also virtualization layers, there's like abstracted policy layers. There's a good few layers of networkin' that you need to know and really understand to be able to get into, so that's one real trend that the network guys >> Yes. really are jumpin' on, and so they should, because they're great at it. >> Yeah, I would add to that. Like I've been seeing, you know, in different conversations I have with people who are coming from the appDev side or the Op side and saying, "Wow, I'm really good at containers. "I can build apps and containers all day." And then they get into it, and they're like, "The networking part of containers is hard. "There's a lot to learn." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And so I definitely see a lot of activity around both sides coming together around, "How do we really make that work?" >> And the bottom line is is that this whole "Your job's going away" is ridiculous because this really proves that there is so much job security in DevOps it's ridiculous. >> There's more devices per engineer to be managed then ever before, so it's really just you have to have the automation to even keep up, right? >> Yeah, it's quite funny, actually, because I come from a very much a software centered background, and networkin' to me was black magic. You had to know so much stuff in the networking order, it used to scare the hell out of me, but I had to go down into the network layer to start understandin' it to do a better job of software >> Well, you was locked down. and I'm seein' the reverse. >> I mean, you had perimeter-base security, (Tom laughs) and you had very inflexible configuration management things. You were just >> Yeah. really locked down. >> That's right. Now agile and dyanmic >> And then we're seein'. adaptive, and these are the words that are described. And now add IoT to the mix. You guys had the Black Hat, you know, IoT booth here, >> Yes. which is phenomenal. >> Yes. It's only going to increase the edge of the network, which is not new to Cisco. >> Definitely. Cisco knows the edge. >> That's right. So it's going to be interesting to see that going forward. >> Yeah. >> Definitely. >> And that's one of our sandboxes. We have a sandbox where developers can practice taking docker containers and deploying them into Edge Compute in our routers, and that's one that's really popular and gets a lot of-- >> It's incredibly popular. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Mandy and Tom, thanks for comin' on The Cube. Really appreciate, great to see you again. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Congratulations on all your success. Go kick on the tires of the Sandbox. >> It's all down to Mandy. >> Yeah. >> You guys did a great job. >> DevNet developer network for Cisco here, and of course DevNet created in separate small, boutique-event small, for the Cloud Native World. You want to check that out. Well, the Cube will be there this year. This is The Cube live coverage. I'm John Furrier, stay tuned for more of day 2, exclusive Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, Veen and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, to our live coverage from theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain, for exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, cofounder and cohost of theCUBE, with my cohost this week, Stu Miniman. Been to many events also, senior analyst at wikibon.com. Stu and I have been breaking down all the action here in the DevNet zone. And we have with us here as our guest, Ashley Roach, who is a principal engineer and evangelist with Cisco. DevNet himself, has full view of what's going on. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> Good to see you again. We covered DevNet Create, which was really our first foray into what DevNet was doing outside of the Cisco ecosystem, bringing that cloud-native developer into the Cisco fold. Here, it's the Cisco show where all the Cisco ecosystem and your customers are growing into the cloud and programming with DevNet. So congratulations, it's been phenomenal. It's been one of the top stories we've been covering as DevNet has just been explosive. >> Oh, thanks a lot. It's been a lot of hard work. >> People have been learning, they're coding, they're being inspired, and they're connecting, It's a very sharing culture. Props to you guys and the team. Well done. >> Ashley: Appreciate it. >> So what is DevNet? I mean, this is a cultural shift. We've been reporting on theCUBE all year and last year. But really this year, end of last year, we started really putting the stake in the ground saying we are going to see a renaissance in software development. Linux foundations, reporting that there's going to be exponential growth in code and open-source. You seeing that you can create intellectual property with only 10% of the energy codewise, 90% using open-source. They call that the code sandwich. Again, this is just data that they're sharing, but it points to the bigger trend. Developers are becoming the important part of the equation, and the integration of the stack from network to application, are working together. And again, proof point's there, things like Kubernetes, containers, have obviously been out there for a long time. You're starting to see the visibility for developers. >> Right. >> John: You're at Cisco, you're in the middle of all this. You're seeing one side of the camp and the other. >> Ashley: Yeah. >> What's your view? >> Yeah, I think that's a good, it captures a lot of the dynamics that are going on right now in the environments. And I mean, for me, I come at this from an application developer standpoint. I actually, when I joined Cisco, I was not a hardware guy at all (laughs) Frankly, I'm not even now. I'm much more oriented towards software, and so when we've seen, though, sort of the power of the underlying infrastructure that gets married up to some of these overlay systems like Kubernetes and containers, more and more of the infrastructure on one hand is getting abstracted, which you might think, oh, uh oh. Like, that's a problem. But in reality, the infrastructure still needs to be there, right? You can't run your serverless function out of thin air. >> John: Yeah. >> At least not yet. >> John: It's truly not serverless. There's servers somewhere. >> Yeah, exactly. So, you know, those are the funny jokes that we like to have in the industry, right? But at the same time, you want to think like, okay, well I'm writing my application, I'm a developer. I don't want to know about infrastructure. My whole job is I don't care about that. But there is information and utility in the data that you can get from the infrastructure because at some point, your application will fail. You may have some bugs, and yeah, Kubernetes may kill your container and bring up another one. But you still need to de-bug that issue, and so yeah, you can get tracking, you can get analytics. But also, you can get that stuff from that infrastructure that's underlying it. And so, like one of the presentations I'm doing tomorrow, I wrote just kind of a proof of concept sample app where it's a Spring Boot app that has a built-in health check capability. It ties into APIC-EM and or DNA Center and uses that information that's available about the network. So maybe it's your, from your firewall to your application, you can run a path trace and just have that happen every five minutes or something like that, or check the health of an entire environment every, you know, so often. And then your application can resolve issues or have just data about it so that we can keep moving. >> Yeah, actually, you know, I love that comment you talked, you know, you're not a hardware person, and that's okay. >> Ashley: Right. >> And there's lots of people here at the Cisco show that aren't. That's a change from just a few years ago. How is that dynamic changing? You know, I remember for a few years I was arguing like every networking person needs to become a coder and there's, you know, push back and people are scared and what's going to happen to my job and can I learn that skill set? >> Ashley: Right. >> The bar for entry seems pretty low these days but how do we translate some of those languages? >> Yeah, I think that perception of say, an ops person becoming a programmer, it's not really the right mindset. >> Right. >> There's a couple mindsets, though, that are important. So one of the things we're trying to do is foster the DevOps culture somewhat. And to do that, an ops person has to understand and have empathy for the problems that exist on the application side and vice versa. So for us, we're just trying to education people in that vein. >> John: Yeah. >> But all of the infrastructure is now also automatable and you don't have to automate at low level. You can automate it with things like Ansible, which is a bit more accessible for people that haven't been programming for a long time. So, you know, I think those are the things that we see and that we're trying to encourage within our community and just broadly speaking, I would say, in the industry. >> You brought up empathy, interesting. Because this is a cultural shift, right? So this mindset, this cultural DNA, you have to have empathy. But it's kind of like the Venn diagram. Empathy is one circle. >> Ashley: Mhm. >> Feasibility is another and viability is the other, right? >> Ashley: Mhm. >> So it's always in context to what you can get done, right? So you guys at DevNet have a good view of the development environment. What are some of the challenges and what are the opportunities for folks in the Cisco ecosystem to get their hands dirty, get down and dirty with the tech-- >> Ashley: Oh, yeah. >> Where they can do feasible, viable projects that are possible. Well, seeing Python certainly is one approach. Great for data wrangling, but you know, you got Node.js out there, has been a great language. >> Ashley: Yep. >> App guys are doing Node.js because of JavaScript in server-side. >> Ashley: Yep. >> You got a lot of IO that sounds like a network service mindset. Is there things that you see going on around that what's possible and what's kind of moonshot like projects and where should people start? >> Well, I think, again, kind of going to this historical point of view, it used to be you had one programming book and you're sitting there, you know, late at night copying code from that. And maybe it came with a CD and you could download, you know, your sample code onto your hard drive. And then, you know, you'd be sitting there flipping back and forth and then you hit an issue. You're like, I don't know what to do. Maybe you're trying to teach yourself. I don't have any friends that are programmers. I mean, today, with, I built the vast amount of resources that are available online. You know, like, we have our DevNet Learning Labs. And so that's the set of tutorials that we've provided, but that's not the only thing out there. You've got Code School, Codeacademy. You've got the loops out there. I mean, shoot, MIT, Stanford, they're all putting their courseware in open-source. So the universe of educational material for people to understand this stuff and get started is really, really awesome now. And then also, it's easier than ever, I think,. to actually code because you're, again, like code is becoming more and more abstract at higher level languages. So Python, Node.js, those are still kind of low level, but there are packages on top of those, you know, middleware and Node.js, to build a web server. You get Express or sales or whatever, and then you're kind of off to the races. Like Spring Boot is crazy. It used to be Spring was a bit of a pain in the butt with, you know-- >> Yeah. >> Ashley: All the dependency, injection and everything. But with Spring Boot, now you just add, you know, a dependency, and you've got an entire web framework or an authorization framework or whatever. And that was like, I was pretty blown away when I started seeing-- >> So it's a lot easier. >> It's, yeah, it's just a lot easier. Things are more curated. You have certain stacks. You know, it used to be LAMP stack, now you got ELK stack for data things, you got, you know, and so on. So the universe is wide open for a lot of people to program today. >> So Ashley, love the training angles that you talked about there. But what I bring to mind, a little bit orthogonal to what we've been talking about here-- >> Ashley: Ooh, good programmer buzzword there. >> But one that John and I have been asking about, you mentioned open-source. >> Yes. >> So obviously, things like Spring, lot of things you mentioned are open-source. >> Yes. >> But what about Cisco's, you know, involvement in the community, giving back to open-source. What's the philosophical, you know, viewpoint-- >> Yeah. >> From Cisco's standpoint? >> Yeah, we're active in open-source. We're big contributors to OpenStack, for example. You know, we've got some of, we've created like a CNI module for Kubernetes called Contiv. And so that's in open-source. We, you know, in DevNet, we publish tons of things in open-source, just code samples and you know, example projects and so on. Cisco's actually a big contributor to the Linux kernel, so it's a long legacy of open-source at Cisco. So it's part of our culture. >> So there's no restrictions on everybody going on GitHub, throwing their stuff in, being part of the communities-- >> There's certainly restrictions. Yeah, we have processes that we're supposed to follow. I mean, we got to protect the intellectual property when we need to. I mean, it's the way it is for working at a company. But at the same time, you know, there is viable processes if it makes business sense to open-source things. >> I mean, the line John's used, you know, for the last year or so, is GitHub, that's people's resumes these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So we want to make sure, what I'm saying is it sounds like the ecosystem at Cisco, friendly for the developers to come in, participate. You got a business to run, obviously. Legal keeps their eye on stuff, but you know, Cisco's out there. We saw it in the container ecosystem, OpenStack-- >> Ashley: Yes. >> Stu: Kubernetes, Linux, absolutely-- >> Yeah. >> Stu: Not just even in networking but beyond that. See a lot of Cisco out there, so-- >> Yeah, great. >> So my question for you, personal question. If you could talk to your 22 year old self right now-- >> Ashley: Oh, wow, yeah. >> You're high school, actually, you're college or college graduate, what would you say to yourself knowing what you know now? 'Cause this is a really interesting point. I mean, at my age, we used to build stuff straight up from the bottom of the stack to the top, and it was a lot of heavy lifting. Now you're really kind of getting into some engineering here and then some composite Lego block kind of thinking where these frameworks could just snap together. Sometimes (mumbles) But it's a lot cooler now. I mean, I wish I was 22. What would you say to your 22 year old self out there? What would you advise yourself? What would you say to yourself? >> Where's my smoking jacket? (John laughs) Yeah, so, I mean, I was a liberal arts undergrad and I did take computer programming classes. So I did a couple courses in C toward the end of my time in university, and that's because I've always been interested in technical, you know, in programming and stuff. But I think probably I would have maybe stayed another year to try to maybe get an actual CS degree. So that might be one thing, I think the other-- >> John: What would you jump on today if you saw all of this awesome code, open-source? I mean, like, it's like open bar in the coding party. I mean-- >> Yeah, it's overwhelming. >> It's so many things to jump on and-- >> You know, obviously, joking, I should say blockchain and machine learning and AI, right? But actually, I would say the machine learning and AI stuff is probably a good, interesting, you know, wave of technology, yeah. >> I just want to, you know, we're talking about your 22 year old self. How about your kids? >> Ashley: Yeah. >> You're working with your kids, checking out your GitHub on there. So, you know, maybe share, you know, younger people. You know, how do they get involved? In the keynote yesterday, it was, you know, jobs of the future. >> Right, well, yeah. For my kids, I have two daughters. And so, I try to encourage them to at least be familiar with coding. I've tried to teach them Linux some, but we've done programming classes, but it's kind of hard sometimes to get them interested in something like programming, to be honest. So some of it's trying to be creative problem solvers, trying to craft that sort of attitude, you know. So that then, when they do get the opportunity to do some programming, that they'll be interested about it. >> I mean, the young kids love gaming. Gaming's a good way to get people in. >> Yep. >> VR is now an interesting-- >> I mean, Minecraft and Sims, those are the two that my oldest daughter loves. I mean, the thing I remember that's the funniest was when you know, of course, this was when we all got computers back in the day and we did keyboards, right, in order to do stuff. So I got the first iPad when it came out and I brought it home and my daughter, who was, I think, six or eight at the time, she's like, "Cool, I understand this." Like automatically understood it. But then, she went to the TV and it had icons on it. So she walked up to the TV and tried to do that, and I was like, "Oh, that's funny." Like her mental model is this. >> Yeah. >> Where our mental model was that and so on earlier on. >> My oldest son says, "Dad, search engine is so your generation," (Ashley laughs) Not even email, like search, Google search. >> Yeah, the digital, it's like the digital native thing. On the other hand, we actually are fairly restrictive about like cell phone and mobile because it's a lot. That sort of thing. They really, really are going to face some interesting, I don't know, social, you know, the social things that you have in high school and middle school now multiplied and amplified through all that. We're sort of cautious, too, as parents, you know. >> Lot of societal issues to deal with. Alright, now getting back to DevNet here, I want to get your thoughts because we had a big setup here. One of the things that the folks people can't see on camera is we're in the DevNet zone. You see behind us, but there's everywhere else around. It's really the big story at Cisco Live and has been for awhile. Every year it gets bigger. It's like, it keeps growing in interest. What do you guys show here? What's the purpose? Give a little quick, take a minute to explain the DevNet approach this year-- >> Okay. >> John: And how it's different-- >> Yeah. >> John: And how you guys take this going forward. >> So the DevNet zone, philosophically, we tried to have the experiential. We don't want people to come in here and get death by PowerPoint of hey, check out this awesome new product that we created. You know, that kind of thing. >> Yeah. >> Instead, we want people to come in and have the opportunity to sit down, either by themselves or with a friend or, you know, with one of us to be able to work through sort of tutorials so that we have this area of the Learning Labs or learn about the DevNet sandbox. That's another area that we have where that is a sort of try it out, live, always-on, cloud service that we provide for anyone. We also have, of course, examples of example use cases. So we have some IOT and collaboration use cases that we're demonstrating in the new APIs that have come out of those products that you wouldn't think may be necessarily, oh, collaboration and IOT really are connected. But in fact, you know, ultimately you need to get a human involved when you have exceptions. And in a lot of cases like for edge compute scenarios, it's exception oriented. So when we, the example that we have here is we have a truck that's sitting on a handcrafted scale that's like a raspberry pie thing that one of our evangelists, Casey Bleeker, made. And it's putting, you know, analog data into our container that's running on an edge device. And when an exception occurs when the scale has this truck on it with too many stones in the back, then it triggers an alert. It creates a team room for people to come and escalate and discuss. It'll make a phone call automatically to the truck driver and pull people together to deal with that situation. But then, additionally, we have a new room capabilities with like, our telepresence systems. And that has face identification, not like from identifying the user standpoint, but it knows it can count how many people are in the room, for example. So if you combine that sort of IOT capability with this collaboration unit that's going to already be there, you're getting kind of a win-win of that infrastructure in the rooms. >> Ashley, talked about there's so many different things going on there, what's exciting you the most? Where are you seeing the most people, you know, gravitating around? >> Yeah, in the DevNet zone in general? >> Well, it can be here or in general, yeah. >> Well, I think one thing in the DevNet zone, we also have a white hat black hat challenge. So that's been very, very popular. What we're doing is demonstrating using, you know, off the shelf hacker tools, how vulnerable some IOT devices are to give people. It's kind of a you've heard about it, now experience it and do it yourself to see how easy it really is. And then see, of course, how our solutions can help you mitigate those problems. So that's, you know, IOT security is a big concern, I think, in general, and so I think that's an exciting spot for people-- >> So hands-on learning, very people-oriented, very open-- >> Yes, yep. >> The motto I love, I'm reading on the thing there, learn code, inspire, connect. So learn, toe in the water, connect-- >> Ashley: Yes. >> Share. >> Yeah. >> Mentor, collaborate. >> The other thing that we're sort of soft launching, I guess, is we have a new application developer site on DevNet, and so-- >> John: What's the URL? >> It is developer.cisco.com/site/app-dev. >> John: Okay, that's good. Memorize that, quiz later. >> Yeah. >> That's long, just search. >> Yeah, right, right. >> Hey, Alexa. >> Right, so, but with that, we're trying to make it easier for people to understand the use cases for what kinds of applications they can build using our technology. So indoor location, using kind of doing maps and heat maps and building that kind of scenario, for example. >> Awesome. >> Ashley: Through T-Mobile and video and such. >> As you are evangelizing your engine on the engineering side, what's the plans going forward? Post-event, obviously, you've got Cisco Live in Orlando this year, it's in 2018. >> Ashley: Yeah, we have-- >> But you guys got a lot of these going on, you got a lot of digital content. What's the outreach plan? Where should people expect to see you guys? Share the going forward plan. >> Yeah, I wish I knew where everyone was going to be. So thankfully, on the website-- >> They're on the internet! >> We have an events calendar, so I would definitely encourage you to look there if you're interested in connecting with one of us. We have the Cisco Live in Melbourne then Orlando. We also have DevNet Create in April and that's in Mountain View, I think, Bay Area. So would love to have people come out to that, and kind of the theme of that last year, which was the inaugural one, continues this year, which is where apps need infrastructure. So we want to kind of continue this conversation about DevOps, how, you know, applications and infrastructure-- >> John: Yeah. >> Can benefit each other. >> And just for the folks watching, theCUBE was at the inaugural DevNet Create. We'll be there again, we'll also be in Orlando. And again, this is important, we'll end on this point. I'd like you to take a minute to explain the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create because this is really interesting. I like the way you guys are doing this. It's really open, but it's pretty transparent. So share the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create. >> Yeah, so DevNet is our developer program, and so that's a website-- >> Before Cisco and-- >> It's Cisco, it's oriented towards those things. DevNet Create is more about forming a community to solve these problems about applications and infrastructure. So that intersection, whether you call it DevOps, whether you call it I don't know what, potatoes and you know, something. Something in there, you know, there is this fluid spot where applications are looking more like infrastructure, infrastructure is starting to look more like applications. So what does that mean and how do we explore that together to, you know-- >> We call it cloud-native. >> Ashley: Yeah. >> It's a set of developers who just, like you, don't really want to get involved in network but love it to be more magical. >> Right. >> Right? And Cisco folks love Cisco because they're in that world, right? So-- >> Yes. >> To me, it's really interesting you guys do that. Congratulations. >> Yeah, thanks. And it's not just for Cisco people, right? So Cisco Live and DevNet Zone is that. For Create, it's actually the inverse. We encourage people from the community to come and check it out as opposed to the-- >> John: Props to you guys, great stuff. Cisco, DevNet Zone is where theCUBE is. Of course DevNet Create is going to be outside of the Cisco ecosystem. Connecting the two is really the key. We're living in a world, global connected devices, connected people, that's the mission of Cisco. Love that vision, but of course, we're theCUBE, bringing you the live content here in Barcelona. All, of course, is available online, youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, thecube.net is our new site. Check it out. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage coming from Barcelona with theCUBE after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here at Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE with my partner co-host this week, Stu Miniman, host theCUBE hundreds of events also an analyst at Wikibond.com. Our next guest is Rowan Trollope, who's the SVP and General Manager of the applications division groups plural applications. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, too. >> So you did the Keynote up on stage here in Europe and, obviously, Europe is the 2018 kickoff. So it's officially Cisco Live Europe but it's 2018. >> Rowan: Welcome to 2018, it's here. Europe is a big exploding area. You got GDPR on the horizon, you got sophisticated customers, lot of networking, lot of cloud discussions, lot of futuristic views in your speech. How is Cisco changing now? That just really nailed it in the Keynote. What is the future vision that you see for Cisco? >> You're really seeing a new Cisco emerge at this point, I think. A software-defined, faster-paced company, frankly. The idea that what got us here won't get us there, we have to reinvent the company. We have to reinvent what we'd done for so long. And that's what the team is doing. And that was, what was so impressive, frankly, about the network intuitive launch last year was just how dramatically that team had reimagined the concept of, in this case, campus networking, right? But we know that it doesn't stop there. As David said yesterday, it's going to go into the data center, it's going to apply across the rest of, and even the cloud. >> One of the things that Cisco's always had and observe in just as an industry participant over the past 30 years is, you know when open standards TCP/IP came out, that created an industry. So much happened from there, but Cisco's been an enabling company. You guys enable people to be successful. That's always been kind of the network stack. The disruption from going after the old SNA and DECnet protocols, Sonova protocols. >> You're going back before me. (laughing) >> Yeah, but going forward and your speech was not about looking back, it was about looking forward. So now, how is Cisco going to be enabling that future generation of customers, stakeholders, developers, and where is that value going to be unlocked? Where's it going to come from? >> I think that if we were to have a history book and be living the world 2050 right now and then we had a book called the history of the internet, the last 50 years, what would that book say? And how would it talk about 2018 and the world we live in today? And I bet you that it would sort of almost be quaint or sort of Jurassic era internet to the users of 2050 or the inhabitants, the citizens of 2050. That we would look back on this era that we're in today and just say, "Wow, I can't, could you believe the." You know I could imagine my kids are like, "You guys had all these security problems? "Oh my God that's crazy, how could you have lived that way?" >> You carried a phone around? (laughing) >> Yeah, like this is crazy, in other words, we kind of haven't even really started with the internet yet. We just tried a few things and it seems pretty cool and we know there's a few problems and one of them's like, "Gosh, it can't be so manual." We know we're going to have to fix that. "Gosh, it can't be so insecure." We know we're going to have to fix that. "Oh my gosh, this cloud thing's "pretty cool but turns out there's "a little more complexity." We solve that, you know, as well. So it's really going through those things and, at least the way my brain works, it's kind of that I put myself in the future and look backwards and it helps me to sort of think that, gosh, we just got to really think about this in a bigger way and start moving faster. >> Rowan, I love that. If they go back in the history book and it was like, okay, that era networking, dominated by Cisco, tracked by ports and revenue and the old Cisco and the seven dwarfs. Now the future era: software, it's applications. What defineds who Cisco is in the market and how do we track who the winners and losers are? >> Well, I think what you said earlier is right. Cisco is an enabling company and Cisco is a special kind of company, frankly. I think a different kind of company than what you see out there in the world. We're a company that has created orders of magnitude more value than we've captured. And we've captured a lot but when you think about some companies don't do that. Some companies create, almost capture the same amount of volume that they create or they keep almost all of it for themselves. And there's some notable current examples, but I won't name names, where they're really capturing almost all the value that they're creating. Cisco's a different kind of company. We're creating a platform for society, frankly, to be able to exist on this planet in a meaningful way in the future and it reminds me, the way that Cisco is, it reminds me of a great line that's been going around recently which is, "A society grows great when men plant "trees whose shade they know they will never sit in." And that's how I think about the next generation infrastructure. This is going to take a long time to get out there. And we are creating that future for our next generation, but doesn't mean that we have to wait. We need to get started now. There's urgency. >> Rowan, one of the observations that we made yesterday, Stu and I were talking about it when we were walking in this morning is, we usually talk about competition but not this year. It's almost as if this point in history, it's not about competition being names of other companies; the competition is being on the right side of history. >> Right. >> And so you bring up this point, right this is really clear, but the question is architecturally, there's some decisions that companies, and companies are trying to face this, your customers are trying to figure out I want to be on the right side of history because that future is coming. What in your mind's eye is that architecture, obviously software, billion connected devices, I get that, but specifically, what is the history line going to look like? What line, where should people be on, what side of history do you see unfolding that customers can go to for safe harbor to put the 20 year plan together for their business? >> You know I think right now we're at a moment where customers do have to make choices but the choice is pretty clear to everyone. It isn't like there's a lot of questions. We know that the network needs to be reinvented. We've built the products and they're here now. So it's really about, do you start now? And in my view, it's sort of a matter of life or death. Except for many of these companies, waiting is not an option. So, I think that the dividing line on history will be did you get started? Did you transform your business at that time? If you didn't, it's unlikely that your company will be around for very long. And so that will sort of define the future in my mind. It's who got started early. Who said, "Okay, now is the time "we got to get onto this stuff," >> And in 10BASE networking, in context, great message, love that. That's certainly an architecture that's data driven. But not a lot of data driven constructs in the Keynotes, probably in the sessions there are, but what's the role of data? Obviously we had your Chief Privacy Officer Michelle Dennedy on earlier, she was awesome, data is now the asset that will probably value businesses so you have on the app side we had the collab team over, it's a platform, not just a tool, a set of tools that's throwing off data. This data is the instrumenting valuation for companies. How are you looking at this and how does Cisco evolve to skate to where the puck will be? Cause it's still early but developing really fast on the data front. >> I think that academics today and a lot of Cisco thought leaders would agree with this, are looking at a next-generation networking principle called Information-Centric Networks, or data oriented networking architectures. And it's the idea that current networking architectures are based on the N10 principle, which are systems-based. System A connects to system B and they can send bits. Well, the next generation networks not going to be system-based, it's going to be information-based, which means I don't ask for the Microsoft.com URL and then get the IP address and connect to a system. I find out, I want to see, show me the product list for Microsoft and the network serves me that up. And Microsoft publishes it and says, I have that information. So when someone asks for it, I say I have it and I publish it. So the network abstracts to a higher level that is at the data layer, not at the connectivity layer and that is what I think is going to happen over time. Is you're going to see this continuing abstraction up the stack of all this infrastructure where it gets easier and easier and easier for developers to interact with the infrastructure. >> So here's a philosophical question for you. Network theory, we all know how packets move around, folks may or may not care, if they don't are in that business. >> Rowan: We care. >> Well I mean someone in the business might not care how OSPF routing protocol works but I mean it's a network theory. Social networking and IoT are connected devices, they're nodes on a network. How do you take that DNA of being competent in network DNA to applications that are inherently more graph databases? More network-oriented where attention, reputation, intent, context, it's always been like a search paradigm, not a networking-moving packet paradise. So, I guess my question is, how do you connect those two worlds, how does Cisco do that? Cause you do dominate the network, network theory, network graphs. >> Yeah, I think that, you said it's a philosophical question so I can give you a philosophical answer. You know, we live in a world today where we don't actually really access the internet. We access it through companies that have put a business model on top of it. You go to Google or any other search engine, that's the case. So they've essentially layered this data-oriented layer on top of the network already. But you're paying for it. And you're paying a price because if you search and you search and I search, we're going to get three different answers. I mean this whole idea of filter bubbles and what's going on with social networks today is a true phenomenon. And the internet was never really meant to be that way. So I think there's an opportunity for us to reimagine that. And some of the basic, sort of, principles of the network can be reconsidered. Now, obviously, we've got the short-term things we need to do over the next few years like have companies deploy our new gear and buy our stuff and everything else. But we are thinking about these next generations, I'd say pretty keenly and, you know, I think that the infrastructure of the future, the way that I think about it, does provide a much higher level of abstraction to the network than what we have today. >> They're making it programmable, you mean. Making it resilient. >> Yeah, as a developer, I shouldn't have to worry about standing up a server. I should be able to write some code and publish some data and subscribe to data and that's it. >> Rowan, I loved actually the open of your Keynote. You talked about it's a new era and a new infrastructure. We've seen Cisco change the dynamic; the applications, some of the acquisitions you made, the push much deeper into software. What are some of the biggest challenges you face there 'cause I think we agree, if Cisco is alive and thriving in 2015, we don't think of it as infrastructure networking company. So, what's the biggest challenge for the company to move that way, up the stack. >> Well, I think the biggest challenge is how quickly we moved. I think that we have to constantly be challenging ourselves to move faster. We know, I think we have a pretty good sense for where the future is going and what we'd like to create. The question is how quickly can we and our customers move. And we have to make it easier for our customers. So advance services plays a big part in that. That's why we have such a big investment there and why we're so over-rotating onto staffing that for the network intuitive. The collaboration business is going through the same transformation, IoT in the same way. So really, we're racing to keep up with our customers as much as they're racing to keep up with us. And that's the biggest opportunity and challenge, I think, for the company right now. Is can we move fast enough. And if we do, a $40 stock price will look like, you know, again, quaint. >> So developers are going to be a key role. Obviously a developer-focused, developer.Cisco.com. You guys had that around for a long, long time. You guys, when vertically-integrated Cisco works great, Cisco on Cisco, as you go out and have more APIs and things like Uber Nettes with cloud-native open up more non-Cisco. One trend we're seeing here at Cisco Live is a lot of developers that aren't necessarily a hardcore network guys are coming into the Cisco fold. That's going to be more of the trend going forward. How do you view and what does Cisco need to do to capture that mind share and convert them into valuable participants in the community building on top of Cisco, because integration with non-Cisco related things, whether it's open source and/or other systems be imbedding into the sales force and what not. That has to be the new normal for you guys. What's your view on that and how do you drive that forward? >> I think companies of the future, next generation companies, there's not going to be a distinction between tech companies and non-tech companies. Every company will be a tech company and you won't have sort of the difference between the application and your business. The application is your business. So the app is your business and you're a tech company and that's that. And all companies will be that way, essentially. Powered by software. In that kind of a world, it's developers that are key to delivering on your company's mission. And so I think developers will continue to accelerate. We see the DevNet zone grows here every year. It's phenomenal, it's bigger than ever this year. And the examples in the programmability that we've been adding to the network, to the collaboration portfolio, every time I come here, it blows my mind. And so I think that's certainly a vision of the future, when you come and take a look at what's going on here. You can see that the developer is the key for those businesses of the future and we're going to service them. I mean, that is our mission is to get very, very focused on servicing developers with the platforms that we're building. >> If you had to extract out and describe to a college buddy or customer or friend, they asked you, "Rowan, what's the big wave "that you're riding for the next 20 years?" These waves are coming. We're seeing a lot of examples of crypto and blockchain on one end, really active, you certainly got cloud as a wave, data AI as a wave. Is it all one big wave? I mean waves of innovation come once a generation this size. We've said on theCUBE, we think it's the biggest wave we've seen in a long, long time. I mean right now, it's a combination of all those things. Your thoughts of the wave, how would you describe that to someone. >> I think the biggest and most meaningful thing to us is the connectivity of everything. I think that's probably the big one. Data comes along with that, all the other parts of it come along with it. But, if you think about the history of where we've been, for the last 30 years the internet was largely here and here. That's where it is. >> Like that remote. (laughing) >> And it's not in your lights and it's not in your cameras and it's not in the desk and it's not in your chair, but it will be. That to me is the biggest transformation. It's going to take a long time. You know, I think we've been talking about this transformation for a long time but as we get to that level of connectivity, as we get to that level of pervasiveness of the network, that's the biggest transformation to me is that the network goes from here to everywhere. >> And the common threads to your point is data, cloud, no-no, data, network-- >> Yep, cloud, security-- >> And software. >> Yeah, I mean look-- >> Things that'll never change. There will always be data, there will always be the network. >> Yep, and there will always be compute of some sort or another. We just think that if you look at our portfolio, we are really well positioned to create that next generation infrastructure. We've got the products now in many, across the boards. And we're thinking about, when you think about data as one of the most interesting things I think about, one of the most important transitions for the company is around data. It's about pivoting our focus from moving packets to addressing data. And what we want to be ultimately for in enterprise is a central nervous system and the real-time platform for data. We're not going to be the database. We're not going to be the analytics company. We're going to be that real-time source of information. You could think about it as a nervous system for a business. >> You're taking your network DNA and expanding it. Not trying to land grab new trends. >> No I think there's plenty of work for us to do. >> Rowan, a final question, what's the vibe here in Barcelona? Obviously, great Keynote. Stu and I both really enjoyed, love the vision. And then the meaty part of the intent that came after was great. What's going on, your conversations in the hallway, customers, dinners, what's the vibe like here in Europe for Cisco this year? >> Well, it's a thrilling vibe, especially down here on the show floor and right here at the epicenter of that which is the DevNet, sort of workshops and all the things that are going on, they're packed. So I think if you're going to come down, get down here soon because they are just absolutely filled up and so, that's one thing. I think a tremendous amount of optimism for the company is what I'm picking up as I talk to customers. People that have been coming up to me have been just very excited about Cisco's future and very excited about our vision and very excited about what we're doing and what we are doing together. I think the idea that Cisco is a different kind of company. We're the kind of company that is an enabler for our customers to do great things. And that, to me, is a very noble pursuit. >> Alright, Rowan Trollope, SVP and general manager applications Cisco, headlining Cisco Live 2018 here in Europe. This is theCUBE's live coverage from the DevNet zone here in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live CUBE coverage after this short break. Thanks for watching.

[Announcer] Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> We're back. I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live 2018, beautiful Barcelona. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Mike Bundy, who is the head of global strategic alliances with Pure Storage. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, first-time guest. Give us a little bit about your background. You're relatively new to Pure, but you know this ecosystem quite well. >> Absolutely. Relatively new with Pure. Spent 21 years at Cisco leading various technology groups in the company. Most recently from there led the global enterprise data center sales force. A lot of background experience around cloud, virtualization, automation of the data center space, so, very excited to be at Pure. >> When you talk about Pure here at the Cisco show, I know it's FlashStack, but give us a little bit of the breadth and the depth of the relationships there. You hear a lot of themes talked about at this show, everything from IoT and just the future of where all these technologies are going. Where is the intersection? >> FlashStack is a partnership that Cisco and Pure have to deliver converged infrastructure in the marketplace. What differentiates us is really our ability to derive high, high performance. You'll definitely see value as you deploy just about any database application. It drives a much more economical, valuable solution to the customer base as a result of that. We're poised to capture new trends in the marketplace with the explosion of IoT intelligence, whether it's deep learning, neural networks, or business intelligence, with the likes of SAP or various other applications deployed on hadoop infrastructure. >> I want to unpack some of those, 'cause you said a lot, there. Our research from Wikibon, we see coming into 2018, I mean, data's at the center of it all. We talked to Cisco, data, majorly important. It's not just moving it things, but how do we get value out of the data? Start with IoT, you mentioned in there. How does a company, I think at Pure, it's a storage company. How does Pure have an impact and relationship on the IoT discussion? >> IoT in itself is driving a huge explosion in terms of the amount of data. In two years, according to IDC, it'll be 20 times the amount of capacity on the internet will be the amount of data that's created. For us, deploying a platform that allows you to really take data and look at it as a platform and how you use it is really one of our strengths at the company. Our software set is called Pure1, and it really takes a look and helps you handle and manage that data very differently than any of the other traditional storage solutions that have been on the marketplace. But it was all built on the foundation of Flash, so you get the scale and you get the performance that Flash brings at the same time. So, very, very powerful, and we're glad to see trends driven by IoT to drive that explosion for us. >> FlashStack, talk a little bit about it. What is interesting to customers these days? The trend of convergent infrastructure now has gone for over eight years. You know, there's the buzz of hyperconverge, there's cloud, is kind of front-and-center. Why is converged infrastructure in general, and FlashStack specifically, so important today? >> If you break down the market in terms of where converged infrastructure fits, it's both in the hybrid cloud and the private cloud side of things. There's still tremendous growth in the private cloud world where we see a lot of deployments, there. If you look at the solution, it's very cohesive with what Cisco has, from a UCS standpoint. It's a stateless platform. It's very simple to manage. It's very scalable. You can get 10 times the rack density from a storage and compute perspective with a FlashStack than you can the competitors. It's really an innovative, modernized converged infrastructure stack. As you said, CI's been around for eight years. The FlashStack's been on the marketplace about two years, and has had tremendous growth in that time frame as a result. We continue to try to drive simplification, automation, a different consumption model. How you maintain it from a cost perspective is different, so it has a very unique value proposition compared to other CIs in the marketplace. >> One of the founders of Wikibon, David Floyer, when the Flash wave started, he said to companies, "It's database, database, database." There's so much opportunity to really transform both the economics as well as the business productivity. It wasn't the first use case that happened in converged infrastructure, but definitely somewhere, Pure's focus has been. Talk about, some are what of the results? What did customers see when they moved to CI for business-critical applications like database? >> Key, key. If you look at the timing that it takes to develop an application, a lot of that is how easy are you able to grab the data, create a usable format of that, do your development test cases, and then move it back into production. The way that the FlashStack and the Pure Flash arrays allow you to take that data, you don't have to necessarily copy it and create replicas. It's very fast and easy. We've seen developers cut down 25%, 30% of the development time on an SAP database or an Oracle database, right? It's drastically different than what they've been used to in the past. >> All right, so, Mike, you've lived for years on the Cisco side of the equation. Now you're a partner. What's it like to be a Cisco partner these days? They've got dozens of partnerships on the storage side, so how do they make Pure feel special, understand the cooperative nature of our industry? >> I think what we're trying to make sure we do, here, is focus on the customer outcome. We are really working day in and day out to make sure that whatever we do drives business value to the customer. That is what separates the partnership from others. When you take a look at that, it's given us the ability to grow the amount of resources that Cisco and Pure can contribute into the marketplace. It also has allowed us to help develop new lines of business for some of our other partners in the ecosystem. It's very competitive, as you call out, but there's still a great partnership here. Cisco's been very supportive of our growth. >> It's been a few years since I've attended a Cisco Live myself, but feels that the attendees and the focus of the show has gone through a bit of a transformation. We're sitting here in the DevNet Zone. Lots of people here coding. I walked through the World of Solutions. It's not just networking, you know. Networking's a big piece. What have you seen changing over the few years? How's that impact Pure, and just personally, what do you look at this ecosystem? >> I think, going back to what I said earlier, it's all about driving value for the outcome of the customer. What is the business challenge you're solving, what is the opportunity they're seizing, and how can we develop a more agile platform that allows their software teams to really take advantage of that? Really, that's what we're focused on, is what can we build horizontally that makes the platform more cloud-friendly, more automated? And then you can drive down to specific vertical value propositions within that, whether it's automotive industry, airline industry, healthcare industry, et cetera. That's really where I've seen the transition from. It's not as much about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure. It's about the higher-level outcome for the customer business. >> When it comes to Pure's business in general, and FlashStack specifically, any differences in here in the European geographies compared to the United States that you could comment on? >> Not really. I think, from a Flash adoption period, the adoption rate has been higher for all Flash arrays in the United States. As you move to Europe, we're seeing an acceleration of that, here, of what we saw probably about two years ago in the United States. There's actually a ton of excitement here now, in terms of the opportunity for the FlashStack and what Flash can do for that. >> It's interesting, you mentioned for Flash and even for converged infrastructure, there's still a large percentage of the market that hasn't dove in. Any commentary as to what's holding people back, or some aha moments that you've had customers that, those that haven't gone for the simplicity of converged or hyperconverged, that they should get on board? >> I think if you look at Flash in general, it was focused on high IOPS, input/output performance requirements initially. Virtualization, virtual desktops were very big. And then, your higher-performance applications. Now that you've seen what we've been able to drive in terms of full functionality across the platform, it's not just about Flash and performance. It actually is about a storage platform, now, and the economics of the entire support are making it more palatable now to move other workloads. I think you'll continue to see this expansion. I think Gartner and IDC talk about the next three to five years, you'll see a much greater, greater density of applications moving on to Flash, versus what it was in the past. We're actually releasing very soon, and we'll be integrating into FlashStack other platforms that we have around FlashBlade, which is real focused on unstructured data, things that wasn't necessarily rows and columns from a block storage perspective. I think you will see that help drive some of this disruption and transition in that space. >> Mike, as we look into 2018, what should customers look to find from the Pure and Cisco partnership? >> Absolutely. We'll continue to drive more tools with FlashStack that allow you to more easily and rapidly deploy the system itself. We will also be looking toward new use cases that are very relevant in this space, to capture the demands of the customer. So, things around business intelligence, things around artificial intelligence, we'll scale that out. You'll also look at seeing us drive toward more scalable, foundational elements of a storage platform. Those are some of the things that you'll definitely see from us moving forward. >> Well, Mike Bundy, really appreciate all the updates on Pure, on FlashStack, and your partnership with Cisco. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live Europe 2018 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (fast electronic music)

(upbeat contemporary music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier cofounder SiliconANGLE cohost of theCUBE with my cohost partner Stu Miniman this week analyst at Wikibon.com also cohost at many shows across the industry. Our next two guests talking about data, data privacy is Michelle Dennedy who's the vice-president chief privacy officer at Cisco and Robert Waitman who works for her. We've got a smashing new data report to share with you about some of the surveys and customers and impact of privacy in business. Michelle, Robert thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Michelle, good to see you again. You were on the front pages of SiliconAngle.com as a feature story this week of the interview you had on the ground with theCUBE team, welcome back. >> You can't get rid of me. >> Well we love having you on because it's really important because not only is GDPR which we reported on for our last interview but the role of data, data driven organizations you hear that at every C-Sweep from security to user experience and everything in between down the data center. You're measuring everything certainly Cisco managing data center and everything else. But this really nuanced thing here about impacts to businesses because now users are in control of their data and you're seeing things like cryptocurrency and immutable block chain on one end and then just what are the rights of the users and the consumers in context to digital business? This is one of the most cutting-edge social and technical issues. I mean GDPR is a nightmare in and of itself just to figure out where the hell the data is. >> Some people's nightmare is other people's dreams. >> It's good for users but not good for database administrators, good for the tech industry. What are the current challenges right now from your perspective? What are you seeing as the core top three issues that you see around data and data privacy impacting business? >> Well I think you actually put your finger right in the heart of it. It is coming together of human rights, human needs, policy law meets technology capability and functionality. So I think understanding that the data is the common currency across all of these systems whether you're talking about human rights and ownership, whether you're talking about legal rights and management that data currency goes across educating people and making them understand that currency is absolutely critical to surviving this next new era. >> As always I tell my kids advice, I say that if you want to get into something cutting edge, get into data science meets societal, political science and social science. >> Michele: Exactly >> As that's coming together and you know Steve Jobs had that liberal arts meets social meets technology kind of intersection. What are some of the brightest minds in the industry that are in your area working on? I mean how are they attacking this? Are they looking at it from a big picture? Are they diving deep into it? What are the brightest minds doing in this area? >> Well so I have a deep bias and of course I hired some of the best minds here, right? I think the pragmatic mind, I'll put it that way rather than judging anybody's thing. If you're writing pretty policies like, brava to you. But what I really like to see is looking at what is a data inventory? Starting to look at data as a supply chain issue. And the reason I love supply chain and management and measurement is we know how to do it. So we're applying these common business schemas and strategies to this newer functionality of data as a piece of currency that changes and is contextual over time. So the pragmatic thinking I'll put it that way is to really look at privacy engineering as first a business use case requirements gathering exercise and then figuring out how does it work in the architecture. What's your industry? What kind of data do you have? And then you can figure out what are those granular features and requirements. And then the rest of your supply chain pulls through. So when you take kind of that management approach it sounds a little plodding but it's actually very exciting. There's a lot of innovation, it must happen. >> Another thing that we cover I was looking on our research side is nailing that exact point. How do you instrument the data? So talk about some of the confluence things that you just mentioned but then as business starts to look at how they value themselves so we really haven't seen any cutting edge data on this, would love to get your perspective on how data is impacting the valuation of a business. Because valuation techniques have been mostly financial, because you can measure it. >> Yup >> But now that you have data as currency as you mentioned, how are companies looking at the valuation of their enterprise? >> So I brought along a little friend today, because we really believe that the mantra in my working group within Cisco is values to value. So figuring out the instrumentation of the gear. You know I have a lot of support to do that within Cisco, we do engineering pretty good. But then figuring out we actually went out to some academics, we looked at what other people in the marketplace as you say, not a lot of metrics about how to instead of saying how much have we lost, how do we know that there is progress? And so Robert Waitman joined my team about two years ago I stole him from the worlds of economy and finance and business preparation and he said, I don't know anything about privacy and data. He does now, but I said I don't really want you for that, I want to start to build a model that we can share with the world on how to value data and how to look at the upside as well as the downside. >> So Robert, I've got to ask you so one of the things we've been riffing on in theCUBE recently is with the role of decentralized applications and this kind of applies to network theory because Cisco has been a successful network company, the role of the chief economic officer a term that we made up because you're starting to see economics certainly with token economics with cryptocurrency that's all the rage right now so Facebook just recently banned all ads for the coin offerings, but that is the trend that's happening, right? So you're starting to see the role of an economist in business. So with data the valuation, this seems to be a new trend. Your thoughts and reaction to that. >> Yeah, well you know data's not on the balance sheets, so we don't typically valuate and manage it the way you'd manage all of our other assets. But data, especially when it's well curated which is one of the things that privacy enables with that unlocks a lot of values. But that's kind of the focus of our research. Say look, GDPR and all those other things can require you to do certain things, but by having data that's well curated, you can unlock value for your organization. And there are a lot of different ways to do that, whether it's operational or whether it's revenue upside you can get from better understanding curation of your data. >> Before we get into the reports, I just want to ask you one follow up question. Do you see a day where there is going to be a fiscal and monetary data policy? >> Michelle: Yes >> Yes and yes? >> Absolutely and you know, this was predicted. This is my favorite quote. I say it everyday and I'll say it again today. Grace Hopper, 1965 that one day information will be on the corporate balance sheet, because it's more valuable than the hardware that processes it. That day is now. We have enough granularity in the system to actually have big data and analytics. We have enough compute power. The day is now to understand and now we have to figure out what's that report look like and how do we ride on that trend? >> Do you that that's a strategic imperative for CEOs of companies to actually get the data on the balance sheet? >> If so, how? >> I'm going to say that here first. The ones who get it on first are the ones who win. Now they won't get it on the balance sheets first as Robert pointed out. You cannot under our current accounting rules; however, just like we took brand and we turned it into an asset and we valued that asset. It's not allowed on many balance sheets. It's definitely something to invest in or divest in and to curate and measure. So I could go on for a long time about this particular topic. >> We'd love to hear a whole segment on this cutting edge data concepts and currency. Stu wants to get a question in here, go ahead Stu. >> Robert, the keynote yesterday it was security is one of those headwinds you know preventing companies from innovators to slow them down. You've got some good data on privacy and want share what is the mindset of the customers? You know, we've been asking is GDPR just going to slow things to a grinding halt, you know in IT? We think there are some opportunities there, but what's the data telling you? What are you hearing from customers? >> Well I think the world that we're in the background is that customers are asking more questions about data and data privacy, but before they buy a product or service, they want to know who has access to my data? What's it being used for? Is it going to be deleted? How long is it kept? All of those questions are contemplated by GDPR but it's a broader issue of general having privacy controls around data. So in seeing that environment we were wondering as a team is to what extent can we measure how much business may be slowed down by those kinds of questions. And so the study we released last week quantified that for the first time. And what we learned is that 65% of companies globally, and this is based on a survey of 3000 corporations around the world double-blind so we don't know who they are, 65% of them said that we are in fact they are in fact experiencing sales delays due to data privacy issues. And remarkably the average delay is seven point eight weeks. That's almost two months on average across all of these companies having a delay due to customers' asking the right questions about where their data is. We find that remarkable again adding to the idea that organizations who invest and do a better job on this can manage that to a greater degree. >> Just a clarification here this is the germ of the Privacy Maturity Benchmark Study >> Michelle: Correct >> And you can check it out on Robert's Twitter handle which is Robert Waitman his full name no space RobertWaitman W-A-I-T-M-A-N, saw that pinned on your top tweet. Impact to business >> Right >> More cost, more value again unlocking the value we totally agree with you by the way. How and at what cost? >> Well, that cost of sales delay translates into many things that affect the company's bottom line. You might miss quarterly or annual forecast because you're not making revenue. It could be that you lose sales. Once you delay a sale, you're more likely to lose a sale, so every company would be in a different situation as to how much impact it has on their product portfolio and to what degree they're seeing these delays. What we did find is that privacy and investments in privacy maturity can help manage it, so those organizations that are immature from a privacy standpoint are seeing the longest delays on average 16.8 weeks of the most immature and for the companies that are privacy mature according to the standard model only three point four weeks. So think about the difference. Sixteen point eight or three point four by having investments in privacy and we show that correlation and it makes sense because companies can manage their data better >> We've been also riffing on the notion that security was handled in the early days with perimeter based security and now, you know, it's no perimeter. It's the wild west. Security is a great example. You know, of all the vendors no one has more than four percent market share. It's a disaster and we know that. We have friends working on it. Privacy is the same way, it's almost like we got to cover the check box you know compliance. We have a privacy statement, we handle the data. It's more reactive more protection oriented not proactive. So the question is what should companies be doing to be more proactive in driving privacy oriented investments which now we see that translate to more of a business impact certainly at valuation and capability. >> Yup >> Thoughts? >> Well, I mean I would start by saying that what we're trying to put out there is that it's not just about compliance. So this is about both business value on the revenue or cost side as well as the ethical standards that we're trying to set. So we should be doing these privacy controls, because it's the right things to do regardless of the GDPR environment that we're in currently. So that's kind of the overall missioning and it's much longer term than just the GDPR timetable but it's trying to get companies to do the right things to protect the data and also because it's good for their businesses. >> Any anecdotal data on investment thesis, orientation posture from CEOs? What is the investment climate? Are they putting money into it or are they just kind of holding the line? Right now I'm trying to figure things out. Thoughts? >> Thoughts on this one? >> Million dollar question >> Yeah, so and it's a billion dollar question actually which is an important one. I think where we are seeing investment and when when we talk about privacy maturity you can come at it from a number of different vectors. So privacy engineering to Cisco is critical we sell IT things and we depend upon data as an asset, so you would expect us to do heavy investments in raising our security baseline. We've done it. We're having specific training for developers. We've done it and my team actually does not live in legal. I have a wonderful legal support team. I live in operations. So one of the investments you can make is to operationalize your working so you understand which of your business requirements are data sensitive and adding them on. The other piece of the study that is correlated again no causality yet, but we're correlating the number, mix and the complexity of your vendor set with the trend and reporting of the actual harm after a breach. >> Right, so we looked at the privacy maturity and also compared to companies who had been breached and how much they reported they had lost on this. And so interestingly again the privacy immature companies many more of them had lost enough metric here we used was over half a million dollars due to data breaches so 74% of those immature versus only 39% of the mature guys. Now why is that? We can speculate that those who are protecting their data, only keeping the data they need for their business purposes deleting it when they're done with it and having the right knowledge and inventory of where they are, are doing a better job at protecting that critical data asset. So it makes sense, but we need to learn more about what really is behind it and causing that. >> It's so interesting because there's a relationship with security, because that's where people react to what happens if there's a breach in security but they're also separate, decoupled in their own way, and it's interesting that you mention it in your organization and that's I think that is really notable and something I'd like to just double-click on. Most companies' viewed security in the early days metaphor for security in an organizational setting it's part of IT. Now it reports to the C-suite. >> Yes You're getting at a different angles. You're thinking about privacy and data as a separate group not being subservient as say legal or administration function. It's more central to the C-Suite. >> Absolutely >> Are you recommending that companies think differently? >> Absolutely >> Can you explain why? >> Oh I think and again it varies company to company, so I would love to say you know, I'm a legal person by training or I ran away from home from legal a long time ago, so I'm a business person. It's valuable to have lawyers we're nice people. We can be funny sometimes, but typically most companies it is like Bob, Joe, Sally and legal. Now what kind of an innovation posture are you taking? The other part is you know in our lawyers' defenses there is such a plethora and complexity of the laws that they have to be determinative and say this is just enough and this is the gray area. Innovators don't think like that. I don't want my innovators to think like that. I want to do the experimentation so in addition to the work we do in house with our economic guru we actually partner with universities to do financial studies to say where you're having potential breaches at every layer of the network what's the quanta? The other side is I have a seat at the table with all of our engineering teams and our business development teams so that makes a huge difference. >> I totally agree. Robert, I want to ask you a question. Back to my theory that we'll have a C-E-O chief economist officer as a standard role in a similar way not just call in the strategy guy, right? >> Michelle: Yes >> So it's like strategy hey you know whatever. This is really becoming a decentralized world global impact whether it's GDPR or other compliance economic impact is a really critical thing. >> Robert: Right >> What is your view for companies to think about the role of a company and or group to be like a economist center? Like a C-T-O is really important but you also have a V-P of engineering. So C-T-O, V-P of engineering Chief economist officer and group How do you look at that world and how do you envision it in unfolding? >> Well, I think that one element that most companies don't have today is somebody who really thinks about data and the economic value of it today and what it means. Again, because it's not on the balance sheet it's not treated the same way but it's one of our most important assets. So having someone who at least focuses on what is the value and importance of this data to my organization and all the ways that do. Whether it's my value you know in driving my ongoing operations whether it's allowing me to cut costs, whether it's unlocking value that my organization could uncover by inventorying and developing that. So I think that economic value piece of data you know is something that we're going to see more of and because data is being recognized as such an important asset I think there will be some progress in that. >> I think Michelle you made a great point about supply chain. We've been seeing the same trend in that. Block chain has been a great example where not so much bitcoin and a theory of encrypto, block chain as a technology has been impacting the supply chain. That's a data driven trend. >> Michelle: It's exclusively a data driven trend. I mean what you're talking about is indelible auth. And so there's always a place for authentication. Sometimes you just want a watermark. Sometimes you want a dossier. That's I mean that's the whole mystique of block chain is gorgeous but the reality is it's a wonderful tool if you want to authenticate something in the clair. Just like we were talking about P-K-I in the old days now if you apply that to data, so what you're calling a chief economic officer I would call a chief data officer. >> So again economics, ledger, hyper-ledger, block chain are we looking at maybe the world is going to circumvent existing standards with you know disruption with like a block chain, crypto centralized does that come together? I mean it's a collision course, no one knows the answer. Observation? >> Well, there may be some opportunities to do that. But I'm sure that we'll try to have the right ways to have controls around it as well. So not just to birth the system but to do it in a way that makes sense to protect the values that we are all trying to hold onto in terms of individual values you know as well as having the right monitoring and systems around them. >> You know Cisco disrupted the entire network protocols back in the 80s by unlocking value. And again value is the key driver of making change not just for the sake of subverting. >> I love that you're saying that because disruption has always bothered me. That's like me grabbing the chair and watching you fall down and going oh look I have a softer chair. I'd rather like have a more reductionist point of view and say what is essential value. Let's clear out the gunk that's getting in your way. >> Value is the north star for all >> It is. I think it's madly innovative and will it change businesses radically? Yes. If we want to call that disruption we can, but I think it's actually enablement of what we wanted in the first place but don't have yet. >> Well people know me I'm very bullish on crypto and block chain as a unlocking value and changing patterns and offering a new re-imagining industries that are just not moving fast enough >> Wow >> To capture the value >> Yeah >> John: Thanks so much guys for coming on. I know we slotted you in because it's a super important conversation to hear at Cisco Live and the industry. Love to have more time. Maybe we can do a follow-up with you guys. Great to see you again. >> Yeah, you too! >> It's theCUBE talking data privacy, investment, valuing data on the balance sheet. A lot of radical, progressive, cool value opportunities for the industry out there and enterprises. Yeah, this is theCUBE live coverage from Barcelona. More after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to day two of live coverage with theCUBE here at Cisco live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John, for the co-founder of Silicon Angle. Co-host of the theCUBE, with Stu Miniman, analyst on wikibon,com. As well as Cube co-host many events certainly Stu is not a stranger to Cisco. Open-sourced. And overall, the discretion that digital is having on the enterprise. Our next guest is Michael Kay, global technologist of product strategy of theme software. Michael it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey John, hey Stu. >> So, you guys are here with Cisco Veeam, you guys have been a big success story we've coverd on theCUBE many times. You're up Cisco. What's the vibe here, what's going on in the show? >> So back in mid 2017, October 2017, we announced we were going to be on the global price list, and so obviously that this is different from last year in that we're having more conversations, people know what we're doing. For starters, asking how do we protect the network? How do we protect the ASA? Using the firewall and etc. It's very good to have those conversations with the enterprise guys. And they now understand we're able to protect their workload, their data. So, I imagine that it will be exactly the same when we go over to Cisco Live in the US, but this is obviously the first show that we've had where we are talking about availability with Cisco as a joint partner on their global price list. >> One of things that we always see is that with you guys, your logo is everywhere. You've got the big green Veeam. What's the relationship that you guys have with customers? Because you're playing a lot of great spaces. I mean, what's the main relationship in brand promise that Veeam has? >> So I guess from our point of view is that we come from SMB root, if you'd like. But over the years, over that last 10 years, we've developed that scalable product that allows us to protect the larger workload within the enterprise. We also have cloud offerings to enable our service provider partners. So, exactly that, we want to be able to play and protect data in whatever facet that needs to be. So, whether it be cloud, whether it be on-premises, SMB, commercial, enterprise, we want to be able to protect all of those workloads. >> So Michael, one of the things we've been talking about here at the show, you won't just go look at world's agents. It's a big ecosystem and it's been changing. Cisco has got a lot of pieces of big movement software that's happening to cloud and data center. They have dozens of storage relationships and that's where Veeam ties in a lot. Maybe gives a little bit of an overview, kind of the breath and depth of the relationship where you play in relation to UCS, Converged, Hyper Converged, all those pieces. >> Yeah so I guess Converged first. If we look at the majority of the data centers and the customers that we speak to there is still very much, there is a large footprint of Converged infrastructure where that be FlexPod, VersaStack, Pure FlashStack, or Vblock from a DeliMC point of view. And the good thing where we come in is that we have storage integrated in all of them. So, regardless of like, compute, however it brings a nice simplicity model to the customer from that stack. But for us to just slot into that and be able to leverage the storage integrations and to be able to take an efficient snapshot of those virtual machines and push them onto a, maybe Cisco 2600, that modular, scalable server that will both compute and high density storage really gives us a best of both worlds in terms of plugging it into that fabric interconnector. Making is converge backup story or converge available story. >> Yeah so, you mentioned a lot of options out there. Still, most customers, there are more customers that aren't doing some flavor of Converged drive or Converged than are - there is a lot of buzz behind the Hyper Converged piece of it. What are you hearing from customers? You know, you've said there's a lot of kind of CI versus HI that numbers show that out. I mean, there's a lot more solutions out there. It should be in the market a lot longer. But you know, where are the customers? What are some of the decision points and how has your organization held on them? >> So I guess where we are seeing things that are HyperFlex, where we also have storage integration there from a protection point of view. Seeing many of them feed into that main data center. So, we're protecting the data, we're using our replication engine to push data into that larger data center for hot DR or high ability type solution. And I think that's where we're seeing it. But we are also seeing it more HyperFlex or more HCI come into that main data center for some certain verticals from that point of view. >> Okay, so if I could just unpack what you're saying there, you know, mostly HCIs have been kind of the robust, smaller environments where you know, traditional three tier or CI has been there but we're starting to see that. That blurring of the lines between what is there. >> Yeah, people are definitely bringing that HCI, that simplicity, that scalable simplicity model into their main data center as it kind of merges with that converged offering right? So. >> Yeah, the other thing that's very clear, the Veeam show last year when we covered it really customers trying to bake out their cloud strategy. You know, how does that tie into all this discussion here? Cisco is talking a lot about multicloud, that's really the management plain, how do you see that from an availability solution? >> Yeah, okay, so yesterday I sat in the Keynote and reading some of the stuff, we had our sales kick off last week and some of our stuff really resonates with our message as well that's out there. So the whole multicloud, our tagline is around any app, any data, any cloud. So it kind of resonates with what Cisco is saying. And that's obviously a good thing. But, so whether that be the public cloud, whether it's to enable our service providers to leverage the Cisco technology plus Veeam to offer a service out to our existing Veeam customers. The On-Premise's solution. Or whether that'd just be on-premises they sense that we just talked about whether Converged or whether HCI top plate. >> What the big thing you guys learned at your sale's kick-off because we always wonder what goes on in these sale's kick-off. People like cheering, their making their quota, business is good, but they listen to customers. What's the big used cases that you guys are really doing well with Cisco on? I mean that's ultimately the pattern that has kind of emerged. There is always a best product. What's the hot, used case for you guys? >> So I think one of our biggest things is about how do we partner with the likes of Cisco. How do we leverage that relationship to bring more Cisco validated designs, reference architectures, from a technical point of view up. So when the good door, the numbers being rah-rah as you're in the sale's kick-off but ultimately it's about the vision. How do we go forward with that partnership? Being on that price list is really going to help us get into some of those accounts, from that point of view. But also, we've got, from a technical point of view, I know that we've got the design, we've got the model behind this. >> Yeah, when did you guys get onto the price list? Recently? >> Uh, I believe it was October. >> So just recently? >> So really recently. >> Some deals are just going to be flying in. Right? (laughs) >> Hopefully, right. >> What's the biggest challenge that you find with Veeam's customers? Because you guys have certainly done really well. Again, we've covered your success on theCUBE many times with other events, like Vmworld and others. What's the ah ha moment for the customers with Veeam? Is it just the easiest solution? Is it a technical paid point they saw? What's that moment when the customer really gets it? >> So, I think the simplicity, that easy-to-use, easy to deploy, regardless whether you're three, six tier host shop or whether you're a multi 10,000 VM type enterprise estate. It's being able to use that same tool-set to protect all the way through. That's really simple. We really want to keep that user interface really easy to consume, and use, and scale. So that's one of the key areas that I've seen that we're playing in. >> Alright, so it's 2018 now, we've got a looming, headwind that a lot of customers we are concerned about, haven't heard a lot about it at this show, but GDPR, that's definitely something on everybody's mind. Is this another Y2K that's going to slow down ID bind or are there engagements? How does Veeam work with customers? What's it going to do with the landscape of IT this year? >> So we were, we've been looking at GDBR Compliance and our messaging in those has been, we've been really working on how we start mentioning this and marketing this out from a Veeam perspective. So we're not going to keep, we're not going to get anyone GDBR compline. But what we are going to do is help you understand where that data is, how long has it been kept for, where is it kept, where it's stored, et cetera. So update three that we've released just before Christmas it was around location tag in. So if that back-up comes into a certain GO then we want to be able to tag that, and that tag stays with that back-up data wherever it goes. Then we've got Veeam ONE, the monitors and reports against that. So you know whether you've violated GBDR compliance or a violation of where that data should have be located. But it's one of the things that it's not a day that kind of goes back the moment where I'm not speaking to someone about GDPR. And obviously, it's really, it's coming around very fast. May this year, is when it comes into force. >> Are people shaking in their boots? I mean, I'm hearing, like, a lot of people really nervous. I mean it's kind not has been played up. Certainly the press has been covering it but I mean the Y2K problem, you remember those glory days, you know, the millennial, you know that bug never really happened. But GDPR is a freaking, hard-core enforcement. And the penalties are stiff. >> Yeah. >> I mean it's ridiculous. >> That's a big percentage of your gross income. Right, the people that I speak to are definitely aware and concerned that they need to be in this particular state by the time we get to May. It's not about waiting until that date in May. It's about how do we do it now and start understanding it a bit more about our data. Cisco yesterday, on the main stage said, "it's all about data." And absolutely resonates exactly with what we want to do. We want to be able to do more with that but also we need to understand what that data is and how long do we keep them for. Or why we're keeping it? And ask those questions to these new data protection officers, data-- >> Well people are having more data driven strategies and we were commenting yesterday. We didn't kind of, we didn't hear much here about that Cisco not using that data driven. Is it just not a real big data show or not a lot of AI here yet but if you got data driven, you better have data protection, right? I mean, you can't have both. >> They kind of go hand-in-hand, right? And I think that's another thing where we're coming into the fold. Is that we've got features in our tool-set that allows us to spin up that data, in an isolated network. We had to run test against them. Run compliance checks against them. To make sure that, one, the back-up comes up. So, when you're not waiting until that problem hits. So you can bring it up but also test against updates, et cetera. >> Alright, so here is a question for you. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Okay, "Well you know, I really am on-premises, on-prem." Stu, depend on how you want to argue that point. Well Stu and I argued about it yesterday about on-prem versus on-Premises. I'm on-premises, I'm getting my cloud operation. I've got my data protection. But I really got to get into the cloud. I've got some stuff in the cloud now. Cloud is my mision. I'm going to be moving to the cloud in a very big way. How does Veeam help me? >> So, we want to bring the technology that you've been using on-premises, hopefully, maybe Veeam, and we want to take that same, easy-to-use concept, that same UI that you've using and really, hopefully you've seen it as a simplistic approach to your data. We're taking the headache out of the data protection story. But if you are pushing into those public clouds, being able to give you a seamless way-- >> So same dashboard, same-- >> Similar tool-sets, exactly that. And being able to protect that. >> Across multiple clouds as well? Because multicloud is hot. >> Yeah, exactly, we want to be able to be like we are within virtualization. Being able to protect any workload on VMWare, Hyper-V, et cetera. We also want to be able to protect any of those public clouds. From using the same tool-set to be able to protect that same file format that we're backing up to, same fundamentals that we have. >> I want to get your view on Cisco Live here. You're in on Keynote, you go to number shows, you know, this show used to be, it was hard-core networking, it was all networking. CCIEs and everything. We're sitting here in the DevNet zone. They've got developers, got good storage ecosytsems here. How do you look at the audience here compared to say, a VM world or some of the other partner activities that you go to? >> So I think like couple of years ago, they were kind of saying that you need to broaden your knowledge as an IT consultant, IT person, within a company. You have to expand your technologies. You can't just be the networking guy. You can't just be the storage guy. And I think that we're, I don't know if you guys see it, but definitely seeing more broaden people like, again, like I said there, the people that I'm having conversations with at the booth, they're all aware of what we do now. So, they have clearly broaden their knowledge away from that networking. But, also with the likes of the DevNet. So like being able to code, and all of the API driven type stories that we hear. It's also being able to leverage that and push that into whatever that data center needs to be from an automation orchestration point of view. So, and everyone plays a part in that. Whether it's the storage, whether it's the availability, whether it's the compute vendors, whether it's the virtualization. Everyone has a part to play in that, that automation orchestration piece. >> Awesome. Well how has your experience with the show has been as a European flavor year, what's your take away? >> Um, I guess-- >> John: Customer action, good partners? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking to your Cisco reps. Kind of seeing it from a Veeam point of view in your region. Understand a bit more about around GDBR. GDBR is coming in. So there is no way of getting around that. Understand what tools can actually help you be more compliant. Also, look at, I've spoken to a number of people around that conversion, HCI piece, and they weren't aware around the integration. So, go away and see if we do fit in that integration piece. Existing customers go away and find out that information, and yeah. >> So what's the difference between an North American customer and an European customer? Do they have little nuances? Do they have regional issues by sovereignty in countries? Is there a buyer behavior from a Veeam customer standpoint? Difference between a customer in North America versus Europe? >> So, I'm mostly over in Europe but the customers that we speak to over in the US, that's the most concerning part around that GDBR piece, there is still, I have that understanding of what GDBR is doing. If they are holding data. Especially these larger enterprises. They are going to be holding data for those European countries. So they need to be compliant that way. And that's the misunderstanding maybe from some of the people. >> So European are more savvier on the compliance side? >> From the people that I have spoken to they know that it affects them because they're in country and holding that data. However, it affects everyone. It's a global compliance if you're holding data from anyone. >> I think in North America they kicked the can down the road. Oh wow, GDBR's upon Europe. Alright, Europeans are very savvy on compliance. That's a huge issue, data drive, data protection. We're here inside theCUBE with Veeam software. I'm John Furrier and Stu Mimiman live from Barcelona for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is live coverage here at theCUBE in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier the co-host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon.com and also cohosts theCUBE at many events. Our next guest, Adam Kalsey, who's the Cisco Spark Developer Relations at Cisco. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you >> Looking good today. >> Thanks. >> Love the mojo this year and again, we've been covering DevNet Create this past year. Cisco and developers really coming together and it's a real extension of a dominance that Cisco's had on the network side. >> Sure. >> A lot of Alpha geeks, they know their stuff, but as you guys are moving up the stack, you guys are contributing more to application developers. So we're super excited to see that movement, some open source action. You got a lot of stuff, we're talking about AI in the keynote, IoT. It's becoming software focused. >> It is and everything from Cisco's traditional business core networking, enterprise networking, a lot of that stuff moving to software and becoming developed and run and managed by software. But then also seeing applications and in the application space and seeing everything from enterprise applications moving to a consumer space, moving to APIs, everything becoming open and no longer being an island, and connected together, and we're excited to be a big part of that. >> It's the engineering mindset of networking. Stu and I both have a networking background so we kind of know the culture. They can get stuff done, the designing, architecture, engineering, but now the DevNet has been the big story for Cisco, DevNet as a developer attraction. It's transforming the DNA of the Cisco stakeholder. >> It is. >> An MVP. >> It's not just networking-engineering, it's network ops, network devops, network software for applications. What specifically catalyzes that story for Cisco? Someone's like "Hey, I'm seeing that Cisco's got this whole DevNet vibe." What catalyzes at the mind of the customer? Is it a specific product, is it an approach, is it Spark? What product, what thing highlights Cisco's focus on developers? >> Well, so everything here in the DevNet zone obviously. We've got a lot in the collaboration space, a lot of things becoming developer focused and developer friendly and even products that are being developed with the developer first mindset. We build it for the developer and then work backward from there, rather than trying to tack a developer interface onto an existing product later. And so, we've got everything from the networking and software defined networking and all of our ability to automate network deployment and services deployment to collaboration and communications and allowing people to communicate inside their existing apps. >> What's the big thing impact to customers now because now Cisco's moving up the stack, I get that, love Cisco, have Cisco. But what's in it for me? I'm the customer. >> Adam: Right >> What's the value? >> So the big value to you as the customer is that now developers can bring in the applications that you're using every day into the products that you're using every day to communicate, to run your network, to do anything. The idea is eliminate those islands and those silos of applications where I used to have to go here to get one thing done and then I'd move over to this other thing. Bring them together and either bring those products into Cisco products or bring the Cisco technologies into those other products and start blurring that line. >> Yeah, it's interesting. Stu and I were talking yesterday about the impact of cloud, cloud-native, and certainly DevOps, certainly on-premises and in the cloud as people start doing hybrid and start thinking multi-cloud. There's two kind of schools of thought, replatform everything or incrementally build on top of what you got. I've love to get your reaction to that because we see replatforming as good for certain things. We just want to through away the old and bring in the new, kind of lift and shift or just change. But in some cases you don't. I mean, you don't really want to replatform the network. You don't want to replatform a lot of systems. You've got to build on top of it, learn new things. What's your reaction to that and how would you advise customers who say, "Oh, just replatform the whole thing?" >> We actually run into that a lot with Spark because companies have massive investments in their communications infrastructure and they've spent all of this money building out this communications infrastructure and then you come and you go, "Okay, now we've got all this cloud service." And they're, "We're not going "to throw away our communications infrastructure "to go to the cloud." And so that's why our hybrid model and our hybrid strategy is so effective because you can use all of those things that are inside and those investments that you've already taken to speed up voice traffic and video traffic and your network, but then also take advantage of the cloud, where you've got the rapid deployment and the rapid evolution and the upgrade cycles and not having to go and upgrade everybody's machine every six months and being able to keep that investment and take advantage of that investment while moving to the cloud. >> That's pretty core though, that's like fundamental today. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Adam, some of my friends, some of the hardcore networking people come to the show every year. They're pretty excited about the DevNet stuff. Not just getting my certification, learning about new things. It's like, "I could like, learn to code." >> Adam: Yes. >> And they're getting pretty excited which I know I was glad to hear. Take us inside a little bit, what's happening? You've been right here near theCUBE all week so far. What kind of people are coming, what kind of activities do they get to do? >> So we've got a lot of ... There's a gamut, so we're seeing a lot of traditional network engineers, people that have no background in programming. Highly technical people, but have never written code before, coming and starting to learn to code. I was talking to somebody yesterday. He's very excited, he's taking a certification that requires coding and he says, "I didn't know "how to code three months ago "and I've started figuring this out "and it's so awesome I get to do this." But then we're also seeing a shift toward people that are developers first, now coming to Cisco events, coming to Cisco Live and we're running into them here. Where when we first started doing this ... So I've been with Cisco almost three years now and when I first started coming to doing these DevNet events, we had to start at very basic levels. Here's code 101 and this is an introduction to APIs. Now we're able to get much deeper and start diving a lot deeper, both because the audience that's the traditional Cisco audience is learning so much, but also because we're now attracting an audience that isn't looking at it and saying, "Oh well, Cisco's just a networking company." They're realizing there's a lot of products for developers. >> You're attracting two major constituencies. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, I think the network APIs stuff's really interesting to me. We were talking yesterday with Susie Wee, who's the vice-president, CTO of the group, but it makes total sense that if you look at micro surfaces and then what Kubernetes doing, it's really changing the game and opening up the aperture of what developers can do with programmable infrastructure. So it's always been kind of like, "Oh yeah, I can program some config stuff," but getting down to the network level and doing policy, it's pretty interesting. What's the impact of that? 'Cause this is kind of like a new dynamic that's happening with DevOps where you got pure programmable networking capability. Where are some people using this? Where do you see this evolving? What's the sequence, what's the order of evolution, if you will, with net DevOps, networking DevOps? >> You know, I think the biggest evolution, the most interesting evolution is on the human side. So how this is changing the job role and how the engineer is having to change their mindset from I'm installing and racking equipment and my job is picking up this big heavy box and putting it in here and plugging cables in, to my job is thinking more logically about how the network needs to work and plug in those things. >> So they're slinging APIs rather than slinging cables? >> Absolutely (John laughs) It's also an interesting impact on Cisco's business. We're such a channel focused company. We've got all these partners that are out there selling things and resellers. As more things move to software and move to the cloud, how their business has to change. I now longer make money by buying this box and selling it you. I now money by actually adding value and creating a lot of value there. >> Yeah. Adam, I was wondering if you could take us inside the collaboration space? John and I a little bit old on some of the this stuff. Remember the kind of Enterprise 2.0 wave that come. I worked when Jive was helping internal companies. We've been heavy in social. Where's kind of the UC collaboration, where does all of that fit and Cisco's position in that market? >> Sure. So we see a big move to messaging, obviously, both in the consumer space, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp? or SMS and text messaging and that's really starting to move into enterprise as well, where it's not just messaging where I'm going to send you a quick IM to ask you a question, but my daily job is happening in messaging. Everybody's promised to kill email for 20 years and for a product everybody wants to kill, it sure seems to have survived a long time. But with messaging and the rise of messaging and integrated messaging and voice and video and conferencing and meeting applications, we actually are now seeing a reduction in email usage among people that are using this. >> What about chatbots has been something that we've been talking, that kind of combination of machine learning with the collaboration. Lots companies using Slack these days as one of the pieces. Where do you see that fitting into it? >> So chatbots are growing in usage in business in general. We're seeing a ton of usage in the enterprise. In fact, to the point where almost every single customer of Spark has a significant deployment of chatbots, either things they've built internally or things that are working with other products that they've downloaded. We've got our app store called Spark Depot, where people can go and download and install different bots into the Spark platform and we're seeing that those being used so much across every enterprise. One of the things that's interesting that we're in a unique position to take advantage of that a lot of companies aren't, is we are completed enterprise focus. We are top down when somebody installs Spark in the network, it's the entire enterprise gets Spark. The entire company gets Spark. So now it's not these little silos of, "Hey, this group is using this platform "and this group is using this platform. So for an application developer, I can go build an application once and know that my target is every company in the world, that as we start taking and becoming a more ubiquitous across enterprise, that your bot then has a deployment target of that same footprint. >> Final question from me is what's the hottest DevNet zone area this week? What's getting the most love and attention and interest from you guys. >> You know, anything that is talking APIs. So we're walking around and seeing all of the classroom sessions, anything that we're talking about APIs and programmability, specifically on web services, REST-type APIs. Crowds of people around the table, not big enough spaces for them, the classrooms are too small to hold the amount of interest that's there. >> Anyway, so I think you guys, just to kind of give you some props here, I think this net DevOps concept is like, groundbreaking. I think it's too new to kind of ... I think main stream won't figure it out, certainly I see people there, like some Alpha engineers there, but that's pretty big. That's really going to be we see Kubernetes really opening up a whole new level of Cisco. That's going to change the game. Congratulations to the team. That's really, not just visionary, it's conceptually relevant, right now. So I think you are skating to where the puck is coming. You're there, so congratulations. >> Adam: Thanks. >> Okay, we're here inside the DevNet zone, talking DevNet developers at Cisco, changing environment, the evolution of the networking persona is now becoming software driven and has been popular here at Cisco Live. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Live coverage from Barcelona at theCUBE. Be right with more after this short break. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone. Live here, CUBE coverage in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Stu Miniman. We go to all the events, exttract the signal from the noise. Our next guest is Jose de Castro, CTO, Cognitive collaboration with Cisco, formerly with Tropo, which was acquisitioned. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so cognitive collaboration. What does that mean? Let's start with that one, love that name. >> It's a bit of a mouthful, but yeah. I mean, there's a lot of talk about cognitive these days and really what it comes down to is, you know for the last 10 to 15 years, especially in the collaboration space, we've been focused on building tools. Tools that people can use to connect their employees and allow them to be productive over long distances. Um, a lot of those features are pretty much table stakes nowadays, and so now we're looking at what are the data assets that we have at Cisco that we can use to allow our customers to derive insights from the collaboration that is taking place that no one else can do, and so that's part of what my team's supposed to do. >> Take a step back. What's interesting is that you know, as the world kind of becomes an evolution, Cisco's got a lot of tools. You've got Webex, which a lot of people use. You've got the phone, people use, sometime mobile phones. I know Cisco sells the telephony thing, but most people are on mobile, connecting via voice. Um, you've got online now, digital. How are you guys looking at that, and how are you tying it together? And how do you go to a customer that might have a little bit of Cisco, and no Cisco over here. How do you integrate it in, and what is the playbook to make that happen, what's the view? Just take us through that process. >> Yeah, well there were a couple questions in there. Um, first off, you know, one of the strongest assets we have is our, you know, software, cloud, and hardware kind of vertically integrated strategy, right? Um, I'll talk about integration strategies in a second. But, especially in the collab space, you know, if you look at Webex, our telepresence portfolio, and now the Spark Board, which is everywhere here at Cisco live, which is great to see, um you know, our goal has been to make those kind of three prongs of the strategy work really well together. And we're not there yet, but we've got some stuff coming down the pipe over the next few months that are going to make those three products just be a delightful experience that just works for everybody. Um, once we get there, then there are a couple of ways that we can go. You mentioned Webex earlier. Webex is a great product, you'd be shocked at the number of meetings that are actually recorded where no one actually goes and listens to the recordings. Why do you think that is? That's because no one wants to sit through an hour long recording, right? >> The same meeting that they were either in, or another meeting. >> Yeah, even if they missed it no one wants to sit through an hour long recording that they can't actually participate in, right? And so when we, you know, talking about cognitive, and some of the opportunities we see there, you know, we're sitting, Cisco's sitting on literally billions of minutes of video and audio recordings that we can be doing a lot with. And so, by applying machine learning techniques, face recognition, speaker summarization, meeting summarization, natural language processing, we can now begin to extract real semantic insights out of that data, and then be able to surface that up either to the teams that had the meeting so they can go and kind of scrub through, and digest an hour long meeting in five minutes, or to like a CIO type who wants to be able to understand, you know, how are my teams actually working in practice, not what the org chart tells you, but like how are my teams actually forming to actually get work done. >> I mean that's from a data standpoint, you have behavioral data, and you've got contextual data. How do you guys do that? I mean, I can just envision that extracting those nuggets from the meetings through entity extraction, or techniques like that, how do you do that? I mean, is it Cisco code, do you guys use open source? What are some of the techniques that you guys are doing to kind of simplify and save time doing that? I mean, that's really valuable. >> Yeah, well, we're not doing a lot of basic research in AI. Um, there's some happening at the company, but the reality is that, you know, machine learning and deep learning, especially, has come leaps and bounds over the last 18 months to 24 months, and a lot of that research is happening elsewhere. Really, what we're doing is taking kind of best of breed techniques, commonplace techniques and blending that with the data that we have. AI is all about data, full stop. >> Yeah. >> And it's about the training sets that you can actually build around that. And so, we made a recent acquisition, a company called MindMeld, um, that happened last year. And they had an amazing platform called Workbench, where they are able to, with extremely high accuracy, be able to derive semantic insights from text, using natural language processing techniques. And, um, just about three months ago we announced the first product that's going to be based on that asset that we acquired, called Spark Assistant. Spark Assistant is a digital assistant, just like Amazon Alexa, or Apple Siri, for example but built for the enterprise with a Cisco security build behind it. >> So Amazon announced Transcribe, which is a service of re:Invent where they basically take the audio and try to transcribe it. >> Yeah. >> Is that something that like, Workbench would do? Because that, the text piece, that sounds like it's a text piece, and LP works well for that. >> Workbench works off text, >> Audio and video extraction, any open source or technology you guys are using for that piece? >> Yeah, we're using a number of open source, we also have some partners in the area as well that are kind of unannounced, but coming soon. Um, but there are a lot of key players there. Like Google has some technologies there, Amazon as well, and we're working with all of them. Because the reality is if our customers have already made an investment in one of those companies, we want to be able to leverage that, feed that into our pipeline and be able to derive insights from there. >> You know, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the 90s and Cisco just totally transformed that market, you know, drove the Voip transformation, unified communications. John and I were at the Google show, and the Amazon cloud shows last year, and voice seems to be coming back into the present. We talked about the digital assistants. Where does Cisco fit into that whole discussion and, you know, how do you help that next wave? >> Yeah, well so a couple ways. You know, I talked about our hardware portfolio earlier. That is the single biggest asset that we have at Cisco in order to kind of penetrate this digital assistant, voice assistant market. We already have the hardware in place. You know, for some of these other companies, they kind of get into the conference room, they first have to convince IT facilities and everyone to kind of install this new thing, and that is a unknown quantity, right? For us, it's a software upgrade. And so that's what we plan on doing with Spark Assistant is essentially roll this out to a huge swath of the portfolio, obviously with an opt-in controls and be able to explore it there. The other thing that we're doing, and especially with the Spark Board, you wouldn't tell, you wouldn't know by looking at it, but the Spark Board actually has 12 microphones built in behind it. >> John: The Spark Board? >> The Spark Board. >> John: Or smart board? >> The Spark Board. >> The Spark Board, okay. >> Yes, uh yeah, you can actually check them out over there, they're um, well they're everywhere. >> Can they broadcast white board sessions? Because that's what theCUBE needs. >> Yeah, it does white boarding, yeah. So the Spark Board actually has 12 microphones behind, hidden behind the bezel. And with that, we're able to do high accuracy beam forming, which essentially trains in our technology, our microphones on a single voice in the room, isolating them with crystal clear accuracy. >> Alright Jose, I need to poke at something for a second. You talk about devices, you know, we saw the phone just permeate from the Blackberry and then the smartphone come into it, you know. Amazon is selling the Alexa products everywhere, and Google is selling a lot of those, seeing lots of devices do that. So I heard at the keynote yesterday, Rowan was talking about you know, we're going to have the glasses three dot oh, and you know, future type is there, so I wonder, I see a software driver for what's there. And it sounds like you're saying, it's like no, no, no, we've got the physical footprint and hardware, but it's a software angle and it sounds like that's a lot of what your group's doing, so how do you make sure you're ready for all those pieces? >> That's right, and I don't mean to be dismissive around the software component, but let's face it that's table stakes at this point. Like Cisco, we spent the better part of the last decade getting good and transitioning the company to a software company. The next stage in that evolution is to pivot, you know, we went from hardware to software. Now we're going from software to being a platform company in many ways. >> Sorry, so I love that and what I see in your group is the app economy, it's the API economy, and I want to dig down a little further, since you're a CTO type. The functions as a service are server-less, its one of those real enabling pieces that you hear Google, Microsoft, Amazon talking about. Is Cisco in that environment we've talked about? We've talked to them about Kubernetes and the likes, but I haven't heard anybody say, oh yeah, you know, this type of piece, server-less, we're there. We think it's a platform play, so I think that would be a good space for Cisco to be. >> Yeah, I think so as well, and there's obviously a lot happening within the networking group to be able to kind of push workloads down to the edge. Um, in collab, and especially just the nature of our customers, like we try to be cloud agnostic, right? And unfortunately that sometimes leads to less of a kind of a Cisco on Cisco, like vertically integrated strategy as you would expect, but our customers appreciate that because, I mean, look, if they've already made an investment in Amazon, or in Google Cloud, or some prime equipment, we've got to be able to meet them where they are today. >> You have to do that. >> Yeah. >> I mean, that's table stakes, right? >> Yeah. >> Otherwise your vertically integrated system, okay good point, so that's really important. But you mentioned that you guys have transferred to a platform company, so um that's awesome, platforms have a lot of value. My question for you is what are you optimizing the platform for? Obviously data is critical, that's a great strategy, love that. What are you optimizing for in the platform, using the data? Is it for user experience, is it for better software functionality, all of the above? What specifically do you guys talk about when you say our platform is optimized for x? As an example, Facebook is optimized for selling ads, and they're kind of not happy about that now, but they made a lot of money. >> Jose: Yeah. >> What are you guys optimizing for the platform? >> Yeah, well so we've rolled out kind of this internal tag line within the company, and you know, it may never see the light of day from a marketing perspective, but we think of ourselves as building the operating system for teams. So that's really what our entire organization about 700 engineers are kind of with this laser focus around building products that organizations teams essentially, which you know, maybe anywhere from five people to 500 people can essentially run their organization within Spark and with our sweeter products. And that's a shift in our thinking, because if you look at the products predating Spark, even Webex, which is a massively successful product, it's a tool, people view it as a tool. They don't think of it as a platform or anything more, and with Spark, we're aiming to be the center, the hub where work actually gets done, and our APIs and integration strategy is central to all of that right now. >> People could get confused, too. They think tool, and they get their mind stuck on that, but Webex is a great tool, okay, but it's throwing off great data that could help the platform, right? >> Jose: Yeah. >> So your point about extracting value out of that unlocked, or that locked data. >> Yeah, and it's tough because, you know, Spark is one of the most secure messaging platforms and collaboration platforms that are out there, and as a result, we've devised a very unique kind of end-to-end encryption strategy that blocks us out from actually accessing our customers' data, and as you would expect that poses some challenges for us that other competitors don't have. So we've been working with the teams to figure out like how do we distribute our workloads so that we can derive insights from the data without ever seeing the data, a pretty tricky problem. >> We want to talk to you certainly after the show because we have tons of video, I'd love to help unlock that video and audio, but I'd like to ask you more of a personal question, or observational question and get your reaction to it. Um, you've been doing some really complex things to be the operating system for teams, it's a lot of work, and it's hard, because you've got tools, you're integrating tools, you've got data as a foundational element of that, and it's awesome, so I love the mission. The problem is you have people who use the tools who may or may not have insight into the platform. So the question for you is, what's going on in the collab group that people might not understand that you want to share, because it's hard to tell the story of platform when you have people who use certain tools more than others, maybe they vertically integrate them all. There's a lot going on in your story here. What is the key thing you'd like to say to illuminate the collab platform to the folks that may know one tool or another? >> Yeah, that's a good question, and it's one that I don't really get asked very often. I guess the first thing that people don't realize is how open it actually is, and you know, we haven't done a great job outside of venues like this of promoting our developer program, but yeah, our developer at CiscoSpark.com, you can go there and there's countless resources on how you can essentially transform your business through collaboration with our platform very very easily, right? So people don't realize that today. I guess the other area that is often overlooked is people see Spark, for example, as Spark the app. And, you know, there have been some talks here at Cisco live around something we call embedded collaboration, where we've painstakingly gone through the platform and taken out nuggets of the Spark application and allowed those to be embedded inside third party line of business applications. A great example of this is the strategic alliance we announced with Salesforce last year. You can, as a Salesforce company today, enable Spark within Salesforce and have a full featured Spark experience without ever leaving Salesforce.com. No one else can say that, and that's because we've made a commitment to open this, and say like look, people may not ever actually download our app, but we want them to still have a great collaboration experience. And we do that by being an open platform and having all the APIs to go with that. >> That's awesome, great, love the vision. I think it's awesome, very relevant. Here's the next question for you. So you see the success of Amazon web services, and the cloud, and what's interesting is that it's been a building block approach. DC2, S3 and then next thing you know, you have a zillion services, RedShift, Kinesis, so we're seeing digital almost taking that same play. I'm not saying digital cloud, per se, but when you're talking platform, Cloud, or wherever it's hosted, it doesn't matter, it's still a service. There's a trend towards having these digital services, almost similar to what people roll out on Amazon, so easy to estreat, you guys have a variety of tools that can be services, the embedded model is a service. How do you guys envision that, because digital is where the action is for collaboration. You guys are in the middle of it. How do you view the future roadmap of digital services when you talk to a customer trying to grok how to invest, how to organize teams. They have to have a vision of this 20 mile stare. >> Yeah. >> John: Digital services, how do you view that? What's your reaction? >> Look, it's a tough one, and it starts with just building a culture around just platform and the potential for platform economics. You know, Cisco just, we don't have that muscle yet. I came from that world before I joined Cisco, I did a startup called Tropo, and in some of those early meetings with Rowan, I told Rowan, I said, look, you have an opportunity. Cisco has an opportunity to be the AWS of collaboration, the Amazon Web Services of collaboration. We have all of the ingredients, you know, all the ingredients are there. I think, and I've spent the last two and a half years preaching that message to the rest of the Cisco community, The reality is, selling platform is hard. Amazon built a culture from the ground up, where that's what they know how to do. It's going to be a journey for Cisco. We're starting with the end user experience. Spark, you can download the app, it's great, it works, integrates with all of our hardware, we have open APIs. To go from there to a decomposed set of services like you were describing, again we have all the recipes, it's all about having the appetite from our sales force and from our partners to go and make that a reality, it's going to take some time. >> Also, timing's in your favor, too, evolution. You can't force something that people aren't ready for, so operationalizing it for a customer is just going to take time, so best move is just kind of ride the wave, you've got DevNet cranking here, you've got your stuff developing. >> Yeah, we're making moves, we're making moves. Pretty soon, we have some customers we're working with in the telemedicine space, and healthcare, and education, that are consuming our services and may not ever actually use our apps, and that's a pure platform play. So it's already starting to happen, we're seeing the shift already take place. >> You guys got a great opportunity. Congratulations on great work, love the vision, love the execution, again, I think you guys are in a sweet spot in the marketplace. >> Yeah, I think so too. >> Okay, CUBE's in the sweet spot, we're in the DevNet zone right here, this is theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain for 2018 Cisco live in Europe, live coverage, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, more live coverage from the action here in Barcelona after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Here in Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, with my partner in crime this week Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst at Wikibon. Also co-host of many events across the world in terms of networking, storage, Cloud, you name it, Stu is on the developers with me. Stu, thanks. Nice seeing you. Stefan Renner is Technical Director, Global Alliances at Veeam Software is with us with Darren Williams, @MrHyperFlex, that's his Twitter handle, go check him out. HyperFlex-V at Cisco, guys welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Also love the Twitter handle. >> Darren: I live the brand. >> You live the brand. I mean that's got some longevity to it, it's evergreen. So congratulations on that. You guys are together with Cisco Veeam, what's the story? What's going on in Europe with Cisco and Veeam? >> I would say there is a lot of stuff going on between Cisco and Veeam. Especially around the Hyperflex story, obviously is the topic of this session, right? So having integration, Hyperflex, having a good go-to-market, having a good relationship between the two companies. We just joked about how often we've been in front of cameras talking about this exact same topic. So that shows that the relationship between the two of us is really moving forward and in a good shape. >> I think we're in good shape in terms of, you think about not just my product, Hyperflex, but you look at what Veeam can do for the rest of Cisco data-centered products, and be that backup, safer hands around what we need in terms of that data protection layer. But also then, what we can add in terms of that target to be the server of choice for backups so you get the benefits of the speed, performance, and more importantly, you get quicker restores. Because that's the important bit, you need to be able to do the quick restore. >> Yeah, we usually talk about availability, right? We don't talk about backups or recovery. Even if recovery is maybe the most important part of availability, still we talk more about availability than maybe anything else. The good thing about Cisco is that the actually can deliver what we need in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, in terms of compute resources. So yeah, that's a real benefit. >> It's such an interesting time, I mean we look back at history, go back 10 years ago, maybe, or more; backup recover, that's like, "Oh, we forgot to talk about that in our RFP." Kind of bolted on, kind of retrofitted in. But now we've seen it come to the main center. But more importantly, with AI and Cloud, and all the action happening with DevOpps on premises, you hear CIOs and CXOs and developers saying, "We're data driven." >> Yeah. >> Okay, so if you're data driven, you have to be data protection driven too. So those things go hand in hand. So the question for you guys is how does a data driven organization, whether it's in the data center, all the way up to the business units, or the business processes, become data protection built in? How do they design in from day one a data protection system up and down the stack? >> Yeah, so maybe I'll start to answer that question. I think when I'm going to customers, and I fully agree on what you just said, most customers 10 years ago were focusing on getting used to platforms and getting used to org systems. It has to be an isolated project, right? Now in those days when I go to customers I tried to convince them to include data protection in every project the do in data center, because at the end, data protection is one of the core elements. >> So designing in early, at the front end? >> I say whenever you go about having a new Hyperflex system or whenever you talk about replacing your existing environment, whatever you do, right, just look into data protection, looking into your availability story. Because right now, and you mentioned that, it's about data services, right? We don't really talk about restoring of EM, we don't restore to the single file. It's about, the customer wants to have a data availability in terms of a service availability. And that includes more than just the VM, it includes more than just the single thing, right? >> Yeah. So they need to include data protection and the design of that in the whole org chart. From the beginning. >> And you're point? >> Yeah we look at it from a similar thing in terms of where you've got changes happening in terms of the way people are looking at how they want to design their applications, where they want their data to live. And that's the whole messaging around 3.0, is that multi-Cloud readiness platform. Being able to think about an application and go, "Do I want to design in the public, and house privately, "or vice versa? Do I want to house the data "of the application in a private location "and the actual application in public?" Having that being able to be transparent to a user in terms of the way they design it and then position, but also as we look at other applications, not all people on this journey are going to go, "We're going to put everything in the Cloud." They're going to look at about, maybe have a little bit in the Cloud, a little bit of the traditional apps we need to manage and protect. And it's all about that 3.0 that we've delivered the pre-multi-Cloud offering around Hyperconvergence, we've now brought the multi-Cloud element. It's giving you the choice of where you want to position things, where you want to house things, how you want to design things. And keeping it nice and simple for customers, and the agility and performance. >> Darren, some really interesting points that you just had there. When I think back to a few years ago, Hyperconverge, pretty strong in North America. But it was project based, it was like, let's take a VDI, some virtualized environment, it wasn't a Cloud discussion. >> Darren: Correct. >> Take us inside what you're seeing in Europe here, because today Hyperconverge is a lot about Cloud, how that kind of hybrid or multi-Cloud environment, so what are you hearing from your customers? >> Absolutely, and I think if you look at the, what's happened in times of Hyperconvergence up to this point it's the initial building block of this multi-Cloud. And we're seeing more and more customers now, I think the latest IDC survey, surveyed that 87% of all customers have a multi-Cloud strategy. And we're seeing now more of the ability to think of Hyperconvergence as that multi-Cloud strategy, and have that simplicity that people have done in terms of the initial thought around a simple application, how they can collapse the layers, they can now utilize that experience into the multi-Cloud experience. And we're seeing more and more of that. We've now got 2500 users around the world around Hyperflex, and about 700-800 EMEA, and the majority of those are utilizing it as private Cloud experience. They're getting the benefits of what they've had in the Cloud, and getting away from the sovereignty issues, and the shadow IT issues that they all face. They can now bring it back into their own data center. They can start small. They can spin out applications very quickly. They're getting the benefit of that Cloud message, but locally now. >> And I think that perfectly aligns with the Veeam story because as you know we are also focusing on the Cloud. We recently changed and also did some acquisitions on the Cloud, so we're also moving forward in the Cloud story and the HyperCloud area. And that's more or less what Cisco's multi-Cloud's story is also about, right? And I think one thing we should also mention here coming a bit back to how to implement and how to design such solutions as having more of a broad view on all the projects. I think one important thing for customers is the CBD Cisco has, right? And we do have CBD available to beam Cisco on the data protection layer. So we try to make it really easy for customers and for partners to design, implement and actually do the right decisions for those projects. >> Stefan, at Veeam On, of course a lot of partners, a lot of talk about the multi-Cloud, of course Veeam has a long history of VMware, but why don't you talk about Microsoft? I believe there's some things you've been doing lately with Hyper-V and the like, what's the update? >> Yeah, so obviously with Hyperflex there is Hyper-V coming, right? That's one of the bigger things coming to Hyperflex. Now for us, when we started to talk with Cisco, Cisco actually told us that Hyper-V is next and 3.0. We said that's fine for us, because as I said, we are dealing with Hyper-V like we did with VMware since a couple of years. So there is no big difference in terms of features and what we can do with Hyper-V. On the Microsoft side obviously it's around extract, which also is a big story with Cisco and Veeam, because there is a extract solution, and so we tried to get the extract fully integrated in the Veeam portfolio, and it's about effort, right? As we just talked about, making this Cloud journey even easier for the customer, making sure we have data protection forever, or making sure we can actually use our Cloud solutions to provide the full experience in the cloud. >> So the question on European audience, I was just looking at some Twitter tweets, getting in some feedback, is, "Ask the GDPR our question." Which is basically code words for the sophistication between data protection, you know we say as you get bitten in the butt if you don't prepare. And this is one of those things where I mean literally, there's so much data out there, people can't understand their own tables. I mean, if you have accounts, how do I know a user uses a certain name in this one, I got a certain name in this database, I mean it's just a nightmare to even understand what data do you have, nevermind taking someone out of a database. >> Yeah. >> So, the challenges are massive. >> Yep. >> This is coming down and it really highlights the bigger trend is: what do I do with the data, what is my protection, what's my recovery, how do I engage in real time, GDPR issue? Talk about the GDPR issue, and then what it really is going to mean for customers going forward. >> Well, I think if you think about GDPR, and people, I've got the understanding that it's just a mere thing, it's not. It's a worldwide thing. Any data that relates to a European citizen, anywhere in the world, is covered under the GDPR. So you've got to think about the multinationals we work with, have to have this GDPR thoughts, even if they're not based in EMEA. They may house data based around a European citizen. So it's a massive thing. Now, not one person or one organization can fix GDPR. We're all part of a bigger framework. So it looks like if you look at the Hyperflex offering, having self-encrypting drives, having good data protection and replication of the data so it's protected. That protects the actual content of a record, but it doesn't solve everything around GDPR. There's no one organization that can do that. It's about having that framework of you do the right decisions around the architecture, and the data protection, you'll get in there in terms of the protection. >> Well, I mean, I'm just going to rant here and say whoever came up with GDPR doesn't know anything about databases, okay. >> Darren: Yeah. >> I mean I get the concept, but, I mean, just think about how hard it is to deal with unstructured data, and structured data in and of itself within a company. Nevermind inside a company, what's happening externally, it is a technical nightmare. And so, yeah, just hand waving, "Hey, someone came "to your website." Well, did they come in anonymously, did they login, which identity did they login on? There's no - I mean it's a nightmare. This is a huge problem. What do customers do? >> I think if you talk about GDPR it's first of all not about a single solution, right? It's not an issue of just one company, or one vendor, one solution. It goes across different databases, different applications, different software, so as you said, it's database solutions, you need to delete maybe a single table entry, which is almost impossible right now. Especially if that's ina backup, right? How are you going to do that? I think between Cisco and us, and he mentioned that one important part of GDPR is data protection itself. So the customers need to make sure they can actually promise and they can show to the government that they have a proper data protection in place, so they can showcase what does my DR plan look like? How do I recover? What is my RPO? So we can already solve those issues. >> It changes your game because, for you, it turns you into a insurance policy to a proactive; in order to do data protection you actually have to know what the data is. So it kind of creates an opportunity to say hey, this is an opportunity to say we're going to start thinking about, kind of a new e-discovery model. >> If you look at 3.0, the multi-Cloud platform, we were discussing around how Hyperconvergence started very small in certain apps. But when you actually then expand that out into the multi-Cloud, security is a major pillar. And you've got to have the security elements, and Cisco has some great security offerings in the data center and outside of the data center. They all form part of that GDPR message. But it's been baked into multi-Cloud 3.0. as a key component to allow customers that confidence. >> It's going to be a Hyperconvergence of databases. So this is coming. >> Darren: Yeah. >> So this is going to force, I think the compliance is going to be more a shot across the bow, if you will. I don't know how hardcore they're going to be enforcing it. >> It's going to be interesting in the first one. Because at the moment I think a lot of customers are thinking, "Well, we'll wait till we see "how big the fines are, and then we'll decide." >> They're going to create shell corporations in the Cayman Islands. (laughter) >> Alright, so we've talked a little bit about some of the headwinds we're facing in IT. Talk about the tailwinds. A lot of things in the Hyperflex 3.0, got 700-800 customers, what's going to drive adoption, get that into thousands of customers here in 2018? >> So I think it's the simplicity message. Customers want ease of use of technology. They want to get away from what they've had before where they've had tough times standing up applications, where they've had to invest time around different skill sets for the infrastructure, be it networking, be it storage, be it compute. Having 3 teams back leaning against each other, and change windows. So the simplicity message of Hyperflex is you can have a three node cluster up and running in 34 minutes, including the network. We're the only ones that incorporate the network into the solution, and we do it for good reason. Because when we can get predictability in performance, and we can grow the solution very, very easily. And that's the whole point of what they're doing, is they want to be able to start small, and add more nodes when required, around what applications they're going to deploy on. Our tagline is "any application, anywhere" now, and either private location or into that multi-Cloud location. Gives customers choice, and I think as we start seeing more and more customers, 700 in just under 2 years is a phenomenal amount in EMEA, and 2500 worldwide, we've had some great traction. And it's just going to get faster and faster. >> Yeah, I think a lot of customers are obviously talking about moving to the Cloud completely or at least majority of the data. So for the customers that stay for them, and I talked with some customers today, and they told me, "For us right now, we can't focus "anymore on a data center itself. "We do have much more difficult and more important "topics to talk about and to cover in our IT business "than the basic data center itself" That includes compute, that includes digitalization. So it's great to hear you can actually set up a Hyperflex system, no matter if that's Hyper-V or VM or whatever in less than an hour, right? And if I tell you now that if you add Veeam on that to provide the availability for Hyperflex environment that's also less than an hour. So if you know how to configure that you can be done in a couple of hours, and you have more or less the whole data center set up. >> You bring up a really good point. What are customers concerned about? I have to worry about my application portfolio, I have my security issue, my whole Cloud strategy piece, so, if the infrastructure piece is just invisible and I don't have to touch it, tweak it and do that, I'm going to have time to actually grow my business. >> The more integrated it is, the more easy it is to set up and to maintain and troubleshoot by the way, that's also an important thing, right? What if it doesn't work? If there is a consistent layer, a consistent way to get all this information sent to get a troubleshooting thing done, the better it is for our customers. Because again, they don't want to care anymore about what's happening in the back end. >> And that's the next challenge we're addressing, in-app product or Insight, is taking that management solution into the Cloud to make things easier for customers. And being able to take a lot of the things we have in point product into a Cloud model. So the likes of analytics, the likes of Smart Tac. Customers get fed up if when they have an issue they have to go and roll the logs up into Tac, and then go and FTP them. They get away from that, they don't need to do that in Insight. And it's all about, we're talking about the deployment of technology, well one of the fist benefits of Insight is Hyperflex. We can roll out sites without even visiting them. You just do a Cloud deployment, and a Cloud management, and it's job done. >> And this is the whole point we were kind of getting at earlier, connect back to the compliance issue, these agile like things are happening; it's throwing off data too. So now you got to organize the data, you can't protect what you don't understand. >> Correct. >> I mean that is ultimately the bottom line for what's happening here. >> Yeah, you can't protect what you don't understand, I think that's a good conclusion of the whole thing. And I think for us >> By the way when you guys use that tagline I want royalties. But it's true. (laughter) We'll get back to you on that. No, but this is a big problem. Protection is inherently assuming you know the data is. >> Stefan: Yeah. >> Darren: Yeah. >> There it is. >> That's for sure the case, and one thing we worked on and, you know, we announced it a couple of months ago, was the Veeam Ability Orchestrator, which is another layer on top of it. So he just talked about how they can deploy within the site, multiple sites of Hyperflex very easily. And for us it's about, you know, getting the customer an easy solution with all the successful recovery and failovers in areas across the data centers with the Availability Orchestrator. >> Data is the competitive advantage, data is messy if you don't control it and reign it in, of course theCUBE is doing their part and bringing the data to you guys here in theCUBE with Veeam and Cisco partnership. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman breaking it down here at Cisco Live in Europe 2018. Live coverage with theCUBE. Be back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here, exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain for theCUBE Day one wrap of our two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman, and we're going to break down day one, Stu? >> I can go for a couple more hours, who else we got? >> But Stu, we'll go live for a marathon session. No, let's wrap it up. We got a full day tomorrow, got some great guests here. At the keynote, Cisco laying out their vision and the story's kind of coming together, and I think Cisco has clarity. So my takeaway, I learned a lot. I learned that Cisco is not just talking, they're walking. They got a lot of work to do. I think that the signs of great progress with Cisco, Stu: one is Rowan put out a great keynote that looks forward not back. They didn't lean on their base and saying we're going to milk this cow until it's dead, meaning the networking engineers and the position. They're looking forward and putting a vision out there that says here's how the network will transform applications and they had a lot of use cases from IoT to multi-cloud and more. And two, they're cracking the code on IoT because they bought Jasper, which is back haul, essentially using cellular to the classic OT market, which is a classic end-to-end. To me, that was a revelation to me and I think that might be the unique creative thinking that could bring IoT into IT and transform the highly unsecure IoT WiFi IP market because anyone can throw a smart light bulb or whatever device. Full processing, multi-threading capabilities, and that can be hijacked and taken over and spewing malware and ransomware and everything else in between. >> John, if anything what I critique a little bit is he gives the vision of 2050. Go to a show like Amazon, they're like hey builders, here's what we have for you today that's really cool. And I think, we heard a lot from Cisco today, the cool things they have. Big acquisitions like AppD. We've talked a lot about, in the IoT discussion today, you talked about it was a $1.4 billion acquisition they made in that space. Here in the DevNet Zone, they're not talking about the future, they're talking about what they're building today. >> Well Stu-- Stu, you know how I feel about this. I kind of roll my eyes when I get that kind of futuristic with no meat on the bone. If you're going to have sizzle, you better have some steak on the grill. That's the critique for me is I'm looking and squinting through the hype and use cases. Oh, we got the future's going to be upon us to reality. What do they got now? That's the progress that I see and the signals that are showing to me are DevNet, active transformation of classic network engineer operator to programmer, one. Two, Susie Wee pointed out a new concept that we love called Net DevOps, which is programming the network for microservices and these new services with Kubernetes as the linchpin. Heard a little bit about Google, so in line with Google. Of course, Cisco's got billion dollar partners in the ecosystem. The certainly great fertilizer if you will, for this growth. They got a lot of things coming together. I think the challenge for Cisco and the strategic imperative that I see for the management team is show progress now. Now you've got the vision, that's the sizzle. Show the stink, that's what's happening now if they can bring that Amazon like mojo, I would think they'd hit a home run. >> John, we've got the Learning Lab behind you in DevNet area here. It's the first time in two whole days I haven't seen it packed and that's just because 15 minutes ago the World of Solutions reception opened. They've got snacks, they've got beer and wine, the music's going over there, so everybody's kind of moved over there but this area's been hopping. A day before the rest of the show really started, before the key notes. Absolutely, I'd love to have Susie talk about the four year transformation internally. We'd watched some of the people inside Cisco beating the drum, talking about making change. Cisco's made investment in Open Source. They've tried to move the needle some, but this developer wave, absolutely, they need to be a part of it. I think back to John Chambers talking about all the adjacencies, some of the failed acquisitions, flip acquisition, some the set top box type stuff. IoT, is the message they've had. I think you laid it out well. They had a good vision upfront but the market needed to mature some. Now we're ready for this to be real. Partner ecosystem, absolutely. Cisco is still a behemoth in this space and they've got strong partnerships a lot of way. There's a lot of transitions. There's some things they need to be careful about how they make the moves, but absolutely, there's interesting times here. >> Stu, you and I always love to talk about this because the network is where the bottleneck has always been. You mentioned in one of the questions, I forget who the guest was, what's going on with some of defined networking? Well, guess what, microservices changes that game. With Kubernetes now as a integration layer, it kind of splits the line between app developers and under the hood software engineering, all the way down to network engineering. Those are okay personas, but now you have policy programmability at the network level that services could take advantage of Those app developers that are slinging APIs, doing no JS, they're used to IOs. They're used to programming these functions. This kind of feels a little bit like serverless is coming to the table. I haven't heard that word here, but kind of getting that vibe. >> Absolutely, we haven't heard serverless. We have talked about containers some. Obviously, we talked about Kubernetes in area we've won, but the multi-cloud is still a little bit early for where Cisco plays at that M and O piece of it, Cisco has had a number of plays over the years and they make an acquisition. We'll see how it is. My friends in the networking space, the line is the single pain of glass, John, is spelled P-A-I-N. I'm glad I didn't hear that term from Cisco. >> John: I heard it once only. >> In general, they understand some of the challenges. They touch a lot of the pieces and they're not being overly dogmatic. They're not bashing the public Cloud. Yes, they have a lot more revenue in the data centers in the service providers, but they're not coming out here as a Cloud denier. >> That's a great point for a couple things. You know how I feel about multi-cloud. I think multi-cloud's BS right now. I think it's one of those moon shots down the road and I don't think anything's going to happen in multi-cloud for awhile. Your "True Private Cloud" report on Wikibon.com kind of validates that. The thing about the pain of class, Cisco actually has a lot of that on the management side. What needs to happen is that pain of glass management has to move up the stacks, Stu. This is where I think the test will be for them. That's going to be key. The thing that I did not hear that I'm surprised about is I didn't hear anything about data-driven anything. There's a lot of stuff being talked about. Programmable networking, kind of implies data. You even heard the IoT general manager talk about IoT feeds AI. I think AI's fed by data. Certainly, IoT supports data. I didn't hear about how their data is driving either policy, automation, not enough of that. I think that's a weak area, I'll say, they've got to do some work on. >> John, some of that I think is just terminology cause if you look inside the intent-based networking pieces that Cisco talks about, David Goeckeler this morning in the key note. He said it's about learning and security. Learning, it's all about data. How do we train those models? They didn't throw out the AI and MO buzzwords out there, but underneath, that's what's happening. It is about data, just networking people don't talk about data nearly as much as the compute or storage people. You're right, serverless, how will that impact the network? Because underneath infrastructure matters. Teagan's going to have to move around a lot more. I would've expected to hear some mention of it. >> Well, you made a good point, I agree with you. I love this intent-based networking. It really changes the conversation. If you say, what is that, what is intent in context? Huge conversation point, huge area to explore. This truly will make an adaptive network, a flexible network. It'll make it programmable. That's what people want. App developers need to have the services on the network side and they need the automation. Really, really key point. Any other learnings for you, Stu? >> Really John, it's going through that shift in model as we talked about in the intro. Cisco heavily moving towards that software model. Riaz who they brought in, heavy software background. You've got that balance of Cisco has strong history. They are trusted. Network provider, Trust and risk are absolutely the number one things that customers hear about. Security is something they bang on, but they need to undergo those transformations. People like Susie, like Riaz, coming in, helping to drive what's happening there. It's been nice to see very different from when the last time I came to Cisco, very heavy gear, and people plugging and running around, dealing with all those challenges. You think back to customers always-- What do they spend, 70 to 80% on keeping the lights on? Most of the activities we talk about here aren't the, oh, how do we keep the lights on? It's about growing the business and transforming the business, which is the imperative for CIOs today. >> The other thing I liked today is we had storage on, IBM and NetApp with a Cisco partner and ecosystem managing executives. Here's the thing that I learned and I'm happy to see this. You see storage going through the haves and have nots. There is a line going on, maybe its NV, NVFE over-- >> Stu: NVME over Fabrics. >> MVME over Fabric is causing a line that's going to define history, either on the wrong side of history or the right side. We're seeing storage start-ups struggling. We're seeing a lot of companies that we knew that went public, going out of business, start-ups cratering. But there's winners. Hearing the Cisco guys with NetApp and IBM, you're starting to see the storage vents who continue to make it, doing well and they're differentiating. What Cisco has actually done masterfully in my opinion, is they've balanced the ecosystem with the storage guys so that they can let everyone win. It's like a race car. Do you want the Lamborghini or the Ferrari or Porsche? You have different versions of storage. Each one can stand on their own and use Cisco and the better mousetrap wins, the better engine, will win for the use cases of the storage guys. Seeing kind of some swim lanes for storage. That's a good sign, Stu, for Cisco. >> Yeah, absolutely. That's how Cisco really drove that wave of converged infrastructure. I heard from lots of the partners at the (mumbles). CI, even though it's not the sexiest thing anymore cause it's over eight years old now, we've been talking about it, billions of dollars, that's what drove UCS, Cisco has a little bit of fear that they missed out on some of the core verbalization so they're not going to miss the container trend. They're not going to miss microservices. They're all over these pieces. But absolutely, they understand the value of ecosystems and they're very smart about how they target that. >> I agree with you, they got the container magic going on. DevNet certainly is looking good from a developer's standpoint. We will be covering the DevNet Create Event, which is a non-Cisco ecosystem. It's a new territory that Susie Wee has taken down, which is to get real Cloud native developers that aren't necessarily in the ecosystem, so that's going to be a positive. The thing I want to ask you, Stu, to end day one wrap up because this is kind of coming up as the NVME over Fabric. What's the impact of Cisco because we see the impact on the market place, with David Floyer would be chiming away if he was here, but I'd like to get your thoughts because you covered it closely, how is that going to help Cisco? Does it hurt Cisco, does it enable them, is it a game changer? What's the impact of NVME over Fabric? >> Cisco, remember not just a networking company, they're a compute supplier with UCS here. They have the M5, they have their latest that they have. Cisco's all over this, they're involved. It's how do I really bring that HPC kind of environment we've been talking about in the networking space. RDMA options out there. iWARP and Roce and NVME over Fabrics is going to be able to give me even higher speed, really low latency, getting scuzzy out of the way, which has been something that we've been trying to do for over a decade now in the storage world. I don't think-- We talked to Eric Herzog this morning and I really agree with him. This is evolutionary and this is not something that's catching anyone by surprise. It's not like-- >> It's on their radar. >> We're going from wire to wireless, or hey, this is now ethernet instead of token ring. >> So not a massive shift. >> It is similar to disk and Flash. It's absolutely, it's the next generation and there will be companies that implement it better, but we've all seen it coming. All the big guys are involved in it. Cisco, it relates to them and their ecosystem, and you expect them to not be a huge shift. >> One of the things we did not hear about. It's not a main theme here, it's certainly an undercurrent. It's certainly mainstream in the tech industry, both on the enterprise and emerging tech, certainly on AI and software, Stu, is the role of open source software. Not a lot going on here. I looked for sessions, I didn't see any birds of a feather or any meetups around open source. I know it's a DevNet show, Cisco show. DevNet creates a little bit more open source with Cloud found. We've interviewed folks like that and others. But if they're going to be talking to Google, and we're talking about Kubernetes, you cannot ignore the role of open source in the Cisco ecosystem. Your thoughts. Miss, not relevant to the show, kind of the back burner? Maybe Cisco's boiling something up? What's happening with their role and impact with open source? >> John, we heard that there's a presentation tomorrow in STO, they're working with Google on that. I'm not surprised not to see heavy open source in here. It would fit into the Cloud messaging, absolutely Cisco. On that Kubernetes train. We talked about in the containers that ecosystem when Docker announced the networking pieces, Cisco was right up there, wanted to make sure they're there. Cisco's doing it. John, they've had middling success to where they've been able to roll that into their products. We've covered a lot of it because we're big proponents of it but the typical customer here, I don't think that they're like oh hey, I didn't see this. There's other places where those communities, the builders and the contributors in those environments know where Cisco goes. >> Cisco's got billions of dollars they've got to focus on that I agree, but open source is important. You know, Stu, we think Kubernetes could possibly unlock the multi-cloud path. We're constantly watching it. I think it's important to them, they have to be there. They're talking Kubernetes. They're talking about that line in the stack that creates an app developer, very cohesive app developer ecosystem, and then under the hood, engineering, software engineering mindset. They got to play. If you're going to play with Google in multi-cloud, Google's all in open source. They want to be on Amazon, they got to be open source. They got to be there, so we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Okay, day one wrap up here. theCUBE, live in Barcelona for exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018. We'll be here all day tomorrow as well. Thanks for watching, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veem, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to the live CUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live Europe 2018, kicking off the new year with the big event. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, cohost of theCUBE. Our next two guests, Alfred Manhart is a Senior Director Channel and System Integrators for NetApp, EMEA of Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Benjamin Laplane, EMEA Chief Sales and Solutions Officer with Outscale. You guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Hi. >> Love this partner segment. NetApp, you have a customer on, partner, and you guys have an interesting relationship. Would one of you like to talk about your relationship with Outscale, and why are you guys here? >> I think engaging not only with the typical resellers and distributors is pretty key for us. We engage with service providers and cloud providers from 2012, 2013 ongoing. It's mainly to be the foundation for the services they are going to market with, and Outscale is out of France, one of our predominant service providers we engage with on a local level. >> How has the channel changed, because as the cloud service providers, and cloud creates such great agility and speed. You can get products out faster, MVPs and those things can be very specialized. How has your go-to-market changed with the cloud, accelerated it, changed the makeup, what's NetApp- >> First of all, the market is demanding it, so some of our traditional players go the services way and some service providers go the typical, traditional way so engaging and broaden up the ecosystem was pretty critical for us. Different engagement models are needed because the customers require different kind of consumption models. >> Good leverage, sales model, always a good business. Benjamin, talk about what you guys do. I want to ask you some specific questions about your business, on how you guys are advising and implementing solutions with customers, but first, take a minute to explain your business. >> Outscale is a cloud service provider. We built the company in 2010 and we've been providing public cloud solution for worldwide, so implementing in the U.S., in Europe, and in Asia for the past five years now. The objective is to be able to provide sovereignty and reliable cloud solutions for our customers worldwide. It's based on NetApp and Cisco FlexPod architecture. >> So you guys actually have a cloud yourselves? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And you bring that to customers? >> Yeah for the past five years, what we've been doing is developing our own orchestration layer that allow us to actually use the whole FlexPod architecture to provide infrastructure as a service for our customers. What we've been doing for the past year is actually package all the technology that we've been developing for the past years into a unique solution, which is TINA On-Prem, which is a private cloud solution ready to be deployed wherever you need to. >> I'll get back to the FlexPod in a minute, but I want to drill down on this notion of serving the customers, because there's a thirst for customization and specialization, whether it's an application, or some regional challenge on the data, certainly you see that with GDPR, it's coming down like a freight train, like a ton of bricks on everybody. So there's design challenges that are now upon the customers. How are you guys bringing the customers' solutions to them? Is it rapid engagements, is it ongoing? What's your relationship with your customers? >> So if we talk specifically about GDPR, but I think it's true for most regulation that comes out, Outscale had the chance to be able to develop their software with security design first. That means that it's designed for security, but also for privacy, so that's kind of give us the edge when talking about regulation enforcement and also all the process that we put in place around infrastructure management that allows for us to provide the best services for our customer, always aligned with the regulation that comes out. >> What are the biggest challenges your customers face with the cloud? >> I think most of them, so things improved a lot for the past years, but the first thing was everyone wanted to do it because that was kind of the name, the thing that you want to go into, now it's more big data or AI. The idea behind this is a company knows that the cloud is not an option, they will go to the cloud, the question is how, and why and when and how. So we try to help all these companies to decide what's the best for public cloud or private cloud. >> Alfred and Benjamin, I want you guys both to answer this next question. We've been observing and reporting on theCUBE, and certainly Cisco's validated it, that everyone kind of has some cloud thing going on. Yeah I put an app in there, it might be low-hanging fruit, test dev, or something non-critical, but all the work and energy and money being spent is kind of getting their act together on-premise, because they got to get cloud operations going, move from the old operating model to cloud-ready on-premises, and then do some hybrid cloud. Do you guys see it the same way, and if so, what specifically are they doing on, is it DevOps, is it pure operational, what are your thoughts? Start with Benjamin. >> So from where I stand, what I can see is we've seen companies for the past year that went full public cloud, and then other company that always stay back and say, no, we won't go to the cloud and we kind of things going into a balance point where basically all companies now realize that they need to have a part of their infrastructure, such as private cloud, for security, politics, regulation sometimes. The other places to decide what's going to be the perimeter, they going to be allowed to put into the public cloud. That's why now we are more talking about hybrid between public and private cloud, and that's one of the first major design of the solution that we developed. >> Are you saying that you're seeing some customers move completely from on-premises to cloud, full migrations? >> No, I think what I've seen is people that have, so the cloud was not made for them, finally decided that maybe it could have been useful for some of their operations, so I don't think it's always like an all-in move. You need to decide where's it's going to be good, depending on the perimeter, the context, the data, the cre-dee-city of the data. >> Alfred, on-premise activity. >> Heavy on the one side. (laughing) On the other side, I think you talked about test dev. A lot of people play around with test dev, this is mainly on a local level, behind the scenes, but if it then goes to backup or a disaster recovery, it goes up the productive stack. They are more interested if it's really going well, if the data resides in their country, if all the legislations are held. We currently see getting out of the test dev, and on the other side we of course see a trend that the customers are forced by the software Windows to go to the cloud. So Microsoft is going cloud. SAP is also going cloud, so it's not only a market trend, it's also a trend from the software end that they are forced to do something, and they want to keep control of their data. That's why data's a little bit different from going to the cloud, it's computing with the apps. >> Data's a huge issue. So how are you guys using NetApp? Talk about the FlexPod, you mentioned that earlier. >> Outscale, we've been using NetApp for the past six years, something like that, which is a pretty long time compared to the lifetime of a company. The thing as far as the most important thing was to be able to provide the bridge services for our customers. Even if we abstract some of the features, some of the value of the NetApp that we buy, we just keep the value for ourself to be able to deliver more services, more value to the end customer. That's how we've been doing things. The second thing is also when you want to deploy private, on-prem solution, it's always better and it's more reassuring for the customer when you use and you partner with one of the leaders on the market, such as NetApp. >> So when I hear people use the term enterprise class architecture, what does that mean? Does that mean certain maybe arrays? Is it configuration, is it network? What is enterprise class architecture mean to you? >> For me it's two things. So the first thing you have the architecture, and you also have the hardware that you're going to use to apply to this architecture. The thing is, I was talking about reliability. I think that's one of the major things is how much maintenance is it going to require, how it's going to impact your permissions for the user or for the end customer, and when you see the architecture that we've deployed, it's everything is redundant, it's not fail-safe, it's failure-proof, which is even better because that means that you know things are going to fail at some point, and you can't even allow yourself to have a failure where you can't serve the service to your customer. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned in doing the cloud migration, cloud service provider, with customers over the past two years? What's the big aha moment that you've had? >> I think that's when you realize that even if you have some pattern that you can recognize for a specific customer, or for a certain type of customer, you have no magic recipe. That means that you always need to take a step back, look at the problem of your customers and try to think what's the best for my customer, and how can I bring the right services to him so he can add value to his market and his business? >> Alfred, you mentioned regulation, so the question to Benjamin is how does the role of storage play in a world where data and sovereignty issues come into play? Does it change the strategy? What's goes on for the folks that are really trying to solve this problem? >> I think we see more and more movement where basically even the customer want more managed services. I think it's always important to give the customer the hands so he can do whatever he want with his data. We are here to support him, to give him the best advices, the best practices about data management, but at the end is he accountable and responsible for these data. So at the end I think it's just we need to give the right tools to our customers so they do exactly what they want to do with the data and they don't have hidden policies apply to their own data. For example, replication of your data for safety measures. Maybe they don't want it to be replicated abroad, they want it to stay on the territory, so that's kind of a thing that you need to rethink about and give the right tools to your customers. >> Alfred, what are the top use cases that you guys have seen at NetApp for cloud services providers, and just in general the partners, because they're on the front lines serving customers. They need to have low cost, high performance gear, great software, we heard reliability. What are the use cases now that you're seeing? Are they broader use cases, are they more narrow? What's your- >> So of course, when you come from a storage perspective, you mainly aim for the infrastructure and for the storage-related services, which we are not where we are stopping, because we are working with Cisco on this validated designs going up the stack, so if you are not going up the stack regarding different workloads, going after the IOT, going after the analytics, going after the application layer, we will fail. So having a fair balance of partner that can offer the services from bottom to the top, that's very important. Of course, use cases like intelligent business analytics, going after SAP, going after SAP HANA, going after Microsoft, this is obvious that the partners and the customers are going that way. >> Benjamin, talk about what it's like working with NetApp. You happy with them? Some things that they've done that you think other suppliers should adopt? What's the mode of support from NetApp, what's the overall experience like? >> I think I would describe it as a strong partnerships. They are our exclusive partner for the storage as Cisco can be on the other brinks of technology that we are using. We have a strong relationship, we have a booth on the on-stand today so that's one of the reason why we're here. We also pushing with them with the whole, we were talking about analytics, we are talking talking about big data also. We have a lot of use cases, pretty amazing use case in resales in Europe, and also we give them a lot of feedback about how we use the hardware, what could be improved, and I think that's the kind of communication that makes a strong partnerships and bring value to both sides. >> NetApp's a very engineering-oriented company, I know them very well living in Silicon Valley, so I give 'em props for that. Question for you is when you hear someone say data-driven storage, or data-driven analytics, what does that mean to you as a partner of a storage supplier? >> For us, it's another way to look at the way we're going to provide service to our customers in the years to come. I think that customers is going to expect more and more services, more and more value, from the service that we're going to provide them, whether it's going to be storage, computer network, or even security. I think that's always a good thing for us to have more tools to build new technology for tomorrow. >> Great, and NetApp's channels and partners, what's the message from NetApp these days to the partners? You're enabling them, obviously you help them make money obviously, but- >> I think the biggest challenge is that we drive the ecosystem in the right direction. If we just stick to the traditional players, we will not be successful, so we have to expand the ecosystem. Going up to different player that are currently probably not in our radar, going up to ISVs that help us to really embrace the data from a value perspective, so our biggest, let's say, message to the channel is don't stay where you currently are, develop the channel with ourself. >> And certainly the relationship with Cisco is blooming for NetApp. >> It is, it's probably since six years, we have now around 8,700 joint customers. We go up the stack, we talk about strategic engagements on a IT SP perspective, so it's going in the right direction. Very important. >> As your competitors get distracted, and do things or doing things, you guys eating their lunch? Is that, (laughs) you smiling? >> Eating their lunch is probably not the word. >> Maybe a little croissant. Breakfast, or was it dinner, what's going on? Are you eating the breakfast, lunch, or dinner of the competitors? >> Currently I would say in French, I think we are jointly engaging on a croissant perspective. (laughing) So we're heading in the right way. So these partnerships are very important. >> It's always a great, fun time. It's been fun watching the storage, been watching NetApp for many years, I remember when they went public back in the dot com A days, they still keep their roots. Great to see you having some great success. Congratulations on a great partnership. It's theCUBE live coverage, here with NetApp and their partner inside theCUBE here at Barcelona at Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (digital music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's Ecosystem Partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. We are live at Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder SiliconANGLE. My co-host Stu Miniman, analyst at WikiBon.com. Our next two guests is Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director Data Center Solutions at Cisco and Lee Howard, Chief Technologist, Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Great partnership here to talk about the tech involved in the partnership. Obviously, in the industry, it's pretty well known that NetApp's doing really well with Cisco. Congratulations. You guys have been enabling great partner dynamics lately, but all the action's been on the intersection between a raise, better, faster, cheaper storage, but also enabling software defined stuff, value. What's the check involved in the partnership? Why is it going so well? Lee, can you start? >> I think offering choice out there is the best thing that we can do. You've got data fabric from a NetApp perspective is that super interconnected highway and as many on ramps as we can build for folks to get on that highway. The more successful you're going to be able to see. I mean, the IDC numbers speak for themselves, prolific, double digit growth. I think we were at 56% last quarter, listed together on there. That's how tight this partnership's been. Leveraging that combined portfolio has given us a very competitive offering out there in the industry. >> Siva, I want to get your thoughts because actually Cisco, we've been... Stu and I love talking about networking, in Cisco in particular because the old days, provision the network and good stuff happens. Apps get built. Things get done. But with the Cloud, you see the shift where you've got DevOps culture, you got cloud-native happening. The real enabling technologies have to be beyond the network, so you guys have been successful with a variety of other things. What's the key things that's making you guys key partners in the ecosystem? What are you guys truly enabling? Is it network programmability? What's the secret sauce from Cisco's standpoint? >> If you look at the way Data Center has evolved in the last decade or so, the way customers are consuming technology is much more at a platform level. They want things simplified. They want to, as you just said, the innovation that's happening in the above layer, in terms of the software's tech and use cases, is just tremendous. They really want the platform to become simple and that's what Cloud did to you anyways. That level of simplification, that level of optimization, but still a best of breed, it is what got us together. We have continued to build world class platforms that started one way, started mainly looking at virtualization in those place over time. In the last four or five years or so, the amount of innovations we have brought on top of a FlexPod, which is a joined solution together, has been right at the cutting edge of where technology is going and where applications are landing. That, in a very large way, has become the key for the success between the two of us. >> We had talked Brandon on here earlier and he validated our thesis and WikiBon actually had a report that came out last year, in the middle of the year, called "True Private Cloud." It was the only research analyst firm that actually got this one right, in my opinion, which validated by you guys is that... Certainly any (mumbles) would argue that everything is moving to the Cloud, tomorrow. Certainly there's some cloud migration and some stuff in the Public Cloud, no problem. But what WikiBon did is they looked at the true Private Cloud numbers, meaning that the action where the spend is and where the buyers are doing the most work both refreshing and retooling is on premises. Because they're actually changing the operating model on premises now as a way, as a way, as a sequence, to hybrid and then maybe full Multi-Cloud or full Public Cloud, whatever they want to do. So that being said, Lee, what does that mean? Because certainly, I understand what a Cloud operating model is, but I'm talking about storage and networking. >> Yeah. >> What does that look like? Is that a full transformation? How long is that going to take? Your thoughts? Comment on that. >> We're seeing, you saw on the key note this morning them referencing brand new titles and new personnel, new human capital that's coming in. I think that is, both you're enabling and your barring the factor to changing how you're consuming resources on site. Cloud architects as they're coming in to prominence enterprise architects. I think we're getting to a point where there's enough of a intuition to the software that's enabling those consumption trends to shift, that it's now a way for not just those that have the inside information, but it's something that's consumable for the masses. I think 2018, you guys hit on DevOps, highly versatile model going forward and I think Multi-Cloud is going to be the right answer. >> John: The roles are changing. >> Roles are changing and we have been seeking to be that technology provider that regardless of where you're at in that journey, you're able to leverage our portfolio to be able to do it. >> John: Does the product change? >> The product, the tenets behind the product, not so much but I think the way that it's being leveraged does end up changing. >> Siva, your thoughts on this. >> You know, if you start to think about the earlier generation of Cloud, it was mainly seen as a capacity argumentation, mainly on the IS. It really started people to think that everything is moving to Cloud, but if you look at the innovation that happens in the Cloud, the Cloud in itself is a massive ecosystem and people want to go do that. So there is a huge reason why the cloud is successful, but that's not necessarily just taking everything on. That's not the trend. What you really see is customers now starting to reach that level of maturity to say hey, there is a tremendous value in what I can do and on-prim, the data gravity and the latency and those things. >> So you agree with the "True Private Cloud" report, the on-prim action is where? >> We continue to see that from our customers, you see it as option and things like that. We absolutely see that is real as well. >> Let's go back to the data center for a second because some people look at it, and it's like oh, well CI's been happening now for gosh, almost a decade now. HCI has a lot of buzz out there. We want to hear what you're hearing from customers because first of all, what we see is there's still the majority of people, still building their own. They're taking the pieces. FlexPod is a little bit different than say hyper-converged from a single skew, but you've still got to build your own CI. Big partnership >> Absolutely. >> There's a huge revenue. HCI has both Cisco and NetApp have pieces there. Where are the customers today? Why is CI still a meaningful part of the discussion today? >> I think it all comes down to scale and how you want to be able to interface. What do you want your data center to be like today? How are you staffed and proficient at implementing a solution and where do you want that data center to go tomorrow? I think CI and HCI absolutely have a place together in the data center, but as we see RFPs fundamentally shift to reflect the new way that infrastructure's being consumed, a cookie cutter approach that you get with a lot of HCIs isn't always going to be the answer. You want to have that full modularity, that full flexibility. It's in the title, it's FlexPod. You want to be able to have that versatility to address not just the initial scoping project but with Flash and able data centers, assets are staying on the books longer and longer. Those depreciation schedules are getting stretched out. Having the versatility, not just to live in today's operating environment, but the operating environment of tomorrow, I think is what's really driving that main stay of CI. >> Siva, we heard in the key notes this morning a lot of discussion about Multi-Cloud and management. Talk about Cisco and NetApp. How do you view those together? Where do you go to market together, co-engineer, things like that? >> Absolutely. If you guys look at what we did in the FlexPod, we created what we would fundamentally call or say code platform for data center. That was the biggest success. We had a lot of work loads and news cases. But in the last two to three years, what we have both done, because individually we have portfolio products that allow a Cloud journey. Cisco is a big proponent of Multi-Cloud and the journey to Cloud and proving customer the right platform so they can pick and choose when to go to Cloud and how to go to Cloud. There are similar assets from NetApp. What we have done is we have built FlexPod solutions that builds on top of on that leverage, is the Cloud Center products, NetApp's data fabric, some of their technology that's call location within the equinox and so on and so forth. What that has allowed is FlexPod as a platform has blossomed as the Cloud has grown because we now offer the choice. That also brought more customers to realize while these guys really provide me the journey to Cloud model. That is more new solution that we are building that continues to drive that mindset from both companies. >> Stu: Lee, you want to build on that? >> Yeah, providing that operational excellence to where you're able to come in and leverage these assets, not just day zero but through the entire lifespan of that asset and that's the... Quality of life improvements is a big thing from NetApp and Cisco's perspective as we're coming together and we're planning what the future state is going to look like. It's not just hey, this is the specific drive capacity you're putting in, that's yesterday's infrastructure. Tomorrow is all about what quality of life, how much time can we give back to those end users out there? >> So I have a question for you guys both. Lee, we'll start with you. You got the storage compute and switching cause you're leaders in those areas, what's next? What's driving the partnership? You talk about how you present the partnership with Cisco to customers. What's in it for me? What's new? What's fresh? What's the deal? >> The conversation we have out there a lot of times there's perception issues that we are the old guard of technology. FlexPod's been around seven going on eight years and they say what's fresh out there? Well, we're so much more than just the infrastructure piece. It's a combined portfolio. Cisco recently announced their partnership with Google Cloud. We have our NFS Native on Azure going forward. Leveraging those better together stories and each other's Rolodex to be able to come in and truly engineer next generation solutions, that's what's getting people excited. How are you going to set me up for success tomorrow, not just how are we going to be successful today on today's technology? >> Siva, how are you guys successful with that? How do you talk about the relationship because they have a unique capabilities, been around the block for awhile in the storage business? Look at the history of NetApp. Very interesting, very engineering oriented, very customer focused. >> Lee: 25 years. >> What's your position in this? >> I think you have two companies who have a tremendous technology focus in building, but what keeps this partnership going together is easily our customers. We are not young anymore in the partnership. We have over $10 billion of install based customers. We have over 8,000 customers. Just keeping up with those customers and providing them the journey however they want to go, it absolutely becomes our, it's our prerogative to make these customers successful in wherever they want to go next. That's a big driver for how we look at innovation. We continue to provide the capabilities that allows our customers to continue their journey and at the same time, we bring our innovation to make this platform successful. >> So I'm going to put you on the spot here, both of you guys. I know Stu's got a question. I got a couple minutes left. Kubernetes has put a line in the sand and separates the two worlds of developers. App developers, really just looking as a fabric of resource, they're creative, doing cool things. Then you've got the network storage software engineering going on under the hood, it's like a car. You're now an engine. You got to work together. What are you guys doing specifically to make that work, make the engine really powerful? >> In the context of Kubernetes, we are-- >> Under the hood. What's under the hood? Kubernetes is the line there, but you got to sit with that app. You got to make the engine powerful. You guys are working together. What's the sound like for the customers? Why NetApp and Cisco together? >> If you look back at our containerization, micro services that journey, we certainly again, same logic, same model. We are building an ecosystem there. We are developing joint solution that optimizes how Kubernetes and Cisco and Google have made several announcements on how we are bringing innovation and infrastructure automation level, network scale level, that allows a massively scalable container environment of Kubernetes environment to be deployed on top of a Cisco infrastructure. NetApp's innovation around Kubernetes, around building the plug-ins for how the plug-ins interact with the storage subsystem that allows us to say if you are deploying a Kubernetes environment, if you are deploying the best of breed, you certainly need the platform that understands and scales with that. >> All right, Lee. Your differentiation for that power engine under the hood with Cisco. >> It's infrastructure is code. That's what we are together and I don't think that across the competitive landscape that they are, everybody else is really embracing it in such a fashion. It's speaking the language that these developers are wanting to do and we're marrying that up with the core tenets that made us an IT powerhouse together. >> It was the developer angle John- >> All right. (laughs) >> We've been doing so many of these together. Absolutely where we wanted to go. >> Stu and I get the-- Infrastructure is code. The great shows. We do the cloud-native, got Kubernetes, we do under the hood. This is a big journey for customers. There's a lot of fud out there and they want to know one thing. Who's going to be around in the future? Having the partnerships is really key. You guys have been very successful. I'll give you guys the final word. Each of you share what customers should expect from the relationship. Siva, we'll start with you. >> I think continued greatness, continued commitment to making customers successful with the innovation that keeps them worry much more about the above the layer, the application, the business critical elements and make the infrastructure as simple and as versatile as possible is absolutely our commitment. >> I'd boil it down to the human capital out there, the human element and that is bringing conviction to your decisions. We've both been here multiple decades together in our partnership. FlexPod's coming up on a decade. It's conviction and knowing that you can rely on the lifeblood of your business being secure with us together. >> Well, congratulations. Certainly, the developers are going to be testing the hardware under the hood and we got a DevOps culture developing all on-prim and in the Cloud hybrid. It's going to be an interesting couple years. Interesting times we live in. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist with NetApp and Siva Sivakumar, Senior Director Data Center Solutions. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Live from Barcelona. Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)