>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 Cube coverage. Three days, we're in day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman as well as Dave Vellante's been on interview. Our next guest, Saurav Prasad, Principal Engineer and Technical Marketing at Cisco as part of the Cisco DNA Center Platform. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So you guys are having a DNA take, and we're in the DevNet zone all week. This has been a real revitalization within Cisco DevNet, Cloud Native, Cisco coming together. The DNA center has been a part of this from day one. >> Yes. >> What is the DNA center these days, what's happening? >> Okay, so, let me take you a bit back in time, right. So, back in October 2017 is when we first launched the Cisco DNA center. Since then we have added a lot more application, work flows in the DNA center. And last year in May or June of last year, 2018, is when we launched the DNA Center Platform. And this protocol, FCS, some time during October of 2018. So, we now have the DNA Center Platform, which essentially is an open platform which lets our developers, our partners, our ISVs build applications on top of DNA Center which will let them talk to the network. And the way they do it is using our APIs, our SDKs, and then we have a lot of other modules, which help them interact with the network via the DNA Center. Now the benefit of this is not really with respect to APIs or SDKs, it's more about we give them a very easy way to talk to the network. Instead of talking to 10,000 network devices, they talk to one DNA Center. So, that's the, you know, idea behind the DNA Center Platform. >> Well why not expand a little bit when we've been talking about platforms in general for many years now, and it's one thing to say you're a platform, but the proof is, who's actually building on it. What can they do on it? So, you've got the platform, FCS, first customer ship, it's available, it's launching. What can you tell us about, you know, real customers, what they're doing, give us a little bit of the spectrum as to what we see out there. >> That's right. So before we FCS'ed our platform in October, we actually relied on early field trials for almost three to four months. And in then in that time we were actually working with our 15 top partners. And this was across the world, right. So they were actually using the platform to build some integrations from their side which was beneficial for them, right, so these are partners like Dimension Data, Accenture, WWT, and I'm just naming a few of them. These are all listed on our DNA center portal, on DevNet. But, then, we were working them and we were actually looking for feedback on whether it was useful and we found that it was really, really useful for them to build some good applications, good work flows, good integrations, and that helps them drive their own business with their customers. >> So, what's the mission of the DNA center? What is the purpose? Why do you guys exist? >> So, the DNA center is built to provide you intent based networking. So instead of you having to go to each and every network device and provision things on the network devices, you now go to the DNA center and say "Here is my intent!" An example for an intent would be, "I want to prioritize Cisco job or traffic". It should be high priority. Now that means there is a lot of network devices that I need to provision quality of service. I need to make sure I have the right cue instructors in place. And guess what, we have so many devices, each one of them might have some different CLIs, different architectures, we now give them one single place where you provide the intent and not worry about the device level details. And I am just giving you one example. There could be a lot more where, for example I'm getting the telemetry back from a network. Each and every device is saying I am having some issues but they might all be the same issue here. What DNA center does is takes all of those issue provides you an insight into what really is happening in the network, so that's our idea of DNA Center. >> Saurav, come on, who doesn't want to use this? Everyone who's gone out and provisioned a device knows how much a hassle it is. I mean think about the manual labor involved. Just going out and doing all of this stuff so it's an action center, basically. You take action, one spot, window into the network policy, whatever it takes. It's driven by, and now applications can come in as well. Am I getting that right. >> That's right. So the greatest work says, again this is what we do with platform is, different partners, different customers, might have some different workflows. So within the DNA center we have decided, here is how the workflow should look like. So if I want to do an upgrade of a network device, here are the steps I might follow. But when you use the API's, you can almost define your own workflows. So this allows you the flexibility of building your own workflows. That's one example. Other is, say for example, I need some feedback from a different system, not the network maybe some other IT system. I need to get some information from them and based on that, I need to configure something on the network. You cannot do that automatically. There has to be an application in between which talks to both of these systems, one of them being the Cisco DNA Center. Now this allows you to do that. If I have the API's, if I have the event framework, I can do all of that. That's the benefit of using these. >> What's the alternative if someone doesn't use the DNA Center 'cause this is a no brainer. You've got, I get the device piece, that's just a nice window. Now the platform allows applications to integrate and be programmable with the network. Why wouldn't someone use this, it's a no brainer. >> If you don't use this, what you do is you go to each of your thousand network devices talk to each one of them and take care of all of the device level details and do it. It's doable, people have been doing it for years now but now we are making it slightly more easier to make it faster. >> Well, it comes to, we have been talking for years the need for scale and if you don't have good automation if you don't have tools to be able to help you there, you're not going to be able to reach the scale that you need for your business, explain why this is important. >> For example, what we are seeing is and we have been talking about digital networks for some time now. What really is a digital network, that's a key point to understand here. What we are seeing is there was a time 10 years back when you had to roll out a new service network admins, network architects had six months to provision that. Nowadays they don't have that. >> Six hours >> They probably have six hours, that's right. In order for you to do all of that so fast, you really cannot go into each device and talk about it. You have to abstract some of that and that's what the DNA Center provides and using our API's we are now adding a new level on top of it, which really makes it much more easier for you to scale. Again, not just scale, also integrate with other IDSM systems, other IBM systems, other reporting systems. So this is all happening automatically, instead of you having to manually touch each of these systems. >> Talk about the plug and play process. How does that fit in with DNA Center, compatible, not compatible? >> So plug and play is an application or workflow within DNA Cneter. When I look at plug and play, every network device in Cisco has a plug and play agent running. I'm going to get into a bit of a technical detail here, but they have a plug and play agent running and so when this device comes up, say for day zero onboarding, you open up the box, take out the device power it up, the agent fires up. What it looks for is the plug and play server. The Cisco DNA center is the Plug and Play server. So now I am allowing you to onboard new devices. You could roll out a new site with 25 network devices, 100 network devices in a matter of minutes. >> So all of the configuration gets pushed down from the DNA Center? >> Exactly! So you build your own profile in DNA Center and attach the templates or the configurations. You say here is a serial number and when this device comes in, I push in all the configuration, I provision a new software image on it, so your device or your site is up and running. >> Great for campus, great for remote sites. >> Exactly, so you really don't have to send a network admin on every remote site to do that. >> Will it take policy so if I set policy up in the DNA Center, will it automatically take that down through? >> Yes, yes, yeah. Once a device is onboarded, it gets added to the Cisco DNA Center and once I do that, now I can throw in policies any kind of provisions. >> I don't mean to get in the weeds, sorry Stu, go ahead. >> What's great about a platform, you've talked about some of the partners. My understanding, not just some of the integrated partners like WWT that you mentioned but even some of the technology partners like IBM have services that plug into this environment. We've seen in platforms, where you can, one of the other dimensions is the customers and what are they asking for and how are there feedback there. Is there anything in the DNA Center platform that if one customer is asking for something that more customers are going to get value of that. I think back to the day of Salesforce. When Salesforce gets something, we add a new feature and that's something that can roll out, we can learn from all the customers, you get that fly wheel of development in a platform. >> What we are doing here is we are actually working very closely with Cisco DevNet on that. They have a partner ecosystem exchange. What's happening is a lot of this channeled partners technology partners, ISV's, when they build something they go into the ecosystem exchange and they can post it there. So its not just useful for them, there are other partners, other customers that can use it. They have a data repository of all the core, sample core and again, not everybody shares it to the extent what we would like because there's a lot of intellectual property which they have built and they might want to monetize on it but that is the whole idea behind the ecosystem exchange where I am allowing partners to share what they have built and this could be used by others. >> Saurav, talk about the success, what's the uptake? It must be well received, obviously we see a lot of action her in the DevNet zone. Give us some color commentary on what the momentum has been, who's using it, how? >> From our side, I'm from the business unit which is actually building this product. The way we judge whether this product is getting traction is what is the amount of feature requests I am getting? So, we are getting a ton of feature requests with respect to new API's that we want to expose. With respect to new documentation that we have to build. I mean, what we don't want is we release a product and we got no feedback. >> So what's the fee for requests? Backlog big or what's going on? >> Oh yeah, so for example when we launched we had a limited set of API's available. Now since then, with every release, now we have a release almost every month, where we are adding newer API's and newer functionality, we are actually adding more and more API's and again there is much more to add but that's the process and-- >> Just keep jamming and taking it in, backlog it, get it out there, iterating quickly? >> Exactly, and again, the one point to add here is we are not really just exposing an API, we are exposing an intent API so it's got slightly different. So instead of, say for example, I want to provision a wireless network, that is probably a 10 step process even within the DNA Center. What we want to give you is a single API which will do all of that and all of that heavy lifting will be done by the Cisco DNA Center platform. So, we will internally call the 10 separate API's. So for a developer who is building this, he or she may not be a network expert, they might not be an expert into how the network works so all they have to do is call one single API and all of the details or all the heavy lifting will be done by the platform, so they don't really have to worry about some of those details. >> So this is where the automation will get done on behalf of the customer. They'll come in, deploy DNA Center understand what's going on and that's where they do all of their work. Figure out what to do, get it done there. What's been the biggest use case so far? >> So, a lot of use cases. Like, we have a partner who is actually building a mobile app so we have a DNA Center which is sitting on prem in their own data center, they can go and look at the browser, open up the Cisco DNA Center console and look at the various workflows or see what's happening in the network. They might see there is a router which has crashed. Or an application which is having some application performance issue but what we want to see, is also, send us even send remotely and now their network admins could be walking in a grocery store, for example and the mobile, that alert shows up. Guess what, that is application is having an issue lets do the debugging so we will provide you all of that details within our API's, which can then show up in the application externally. >> So DNA Center platform has a takeover going on in the DevNet zone. We see classrooms, we've seen labs, give us a little bit of the flavor of the solutions for the next hour as well as at the show in general. >> In general here at the Cisco DevNet zone, we have a Cisco DNA Center takeover going on right now. We have workshops, we have sandbox labs, we have learning labs. You can go to any one of them and try it out. That is not only for this hour, that is there for throughout the show, but for this hour, we have a tech talk going on from one of our distinguished sales engineers Adam Rattford, he is talking all about DNA Center Platform in deep dive, showing live examples. We have some demo systems up and running here where you can actually see how we are able to generate events, how we are able to send events to external systems, so all of that is going on. Plus, we have all of our experts. A lot of our experts from the engineering team are here on the show right now on the show floor so if there are any questions around DNA Center Platform they will be more than willing to help. >> The brain trust is here. >> My understanding, I mean, when I have talked to people the DevNet group has labs running all the time. And that's what's great, I have talked to customers that say, I need to be able to play with this and here's something that's online, it's in the cloud I just do with it whenever so. >> Just to add to that, of course for our customers, our partners, our developers who want to try this out, they are more than welcome to come and join us in the Cisco DevNet zone here. Even if you are not at Cisco live, these sandbox lives are live online and we have I think around five or six of them and we are adding more to it. You can go anytime, try our API's on that sandbox. You don't really need to have your own environment. Now of course when you go production with it you will but just for trying out or building some applications, you can do it on the sandbox. >> Saurav, thanks so much for taking the time sharing some technical insight, went a little bit deep on the plug and play but appreciate your time coming on theCUBE, thanks for coming on and congratulations. DNA Center, the Cisco DNA Center Platform, the official name, really an oasis, a place to go in and configure the networks no brainer as far as I am concerned, check it out. theCUBE's bringing you the DNA of the show here, which is all the action, coverage, I'm John Furrier, Stu Minimin. Stay with us more here live in Barcelona and we will be back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here, in Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live! Europe 2019, I'm John Furrier my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the IoT group at Cisco, formerly as part of the engineering team, Cube alumni, great to see you again, thanks for coming on! >> Great to be here, always good to see you guys. >> So you're in the center of a lot of news, IOT, edge of the network, redefining networking on stage, we heard that, talk about your role in the organization of Cisco and the products that you now have and what's goin' on here. >> So I run our IoT Business group. Similar to what we do with EN, data center, all of that, it has the engineering team, product management team, we build products, solutions, that includes hardware, software, silicon, take 'em out to market, really in IoT it's about you know, the technology conversation comes second. It's like, what can you deliver in terms of use case, and business outcomes that comes first. And it's more about what technology can enable that, so the conversations we have with customers are around, how can you really solve my kind of real problems. Everything from, I want to grow my top line, I want to get closer to my customers, because the closer I get to my customers, I know them better, so obviously, I can turn around and grow my top line. And I want to optimize everything from internal process to external process, because just improves my bottom line at the end of the day. >> So a lot of news happening here around your team, but first, talk about redefining networking in context to your part because, edge of the network has always been, what is, you know, edge of the network, now it's extending further, IoT is one of those things that people are looking at from a digitization standpoint, turning on more intelligence, with a factory floor or other areas, how is IoT changing and what is it today? >> So you gave an example of you know, digitizing something like a factory floor. Right, so let's talk about that. So what do customers on the factory floor want to do? They've already automated a number of this factory floors, but what they want to do is get more efficient. They want better EL, they want better quality. They want to bring security all the way down to the plant floor, 'cause the more and more you connect things, the more you've just expanded your threat surface out pretty significantly. So they want to bring security down to the plant floor because these are environments that are not brand new they had brown field equipment they had green field equipment. They want to be able to have control over what device gets on the network with things like device profiling. They want to be able to do things like, create zones so that they can do that with things like network segmentation so when and if an attack does happen, they can contain the attack as much as possible alright? Now, what you need in terms of a factory floor, automation, security, to be able to scale, to have that flexibility, that's no different than what you have in the enterprise already. I mean we've been working with our IT and enterprise customers for years, and you know, they, it's about automation and security, it's about simplicity. Why not extend that out, the talent that IT has, the capability that it has, it really is a connective tissue that you're extending your network from that carpeted space, or your clean space into outside of the office, or into the non-carpeted space so it's perfect in terms of saying, it's about extending the network into the non-traditional space that probably IT doesn't go into today. >> Well right and it's a new constituency, right? So, how are you sort of forging new relationships, new partnerships, what is, describe what that's like, with the operations technology folks. >> I mean at Cisco, we have great partnerships with the IT organization, right? I mean we've got more than 840,000 customers and our sales teams, our product teams do a good job in terms of listening to customers. We're talking more and more to the line of business, we're talking more and more to the operational teams. Because at the end of the day, I want to be candid. You know, going to a manufacturing floor, I've never run a plant floor, right? There are not very many people in the team who can say, I've been a plant manager before. They know their processes, they're concerned about 24/7 operation, hey I want to be in compliance with the fire marshal. Physical safety of my workers. We come in with that IP knowledge, that security knowledge that they need. It's a partnership, I mean people talk about IT and OT convergence, usually, convergence means that, mm, somebody's going to lose their job, this is more and IT and OT partnership. And most of these digitization efforts, usually come in for the CIO level or a chief digitization officer, we've got good relationships there already. The second part is, Cisco's been in this for quite some time our teams already have relationships at the plant level at the grid level, operator level, you know, in the oil and gas area, but we need to build more and more of that. Because building more and more of that is really understanding what business problems are they looking to solve? Then we can bring the technology to it. >> Liz, what's that in the enablement, you mentioned partnership, 'cause that's a good point, 'cause people think, oh, someone wins, someone loses, the partnership is you're enabling, you're bringing new capability into the physical world, you know, from wind farms to whatever. What does the enablement look like, what are some of the things that happen when you guys come into these environments that are being redefined and re-imagined or for the first time? >> Yeah I would say, you know, I'd use what our customer said this morning. And what he said was, IT has the skills that I need alright? They have the IP skills, they have the security skills. These are all the things that I need. I want my guys to focus on kind of business processes. Around things that they know best. And so, we're working with IT as part of what we're putting this extended enterprise, extending Intent-Based Networking to the IoT edge means, IT already knows our tools, our capabilities, we're now saying, we can extend that, let's go out, figure out what those use cases are together, this is why we're working with, not just the IT, we're working with our channel partners as well, who can enable these implementations on IoT implementations work well. Part of this is also a constant, you know, learning from each other. We learned from the operational teams is that, hey you can start a proof of concept really well, but you can't really take it to deployment unless you address things around the complexity, the scale and the security, that's where we can come in and help. >> And you can't just come in and throw your switches and routers over the fence and say, okay, here you go. You have to develop specific solutions for this world right? And can you talk about that a little bit? And tell us what you're doing here? >> Absolutely, so, if you look at the networking, industrial networking portfolio that we have, it's built on the same catalyst, ISR, wireless APs or firewall, but they're more customized for this non-carpeted space, right? You've got to take into consideration that these are not sitting in a controlled environment. So, we test them for temperature, for shock, for vibration, but it's also built on the same software, so we're talking about the same software platform, you get the same automation features, you get the same analytics features, it's managed by DNA center, so, even though we're customizing the hardware for this environment, the software platform that you get, is pretty much the same, so IT can come in and manage both those environments, but IT also needs an understanding of what's the operational team looking to solve for? >> Liz, I want to ask you about the psychology of the buyer in this market. Because OT, they're running stuff that's just turnin' on, put in the lightbulb, make it work, what I got to deploy something? So their kind of expectations might be different, can you share what the expectations are, for the kind of experience that they want to have with that? >> I use utility as a great example. And our customer from Ennogie, I think explained this really well. This is thing that we learned from our customers right? I haven't been in a sub station, I've been in a data center multiple times, but I haven't been in a sub station, so when they're talking about automating sub station, we work with customers, we've been doing this over the last 10 years, we've been working with that Ennogie team for the last two years, they taught us really, how they secure and manage in these environments. You're not going to find a CCIE in this environment. So when you want to send somebody out to like 60,000 sub stations, and you want to check on, hey do I still have VPN connectivity? They're not going to be able to troubleshoot it. What we did is based on the customer's ask, put a green light on their LED that shines green, all the technician does is look at it and says, it's okay. If not, they call back in terms of troubleshooting it. It was just a simple example of where, it's different in terms of how they secure and manage and the talent that they have is different than what's in the IT space, so you've got to make sure that your products also cover what the operational teams need, because you're not dealing with the CCIE or the IP expert. >> So it's the classic market fit, product market fit for what they're expecting. >> Correct. >> LEDs, you can't go wrong with a green light, I mean. (laughter) >> You know, everybody goes, that's such an easy thing, it's like well, it was not that perceptive to us. >> What's the biggest thing you've learned as you've moved from Cisco engineering out to the new frontier on the edge here, what are the learnings that you've seen, obviously growing mark early, it's only going to get large and more complicated, more automation, more AI, more things, what's your learnings, what have you seen so far that's a takeaway? >> So I'll say, I'm still in Cisco engineering. The reason we're in IoT is that, a secure and reliable network, that's the foundation of any IoT deployment alright? You can go out and buy the best sensor, buy the best application buy the best middleware, but if you don't have that foundation, that's secure and reliable, those IoT projects are not going to take off, so it's pretty simple, everyone's network is the enabler of their business outcome, and that's why we're in it. So this is really about extending that network out, but at the same time, understanding what are we looking to solve for, right? So in many cases, we work with third party partners, 'cause some of them know these domains much better than we do, but we know the IP, we are the IP and the security experts, and we bring that to the table better than anybody else. >> And over the top, DevNet showing here for the second year that we've covered it, here in DevNet zone, that when you have that secure network that's programmable, really cool things can develop on top of it, that's a great opportunity. >> Yeah, this is, I'm super excited that we now have an IoT DevNet. You know, as part of our entire Cisco DevNet. Half a million dev-opers you know, Susie Wee and team done a fabulous job. There's more and more dev-opers going to be starting to develop at the IoT edge, at the edge of the network, right? So when you look at that as, our platforms today with IRX on top of it, make this a software platform that dev-opers can actually build applications to, it's really about, you know, we're ready, ISVs and dev-opers unleashing those applications at the IoT edge. And with Susie making that, you know, available in terms of the tools, the resources, the sandbox that you can get, it's like, we expect to see more and more dev-opers building those applications at the edge. >> We got to talk about your announcements, right, so. >> Oh yeah, exciting set of announcements. >> What's the hard news? >> So we launched four things today as part of extending IBN, or Intent-Based Networking to the IoT edge, the first one is, we've got three new Cisco-validated designs. So think of a validated design as enabling our customers to actually accelerate their deployments, so our engineering teams try to mimic, as much as possible, a customer's environment. And they do this pre-integration, pre-testing of our products, third party products. And we actually put 'em out by industry. So we have three new ones out there for manufacturing, for utilities, and for remote and mobile assets, that's one. The second one is we're launching two new hardware platforms, a next-generation catalyst industrial ethernet switch, it's for modularity of interfaces, and it's got nine expansion packs. The idea is, make it as flexible as possible for a customer's deployment. Because these boxes might sit in an environment not just for three years like in a campus, they could sit there for five, for seven, for 10 years. So as you know, they, adding on, giving them that flexibility, they can be a base system and just change the expansion modules, we also launched our next-generation industrial router. It actually is the industry's probably first and only full IPV Six-capable industrial router. And it's got, again flexibility of interfaces, we have LTE, we have fiber, we have copper, you want dual LTE you can actually slap an expansion pack right on top of it. When 5G comes in, you just take the LTE module out, you put 5G, so it's 5G ready. >> Expansions on there. >> And it's based on IOSXC, it's managed by DNA Center, and it's edge-enabled, so they run IOX, you can build your applications, and load 'em on. So we can build 'em, third parties can build 'em. >> And the DevNet piece here as well. >> And the DevNet piece is the third one where we now have, you know, an IoT dev-oper center in the DevNet zone, so with all the tools that are available, it enables dev-opers and ISVs to actually build on top of IOX today. In fact, we actually have more than a couple of three examples that are already doing that. And the fourth thing is, we depend on a large ecosystem of channel partners, so we've launched an IoT specialization training program to enable them to actually help our customers' implementation go faster. >> Mhm. >> So those are the four things that we brought together. The key thing for us was, designing these for scale, flexibility, and security. >> And are these capabilities available today is that right? >> Absolutely, in fact, if you go in, we're shipping in two weeks! And you can see them at the innovation showcase, it's actually very cool. >> I was going to mention, you brought up the ecosystem, glad you brought that up, I was going to ask about how that's developing, I could only imagine new sets of names coming out of the industry in terms of building on these IOTs since this demand for IOT, it's an emerging market in terms of newness, with a lot of head room, so what's the ecosystem look like, is there a pattern, is it ISVs, VARs, does it take the shape of the classic ecosystem or is it a new set of characters or, what's the makeup of the ecosystem? >> Yeah, it's I would say it's, in many ways, if you've been in the IoT world for some time, you'll say, you know, it's not like there's a whole new set of characters. Yes, you have more cloud players in there, you probably have more SIs in there, but it's been like, the distributors are in there, the machine-builders, the OT platforms, these are folks who've been doing this for a long time. It's more around, how do you partner, and where do you monetize? We know where you know, the value we bring in, we rely on, we work very closely with those OT partners, machine-builders, SIs, the cloud partners, to go to market and deliver this. You're right, the market's going to evolve, because the whole new conversation is around data. What do I collect, what I compute at the edge? Where do I route it to, should I take it to my on-premise's data centers, should I take it to the cloud? Who gets control over that data, how do I make sure that I have control over the data as the customer, and I have control over who gets to see it. So I think this will be a evolving conversation. This is something we're enabling with one of our Kinetic platforms, which are not launched, it's already launched in terms of enabling customers to have control over the data and manage the data as well. >> And bringing all the portfolio of Cisco security analytics, management to the table, that puts anything in the world that has power and connectivity to be a device to connect into a system, this is the, I mean how obvious can it be? It's going to be huge! >> It's great that you think it's obvious, that's exactly what we're tryin' to tell our customers-- >> How to do it-- >> Well this is about extending this out. >> Yeah, how do we do it's the playbook right? So, each business has its own unique, there's no general purpose IoT is there? >> Correct. >> It's pretty much on a custom custom-- well thanks for coming on Liz, appreciate it. Want to ask you one final question. You know, I was really impressed with Karen had a great session, Karen Walker had a great session yesterday, impact with women, we interviewed you at Grave Hopper in 2015. Cisco's doing amazing work, can you take a minute to talk about some of the things that Cisco's doing around women in computing, women in STEM, just great momentum, great success story and great leadership. >> I would say look at our leadership at Chuck's level, and I think that's a great example in terms of, he brings people on depending on what they can, what they bring to the table, right? They just happen to be a lot of women out there, and the reality is, I work for a company that believes in inclusion, whether it's gender, race, different experiences, different thoughts, different perspectives because, that's where truly, in terms of, you can bring in the culture that drives that innovation. I've been sponsoring our Women in Science and Engineering for I can't remember, the last four or five years. It's a community that continues to grow. And, the reality is, we don't sit in there and talk about, you know, woe is me, and all the things that are happening, what we talk about is, hey what are the cool new technologies that are out there, how do I get my hands on 'em? And yeah, there are, we talk about some things where women are a little reticent and shy to do, so what we learn from other peoples' experiences, many time the guys are very interesting, so what do you sit down there and talk, and I said trust me it's not like, a whining and moaning session, it's more in terms of where we learn from each other. >> Peers talking and sharing ideas-- >> Absolutely. >> Of innovation and building things. >> Yep, and we've got, you know, we look around and we've got a great set of woman leaders throughout the company at every single level in every function. It's great to be there, we continue to sponsor our Grace Hopper, we have some of the biggest presence at Grace Hopper, we do so many other things like connected women within the company. It's just a, I would say, fabulous place to be. >> You guys do a lot of great things for society, great company, great leadership, thank you for doing all of that, it's phenomenal, we love covering it too, so, we'll be at the cloud now today in Silicon Valley, Women in Data Science at Stanford, and among other great things. >> It's definitely a passion of ours. >> Yeah. (talking over each other) >> Awesome, that's great to hear. >> Thanks for coming on, this is theCUBE, live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2018, back with more after this short break, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, be right back. (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. >> 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)

(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)

>> 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)

>> 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 and welcome back. This is theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman analyst at Wikibon, covering networking storage and all infrastructure cloud. Stu Miniman, Stu. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at IBM Storage Systems. Eric, CUBE alumni, he's been on so many times I can't even count. You get the special VIP badge. We're here breaking down all the top stories at Cisco Live in Europe, kicking off 2018. Although it's the European show, not the big show, certainly kicking off the year with a lot of new concepts that aren't necessarily new, but they're innovative. Eric, welcome to theCUBE again. >> Well, thank you. We always love participating in theCUBE. IBM is a strong supporter of theCUBE and all the things you do for us, so thank you very much for having us again. >> A lot of great thought leadership from IBM, really appreciate you guys' support over the years. But now we're in a sea change. IBM had their first quarter of great results, and that will be well-reported on SiliconANGLE, but the sea change is happening. You've been living this generation, you've seen couple cycles in the past. Cisco putting forth a vision of the future, which is pretty right on. They were right on Internet of Things ten years ago, they had it all right, but they're a networking company that's transformed up the stack over the years. Now on the front lines of no perimeter, okay, more security challenges, cloud big whales with no networking and storage. You're in the middle of it. Break it down. Why is Cisco Live so important now than ever before? >> Well, for us it's very important because one, we have a strategic relationship with Cisco, the Storage Division does a product with Cisco called the VersaStack, converged infrastructure, and in fact one of our key constituents for the VersaStack are MSPs and CSPs, which is a key constituent of Cisco, especially with their emphasis on the cloud. Second thing for us is IBM storage has gone heavily cloud. So going heavily cloud with our software, in addition to what we do with our solutions as a foundation for CSPs and MSPs. Just what we've integrated into our software-defined storage for cloud makes Cisco Live an ideal venue for us, and Cisco an ideal partner. >> So I've got to ask you, we've had conversations on theCUBE before, they're all on youtube.com/siliconangle, just search Eric Herzog, you'll find them. But I want to recycle this one point and get your comments and reaction here in Barcelona. You guys have transformed with software at IBM big-time with storage. Okay, you're positioned well for the cloud. What's the most important thing that companies have to do, like IBM and Cisco, to play an innovator role in the cloud game as we have software at the center of the value proposition? >> Well I think the key thing is, when you look at cloud infrastructure, first of all, the cloud's got to run on something. So you need some sort of structural, infrastructure foundation. Servers, networking, and compute. So at IBM and with Cisco, we're positioning ourselves as the ideal rock-solid foundation for the cloud building, if you will. So that's item number one. Item number two, our software in particular can survive, not only on premises, but can bridge and go from on-premise to a public cloud, creating a hybrid infrastructure, and that allows us to also run cloud instantiation. Several of our products are available from IBM Cloud Division, Amazon offers some of the IBM storage software, over three hundred cloud service providers, smaller ones, offer IBM Spectrum Protect as a back-up service. So we've already morphed into storage software, either A, bridging the cloud in a hybrid config, or being used by cloud providers as some of their storage offerings for end-users and businesses. >> Eric, wanted to get to, one of the partnership areas that you've talked about with Cisco is VersaStack. We've talked with you a number of times about converged infrastructure, that partnership, Cisco UCS taking all the virtualization. The buzz in the market, there's a lot of discussion, oh it's hyper-converged, it's cloud. Why is converged infrastructure still relevant today? >> Well, when you look at the analysts that track the numbers, you can see that the overall converged market is growing and hyper-converged is viewed as a subset. When you look at those numbers, this year close to 17 billion US, about 75% of it is still standard converged versus hyper-converged. One of the other differences, it's the right tool for the right job. So customers need to go in eyes open. So when you do a hyper-converged infrastructure, by the way IBM offers a hyper-converged infrastructure currently with Nutanix, so we actually have both, the Nutanix partnership offering hyper-converged and a partnership with Cisco on standard converged. It's really, how do you size the right tool for the right job? And one of the negatives of hyper-converged, very easy to deploy, that's great, but one of the negatives is every time you need more storage, you have to add more server. Every time you need more server, you add more storage. With this traditional converged infrastructure, you can add servers only, or networking only, or storage only. So I think when you're in certain configurations, workloads, and applications, hyper-converged is the right solution, IBM's got a solution. In other situations, particularly as your middle-sized and bigger apps, regular converged is better 'cause you can basically parse and size up or down compute, networking, and the storage independent of each other, whereas in hyper-converged you have to do it at the same time. And that's a negative where you're either over-buying your storage when you don't need it, or you're over-buying your compute when you don't need it. With standard converged, you don't have that issue. You buy what you need when you need it. But I think most big companies, for sure, have certain workloads that are best with hyper-converged, and we've got that, and other workloads that are best with converged, and we have that as well. >> Okay, the other big growth area in storage for the last bunch of years has been flash. IBM's got a strong position in all-flash arrays. What's new there, how are some of the technologies changing? Any impact on the network that we should be really understanding at this show? >> Sure, so couple things. So first of all, we just brought out some very high-density all-flash arrays in Q4. We can put 220 terabytes in two rack U, which is a building block that we use in several different of our all-flash configurations, including our all-flash VersaStack. The other thing we do is we embed software-defined storage on our, software-defined storage actually on our physical all-flash arrays. Most companies don't do that, so they've got an all-flash offering and if they have a software-defined offering it's actually a different piece of software. For us it's the same, so it's easier to deploy, it's easier to train, it's easier to license, it's easier for a reseller to sell if you happen to be using a reseller. And the other thing is it's battle-hardened, because it's not only standalone software, but it's actually on the arrays as well. So from a test infrastructure quality issue, versus other vendors that have certain software that goes on their all-flash array, and then a different set of software for all software-defined. It doesn't make logical sense when you can cover it with one thing. So that's an important difference for us, and a big innovator. I think the last thing you're going to see that does impact networking is the rise of NVMe over fabrics. IBM did a statement of direction last May outlining what we're doing. We did a public demonstration of an InfiniBand fabric at the AI summit in New York in December, and we will be having an announcement around NVMe fabrics on the 20th of February. So stay tuned to hear us then. We'll be launching some more NVMe with fabric infrastructure at that time. >> Eric, I just, people that have been watching, there's been a lot of discussion about NVMe for a number of years, and NVMe over fabric more recently. How big a deal is this for the industry? You've seen many of these waves. Is this transformational or is it, you know, every storage company I talk to is working on this, so how's it going to be differentiated? What should users be looking to be able to, who do they partner with, how do they choose that solution, and when's it going to be ready? >> So first of all, I view it as an evolution, okay. If you take storage in general, arrays, you know we used to do punch cards. I'm old enough I remember using punch cards at the University of California. Then, it all went to tape. And if you look at old Schwarzenegger movies from the 80s, I love Schwarzenegger spy movies, what's there? IBM systems with big IBM tape, and not for back-up, for primary storage. Then in the late-80s, early-90s, IBM and a few other vendors came out with hard drive-based arrays that got hooked up to mainframes and then obviously into minis and to the rise of the LAN. Those have given away to all-flash arrays. From a connectivity perspective, you've had SCSI, you had ultra SCSI, you had ultra fast SCSI, ultra fast wide SCSI. Then you had fiber channel. So now as an infrastructure both in an array, as a connectivity between storage and the CPUs used in an array system, will be NVMe, and then you're going to have NVMe running over fabrics. So I view this as an evolution, right? >> John: What's the driver, performance or flexibility? >> A little bit of both. So from the in-box perspective, inside of an array solution, the major chip manufacturers are putting NVMe to increase the speed from storage going into the CPUs. So that will benefit the performance to the end-user for applications, workloads, and use cases. Then what they've done is Intel has pushed, with all the industry, IBM's a member of the NVMe consortium as well, has pushed using the NVMe protocol over fabrics, which also gives some added performance over fabric networks as well. So you've got it, but again I view this again as evolution, because punch cards, tape was faster, hard drive arrays were faster than tape, then flash arrays are faster, now you're going to have NVMe in the flash array, and also NVMe over fabric with connecting all-flash array. >> So I have to ask you the real question that's on everyone's mind that's out there, because storage is one of those areas that you never see it stopping. There's always venture back start-ups, you see new hot start-ups coming out of the woodwork, and there's been some failures lately and some blame NVMe's innovation to kind of killing some start-ups, I won't name names. But the real issue is the lines that were once blurred are now forming, and there's the wrong side of history and the right side of history. So I've got to ask you, what's going to be the right side of history in the storage architecture that people need to get onto to win in the future? >> So, there's a couple key points. One, all storage infrastructure and storage software needs to interface with cloud infrastructure. Got to be hybrid, if you have a software play like we do, where the software, such as our Spectrum Scale or our Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus, can exist as a cloud service through a service rider, that's where you want to be. You don't want to have just a standard array and that's all you sell. So you want to have an array business, you want to make sure that's highly performant, you want to make sure that's the position, and the infrastructure underneath clouds, which means not only very fast, but also incredibly resilient. And that includes both cloud configs and AI. If you're going to do real-time AI, if you're going to do dark trading on Wall Street using AI instead of human beings, A, if the storage isn't really fast you're going to miss a 10 million dollar, hundred million dollar transaction. Second thing, if it's not resilient and always available, you're really in trouble. And god forbid when they bring AI to healthcare, and I mean AI in the operating room, boy if that storage fails when I'm on the table, wow. That's not going to be good. So those are the things you got to integrate with in the future. AI and cloud, whether it's software-defined in the array space, or if you're like IBM in both markets. >> John: Performance and resilient. >> Performance and resiliency is critical. >> All right, so Eric I have a non-storage question for you. >> Eric: Absolutely. >> So you've got the CMO hat for a division of IBM. You've been CMO of a start-up, you've been in this industry for a while. What's the changing role of the CMO in today's digital world? >> So I think the key thing is digital is a critical method of the overall marketing mix. And everything needs to reinforce everything. So let's take an example. One of the large storage websites and magazines recently announced that IBM is a finalist for four product-of-the-year awards. Two for all-flash arrays and two for software-defined storage. So guess what we've done? We've amplified it over LinkedIn, over IBM Facebook, through our Twitter handle, we leverage that. We use it at trade shows. So digital is A, the first foray, right? People look on your website and look at what you're doing socially before they even decide, should I really call them up, or should I really go to their booth a trade show? >> So discovery and learning is happening online. >> Discovery and learning, but even progression. We just, I just happened to tweet and LinkedIn this morning, Clarinet, a large European cloud MSP and CSP, just selected IBM all-flash arrays, IBM Spectrum Protect, and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for their cloud infrastructure. And obviously their target, they sell to end-users and companies, right? But the key thing is we tweeted it, we linked it in, we're going to use it here at the show, we're going to use it in PR efforts. So digital is a critical element of the marketing mix, it's not a fad. It also can be a lead dog. So if you're going to a trade show, you should tweet about it and link it in, just the way you guys do. We all knew you were coming to this show, we know you're going to IBM Think, we know you're going to VM World and Oracle, all these great shows. How do we find out? We follow you on social media and on the digital market space, so it's critical. >> And video, video a big role in - >> Video is critical. We use your videos all the time, obviously. I always tweet them and link them in once I'm posted. >> Clip and stick is the new buzzword. Clip 'em and stick 'em. Our new clipper tool, you've seen that. >> (laughs) Yes, I have. So it's really critical, though, that, you can, and remember, I'm like one of the oldest guys in the storage business, I'm 60 years old, I've been doing this 32 years, seven start-ups, EMC, IBM twice, Mac store Seagate, so I've done big and small. This is a sea change transformation in marketing. The key thing is you have to make it not stand on its own, integrate everything. PR, analyst relations, digital in everything you do, digital with shows and how you integrate the whole buyer's journey, and put it together. And people are using digital more and more, in fact I saw a survey from a biz school, 75% of people are looking at you digitally before they ever even call you up or call one of your resellers if you use the channel, to talk about your products. That's a sea change. >> You guys do a great job with content marketing, hats off to you guys. All right, final question for you, take a minute to just quickly explain the relationship that IBM has with Cisco and the importance of it, specifically what you guys are doing with them, how you guys go on to market to customers, and what's the impact to the customer. >> So, first of all, we have a very broad relationship with Cisco, Obviously I'm the CMO of the Storage Division, so I focus on storage, but several other divisions of IBM have powerful relationships. The IoT group, the Collaboration group. Cisco's one of our valued partners. We don't have networking products, so our Global Technology Services Division is one of the largest resellers of Cisco in the world, whether it be networking, servers, converge, what-have-you, so it's a strong, powerful relationship. From an end-user perspective, the importance is they know that the two companies are working together hand-in-glove. Sometimes you have two companies where you buy solutions from the A and B, and A and B don't even talk to each other, and yes they both go to the PlugFest or the Compatibility Lab, but they don't really work together, and their technology doesn't work together. IBM and Cisco have gone well beyond that to make sure that we work closely together in all of the divisions, including the storage division, with our Cisco-validated designs. And then lastly, whether it's delivered through the direct sales model or through the valued business partners that IBM and Cisco share, it's critical the end-user know, and the partners know, they're getting something that works together and doesn't just have the works option. It's tightly-honed and finely-integrated, whether it be storage or the IoT Division, the Collaboration Division, Cisco is a heavy proponent of IBM Security Division. >> Product teams work together? >> Yeah, all the product teams work together, trade APIs back and forth, not just doing the, and let's go do a test, compatibility test. Which everybody does that, but we go well beyond that with IBM and Cisco together. >> And it's a key relationship for you guys? >> Key relationship for the Storage Division, as well as for many of the other divisions of IBM, it's a critical relationship with Cisco. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer for the Storage Systems group at IBM. It's theCUBE live coverage in Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more from Barcelona Cisco Live Europe after this short break. (upbeat techno music)