(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back already, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio today for a CUBE Conversation that's a little bit of a deeper dive into the Cisco CloudCenter, we've had an ongoing conversation and there's a new component today, we're going to do a deep dive, so we're excited to welcome back to the studio CUBE alumni Ali G, technical leader, software engineering group from Cisco, Ali, great to see you again. >> Thank you so much, happy to be here. >> Absolutely, and joining us from New Jersey via the phone is Michael Chenetz, he's a technical marketing engineer from Cisco, Michael, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you guys. >> And I hope you'll go get a cheese steak when we're finished and figure out how you can send it to me, I don't know if that's possible. But anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it, so Cisco CloudCenter, we've been talking about it for a while, but today we wanted to dig into a very specific feature, and it goes technically by AO, but that stands for the Action Orchestrator. Ali, what's Action Orchestrator all about? >> Well, action orchestration is a component inside our CloudCenter Suite that brings together cross-domain orchestration. And it's extremely useful because not only is it valuable for DevOps engineers to orchestrate and maintain and automate their infrastructure, but it's also useful for application developers to define workflow and orchestration in their products as well. So, this tool is heavily used throughout the stack, inside the cloud, at the application level, all the way down to the intro level as well, and it's made it extremely easy for DevOps engineers to get their hands on defining workflows, and conditions and logics where they can create, maintain, all the appropriate infrastructure that they need. Works very well hand to hand with the current technology out there like Terraform or Ansible, and it's part of our CloudCenter Suite, so. >> And is it more on the config side or is it more on kind of the operational workflow side? >> Correct, so it could be used for both, right, it's so flexible in a matter of this abstraction of having the orchestration engine outside, enables both developers and DevOps engineers to illustrate and create their workflows. Rather, it's again based on infrastructure or even networking layers, are all the way up the stack to the application where if your product requires an orchestration engine in the back end, to process work, this component definitely plays a big role, right, so. >> Okay. Michael, throw it over to you. >> Yeah, so I think everything that Ali is saying is absolutely correct, the nice part about it is it's a product that can really do whatever you imagine, so I mean we've seen people use it for business process, for automation of network, server, cloud, whatever you can think of, it's extensible but we're going to talk about that in a little bit, but really the nice part about it is you create the workflows and you design the way that you want to go. And what I have here, if you can show the next video, is just a little clip of what it would look like to go through a workflow. So let's cue that up and we'll take a walk through it. >> Jeff: Let's go to the video number one, guys. >> Michael: All right, so... Yeah, so if you look here, what we're seeing is, we're seeing a preview of what Amazon looked like beforehand, looking at VPCs and subnets, and now what we're doing is going through a workflow that is going to show afterwards that those actual VPCs and subnets were created by using a flow. So what we're going to do is just pick one flow here, which is called create infra, and this is just an example, and what you see on the left-hand side is something called actions, so these are all the atomic actions that are available. But these are just out of the box, we're adding stuff all the time, and these actions could be dragged over to the right and create workflows. And the nice thing about it is if it's not there, you can create them in minutes and we're going to show you that in a little bit, too. So, right now what I'm going to show you is the fact that if you click on each one of these actions, there's actually some kind of information that you'll see on the right-hand side, and this information is how you configure that particular action, so this particular one's going to create a VPC, and you can see the VPC name, you can see the VPC subnet, and whatever other parameters are needed for that particular action. So now I'll have to do, you pretty much select the target, and this one already had a target selected, which is Amazon, or AWS, and this second action here, if you look down, actually has a parameter too, or a couple parameters, and one of those parameters, you can see the first one is just the name, the second one, though, is actually used in a variable from the previous step. So really really easy to map stuff from different workflow elements, and it allows you to quickly kind of glue things together to make things work, so this is just an example, again, very simple example, that this is going to create infrastructure on Amazon, and you can think about using this as part of the process, like when you're trying to bring up a cloud environment, maybe you run this first. Maybe you run this to say, "Hey, I need some infrastructure "for that cloud environment," and maybe you even want to execute bringing up certain VMs or containers, you could do that afterwards. But this was just a really really quick showcase of a simple thing you can do with very few steps, that you could then run and it will actually, we're going to run, hit validate here, just validates the workflow, but once we click run here, it's actually going to create all of that stuff within Amazon, so in this step you're going to see the run, you can see that both steps work, because they're green. If they didn't work, they'd be red, and we're going to show that in one second. But, when you click on a step it actually shows you the input and output of each one of those steps, so it's really really cool in that all the information that you could possible think of that you'll need to troubleshoot, to look at these things, is available in the workflow by just clicking on each one of these steps and seeing what that input and output, so if you could imagine, if you had an error there, you could quickly figure out what that is, it would tell you the error, it would tell you what's going on, or, if you needed information from a step before, you could run it, get the information from the step before, and then figure out what values you need for the next step. So really really cool in that you could look at this workflow, you get all the information you need, and it allows you to create these workflows and kind of glue 'em together, really really quick. And now what I'm going to show you, I believe, is in the next part here, I'm just going to illustrate that if you go over to the runs that we have here, it'll actually keep a list of all of the different runs we did, and you can see one is in red. Well, that one in red means that a step didn't work. Well let's click on that step and figure out "Hey, why didn't this step work?" Well this step didn't work because of an error that we got, and if we scroll down to the bottom over here, what we're going to see is the actual error that had occurred within this step. So now we know exactly what the problem was, and we can fix it within the next step, so in this particular one, we illustrated right there that there was some problem with, I think a VPC, or the way that I phrased that VPC, or that subnet, I'm sorry, and it caused the problem. But I fixed it within the next step, and now you can see that in these particular two screens that the VPC and the subnet was created automatically within that workflow. >> Pretty cool, so what would they have done to accomplish that in the past? >> So to accomplish that in the past, and this is the real thing that we see, we see that people have all these tools all over the place, those tools might be things that are orchestration engines, other products that might be things that you run from the command line. Which work great together, but what you find is that, there's no central orchestration, and what we want to provide is that central orchestration that can run those other tools, and also schedule them together. So if you use other tools besides AO, that's fine. We're happy to bring them in, and you could use the variables, you could use everything that you still would use, but now you have all the integration, you have all the variables, you have all the workflow, and not only just from AO, but from Workload Manager too, so if you bring up a VM and bring up a container, you get that information. So there's just a lot of tooling inside that allows you to really take advantage of everything you might already even have. >> Correct, I mean that was a good demo, and one of the things I'd like to point out here is that, compared to some of the competitors that are out there with this orchestration engine, I don't want to name anyone particular, but if you look at it, the schema that Michael just showed us in that demo is JSON-based, versus others out there are some still in XML. The other very beneficial to this is that since this is a component of our CloudCenter Suite, it also gets installed on-prem, and what that means is footprint is extremely important when it comes to on-prem especially. And with the technology and the cloud-native solutions, that the team has done inside Cisco, our footprint is very small, due to the technology choices that we use in writing our services in Go, and et cetera, versus outside competitors are doing it in Java, which have a much more larger footprint on the infrastructure, that clients and customers get to install, so there are a lot of features with this orchestration engine that comes when we're trying to compare them with the market and the competitors of that are out there. Conditional logicking, what Michael just showed us inside the workflows, right, it makes it super simple for someone who has not had any experience coding, to put together the workflows and introduce conditions, either for loops or if else statements or conditional blocks, whereas in the competitors, you have to know a certain amount of programming skills in order for you to do those conditioning, so, I feel that that's a great advantage that we have here, so. >> And so does a lot of things come packaged out of the box? Standard processing, standard workflows, standard processes? >> Yep. >> And then what do they code it in, then, if it is a custom workflow that you don't have, how do they go in and manipulate the tool? >> Good question, because like I mentioned, competitors, you would have to know a certain language in order for you to code those logical flows that you want inside your orchestration, right? Inside AO, it's all driven by the DSO, which is all JSON-based, right, and the DSO is so powerful that you can introduce if and else conditions, you don't have to know a language per se, it's just you define your logic, right, and the tool actually allows you to provide those flows, those if conditions, the loops that are required, and also defaulting onto fallbacks or et cetera. >> Think Michael, you were going to show us a little bit more on that, and kind of set up some of these actions. >> Yeah, I think that's absolutely key, is that what we're talking about is extensibility here, so the extensibility is one thing that we kind of tout, because you don't need to be a programmer, but we live in an API world, so we need a way to consume these APIs. How do we do that in companies and businesses that think developer is expensive, and it's very hard to get into. So we're trying to take that out of that and say "Hey, we have this engine." So let's take a look at some of that extensibility on the next video that I have here. >> Jeff: Kay, pulling that up. >> Michael: So what you're seeing here is Postman. So this is a regular tool that a lot of people use, and what I'm showing is just a call, which is in Postman. And this particular call just gets a Smartsheet, so this gets a Smartsheet from Smartsheets, and it just lists what Smartsheets are available. And in AO, I want to be able to create this, and if we look at the timer, I'm doing this in less than five minutes. So I have no calls for Smartsheets, but I want to create a call, so what I did is I created a target for Smartsheets, that's an http target. And what that means is that I can connect to Smartsheets, and if you look at the bottom I list the API address, and I list the default path, so you don't have to enter that path a million times, so we know that API/2.0 is the path that we're always going to use. On top of that, there's always some other kind of element to that path that we're going to need in each particular action that we want to call. So what I'm going to do here is showcase what I did. So, in this first step, what I've done is I actually did a generic http request, so no programming needed, all I had to do is use a URL. People have used the World Wide Web, they know how to use URLs. In this one, the call is /sheets. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out. So, really I did /sheets is what I'm calling, and I'm using the target, and then the next step what I'm doing is I'm setting up a variable that's going to be my output variable, so what am I going to call this, maybe I'll call it Sheets, and really all I'm doing is just setting this up and saying that we are going to call this Sheets, going out of it, and that's about it. So what I've done within a couple minutes is created a new action that's going to be shown on the left-hand side. So now you can think of a reusable element, and what I'm showcasing here is I'm actually going to turn it off and turn it back on just to showcase, but there's something called atomic actions. So I'm just validating that this is running, I'm going to take a look at the atomic action, I'm going to give it a category, so I'm going to put this under the Smartsheet category, so if you can imagine, I had a lot of these Smartsheet actions, I could just put 'em all into one category where I'll find 'em on the left-hand side. But, I'm just going to validate that the atomic action is good, and now what I'm going to show you is that when I call up a new workflow, I could just drag that right from the left-hand side, and it'll be under Smartsheets, it'll be under get those lists, list Smartsheets, and what it's going to ask for now is a token, because you need a token in order to authenticate with Smartsheet, that's a Smartsheet requirement, so what I'm going to do is just go over to Postman, and grab that token real quick, and then come back over to this page and enter that token in. So, the first thing I'm going to do is create an input variable, and that input variable is going to ask for a token, so what that does is it, when I run this, in this particular workflow, I can ask for an input variable, and that means every time it runs it's going to pop up with that variable. Right now what you're seeing is I'm associating that variable that I created with that token parameter, and this is a secure string, so you can never see what that string is. It's hidden, it's made so that it's not ever seen. And so now if I run the run, you'll see it asks for a token. Now is actually when I'm going to go over to Postman, I'm going to grab that token, so you'll see I'm going into Postman, and Postman, again, is just what we use to test these calls, a lot of people use it, it's very industry-standard, and I'm just grabbing the token from here. It's blurred out so that the public can't see it, but I grabbed it, and now I'll go back out into here, and I hit run, and you'll see that I created that action, I brought the action into a workflow, I ran it, it's running, and now it's giving me that exact same output that I would've got in Postman, but now it's a reusable element. So this just illustrates the extensibility that's available within our product. Again, only took a couple of minutes, and I have an action that I might have needed that wasn't available in this tool, but it was created, and it works out of the box now. >> Very slick, and so that was with Smartsheets, how many connectors do you guys already have preconstructed? >> There are so many, I mean I don't want to list a lot of different vendors, but you can imagine every DevOps tool is in there, there are connections to Amazon, to Google, to Kubernetes, to, internally through ACI, through Meraki, through a lot of the Cisco ecosystem. So really, there's just a lot available, and it's growing, it's growing tremendously and we're building communities and we just want people to try it, use it, I think they'll really like it once they see what it can do. >> Yeah, and I'm just curious, Ali, is this something then that people are going to be working on all the time, or are these pretty much, you set your configs and go back to work, you set these relationships and go back to work, or is this, this is not your working screen. >> This is, I mean how cool was that, right, creating those atomic actions and being able to templatize those and building those building blocks like Lego, right, that in the future you can just build more and more out of, and just add to the complexity without it being complex at all, right? But going back to your question is, a lot of these toolings that are build with AO, one of the other advantages that we see that unfortunately some of the competitors don't have outside, is that you have the ability of four different type of events that inside AO is supported. So you, as DevOps engineers, they tie them up to scheduling, they tie them up to events coming in from a message queue, so these workflows that are created get triggered by these events, which makes it possible for them to execute at a certain time, or for a certain event that gets triggered, right, so again, reusable atomic workflows and actions that Michael just demonstrated, along with having both engineers and, application developers and DevOps, and I kind of stress it out, because of how flexible this is. For them to define it one time, and then have it reusable whenever they want. >> I'm just curious, what's the biggest surprise when you show this to people in the field? What do they get most excited about? >> They love it, they immediately say, "How can we start using it the next day?" And we also have, CloudCenter Suite has a SaaS offering where it's made it very easy for us to get them a trial access so that they can come in, get their foot wet and try it out. And once they start doing these calls and building these workflows and as Michael demonstrated, these actions where they perform API calls at the very least, they just get hooked to it, right, and then start using it from thereon. >> Michael, what about you, what's your favorite response from clients when you demo this, what's the one, two things that really grabs 'em, gets their attention, gets a big smile on their face? >> Yeah, well first and foremost you see people's minds spinning on what use cases have been bothering them that they haven't been able to fix, because maybe they're not programmers, or maybe they are, but it's just, they thought it would be too complex and too much work. So, I think it's just, it's so open-ended but you just see the interest in people's faces, it's like the first time, I have a three year old, the first time I gave him Legos and he's like, "I can build stuff, I can do stuff myself?" I mean it's just like that, I mean that's the amazing part of it is that it's so extensible, and to build onto what Ali was saying, there's so many ways to trigger it, too. So this can work standalone and work by itself, or it can be triggered by an API call, it can be scheduled, it could be called from Workload Manager, it can be triggered from a RabbitMQ, it could be triggered from Kafka. There's so many different things that you can do to trigger these workflows, that it just makes it so that it can integrate with other products, and you can integrate other products, so it really becomes that glue that kind of ties everything together, I mean we really really think about it as building blocks or Legos, or something like that. It just is really extensible, really easy to use, and we think it's a real game-changer. >> Great, all right, Ali, so last word, where do people go to get more information if they can't see that cool demo on that itty-bitty screen on their phone? >> So, we definitely recommend them to go to CloudCenter Suite, if you easily Google it on Cisco website or on Google itself, you'll see it apart from first or second links, but definitely check out CloudCenter Suite, Action Orchestrator is where you would like to visit and learn more about this tool and this component. >> All right, well thanks for stopping by, and thanks for joining us from New Jersey, Michael. >> Oh, thank you, and I'll send you a cheese steak. >> All right. I don't know if I want that in the mail, but we'll see if we can maybe fast shipment, all right, thanks again for stopping by, he's Ali G, he's Michael, I'm Jeff and you're watching theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. 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>> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, we're here with Reinhardt Quelle who's the principle engineer, Cloud Platforms and solutions Group at Cisco. Reinhardt, thanks for coming in, good to see you. >> Reinhardt: Thanks for having me. >> So, technical conversation around Cloud is something that we love having. We've seen the evolution over the past decade, Cloud 1.0, compute, storage, greenfield, cloud opportunities, great SaaS applications being built, you've built apps for over a decade, SaaS apps. >> That's right, I've been delivering applications, both to data centers and then of course, later into Cloud for a number of years. >> So you got some scar tissue. You have some successes, you've had some struggles, probably with on-prem, but the world's changed a lot and again, we've been covering this a couple years now. We saw public Cloud, all the benefits, no questions, great, you can lift and ship stuff up there, no problem, but the complexity's still there and now the trend is everything's shifting back to on-prem with Cloud. So now the hybrid model has been validated, Amazon Outpost, Anthos in Google, Azure Stack from Microsoft, clearly this mold, all the cloud vendors are telegraphing, they are doing it, this is a reality, this has been validated. >> Yeah, I think that's no surprise to those of us who've been deploying for a number of years. We've always had data centers where we're running our applications in data centers, and yes we started taking that into the Cloud, but there was always components of our infrastructure that continued to run on-prem, whether for historical reasons, for data gravity reasons, policy reasons, any number of reasons, but what we did learn was how to operate our applications differently and so for the last number of years, we've been moving a lot of the advantages of that Cloud back to on-prem. >> So I want to get your thoughts as principle engineer and look at the overall Cisco holistic portfolio of products because Cisco is a standard in the enterprise, every big company has Cisco gear at some level form of another. You've been dealing with networking for years, but now that networking becomes so much more acute issue because you still got to move packets around, another abstraction layer does networking, security, networking, all tie in to the growth area that is now this next generation of Cloud, Cloud 2.0, intelligent edge, data center on-prem, what's the Cisco story? Why Cisco, why now? What's the story? >> Well the amusing thing, of course, is the Cloud doesn't exist without networking. The very first thing when you set up an Amazon-- a compute in Amazon, you set up a virtual private network and you start deploying into that network, so it's always been true that networking is at the core of Cloud. And so the complexity that we're seeing over time is that the workloads are everywhere. The workloads aren't just in my data center and I'm not paying attention to data center networking or just cloud networking, it's connecting them together, securing them, making sure that they're fast and well managed. And so it's always been true that networking's at the core of this and as the edges get blurry, as we move workloads from one place to the other, all of the things that Cisco does are on managed networks, programmable networks, secure networks, all become even more important. >> And everything's amplified, too, in terms of its purpose. You're seeing automation is a big trend that's impacting the infrastructure and app developers. You've deployed SaaS apps within Cisco for over a decade, you've seen your share of successes and its issues but now as the data becomes critical, you got security perimeter issues are gone, and you got Surface here with industrial in IOT it's only getting more complex. So the complexity never went, but it's still complex these are the same problems. What's changed, what's the-- what's going on? >> Well so one of the things that's changed is that we've-- and this is something we can credit the Cloud providers for doing it is we've learned to treat our infrastructure in a different way. I mean the way we deploy and manage everything including networks compute, even applications. Operating the cloud demanded that we automate those things. Demanded the way, when you're managing now, fleets of thousands or tens of thousands of machines at scale in the cloud and when your call provider won't promise you that any machine won't go away at any moment you get good at replacing machines. And now we take those same tools, concepts, ways of operating that we did on the cloud and we apply them on print. Yeah, so a big part of what Cisco has been doing across our entire portfolio is ensuring that every piece of it from networking storage security is programmable and drivable through automation. >> You and I were talking before we came on camera and I wrote this down a phrase you like to use is, referring to Cisco, why Cisco is, We bring cloud innovation on-prem, what do you mean by that? >> Well really it's taking these new way of doing things, these new opportunities. Yeah, when we talk about-- we've had some funny conversations with our security guys, for example, we're historically in security we would have some policy, we would deploy applications against that policy once every six months or twelve months we would audit against that. Well one example of bringing the cloud innovation on-prem is the way you deploy that software, or deploy a new policy is via software. So auditing that is checking your code before you commit it, this says what it's going to do. Running reporting on the things that you've deployed so that you can see. So its taking these advantages of automation, and observability, and things like code review that are just normal practice in software development and apply them to infrastructure. And so, again, what Cisco is doing is making sure that all of our infrastructure can be-- can be programmed in that way, providing tools that allow us to program the things like Network Services Orchestrator or CloudCenter Suite that allow us to deploy applications or networks or whatever else as software entities . >> How about the reality of the person who's been innovating in the cloud and their reaction when they come back on prem they go, okay I've been doing this in the cloud and I turn around and I see all this. Is this the cloud innovation dynamic that you're referring to? Is it the realization that I had some innovation in the cloud, agility, automation and then trying to figure it out, or applying it, or both what's the reality when someone goes wow, I'm on-prem now, what's that innovation layer? >> Well there's several realities, depending on who you are and where you're coming from. One of my first roles at Cisco was, I was working on the Webex operation team and that-- the way we ran that operations was typical of the time it was built. And we did an acquisition that to accompany-- of a company that had been operating in Amazon and when they saw the way we that had to deploy and manage their application and infrastructure they were horrified. It's like, what do you mean I can't deploy a server in five minutes, what do you mean I can't manage the workflow in this way? So for them it was a shock and horror that they didn't have this infrastructure and that's when we deployed our first private cloud and Webex was to support that style of deployment. The flip side of that is the people who are operating those existing data centers with those existing workflows, their world changed, I mean they had to learn new ways of doing things, they had to learn new ways of managing their infrastructure, coding skills were a requirement not something that a few guys did, scripting in the background. So it was like, there's a lot of change to the people and to the way we did things but really it's a matter of bringing those, you know, bringing the cloud, bringing software development to operations, bringing software programmable to, hard programmability, to hardware. >> Yeah, I mean that's a great point. We cover that a lot on theCube, but I think one of the things you pointed out is the realization that, okay, great, new way of doing things, innovation. But as you kind of pointed out, there's a double edged sword there. The command and control of the network, which has been an old style tactic which doesn't go away, you still need to have control of certain things and on-premise, you certainly can control it on-premise, on cloud you think you control it through software, but this is the deep dive on tech conversation I want to have with you because we're talking about app deployment, Kubernetes management and the reality, I have my own gear on-site, as well as I'm maybe serverless into the cloud, this is the new reality. That you have to manage the controls. Take us through the-- those layers. App deployment, Kubernetes, and the reality of managing infrastructure on a future basis. >> Sure so, it's-- when we think about the application deployment it's very easy to kind of think about it in terms of the layers, and the programmable layers that you provide and I'll just touch--we won't go into detail on the products, but ultimately, today for an application-- someone deploying an application increasing that means push an application into Kubernetes, in other words I'm going to package my application's container, I'm going to hand it to Kubernetes through Kubernetes API and I'm going to expect Kubernetes to do the deployment and management of that. Okay, so that just makes the problem for the guy one layer below you, where's Kubernetes come from? It's like who deploys and manages Kubernetes? And so there's a number of different solutions and the public cloud you can use, you know, AKS, or Google's Kubernetes service, or Amazon's, any of these, but on-prem, where's it come from, who's going to manage it for you, who's going to create that? So Cisco's container platform is a product to deploy and manage Kubernetes to offload that from the developer, I mean, from the operations guy or the platform manager. Of course, that deployer of Kubernetes expects programmable infrastructure, how are you going to be able to deploy a VM or manage hardware that runs below that? >> Back to your innovation message. It's the innovation they want >> Well ultimately the guy wants the simple push the button and get the application deployed, that means someone has to get this layer deployed and well to get that layered deployed, what's there? So we continue to support virtualization managers, whether VMWare or our own cVim, Cisco Virtual Infrastructure Manager. All of these products its like, how do I manage this pool of hardware to provide that next layer of service? So, but in every case the programmability of the infrastructure or as far down as you can go becomes paramount, so, you know, when the guy racks a piece of hardware in the data center he doesn't want to think about how does this read card need to get configured, right? He just wants to rack it, plug it in, and then turn it over to software as quickly as possible. >> And that's the cloud innovation on-prem that you're referring to, that's making it cloud-like operations for Agility Automation, provisioning. >> Consistency, reliability, observability, give you an example of that, I mean when we, when we were talking originally when we were starting these cloud deployments and we had this conversation with Infosac about which application lives in which zone and how do you manage that? And we were like, well the zoning processes that's used in the past don't apply anymore. The way we manage that thing is with security groups, and the security groups are created this way. Here's the software, here's the software. When I'm talking software, I'm talking about configuration and scripts in this case, Ansible, Chef, Puppet whatever, that generate those security groups that generate those rules and it's like, it changes the way the security guy interacts with your team. It's no longer, file a ticket to review your app and app deployment and have a new ticket to do a deployment, it's something that they can do in real time. We're talking about moving these processes left, you know, moving that audit to the system all the way back into the software development stage and then giving the tools to verify that afterwards. And their eyes literally popped open, it was like, you mean at any moment at any time I can say show groups and see what the security posture is right now. And it's like, yes! An that's what sold them on letting us behave in this new way, was the ability to audit in realtime. >> Yeah, and this is a major advantage. This brings up the question that comes us all the time, and I want to get your thoughts on this because this shapes into the overall cloud architecture, cloud portfolio, and in this case with Cisco products is workload portability. It used to be, oh the one way trip to the cloud, not anymore, it's not a one way trip to the cloud, it's now bi-directionally on-premise, been validated by LPOST, Anthos, and Azure Stack, this is going to be an operating model to your point about the cloud innovation now workload portability, I think that's been validated so I think we recognize, the industry recognizes that it's not just public cloud everywhere, it's hybrid. This has been validated. You agree. >> Absolutely we-- there were many things that we never did move to the cloud, never would move to the cloud. Whether it's for policy reasons, or the quantity of data that we had, or systems that weren't available on the cloud, for example DevTest Labs, that have soundproof rooms, it's all audio equipment. We sell phones, we have to test those phones, those aren't ever going to be on the cloud, they're going to be in their soundproof rooms so we can test the audio pairing. There's stuff like that that always lives unrolled. There's a myriad of-- >> Compliance resources also requires-- >> Compliance things, whether its a FedRAMP compliance, this data has to be in this country, well US in that case, European privacy things. It could be-- I was talking to one bank a number of years ago now that worked-- we're deploying, we're talking about deploying Kubernetes from, it's like what applications are you deploying? Why do they need to be here, well, they're building-- they've got a mobile first application they want to use all the latest and greatest ways to build and deploy that application. But the data that that application is accessing is in the mainframe. It hasn't moved in ten years, twenty years, it's not going to move anytime soon. So you put the application next to the data that it needs. An IoT, it might be control devices, or video devices, or any number of things that's like, I think there's a trend overall, it's less about workload portability for a lot of people or being able to move workloads, it's saying, where's the best place for this particular workload to run, and so then provide the appropriate infrastructure to run that workload. And that's where we get back to saying, wait a minute I want to use containerization, I want to use orchestration systems, I want to use all these modern tools for doing this, but still put the workload where it needs to be. >> That is a profound statement, I want to just quickly unpack that a little bit because that really is the heart of the issue, cloud innovation. The workloads are going to be defining the requirements it needs, whether it's cloud selection or where it resides on-prem with what resources underneath it. That's not saying a company has to decide that because of that workload that the entire company has to use that 'cause the choices now because of the levels or granularity that cloud brings, the applications can get almost custom built or-- well not custom built but a specific hardware and compute to serve their needs. So if its a-- you're soul sourcing a set of resources for the workload. That's not saying that the infrastructure has to be that for everything, it's just the whole single cloud versus multi cloud dynamic. >> Yeah I mean, in fact, one of the things we're seeing more and more in our customers is, like, they don't have one cloud, they have multiple clouds, for multiple purposes. On-prem there's not one big private cloud that runs everything, there's lots of Kubernetes clusters and one of the things that a product like CCP does is allow you to deploy and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters for multiple purposes. Multiple problem domains, multiple political domains, financial domains, who's paying for this thing? Well, it's easy if you just buy the servers that are appropriate to your department and you run it. You still get to take advantage of all the way you deploy and package and run these applications, which is just hands down better than we ever did before. And that's some of the innovation we have. Now once you start doing this, once you start deploying these applications in multiple places, in multiple-- well, where are your security borders, where are your perimeters, how do you secure any of this, how do you connect all this stuff? How do you visualize all this stuff? And so, as you look at our products from, you know, we talked a little bit about the infrastructure pieces of that, you know the, Kubernetes deploying to an infrastructure manager, deploying ultimately to hardware, every layer of that. You know, UCS and CVIM and CCP, all of those layers are there and programmable. Okay, now we're deploying workloads, now I've got to connect the things together, how do I monitor it, how do I-- and so that's why you see products like Stealthwatch Cloud, and AppD, and the other applications to do monitoring and security across a now fully distributed application. >> You know, sometimes it's hard for me as a cube host to kind of get the story out about certain trends, especially when big players like Cisco, a lot of people know that I'm pretty bullish on Cisco, I've been very vocal about the Cisco opportunity with respect to cloud and critical, by the way in some areas and I think I would probably advise certain things to be certain ways. But one of the things, I think, is a great opportunity that you guys have, and you're kind of getting at, I want to just get your reaction and thoughts on this, is that what you're talking about here is an environment that's going to be constantly dynamic. That's constantly changing. And being complex is not going away, abstracting away the complexity is the game. But Cisco has always been successful in multi environments, different environments because networking has always been about diversity of networks. Campus this, and SD-- so it's not a new concept for Cisco to deal with this concept of multiple environments. Do you agree with that? What's your reaction to that? How would you answer that? Is that something you think Cisco's dominating in? Is that reason why Cisco is serving all these choices? What's your thoughts on that? >> I would have to say that overall the integrating lots of disparate things. Connecting lots of disparate things is in Cisco's DNA, I mean from our original routers and switches at the very beginning it was always multiple things connected to each other often multi-vendor working across standards and across standard things. When we talk about Kubernetes we're not talking about the Cisco Kubernetes we're talking about Kubernetes, the real thing, the actual Kubernetes, we're talking about-- and we're talking about ceiling, we're talking about openstack a standard, we're talking about-- so across all these boards connecting and integrating disparate things, is kind of what Cisco does. >> And so if you're deploying applications you've done that and certainly your customers are, they're never going to have one general purpose situations that's going to be scenarios, right? And certain things will be guiding principles, some will be governors that will then dictate things that might not be classic cloud native. Can you talk about that and give some examples why that's important and the reality of the statement. >> Yeah so, just use one example of an application, Webex teams our enterprise chat application, for example, that is your classic microservices modern cloud native application. There are three ways of deploying applications in that platform that are appropriate for the three different things. We got the services themselves, the media bridges, or the switching engines that runs these containers in a container orchestration fabric. There's the VM base things that are things like media bridges that don't run in containers very well, not because of the problem with the containers, but because of the overlay networks the containers bring with it and the way you route data to those. And we got physical machines. Now when we're actually running certain things on physical machines and so all of these exist in any kind of, even a brand new modern application so even within a single product family there's not one true way of doing things, what's the appropriate way to deploy this application. What's the right deployment target for this thing and how do I connect these things. >> You measure InfoSec so politics might be a driver that have nothing to do with technology, could be a human capital, resource issue, it could be something scalable. >> And the politics or even or can be even these temporal things, it's like, look I can spend, you know, three weeks trying to convince an InfoSec to do things in a particular way or it can just deploy somewhere where it makes them happy and move on, move on to the next problem and then later when they catch up with the way we're doing things, we may move it later. The other thing about timing on all this is the story is changing constantly when we deployed that application, we did not use Docker containers. And everybody says, why aren't you using Docker? Because Docker didn't exist three years ago! It's like the decisions we were making at that time are changing ever more rapidly. And the reality for our enterprise customers is that you don't just forklift one and then replace it with another one, you tend to manage them all in parallel even as you're making transitions, you know, eventually you kind of get rid of the old stuff, maybe, the mainframe still exists >> Mhmm. >> But in general for most of our enterprise customers it's not and or it's not on-prem or on the cloud, it's not containers or visible machines, its and, I'm running all of the above. >> And to your point about the docker not being around when you guys were doing that, that's going to be a concept that's going to be applied down the road, hey that wasn't around when we set the architecture, so as an enterprise, your customers that you talk to, what is the guiding principle? What is the preferred architecture? Again, a lot of choices you guys are trying to make your portfolio fit the bill. What are some of the decisions they have to make? So, to future-proof because they don't want to foreclose an opportunity and or create technical debt for that matter. Why would they do that? So they kind of have to be holistic in their thinking. >> Yeah, future proof is always-- is a funny concept because the reality is, that the... The way you do things will change. You didn't make something that was future proof, you built an environment that allowed you to do this way and that way. So if you take a look at the way we deployed, for example, our infrastructure in general we start with the UCS substrate, we can run Oracle on bare-metal on those things when we need to. We can run virtualization on top of that, and run a layer of vms on top of that. We can run containers, now I've got choices. Common substrate, common way of managing those things but at least three different ways of deploying on those. So ultimately we're looking for standard practices that enables me to have to do the and to where I can run things side by side and can connect things, I can secure things over the top but run all of the above. And it's really a matter of building things that have kind of clean our connectural layers where one thing consumes the other and then be able to mix and match and plug them together Lego style as it were. >> This a great chat, and really reminds me of the conversations that we'll be having here in theCube. We've been doing a series with engineering leaders and you know, you mentioned foreclose in the future, future proofing which is kind of a buzz word. The conversation happening in the technical circles is about technical debt and I think, you know, I've always seen that enterprise you know, cost of ownership, you know, and the shark fin, the iceberg and what you don't see. Certainly that's been a paradigm that's been known but now you're getting into this notion of not just so much future proofing, it's really the balance of technical debt because you know something new is coming. This is a modern concept that takes costs of ownership and future proofing and kind of puts it to reality because you're essentially taking on some sort of technical debting from point A to point B, but you don't want to take on too much that you can't pay it back if new technology comes in. So this is what's been going on in some of the you know, top customers that we've been talking to. A new management concept, this is kind of a modern new management discipline. Your thoughts and reaction to that? >> So there's at least two different vectors that talk about on it. So, one of the things is, how do I take these older applications, these older ways of managing things and incrementally improve them. Because we can actually make it-- it is easier today to deploy a process running on a machine than it ever was before. Five years ago I would have a ticket, some guy would go and then install software manually, today we don't do that, we use configuration management, puppet and chefs, ansible, etc. We improve the way I do those things incrementally rather than just forklift them. I'm not rewriting these applications and saying okay, we're going to make these into cloud native applications and microservices and bla, bla, bla and replatform them. No I incrementally improve the way I operate that thing. Even if its just deploying the hardware more consistently underneath or improving this layer. So I incrementally reduce my debt by applying, again, deploying some of these new cloud... Cloud innovations, they're grown out of the cloud to the existing ways of doing things. But the other point I'll make on a lot of this, is that, certainly for our team, and for a lot of the customers I talk about we don't just arbitrarily go and replatform things, right? It's like if the thing is working, let it continue to work. Don't deploy the new thing alongside it. You know, we're more concerned about delivering new features, new capabilities, new things. And we do that, and we concentrate our efforts and our engineering efforts on that and not constantly rewriting the past. >> A container can certainly help you there too. >> Absolutely. Containers are beautiful tool for that, for encapsulating dependencies around a thing. And so you'll find in many cases we have applications that are not ready to deploy to run in Kubernetes with a schedule that's going to move it around but I can still take advantage of the container packaging and run it on a physical box with a normal Linux operating system and containerize it. So it's usually valuable. >> Reinhardt, I want to get your thoughts on one last talking track, that is relevant to something that we've been covering. Stu Miniman, co-host of theCube with me on many of these events around networking, we both love networking, both networking nerds. Always joke about how networking is where you go to find out about the state of the industry is. Look at what's going on with the network. Because network ultimately tells the truth. Movin' things around, security people go to the network. You start to see, everything's revolving around the network now, more than ever. I mean, still, it's been that way forever. But you made a comment before we went on camera you said, just adding another layer of networking. If you think about what you just said, the networking paradigm is just kind of slowly moving to another layer. So networking is happening, it's just happening differently. So as the dev ops innovations in the cloud happens it's really a network innovation. 'cause security pivots off the network data used applications, instrumentations, on the network data, everything's around networks. >> It's intrinsically tied. In the past we had a machine, a physical machine had a network interface, singular, and a network identity an address. VMs, multiple network interfaces, multiple on every VM. Kubernetes, an IP address per application, right? And it's like the networking space is exploding as we move up. And yes, we now have a network connectivity and management problem that's over of magnitudes more complicated than it was before because now, individual workloads have IP addresses. And by the way I'm deploying workloads in multiples. I don't run a single application, I run a pool of applications, each one has an address. And so yeah networking is-- continues to be intrinsic and it just moves up. >> And it's fascinating too, you know, we always speculate about looking for that new technology, the new protocol, something new, the shiny new toy. But if you think about it, all the science and intellectual property has been built already. It's usually a combination of a couple different things. In network theory, in network management, the concepts are still around. It's being applied differently now. >> Or sliced into smaller, you know, smaller, the bites are smaller that you're dealing with, right? Everything has an IP address, we got thousands of IP addresses now that we're managing. Having IP address management problems, we have other things to manage now. >> The game is still the same. >> The game is still the same, it's still TCP IP networking. >> So final question, bottom line, why Cisco and the cloud networking as it comes together? As this stuff starts to modernize, hybrid is certainly reality hardcore, as people are doing today. Multi cloud is also another reality right around the corner. Why Cisco? Why Cisco's products and portfolios for the cloud? >> Well fundamentally, as we said earlier, the cloud has a networking problem. Networking underpins everything that we do. The networking, from physical networking the compute has to run on something. So networking, compute, orchestration systems for all of that, security that overlays all of that. I think Cisco uniquely has all of the components that it takes to build a modern infrastructure stack, and in fact deploy applications to that. I think, the breath of knowledge and capabilities Cisco has across those is unique. And then, also, I would say, Cisco's experience. We have many-- several of the world's largest SaaS applications in the Cisco family. Things like umbrella, DNS security, or Webex, web conferencing, we also have deep expertise in running applications and that's within the Cisco domain of expertise. >> Certainly in good position, I really I'm really bull-ish on what you guys can do. I think the network is where the trust is, it's where the data is, that's where the action is, and I think that's the cloud 2.0 equation. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for the insight. Reinhardt Quelle, principle engineer, Cloud Platforms of Cisco here sharing his insight on this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live, US, 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back we're here at the San Diego convention center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman we've had three days wall to wall coverage my co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house and I'm really excited to actually sit down one on one with one of the users at this user conference the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco with their users and partners over 28,000 so speaking for all of them right? We have Sebastien Morissette who's an IT architect specialist at Intact Financial Corporation come to us from beautiful Montreal Canada. >> Exactly. >> All right thank you so much for joining us so Sebastien first of all how many Cisco Lives have you been too? >> Honestly this is my first. >> Oh absolutely exciting for that, my first one I came too was actually 10 years ago I joked at the 20th anniversary they went back 20 years to have some 80's bands they had The Bangles and Devo on and now on the 30 year they moved 10 years forwards they have two great bands from the 90's Wheezer and Foo Fighters so your first time at Cisco Live give us your general impressions of the show. >> Well actually it's been very great I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well so I got some sessions in I did some work as well so it's amazing to see how these events unfold right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths how many technical sessions you can have so, I was very pleased I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intact so you know we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well so it's interesting right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love which is technology but at the same time spend some time together outside of work. >> That's awesome, we've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego hope you definitely get to see the sights before we geek out on some of the technology just give our audience a little bit about Intact and the insurance business but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. >> Okay well Intact is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions we've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010 and afterwards we were publicly traded now so we're Intact Financial Corp. Typically we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative which is kind of a new offering of you know modern IT services within Intact. >> Okay great and just to, your purview in the company and just the comment about the company is you know when you talk about those transformations you know MNA is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're doing that but tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people however you measure you know what, boxes or ports or whatever. >> Okay well you know typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America Intact through acquisition we actually bought OneBeacon Insurance last year, so typically we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines so typically whenever we're looking at different technologies we look at the skills sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to you know accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology so in some cases whatever we're looking at building up these new features like I was talking for data center 2.0 it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco which is why we are here today with the team. >> All right so Sebastien you talk about data center 2.0 and transformation there at the organizational level is it branded data center transformation does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? >> Yeah data center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years but it really is at the essence a digital transformation, what we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the Cloud so we're building an on-prem private Cloud offering with multi-sites so we have three sites in the scope right now and the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the Cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment when we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public Cloud our software engineering teams our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there so it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team so we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team and that we can share with them so they can actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VM's or stuff so trying to accelerate that. >> Awesome I love that 'cause sometimes you hear okay we're going to 2.0 it's basically a fancy refresh but we're going to keep things mostly the same when I hear DevOps I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that, I have to ask you without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private Cloud that's in your data center we understand some of the covenants and reasons what you have but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a Cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? >> I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president typically we were looking at how can we access the Cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go what I asked him to do is say you know trust me I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for Cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services so typically in the end we didn't overhaul anything that we had we built a brand new sandbox for Intact to be able to work with so we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move we've built a three site approach because when I was looking at kind of my capex expenditure if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity when you go to three sites it seems awkward but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements, so in the end you're actually spending 150% of your capacity, or your capex to buy the compute, so there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely it's very easy for us to see how it's a Cloud because we're not operating it the same way we're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch every process has been revised we haven't kept everything we had before so we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software engineering groups were asking us to do. >> All right that's exciting stuff there when you look at these multi-site deployments I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments, management, security and networking are absolutely critical, I hear oh okay I've got 50% in each oh my God what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two so luckily I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your rollout, we're obviously here at Cisco Live so give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially you know what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? >> All right well you know typically the way that our story started was kind of weird the first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ but actually rebuild our whole design to you know integrate ACI into the fabric and then when you start talking about firewalls or switches they tell you well with ACI you have contracts so it really started that way so we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure as our compute layer so typically think of it as Intact is building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that we have all the components so we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier which is running like you know VMware on site, on top of the HyperFlex and then we have the ACI since we had three sites we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites and in the end we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that and when we were looking at it early on it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker we were looking at finding a Cloud management platform, so we ended up using CloudCenter which is now CloudCenter Suite and in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using CloudCenter today we're taking it into the data center and out to the Cloud whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week he was saying you know what sometimes our clients buy it more for the Cloud first and I was like well we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite but it works as well, so typically where we stand today I have the three sites we're able to deploy with CloudCenter we've got multi-site on top of that and the idea it really is that, I spoke about training wheels earlier well we're taking them off right? In the next couple of weeks we're starting to look into negotiations with public Cloud providers trying to move towards the public Cloud and you know there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now you know they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS and now they have all the three major Cloud providers covered with ACI Anywhere so that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all, everywhere so to be honest I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back I think we're in our sweet spot right now. >> Yeah and you're right it's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers which is I have all of these public Cloud's and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the CloudCenter Suite is there so you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public Cloud or public Cloud you choose are you at the point there that do you know which public Cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? >> Well to be honest you know we're keeping our options open you know we have different providers that are offered, you know the major public one there's Amazon there's Google Cloud we're not closing any options it's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure that we get all the information back so I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating but in the end we're not limiting ourselves we just want to be able to scale. >> Right you're confident that the Cisco solution that you choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or need to make switches along the way? >> Yeah. >> Question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-Cloud one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skillsets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected but understanding how I manage each of those environments so do you feel CloudCenter Suite's going to help you through that? You know what do you see as you look out over your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for you know your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public Cloud? >> Actually I'm feeling really confident because you know especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and Kip have announced for the data center and for the Cloud piece we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different Cloud providers. So for me what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a Cloud we need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products you know Cisco's branding it the Anywhere right? They have the HX Anywhere the ACI Anywhere and typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skillsets and allow the people to use it one thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the Cloud First ACI right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the Cloud I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the Cloud you're going to be able to to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on prem or anywhere in other Clouds afterwards so I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to you know transparently migrate apps between sites. >> All right so Sebastien you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco you talk about the HX the ACI the CloudCenter Suite what advice do you give to your peers out there and they say you know I've used Cisco products for a long time Cisco makes great products but you know simplicity and management across the product lines was something that you know needed some work what does the Cisco of today look like you know what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? >> Well you know for us one of the things that was nice like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield so I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built so my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment there's nothing in Cloud native applications that is you know symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center, it's completely different ways of working we have one week sprints we patch everything as it comes out if an application goes into the environment it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every time we're at n or n-1 so, my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure, let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere right? So that's one of the things I would say, from what you said about Cisco and the integration you were right, we have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half, however I've noticed that these new software components like CloudShare and everything not necessarily the hardware part Cisco nails hardware like it works they've been doing it for years the thing is with these software teams they're very customer driven we have access to the engineers now I mean we've had meetings with the Canadian execs Roland Acra's team we were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US so, every company has challenges I would be lying if I told you that even at Intact we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together but I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. >> Well it's interesting Sebastian you bring that up because I look at you say okay, you've got a greenfield environment awesome, we can go do some new tech, well let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces you're like completely overhauling your environment how much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that or you know I look people, process and technology sounded like you were taking it all on at once, did that work well? Would you have if you looked back would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe you know gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of you know start brand new start fresh and get everything going? >> Well I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh however, it helped us get really good pace and work you know it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group so all of that was great learning experience the only thing I would say is you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach but where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get onboard. because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups here's a new area where you can play in but you know typically I'd say that it's been well received we have not had the need to build new skillsets because we're doing infrastructure as code so typically a lot of the stuff we're building we're making sure it's automated so that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy so lessons learned like you've asked me I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of Intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology it's fine for the time it took and everything it's fine, it's really people the change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts it's like if we were disrupting our own company right? So typically I'd say, that would be something that I would say to people manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. >> Well Sebastien I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation I want to just give you the final word sounds like you've got great access to Cisco really hope you're happy with what you've done final word is to you know your expectations coming into a show like this and you know what your take aways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego? >> Well outside from the amazing weather you mean or yeah? so you know typically I like the event I've been to other events before, like I said this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology so they're really present so I really liked how you know we were given the opportunity to do hands on labs and actually learn new technologies so typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. >> Well Sebastien Morissette congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. >> Thank you so much. >> All right we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall to wall coverage Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. 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Upbeat techno music >> Live, from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Cube's exclusive coverage, here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier. With hosts this week: Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, here all for three days. So, we're wrapping up Cisco Live 2019, here in Europe. Guys, we're breaking it down. We had some great editorial segments, where we unpacked everything here. But, as we look back over the show, I want to get your observations and insights into, kind of what's going on with Cisco, the secret formula around why DevNet- their developer program; which also has Devnet Create, which is cloud native- is growing very rapidly. Huge resonance with the customer base in Cisco. It's created a revitalization of Cisco, as a company. And you can see that permeating throughout the organization with their branding, how the teams are organized, and they're engineering their products. Is this the future model for all infrastructure companies that don't have a cloud? And why is that successful? And then other observations. Guys, we'll start with DevNet. The very successful program, led by Susie Wee, Senior Vice President and CTO, executing flawlessly how to transform a community, without killing the old to bring in the new. Stu. >> Yeah, John, it's been fascinating to watch. We've talked about the ground effort, a lot of hard work by a small team, build a community. Last year, over 500,000. We hear they're at 560,000 people using this tool. Four and a half years ago, you know, Cisco- mostly a hardware company. It really- what I've seen over the last year or two, they were talking about software, but I've really seen deliverables here. You talk about CloudCenter Suite, you talk about the DNA Center platform; if they're a hardware company, there's a disconnect between what's going on in the DevNet zone, and what's happening in the company. But, we've seen rallying around software solutions. I've heard from the partnering system, from the customers: this isn't Cisco of a few years ago. Very fragmented, lots of lines of businesses, lots of different things. I remember back when Chambers announced, like, "oh, we've got, you know, 37 different adjacencies we're going to go into." No. Now it's: solution suites and platforms and, you know, DevNet- it is a unifying force of what they're doing. That's a great term, John. Love it. And see, that transformation of being a software company, that DevNet set some of the groundwork, and we heard the CIO of Cisco saying that, you know, security and the developer activity, are his partners in crime. Helping him, driving change, and... >> And they did a nice clever play on words: Data Centered. And that's kind of a shot across the bough of the classic data center, which shows it is a cloud world. And data is a center part of it. And, I think the API-centric economy's certainly doing it. But, Dave, I want to get your thoughts, because you asked a question to Susie Wee of DevNet- a very important question Other companies couldn't be successful with developer programs. Cisco has been. What's the secret formula? Well, I asked Amanda Whaley, who's her right-hand woman around what's going on, and she said, "well, there's no secret formula..." Guess what. There is a secret formula. They're being humble. But seems to be content- seems to be the unifying force of the community. They understood the need, they saw the future around cloud native and API's, being a very important connection tissue- connective tissue, for this cloud native world, and an upstream path for Cisco. They understood the future, knew the need, and they provided great content. The sessions and the education are open, inclusive, very education oriented. But, conversations with their peers have been key. TheCUBE's been here, talkin' to... They treat everyone the same, not the big pitches. Real authentic and genuine content that allowed people to learn and grow, and connect with others. To me, I think that is kind of- this is one of my observations. Your thoughts, Dave, on that. >> Yeah, so... First of all, there is a secret formula. And, this is the new blueprint, or the blueprint that infrastructure companies should be following. Cisco's clearly leading there. I think it's content and community. And, they're used their programmability, of their infrastructure, and they've socialized that. They've developed the technology. They say big companies can't innovate; DevNet is a real solid innovation. And it's- we witnessed all week, people coming in, training, learning; these are network engineers. They're learning new skills. They're learning how to be developers. And that is, to me, a huge innovation in business model, in technology. It's creating a flywheel for them. So, they've created- they've come up with the idea, that the network is a data platform. And it's now, also, become an application development platform. On which, they're deploying applications all over the place. Edge, we heard applications being deployed in police vehicles! And so, this is a very important trend, and from what I can tell, they're way ahead of other infrastructure companies: HP, I don't see this, they talk that game. Dell EMC; we talked about code. You know, IBM trying to make it happen with Bluemix. Oracle owns Java, and it still sort of struggles to own the development, developer marketplace. >> So, Dave, I love what you say there. I saw Jack Welch speak a number of years ago, and he's like, "eh, people always tell me all the time that big companies can't innovate." He's like, "well, maybe big companies, but what are companies made up of? Companies are made up of people, and people can innovate." And I think that's- you know, the key there is, it was very people-focused. Absolutely, content. When you talk about what were the big sessions here: oh, they're doin' Java, they're doin' kubernetes. It's like, okay, wait: is there a connection to Cisco products? Absolutely. Is it a product pitch in a product training? There's plenty of that going here! People need that. People built their careers out of Cisco. But this new career? A big question question I had coming in, is: it's a multi-cloud world, you know... Infrastructure, developer, and everything. Cisco's a piece of that. You know, how do they make sure that they get- sticking this with them, and helping them to build their career, and move forward. There's going to be some nice activity, there. And, you get a good glow, and you know, Cisco makes themselves relevant in those communities. >> The other observation that I saw, and I want to get your reactions to it, guys, is: that we saw Scale- and we talk about this all the time in theCUBE. Scale is now table stakes, to compete in this global landscape. But, complexity with multi-cloud, and these things, is there. Every major inflection point in the industry- abstraction layers and software, and/or hardware advances- certainly, Moore's Law kicks in and helps that. But, it's been software abstractions that have really moved the needle, because that's where you can have complexity, and still remove it; from an integration standpoint, from a consumption standpoint. This seems to be- Cisco's buying into this, across the companies, Stu- software. Not just hardware. They've coupled it, but they all work together. This is the magic of DevNet, the magic of API's. It's the magic of an internet operating system. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, and look- we talked to a number of the companies that were acquired by Cisco over the last few years, and I think those are helping to drive some of the change. You have, of course, APT is the big one, Duo in security; companies that were born in the cloud, and helping to move that change along the way, and John, as you said, that unifying factor of, "we're rallying," it's not just, the new Chip Stubbs standing up on the- and saying, "you know, okay, we spent millions of dollars in developing this thing, everybody go out and sell that." It's now- there's co-creation, you're seeing that evolution of that partner ecosystem. And, it's a challenging change, but Cisco is, you know, moving in the right direction. >> It starts at the top, too, Stu. And, I wanted to make a point of- we learned, also- and this is learning for me. Chuck Robbins is behind all this, okay. The CEO has identified DevNet, and said, "this is strategic to our company." All new products now, that are introduced at Cisco, will have API support and a DevNet component. This is a radical change from Cisco of the past. This means that every solution, out of the box- literally- and software, will have that in there. So, with API's and DNA Center, those are two areas to me, that I think will really be a tell sign. If Cisco can execute on the DNA Center, and bring in API's and a DevNet- a real supporting community behind every product; I think the programmable network will be a reality. >> So, help me squint through this. You know, we talk to a lot of people, we go to a lot of shows. We're gettin' the Kool-Aid injection from the DevNet crew here- but, there's real substance. We're going to challenge some of the other companies that we work with. Some of the other infrastructure companies. The IT business, it's like the NFL. It's a copycat league. So, HP is going to say, "oh, we got ATI's." EMC, Dell: they're going to say the same thing. But, what's different here... I mean, clearly, you see it in the evidence of being able to cultivate a community of developers. >> Of course. >> Is it because of the network? >> No, it's management. HP has people- I've talked to them on theCUBE- that believe in cloud native. The company just doesn't fund them properly. They've got the smallest booth at the events, they're always, you know, a partner booth. They're part of an adjunct of something else. HP and Tony O'Neary, I don't think is funding open cloud native... Or certainly the marketing people, or product people, are not funding developers. >> Well, certainly not to the degree that Cisco is, obviously. >> There's no physical signs of any kind. We go to all the shows. >> What about Dell? What about Dell EMC? >> I think Dell EMC is kind of keeping it open, but there's no coherent group. I can't, in my mind's eye, point to one group, saying, "wow, they're kickin' ass." >> They got bigger problems now. It's how you consolidate the portfolio... >> What is- Michael Dell's state of goal, is for Dell to be the leading infrastructu&re company out there. There's a big hardware component of that. Absolutely, they participate in open source, they have some developer- API's are great, and they love standards. But, you know, this is a software movement. >> Yeah. >> Infrastructure's code is where they're going. VMWare, you know, they've made some pushes and moves, in this space... >> With developers? >> Not big developers... >> But, where are the developers? They had their operators on the IT side, so- back to Dell for a second. I think Dell Boomi is one signal, I've seen some sign there. But then- and that's still relatively new, but there's no one- there's no DevNet for Dell. On VMWare... >> People Labs is someone that is helping customers learn to code, do that kind of activity. But, you know, broadly across the Dell family, I haven't seen as much. >> I think VMware has a good ecosystem. I think they have good technical people. I don't think they need a developer program, per se. I think they need more of an operator program. I think that's VMWorld. You go to VMWorld and you see a lot of the partners, and how they integrate in. >> So, who are the favorites in the developer world? Obviously, Microsoft, and MUS... >> I mean, to me, it's Amazon- as a kid in a candy store, if you're a developer, you're all over Amazon. They have great stuff, they're always introducing new candy for the kids, all the time. New services; Amazon, number one. Azure, I think- not so much, in my mind. I think it's a lot of legacy, there, with Azure. But, they are- they're puttin' up the numbers on the profit, and you know my stand on Azure. I think Azure's sandbagging the numbers. But, the growth's there, it's going to be a matter of time. I think, Azure, is on the path. And they have the legacy developer program, world class, Microsoft. Microsoft is in the Cisco kind of wheelhouse. If they can transform their existing developer community, to be cloud native, they hit a home run. >> Yeah, but, John, you were talking about IT ops, out there; Microsoft does great in that. They've got a lot of big push there. They absolutely- the DotNet developers are there. You go to the Build conference, they play. We go to CUBECon, and a lot of the developer shows, and Microsoft, strongly there... >> No, let me just clarify my point. Let me clarify my point on Microsoft. Yes, they have a pre-existing, huge, development. They've been successful by the core competancy, no doubt. Cisco had a developer community: all networking. So, I think Microsoft has that legacy win, but they have to transform, and go the next level. The question is, do they have that. So- with Azure, I'm saying... >> What about Google? You guys were at the Google Cloud Show last year, we'll be there again in April. >> Yeah, you got to put Google in the mix. No doubt, I mean, no question. And, what about Red Hat? With IBM, on the developer front? >> Yeah, look, when you talk to the developers, and all the- a lot of the training their doing, if you've got LITIC skill sets, you've got a leg up in a lot of these environments. There are a lot of developers. It's not like people at Red Hat- some, are like, "oh wait, 6here's my first hoodie, and I'm going to learn to start code." They're already there. They're in this ecosystem. Red Hat: huge part- everybody we just talked about, Red Hat has a strong piece in there. That's one of the reasons why IBM bought them, Dave, is to help ride that wave. >> That's expensive, but they got the ingredients now. >> Red Hat's- check, I love those guys. Google has a lot of developers. They contribute heavily in open source. But, in terms of a Google community, that's really the CNCF in my mind. I think they're doing great job stewarting CNCF, but there's not a lot of people- users, in the Google ecosystem, they've got tons of developers. And, that's an opportunity for Google, in my opinion. >> Well, let's bring it back to Cisco. So, are we in agreement that they've got a leg up on the other infrastructure competitors... >> Yeah, I do. >> Specifically, as it relates to developers. >> They have a huge leg up, but I think it's even bigger that that. I think that this company is going to skyrocket, if they crack the code on network programmability. They're at the early stages now, you're talking about intro to Python, they give more advanced classes... Give them 24 months, if they continue momentum on DevNet, that's the tipping point, in my mind. Two years, they could own everything, and just be a whole other level company, if they crack the code. 'Cause the network is the value. Payload, network effect, this is the new normal in today's.. >> It's a big challenger. I mean, it's really not- and, the networking companies, for years, haven't been able... The Aristas, and the Junipers, haven't been able to unseed them, as the leader. They still got 60 percent of the marketplace. >> DMWare- DMWare and Cisco. >> DMWare, alright. >> DMWare and Cisco, 'cause DMWare and Amazon, that's a lethal combination. I think that's what I'm going to watch, the frenemy action between DMWare and Cisco. I think that level of where NSX, and what Cisco's trying to do, within ten paces of that working. >> Well, and Outpost is the hybrid infrastructure. Does that eventually become a multi-cloud play? Maybe it's a few years off, but... >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, we've watched- a year ago, we were saying, "okay, Google's a strong partner to Cisco, how 'about AWO's?" Well, they're integrating with kubernetes, they're starting to do more with AWS. It's always an interesting partnership with Amazon. Cisco's got lots of products in the marketplace, they're growing in that environment, but Amazon's learning from everybody and can potentially be a threat down the road to where Cisco is. And, I'd love to see Cisco doing more in the Microsoft space, too. >> We'll be watching Cisco, over the year. We're going to continue to go deep on Cisco. We got the Cisco Live North America Show on the cal... >> San Diego. >> This year in San Diego. So, we'll see theCUBE there, for multiple days, as well. Of course, we'll be following all the traction of software define everything, as the world goes completely cyber, dark, encrypted; whatever it is, we're going to be covering it. Well, thanks for watching. I want to give a shout out to the crew. Good job, guys. Well done. Thanks for watching theCUBE here, in Barcelona. I'm Jeff Furrier with Dave Vellonte, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live! Europe, brought to you by Cisco and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live! 2019 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante. Dave, myself, and John Furrier here, gettin' wall to wall coverage. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Dave Stanford, who's the Customer Experience Cloud Product Management at Cisco, Dave thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me here. >> Alright. So, we've been digging into the whole multi-Cloud piece here, some real big announcements. A lot of their business solutions talking about being anywhere, it's the bridge-to-possible here at the show- >> Exactly. >> So, tell us exactly the customer experience there. Is this, the gooeys, much more than that, do you know? >> It is. >> What's that encompass? >> We really want to put a whole wrapper around all these products and solutions from a service perspective, and that includes everything from advisory, really guiding our customers, how do I get there, we see all these products and sometimes, it's like, well what do I use these for? So, we want to guide them, help them adopt it and then, support it, support's probably the most important piece. With all these multiple solutions, who can the customers call to get support for all of these? >> You know, I mean, I've worked with Cisco, partnered with Cisco my entire career, and the last few years, boy, things are changing so fast. >> Absolutely. >> A year ago kind of opened my eyes, and said, oh Cisco's movin' to be a software company? You really see the movement when I come to the show here, when I talk to people like the Cisco DNA Platform Solutions. >> Exactly. >> And all the things that customers need to change. Bring us inside how you're helping customers with that change, the services, and everything that you're wrapping around there. >> Sure. My role today is to develop the offers and scale them out and enable our other advanced services folks to deliver, but previously I was delivery myself. So, I understand the challenges that the customers have, so I know what they expect, they want the products to go out there and seamlessly work together, now they do. There's APIs, there's connectivity, but we have to actually show them what they can do with them, what are the use-cases. And from our perspective, when a product's released, a CX offer or service package should go out the door with that, too. QuickStarts are the biggest thing we have. >> Yeah and actually one of the keys things we talk about that move to software, with hardware it was inner-operability and how do all these things wire together? >> Exactly. >> Software, right, it needs to be seamless. >> It does. >> It should be platforms. And solutions in there, so give us the critical eye, a look internally, how's Cisco doing, what's the feedback you're hearing from the teams and partners? >> I think we're on the right track. We're well ahead with some of the solutions we're released with Cisco Container Platform, Cisco CloudCenter Suite. The biggest thing we hear from customers, a lot of, especially developers, application users, they don't care, they just want it to be up and running. So, with our integrated solutions, with things like the new HyperFlex 4.0, we build on top of that, they don't have to worry about connectivity to security or to load balancing, name the technology, they can bring it up and we can actually have the software do exactly what it needs to do. >> So, I've observed for decades the evolution and the services' business. >> Yeah. >> When I started in the business, it was all about break-fix. >> Yes. >> Right and then you had large software projects and ERPs. >> Yeah. >> And business process, re-engineering, a lot of consultative selling, internet came in. A lot of e-commerce activity. >> Yeah. >> How has the Cloud changed the service role, the organization, and how you go to market and scale, as you mentioned before. >> I think the biggest change with the Cloud, it's no longer just break-fix, let me go and install it and figure it out. It's, we really need to understand what our requirements are before we move to the Cloud, we hear about speed, cost-performance, but there's a lot more thought that has to go into it. We have to look across the IT infrastructure. So, that advisory upfront, that guidance, that wasn't necessarily always there, that's the biggest change, before we even think about using the product, we need to understand why we purchase this product. >> And so, what do you need from the customer? I mean, you obviously need data and participation and buy-in from the customer, what do you need to be successful there? >> Really from the customer we need to know, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the use-cases, and we have a lot of common use-cases we've seen, security is always a concern. How do I securely connect to the Cloud? How can I leverage Cisco's software to do that? And it's not just about connecting to Cisco's software, but how do we use Cisco's software to do that connectivity? So, it's over and over we see this constant pattern of, I want to build a manager hybrid Cloud securely, multi-Cloud network it and take the complexity out of what we do there. >> As the demographics of your buyer changes- >> Yes. >> How do you service them differently? How do you create a customer experience that's more focused on the way they want to interact with you? Whether it's chat or talk about that a little bit. >> So, you're not really talking to the IT infrastructure person anymore, you're talking to the lines of business or the application developers. So, you have to go in with the understanding of, I'm not going to go in and say, we're going to refresh the hardware, we're going to do this, we're going to give you new switches, new routers. You start the conversation at the application level now. What types of applications do you have? Are they traditional, do we have to re-factor them? Can't we just move them to the Cloud? Then, you go to the next level of, we understand this, now let's get our hardware in place to support this and then our infrastructure. But applications, that's the big shift. That's where the discussion is now. >> Alright, so we've talked about some of the impact of Cloud. >> Yeah. >> We've been hearing about how AI and ML are getting infused- >> Yes. >> Into all the products and that has to have a huge impact on how the customers interact and manage- >> It does. >> And there's got to be a little bit of the retraining that we talked about, too. >> Definitely, I mean, that's probably the biggest challenge, even hiring right now to find the right fit for Cloud or for Dev-Ops, AI, ML, it's a challenge. So, you have to have a plan in place with this background. And, what we've done within CX is we have a five tiered model. So, we start with the pre-requisites, where are you in this scale, we'll give you a rating based on what you have, but you really still have to train the folks, you have to give boot camps, cohorts, then code deliver on different engagements. But you still have to bring in folks with the right background, even if it's network route-switch, you can train them, but you have to have that program in place to be able to ramp them up. >> Yeah, we always said one of the biggest strengths Cisco has, is you've got those army of Cisco certified- >> Yes. >> The CCIEs out there. >> Yes. >> CCNPS and the like out there. Now, a lot of what they have to manage, it's either outside of their control, it's in the public Cloud >> It is, yeah. >> Or, right there's automation. I don't need to just get an alert and go do it, wait I need to make sure that the business rules are in place and- >> Exactly. >> The tooling's going to take care of that. So, help us understand what's the new, what's the new role inside the customers, that's got to change who you're negotiating with and who's involved in the conversations when you're putting this solution together, as well as, kind of the pre as well as the post deployments. >> Sure, sure I think the biggest difference is our customers now have customers. >> Yeah. >> Before we just managed their IT infrastructure. A good example, we have a healthcare comp, a healthcare corporation in Canada, the clinics are basically the clients of the overall organization, they don't care how long it takes to spend, they want speed. They can't go to the IT department and say, give me a VM and then three weeks later, they give it up or they provision it. And then, they'll go and say, well this is too slow. Here's my credit card, I'm going to buy Amazon Web Services and provision it, now we need to bring all of that together so, the route-switch folks need to become multi-Cloud architects. And when I talk about multi-Cloud, they need to know everything up the stack, infrastructure, connectivity with the CSR, security with our Cloud Protect Portfolio, and then the applications, not to mention the vast array of third party solutions, Cooper Netties is everywhere now. It's the defacto standard for containerization. This is really something that's come up over and over. And that's probably one of the biggest challenges is to get our folks to look at the overall stack rather than one piece. >> You challenge. I mean, Cisco and Hallmark, and Cisco has always been partner friendly. >> Yes. >> It's worked with all the different infrastructure that's out there. >> Yup. >> Now, you add in all the different Clouds. >> Exactly. >> And it's not just a cloud. >> It's an entire cloud stack, all the APIs. Your eyes bleed when you look at all the different APIs from Amazon- >> Yup. >> Data services, even. >> Exactly. >> There are dozens and dozens of them and so, so how do you manage (chuckles) that challenge? You can't just throw bodies at it? >> No, so we leverage the tools that we have. Cisco Container Platform's a good example. We use it in-house, but it's the biggest thing we position to our customers in the Cloud story because it's made deploying and managing containers or Cooper Netties simple. Before CCP, my team would deploy open source Cooper Netties which worked great, it was complex to set up, but then you had to look at, I need a tool for monitoring, I need one for logging, for load balancing, you ended up with 10 different applications. You thought you were moving to containers, but hey, there's much more to it. So, now with CCP, it's all packaged, everything's simple to manage. So, that's just the containers. And you mentioned governance before. I think this is a big thing, CloudCenter Suite, we can model our applications in there, deploy to any Cloud endpoint, so we support over 15 Clouds. And what my team does is bring this all together. So, it's not just a service, we want to show you how you can automatically provision those clusters and move it anywhere you want to go. >> Yeah, I wonder if you can put a point on that. The CloudCenter Suite, CloudCenter's been around for awhile. >> It has. >> But there's really been a re-architecture. It's built, Cloud native. >> It is. >> Cooper Netties' in there, but what, as a customer, is going to be like, oh wait, this isn't what I was used to in the past, help us understand what it is for the future. >> Absolutely, I think CloudCenter has been around for awhile, it's an amazing product. I took over this Cloud Portfolio and Services about a year ago and I'd heard all about it, started to ramp up on it, within four hours I couldn't believe this is really gooey-based. This is simple, so I can model the application and it's a simple as clicking deploy, and I can push it to any Cloud environment. And I think that's the biggest challenge, it's always been, how do I migrate my applications from the data center to the cloud or vice-versa. And CloudCenter's made it so simple within two minutes, you can actually migrate an application or deploy it, and they've added so many other features around cost and orchestration that it's everyday, I see customers starting to adopt CloudCenter Suite. >> I want to ask you about Swimlanes. >> Yeah. >> Cisco's a product company. >> Yes. >> You R&D. You build product, you ship products. >> You're not a services company. but you have a large services organization. How do you, what's your swim lane relative to some of the big SIs, what's your relationship with them? How does that work? >> Sure. So, I'm really closely partnered with all of the engineering teams, but at the same time, the partner organization, the systems integrators, they're still partners, especially in the new CX organization, we want to drive the solutions out to our customers, so we're actually taking some of our partners, bringing them on board, ramping them up on our services. And saying, hey you know what, you go deliver it, we'll support you, there's not a competition. I think, with CX now, we've combined everything together, the partners are just as important to us as the products that we sell. >> Will they private label those services or is- >> Yeah, absolutely, so our QuickStarts for example, these smaller packages, to turn up the solution stack quickly and drive adoption, we can hand that off to 'em, they can sell it themselves and label it. >> Yeah, so you're open that. And that drives their brand and their value. Their intimacy with their customers, yeah. >> I mean, we have a big market, but still the partners can reach them different spaces that we wouldn't traditionally be able to get to in professional services. >> Yeah, they have those relationships. Services has always been very local by nature. >> It has. >> The world's not just going to, we've talked about this, not just going to go to three clouds. I mean- >> That's right. >> Services, people want to meet people and they're in the same neighborhood. And there's trust. >> Yup. >> And that just doesn't disappear over night. >> And you have to build that, too. But you have to build the expertise before you get that trust. >> Yeah (chuckles). >> So, Dave, lot of customers here, you've been in meetings, giving presentations all week, give us a little bit of what's the buzz at the show? What are some of the top conversations? People are doing their planning for 2019. >> Yeah. >> You know, big hurdles and big opportunities that people are excited for. >> So, two common themes, security has come up over and over again, customers who haven't moved to Cloud they're concerned, how do I connect? And can I really put this in the Cloud? Or do I have to keep it in the data center? So, we talk about how we can secure and it- >> And I'm sorry, are they concerned about security, compliance, governance- >> They are. >> All of the above. >> One example. Yesterday, a customer said, I have a top secret application. And my company's pushing me towards the Cloud, can I really put this top secret application in a container in a public Cloud environment? So, that's just one conversation. It's the concern of, I don't own this anymore. It's not my data center, so how do I secure the application? How do I make sure there's no type of interference with that app, any type of interjection into damage it, right? And then, the other thing is, I see your stack, I see you have infrastructure, I see all the products, I don't think it's that simple to put together. It's great on a PowerPoint, but show me in the real world how this works together. And, that's what we've been doing, showing these demos, how we can build everything. >> Alright, so once you've shown them, walked through everything, they're feeling answered? >> They're feeling much better, but we go back to the whole CX lifecycle, advisory, implement, support, and that brings it all together. >> Yeah, and the top secret thing, Google, you've been highlighting partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they've got specific Clouds, we've been watching this- >> They do. >> 'Specially, all the stuff happening at the government level. >> Yeah. >> And one of the great proof points about public Cloud adoption. >> Yeah, definitely. >> Alright, want to give you the final word as people come away from Cisco Live! 2019, when it comes to customer experience, what do you want them to understand? >> It's all about solutions, putting it together. So, you see all these products, it's not that complex, CX, our partners can help you build it, scale it out, and really adopt it. >> Alright, well Dave Stanford, really appreciate you helping us understand the CX experience here. >> Thank you. >> Definitely lots of opportunities here. Cloud, AI, ML, putting all the solutions together. For Dave Vallente, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here of Cisco Live! 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (funky upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to, guys, Cisco Live. Introducing some new innovations, Stu and Dave, around reinventing networking. Couple big themes, big announcements around ACI Anywhere application-centric infrastructure, HyperFlex, and the new CloudCenter Suite, where they are doubling down on cloud, redefining the network. Stu we've been here last year, been watching Cisco. Policy based, intent based networking. Cisco's tying it all together with new branding, The bridge to tomorrow. Your thoughts. >> Yeah John, I actually, I like some of the new branding. The bridge to tomorrow. I've been critical of Cisco. Cisco always said, oh well, you know networking's everywhere and it's really important. Well okay, but where's the meat, where's the detail behind this? They've done a number of acquisitions in the space. They're making sure they understand where they are. They had some failures along the way. I mean you know call a spade a spade, John. They are going to be a leader in multicloud. It's where they want to be, but they had some falters along in being a public cloud. You know the Intercloud message that they had. They confused the service providers. We didn't understand how they played with the hyperscale players and now they're understanding where they sit. SD-WAN, critically important. Where they live in the Data Center and It's interesting we talked about do we care about the Data Center or do we care about where the data is centered, and of course that is not in one place, but it is many places. We know customers today live in a multicloud world. How I get to my data, how I leverage my data is critically important, and the networking and management is something that is critical across all those. Right, as you said, ACI and HyperFlex, the CloudCenter Suite I know is an area I know we're going to dig into a bunch this week, because cisco has an opportunity to play across these environments. But Cisco has been trying for a long time to be the manager of managers in these environments. I think back to things that Dave Vellante and the Wikibon team and I have done for years, talking about how you manage in this heterogeneous world and it's just, instead of multivendor we are talking multiclass. >> Multiclass. And you know what everything is coming together, Dave. We've been covering Cisco, with looking at the timing of the positioning. It seems to be coming together and around the rebranding, which by the way I agree with Stu, I like it. The bridge to tomorrow, it resonates with me. Maybe because I am from the Bay area. But they're bridging two worlds, they're bridging On-Premises and cloud together in a very seamless way and elegant way architecturally. So the branding ties in with really much a rounding out of the portfolio, so a lot of storylines to follow: the new branding, Chuck Robbins getting his sea legs now as Cisco goes to the next level. And clearly they see multicloud as their positioning because this has been Cisco's core position for many many years, this idea of enabling other people to do innovation, whether it's applications and work loads. Now they're connecting two worlds. Your thoughts on the timing and their position vis-a-vis the industry. >> Well, Cisco talked this morning in the keynote about another bridge. On one side of the network is users and devices. On the other side of the network are applications and data. And we've talked for years about how the network is flattening and traffic is going east, west, et cetera. But interclouding if you will, puts increased pressure on that and it's clearly Cisco's strategy to be the best at connecting, whether it's On-Prem and public clouds or between public clouds. Cisco's got to make the case that on our networks you're going to be higher performance and more secure. That's certainly what they're implying. They're also making a big transition from being a hardware company to a software company. When you listen to VMware talk about Cisco, they talk about oh they make the best hardware, the best switches. Cisco's like, they're talking software capabilities across the network, new architectures, reinventing, coming at it from the network which is obviously their strong point. And it just really sets up an interesting competitive dynamic between Cisco, certainly VMware, who's trying to do networking and storage what it did to servers. And now you've got IBM and Red Hat coming at it from applications and the development perspective. We're here in the DevNet Zone, and I think that's the other piece of the announcements that we're hearing today is developers can actually program with things IoT and new Use Cases. So, pretty exciting times. >> Stu, storylines around the Data Center, you made the comment and it was kind of a play on words on the keynote. Data is centered, centered, dash, ED, center-ed. So the Data Center concept is moving into the data being center the value proposition. This has been interesting because if you look at what DevNet has spawned and DevNet create under Susie Wee's leadership, you saw the role of APIs. So if data moves around the network, and that's the core competency of Cisco, moving packets from point A to point B, adding automation, adding intelligence, with intent based networking and cloud enabling it on the other side. You got to have access to data, it's got to be traversing and inter operating with multiple environments. This is now a architectural standard. Is Cisco from a product portfolio standpoint, whether it's security analytics, cloud apps management, IoT, and networking. Does it all come together? Your thoughts. >> Yeah so, first of all, Cisco plays in a lot of these environments. We talk not just Data Center but when you talk about branch office, something Cisco has been doing a really long time. And how do I network between all of those remote locations and my central location. And my central location might not be the data center, it might be a or multiple public clouds out there. So Cisco's been attacking this backed WAN optimization many years ago. SD-WAN really has taken that and much more. Super important when we talk about this multicloud environment and how I get that connectivity, so they're there. And Cisco from the ground up has gone through a lot of rebuild. So the CloudCentre Suite we talked about, micro services architecture built with Kubernetes, into that API economy that we're talking about which is a lot of what we talked about here in the DevNet Zone. Absolutely Cisco has, they're known in this space. They have a lot of the skills. They have a very broad platform of products out there. David Goeckeler this morning, he was just reeling off all the different areas they play to in saying, you know, we've got like 6,000 people in the opening key note and he's like I came and look at this room and I've got like 4x the amount of engineers working on your network and security issues that were here. Like 24,000 people. It's an army. There's a few companies outside of Google, Amazon and Microsoft that can haul on that engineering strength and that's just the internal place, what we love. We talked to Susie Wee and she's like we've got 500,000 on our community platform helping to build. IT, OT, IoT, all the network, all the security pieces so Cisco is not new to a lot of these, but is refocused on a lot of what they're doing. >> So the big news obviously is the ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex Anywhere and putting the data center, connecting those two worlds. You got the cloud as well. So the role of hyper-convergence is certainly key in this announcement here today. ACI Application centric-structured infrastructure is codewords for policy-based, intent-based networking, all stuff that Cisco's used to doing. Then when you connect it to the cloud, you've got Data Center, On-Premises, Cloud and Hyper-Convergence at the edge. This is the core, right? They've got the edge, multiple environments. You've got Cloud and you've got the Data Center kind of legacy environment which is evolving. Those are all coming together. Stu, what is, this is a cross-domain challenge. Is Cisco prepared? David, I'd love to get your comments on this as well, to be that domain vendor? Because multicloud truly will require data to be moving around, for policy to be automated and deployed across domains. This is a huge challenge. Yeah I mean John, it is challenging and if you look at the hyper-convergence infrastructure space, where Cisco plays with HyperFlex, goes up against VMware vSAN and Nutanix and the rest there, the people that sell that and build that aren't necessarily the ones that really understand multicloud and we've seen that space maturing for the last couple of years. Obviously Cisco's got a right to be at the table there and they're moving in that direction, but the data center folks and they are data center folks that have done networking and storage and all that piece, are they getting trained up and helping to help bridge to that multicloud environment? I think there's still a lot of work to go when I talk to the channel, when I talk to the people that are out there going to market on that. >> Well that's the big challenge is how do you move the base, how do you get them from point A to point B without spending a billion dollars. You heard Gordon today stand up there and say you got to change. Now, and he admitted it. Anytime anybody tells me I have to change, I kind of get defensive about it, but some of the things that I, I mean obviously this end-to-end architecture, they're in a position in theory anyway to do that. They, what choice do they have? A couple of things that struck me is they've got a new consumption model, the SAAS-based consumption model. They also have four validated designs for OT, for IoT apps which that's good to see some actual meat on that bone. They got like utility substations and mining operations and fleet management. I mean it's stuff that you wouldn't traditionally think about coming from a data center company. So they're making some moves that I think are substantive and necessary. >> Well I took some notes here. I wanted to get your commentary on this, guys 'cause to me this is the core news here is that Cisco is truly trying to put that end to end architecture from across domains. You're seeing their core data center business continue to be robust. That's their bread and butter. You've got the edge that's developing nicely with IoT and Enterprise Edge and other places around campus and then you've got multiclass so you've got the three-legged stool. Core data center, multicloud and Edge. Does this address the industry's demand for apps changing, workloads being distributed and then management across these multiple domains or a multicloud because you've got to manage this stuff. So cost to ownership, these are now the table stakes. Your thoughts on those three areas too. Core data center, multicloud and edge. >> Yeah I mean we've been talking about for the last year, the move from hardware to software is not an easy one. There are things that you need to change for their product. They need to change how their field handles it, compensation and how they support their channel is super challenging. At VMWorld last year, we really highlighted how that intercloud networking, what a critical piece it was. I was so excited that the original vision of what Nicira had for pre-acquisitions was starting to come out there because VMWare's coming after Cisco in that manner. Cisco, not like they're trying to create hypervisors. They're going to live in all those worlds, but there definitely is some conflict there and something I always look at, Cisco's got a giant ecosystem. They have hundreds of thousands of certified Cisco engineers and they've got a great ecosystem here. >> Very strong channel. >> Everybody in a strong channel, right. They go to market partners as well as the technology partners and they're still strong. We're going to have on this week a lot of those players here, but that change is something that is tough to go through and it's this journey that they're on. >> Well this, Dave brought up consumption. I want to dig into the consumption piece because how people consume the cloud obviously means they got to stand up to cloud too, multicloud. Cisco's clearly got Azure AWS and Google Cloud. Google seems to be a strategic partner as well as Amazon Azure but I think Google kind of feels like there's more strategic alliances there. I'm just speculating from my opinion, but if I'm a Cisco customer, it's pretty easy now to go multicloud. I don't need to do a lot differently. The question is how do I manage it, what's the cost, how do I consume it? This is going to be critical. Your thoughts. >> Well Cisco's claiming they're going to abstract that complexity and whatever APIs and software infrastructure or infrastructure of a service that they're using, they're going to make that, simplify that and allow you to have a single management console. So as I said before, they're coming at it from a networking perspective. Vmware is coming at it from the traditional hypervisor and trying to elbow its way into the networking and storage space and then as I said, you've got other companies like IBM and Red Hat now coming at it from the application space and Kubernetes is obviously an important role there. I think personally the networking is a right place, a good place to come from. The problem for customers is still going to be complexity 'cause the cloud providers are going to have their own management framework. Obviously vSphere is a big player here. Now you got Cisco at all and then a bunch of startups saying hey ours is even better. >> Well the IBM Red Hat combination. >> Right and so I don't foresee a day where you're going to have one single painted glass. We never had in this industry. It's always been Nirvana and so then it comes down to Cisco getting its fair share. I think Cisco's in a very good position to get its fair share for the reasons that Stu just mentioned. >> Stu, so I want to get your thoughts. We're in the DevNet Zone. That's where theCUBE is. It's our second year at Cisco Live! We'll be at the American show again this year. It's on the schedule, but the role of the developer, the role of infrastructure as code now is in place actually happening within Cisco's customer base. So if you're a Cisco customer, you're looking at this saying okay, I've been running the Cisco network services. What is the role of the network engineer? Is there a renaissance coming? We said this last year. I kind of see it happening here. The network is now the computer. The network is the data. This is a great opportunity for Cisco. Your thoughts on the culture of the Cisco customer base and that vibe of infrastructure's code. >> Yeah so John, I used to bristle a little bit when you said well we're going to turn all the network engineers and they're going to become coders and I said well I know a lot of network engineers and some of them love and thrive that, but a lot of them, they're in the CLI, they're doing their thing. If you go and walk around this DevNet zone, a lot of stuff that's happening isn't networking. They are builders. This reminds me of going into AWS ReInvent and talking about people here the tools and the skills that you need to have to be a builder and absolutely networking is a part of it, that managing orchestration security, all things that touch into the network, but it's not oh how do I manage my network switch better, which is kind of the hardware focused view and maybe code this, but it really is how am I building APIs, how am I leveraging things? I've got IO key demos out there and networking is in there, but it's not necessarily the thing and so therefore you got the wave of developers and builders and John, we know that's the future. You need to be a builder. How can you create faster? Things like server list or moving in that direction where I don't need, it's less about the coding, it's more about my application, my data and my building. >> You bring up a great point, Stu, and this is something that I always point to when I look at who's kind of bsing the marketplace in terms of speeds and fees and announcements. When you see people actually coding and being enabled to create value, you start to see that's a good signal and here in the DevNet Zone, I saw four or five demos that were writing software and apps taking advantage of the hardware, taking advantage of the network. So now the network is enabling through APIs to extend the data. This is kind of changing the concept of how packages are moved around the networks. So this is truly a tell sign in my opinion of the modern infrastructure. The question is, Dave, how fast will the customers migrate to being true devops or infrastructure as code customers writing apps, building new things, create that value? >> Well I would say this. Of all the sort of traditional large-scale, call them whatever, legacy enterprise data center companies, I think Cisco's the only one that I can really point to that has kind of got developers right. IBM, Blue Mix, StartStop, remember the EMC code initiative that was kind of a joke? And so Oracle owns Java and it still sort of struggles with developers so I think Cisco got it right and I think the reason they got it right is because they're focused. That's what I do like about Cisco's strategy and the reason why you obviously give them a high chance is because they're really focused on that networking piece. They're not trying to be all things to all people even though you can forecast that they're sort of headed in that direction, but they're starting from a position of strength. >> You made a good point. The success or failure of developer programs is about creating an environment where it's compatible with how their expectations are. Microservices containers, these abstraction layers that they're used to dealing with create value. Developers love that. The other thing I would say is that developers look at what they can do, the world's changed. It used to be that the network used to dictate what can happen to applications. Now applications need to program the network. I think this was a shift we saw with DevNet Create and DevNet two years ago where they started moving from the command line interface to more of a software abstractions or application interfaces where they say hey let's just do more with the network. So applications now require programmability. This is the shift, it's upside down from what it was when the industry started. So this new bridge has to be application-centric and to me that's what I get out of the cloud announcement around multicloud. You're starting to see the portfolio up and down their stack. From security they got stealthwatch tetration, that's SAAS, analytics, app dynamics among other things. Data Center, HyperFlex, UCS Nexus all lined up. Cloud-centric container platforms on multiple clouds, IoT nedic, V Edge, Meraki, cloud services router. This is now a portfolio. They've got the products, Stu. >> Absolutely, John. >> Okay guys we're going to have a great day. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're kicking it off here in Barcelona. Stay with us for more coverage here at Cisco Live! This is theCUBE. We'll be right back. (energetic music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its Ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2019's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Dave Cope who's the senior director, market development, Cisco Cloud platform. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. One of your products is the big focus of the keynote, introducing the CloudCenter Suite. One of the core announcements, this was pretty critical for Cisco, obviously multicloud, we've seen the Kubernetes relationship with Amazon. You've got Azure, Google Cloud. Cisco's tied up with the clouds, which is good, >> Right. >> They have the on center core data center, but now dealing with cloud has been really the hot topic, so thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> So I'm looking at your perspective first on cloud in general within Cisco and within your customer base and the industry. What is multicloud? Why is it important? Why is it a wave worth betting on? >> You know, it's a great question, I think. Actually, it's a really fun time right now because if you think about it, it's almost exactly 10 years ago where AWS's EC2 first came out of beta, and so, everybody's talking about the cloud, but it really hasn't been around that long. And even in that sort of ten-year period, it's gone through sort of skepticism to, I think, let me try some non-critical apps, to debate about public or private, or which is the best public, to, today, 94% of the businesses say they either are, or are planning to use, multicloud environments. And, so if you think about it, that's both provided a lot of advantages but also created a degree of complexity in how do I apply traditional disciplines like network management and security across environments that I control and don't control? So it's a whole new world. >> And the DevNet Zone, which for theCUBE is based out of again this year, has a hot growth vibe to it. People are joining the community in record numbers. The demos here aren't just like canned demos, they're actually real code. >> Exactly. >> So you're seeing a developer framework around the network, and the cloud, the cloud is not a one-vendor product. It's an architecture, it's a concept. And so cloud operations is in the cloud, it's also being done on premise and the edge, so everything's cloud now, if you think about it. >> Well I think what we saw is, obviously, huge initial growth of cloud and a lot of applications moving to the cloud, but it's always been my hypothesis and I think it's actually coming true that we're now, and some of the newer technologies support this, we're seeing this natural distribution of workloads across all these environments, whether it's the public cloud, or the edge, or the data center. And it's now technologies that allow you to put the workloads in the right place based on business priorities, not IT priorities. And now I believe you're starting to see this sort of natural stasis and the whole pie grow again. >> So I got to ask you the question from a customer perspective. So I'm a customer, I say, Dave, love it, you had me at cloud, I'm there. I got all this stuff to deal with. I've been working my business, running my business. Love it, what's in it for me though? What's the impact? What do I need to do differently? Is it, do I have to change anything? How does a customer engage with Cisco and the cloud and the multitude of technologies that are available to them? It can seem complex. >> Yeah, I think people had hoped that the cloud would make everything easy, but what they're finding is that the cloud is not the cloud. It's private clouds, public clouds, virtual private clouds. And if you think about it, good free market principles, all these cloud providers are competing with each other so they're all becoming very different. Cisco finds, I think, itself in a very unique position because of its heritage around network management and security, which is connecting everything together. We don't have our own cloud, so what we focus on is providing a very broad and deep solution to be able to manage workloads across all of these environments. So you truly can place the workload in the right place. >> I wonder if you could help us unpack a little bit what you just said, which is, the clouds are actually becoming more different, not more similar, you know. With the Kubernetes show >> That's right. >> we talked to Cisco, we talked to the whole ecosystem. The founders of Kubernetes said they weren't creating a magic layer, that's not what Kubernetes is. There's some base functionality, but everybody's building on top of it, and that's where a lot of the complexity comes in. So, how does CloudCenter Suite, you don't want to do what, in the past it was, you know, let's dumb down everything so that you get a least common denominator. I want to be able to leverage the individual features of my Azure and my AWS, and in my data center. But, I need to be able to get my arms around managing that whole environment. >> Yeah, and if you think about the old world, you know, if you had an application and a target, whether it's a cloud or any data center, you'd have to hard wire those together. And as you have more and more apps and they're changing faster and now more and more cloud environments with no standardization across those environments, this whole hard wiring together doesn't work anymore, so we have to rethink cloud management, and that's what CloudCenter's really all about. How do you describe an application, its components, sequence, and dependencies, independent of the nuances of those targets, and allow CloudCenter, once you define your application, to understand the resources on each of these environments and lay down that application natively on those different environments. And it does provide both least common denominator support around core primitives like compute storage network security, but also provides access to these higher-level services, whether on case of AWS, it's RDS, ELB, et cetera, so you really get the best of both worlds. Move there easily, manage the workload and take advantage of all these rich services. >> You know, I love the keynote clever play on words, data center, center, data is the center of the value proposition. That kind of highlights just basic networking 101, move a packet from point A to point B. Now you have more intelligence in the data, so the data layer is now the enabling opportunity to build software. So look no further than microservices and containers, and you go, hey, this is pretty cool. Policy-based, sounds like the service meshes. So you got policy-based whatever, that's been a core competency in the network, moving to the application with applications programming. So we all kind of like to go, that's great, that's dev ops, thank you, check. Now, how do you deploy it? So, I got to ask you on the CloudCenter 5.0, the suite, so this is new, this is big news, how does that help me move to a microservices architecture? What is it offering? What's different than CloudCenter before it? >> So CloudCenter has always been this platform that allows you to manage the entire life cycle of applications across any private or public clouds. And it's always been a very comprehensive solution, perhaps too comprehensive for some people and so, with CloudCenter Suite 5.0 what we've announced is both new functionality and easier consumption. On the new functionality we've extended our price and performance benchmarking that allowed you to identify where to place workloads, to additional cost optimization capabilities that would actually make recommendations and allow you to remediate and take advantage of those cost optimization recommendations. We have a new Action Orchestrator workflow, which is a customizable workflow but with out-of-the-box connectors that allows you to integrate with both Cisco and third party products. Cisco security products, things like non-Cisco, ITSM ServiceNow applications. So you can provide users with a catalog. So new functionality-- >> That's the workload manager. >> That's the workload manager that provides those out-of-the-box connectors and a workflow to be able to reach out, run those routines. >> So can that do end-to-end management? >> Absolutely, absolutely. And we talk about CloudCenter, sort of full life cycle management, is the modeling of the app sort of the benchmarking or cost optimization, the deployment of the app, whether it be traditional VM based or microservice based, and those working together, and finally, the ongoing day two, day three management. >> So, I get that, you guys had a little bit of workflow management before, but the new things are orchestration, Action Orchestrator, and the cost optimizer. The cost optimizer I can get, that's like a TCO thing. >> Yes. >> The Action Orchestrator's interesting to me. What is that? What does it mean? Is that, like, just cloud-enabled? What is that, what does that mean? Action Orchestrator. >> It's really a dynamic workflow engine that allows you to either create customizable workflows or, if you've already invested in things like script libraries, in your application routine, it can reach out to say, go do a snapshot of the data and then reach back into the application technology. Or reach out to a third party tool, like an ITSM tool, or reach out to their CMDB and update their CMDB to do capacity management. So it gives you all of that flexibility. And, by the way, in all of this, while we were on-prem only, now we're going to provide both on-prem and CloudCenter Suite as a SaaS so now it really makes it nice. It also is available in three tiers, so it's never been easier to start simple and grow. Could be one app, one cloud, and then you could expand clouds, apps, and users, and functionality as you grow. >> But what if I have other systems under other management systems? Does it integrate into those? >> Yes. >> Do I have to toggle between them? What's the-- >> No, it will actually integrate into those management systems. But the whole idea is, if you think about the average Global 2000 company, today they have more than four public cloud providers, and many more regions than that, and this does not include SaaS apps, so what I think most companies realize is they don't want to have siloed management environments where they have to have expensive skills to manage everything. >> Yeah, we spent a lot of time talking about those technical pieces. How do we get something to work in multiple clouds or move them? But one of the biggest challenges I hear from users is the skillset. You know, I'm CCIE certified, I understand how to mange my environment. I've gone through my AWS certification and there's that. I need to learn a new language when I go, you know, go do Azure. So how are you, from a management standpoint, going to help, no matter which point I'm coming from, understand and use this tool simply? >> Yeah, it's sort of interesting. So a very large media company, I can't use their name, but you'll find this analogies, they found that, on average, they needed two fairly highly-paid skilled individuals for every target cloud environment. The other thing, by the way, is sort of interesting they measured, is that without sort of a cloud management platform, for every pairing of an app to a cloud, they had to custom-write about 1,200 lines of script. And every time the app or the cloud changed, and they did, they had to re-write 20% of those script libraries. So, between skilled resources and these manual script libraries, it just becomes unmanageable to have diverse apps across diverse cloud environments. >> And what's the status, just a quick update on the multicloud relationships? Google, AWS, Azure. The recent announcement we covered was the Amazon Kubernetes deal, congratulations, great deal. What's the status of the relationship with Cisco multicloud strategy for your customers that have Google, Azure, and AWS? >> Sure, well first of all, more broadly, CloudCenter today allows you to deploy and manage applications across all of the popular private and public clouds, and I think that adds up today to be about 15. So you can do that. From time to time, we'll see new technologies, in this case, Kubernetes, where we'll provide specific strategic partnership solutions to let our customers take advantage of that. So we announced the hybrid Kubernetes solution with Google and that with AWS. And these are very interesting because now we're taking Kubernetes, which is evolving from really a cool developer thing and now starting to move into production where IT ops gets involved and they say, how do I apply policies? How do I have governance, security? And these solutions with Google and AWS create really that transparency of the data center and those cloud environments. >> We were talking before we came on camera here about your history, and I want to get your perspective a little bit more on the entrepreneurial side in a bit, but I got to ask you, you go back, seen the early waves of IT. It started out single vendor, big mainframe, you know the history there, then it became the whole open systems, networking, the web and the internet. >> Client-server along the way. >> Client-server. But the one thing that was consistent over those decades was the word multi-vendor. Multi-vendor was important. Support multiple vendors, that became the interoperability and then growth happened. So good things came behind that. We're seeing the same trend with multicloud. Similar dynamic, >> I think you're right, yeah. >> But different environment, obviously cloud. If that's the case, multi-vendor created a lot of opportunities, how do you see multicloud creating opportunities for customers who are changing, as well as people building apps? >> I think we have actually seen that shift in the cloud, so I think for a lot of people the cloud may be reducing costs or shifting from CAPEX to OPEX, but today what I see is it's about accessing innovation and that these clouds are often becoming an extension of their engineering organizations and you never know where that innovation is going to be able to occur. And so I may want an Alexa API for a voice-driven application, or access AIML from, say, Google. And so now I think multiclouds, multi-vendor, is driven by access to innovation and it's also about optionality. CFOs talk a lot about optionality and maintaining purchasing power and they'll often put a value on that, 10 to 15% value. Just having that optionality as innovation occurs I can take advantage of it. >> And the speed too, on the agility. >> Oh yeah. >> I mean, this is like, real competitive advantage. People are building management practices around encouraging versus discouraging experiments or tests. >> Well think about where we started this talk, is that, it was just 10 years ago where there was really one person, there was AWS EC2, and today there are a lot of choices and a lot of technology and innovation. The whole idea is, how do I easily access that? >> Well I want to get your perspective, since you're here, on, people might not know that Dave has an entrepreneurial background, done eight startups. Last one was sold to Cisco, so you're now in the big company with a great product, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> But customers have to be entrepreneurial. We were just talking about being agile, that's an entrepreneurial vibe or spirit, >> Right. >> and you're starting to see agile really be very tactically like entrepreneurs. You know, taking new territory, trying things, failing, iterating. This is kind of the dog whistle for entrepreneurship. >> Right. >> How can customers, Cisco customers, be more entrepreneurial with this new set of technologies from Cisco and the cloud? Because that's really what's happening. I got to refactor my existing resources and be entrepreneurial. How can a customer be entrepreneurial? What's your advice? >> Well, I probably have a bit of a jaded position today, but I would say that technology enables that agility because now I can start to have an abstracted access to some of these capabilities. So we talked about hard wiring into different environments, once I did that, I made that investment, and I could not be very agile. Today, whether it's things like cloud management platforms, or things like Kubernetes, it gives me that agility to develop and deploy anywhere. Things like data hub technologies, like SAP's Data Hub that says, now I have apps anywhere accessing data anywhere, I no longer have to hard wire everything, multicloud doesn't have to mean lifting and shifting or refactoring everything, I can now start stretching these configurations across multiple environments which gives me that agility to set it up and to change as things change. >> So, more creative thinking probably going to come to the table. >> Well, more creative thinking, but more agile abilities to implement your creative thinking. I think technology-- >> Very valuable solutions. >> Exactly. >> You know, you got to make money. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And fun. >> Yeah. >> Dave, thanks so much for coming on. Great to see you, congratulations. Dave Cope is senior director, he's talking about CloudCenter here among other things, at Cisco Live! Barcelona. This is theCUBE, I'm Jeff Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its Ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2019's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Dave Cope who's the senior director, market development, Cisco Cloud platform. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. One of your products is the big focus of the keynote, introducing the CloudCenter Suite. One of the core announcements, this was pretty critical for Cisco, obviously multicloud, we've seen the Kubernetes relationship with Amazon. You've got Azure, Google Cloud. Cisco's tied up with the clouds, which is good, >> Right. >> They have the on center core data center, but now dealing with cloud has been really the hot topic, so thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> So I'm looking at your perspective first on cloud in general within Cisco and within your customer base and the industry. What is multicloud? Why is it important? Why is it a wave worth betting on? >> You know, it's a great question, I think. Actually, it's a really fun time right now because if you think about it, it's almost exactly 10 years ago where AWS's EC2 first came out of beta, and so, everybody's talking about the cloud, but it really hasn't been around that long. And even in that sort of ten-year period, it's gone through sort of skepticism to, I think, let me try some non-critical apps, to debate about public or private, or which is the best public, to, today, 94% of the businesses say they either are, or are planning to use, multicloud environments. And, so if you think about it, that's both provided a lot of advantages but also created a degree of complexity in how do I apply traditional disciplines like network management and security across environments that I control and don't control? So it's a whole new world. >> And the DevNet Zone, which for theCUBE is based out of again this year, has a hot growth vibe to it. People are joining the community in record numbers. The demos here aren't just like canned demos, they're actually real code. >> Exactly. >> So you're seeing a developer framework around the network, and the cloud, the cloud is not a one-vendor product. It's an architecture, it's a concept. And so cloud operations is in the cloud, it's also being done on premise and the edge, so everything's cloud now, if you think about it. >> Well I think what we saw is, obviously, huge initial growth of cloud and a lot of applications moving to the cloud, but it's always been my hypothesis and I think it's actually coming true that we're now, and some of the newer technologies support this, we're seeing this natural distribution of workloads across all these environments, whether it's the public cloud, or the edge, or the data center. And it's now technologies that allow you to put the workloads in the right place based on business priorities, not IT priorities. And now I believe you're starting to see this sort of natural stasis and the whole pie grow again. >> So I got to ask you the question from a customer perspective. So I'm a customer, I say, Dave, love it, you had me at cloud, I'm there. I got all this stuff to deal with. I've been working my business, running my business. Love it, what's in it for me though? What's the impact? What do I need to do differently? Is it, do I have to change anything? How does a customer engage with Cisco and the cloud and the multitude of technologies that are available to them? It can seem complex. >> Yeah, I think people had hoped that the cloud would make everything easy, but what they're finding is that the cloud is not the cloud. It's private clouds, public clouds, virtual private clouds. And if you think about it, good free market principles, all these cloud providers are competing with each other so they're all becoming very different. Cisco finds, I think, itself in a very unique position because of its heritage around network management and security, which is connecting everything together. We don't have our own cloud, so what we focus on is providing a very broad and deep solution to be able to manage workloads across all of these environments. So you truly can place the workload in the right place. >> I wonder if you could help us unpack a little bit what you just said, which is, the clouds are actually becoming more different, not more similar, you know. With the Kubernetes show >> That's right. >> we talked to Cisco, we talked to the whole ecosystem. The founders of Kubernetes said they weren't creating a magic layer, that's not what Kubernetes is. There's some base functionality, but everybody's building on top of it, and that's where a lot of the complexity comes in. So, how does CloudCenter Suite, you don't want to do what, in the past it was, you know, let's dumb down everything so that you get a least common denominator. I want to be able to leverage the individual features of my Azure and my AWS, and in my data center. But, I need to be able to get my arms around managing that whole environment. >> Yeah, and if you think about the old world, you know, if you had an application and a target, whether it's a cloud or any data center, you'd have to hard wire those together. And as you have more and more apps and they're changing faster and now more and more cloud environments with no standardization across those environments, this whole hard wiring together doesn't work anymore, so we have to rethink cloud management, and that's what CloudCenter's really all about. How do you describe an application, its components, sequence, and dependencies, independent of the nuances of those targets, and allow CloudCenter, once you define your application, to understand the resources on each of these environments and lay down that application natively on those different environments. And it does provide both least common denominator support around core primitives like compute storage network security, but also provides access to these higher-level services, whether on case of AWS, it's RDS, ELB, et cetera, so you really get the best of both worlds. Move there easily, manage the workload and take advantage of all these rich services. >> You know, I love the keynote clever play on words, data center, center, data is the center of the value proposition. That kind of highlights just basic networking 101, move a packet from point A to point B. Now you have more intelligence in the data, so the data layer is now the enabling opportunity to build software. So look no further than microservices and containers, and you go, hey, this is pretty cool. Policy-based, sounds like the service meshes. So you got policy-based whatever, that's been a core competency in the network, moving to the application with applications programming. So we all kind of like to go, that's great, that's dev ops, thank you, check. Now, how do you deploy it? So, I got to ask you on the CloudCenter 5.0, the suite, so this is new, this is big news, how does that help me move to a microservices architecture? What is it offering? What's different than CloudCenter before it? >> So CloudCenter has always been this platform that allows you to manage the entire life cycle of applications across any private or public clouds. And it's always been a very comprehensive solution, perhaps too comprehensive for some people and so, with CloudCenter Suite 5.0 what we've announced is both new functionality and easier consumption. On the new functionality we've extended our price and performance benchmarking that allowed you to identify where to place workloads, to additional cost optimization capabilities that would actually make recommendations and allow you to remediate and take advantage of those cost optimization recommendations. We have a new Action Orchestrator workflow, which is a customizable workflow but with out-of-the-box connectors that allows you to integrate with both Cisco and third party products. Cisco security products, things like non-Cisco, ITSM ServiceNow applications. So you can provide users with a catalog. So new functionality-- >> That's the workload manager. >> That's the workload manager that provides those out-of-the-box connectors and a workflow to be able to reach out, run those routines. >> So can that do end-to-end management? >> Absolutely, absolutely. And we talk about CloudCenter, sort of full life cycle management, is the modeling of the app sort of the benchmarking or cost optimization, the deployment of the app, whether it be traditional VM based or microservice based, and those working together, and finally, the ongoing day two, day three management. >> So, I get that, you guys had a little bit of workflow management before, but the new things are orchestration, Action Orchestrator, and the cost optimizer. The cost optimizer I can get, that's like a TCO thing. >> Yes. >> The Action Orchestrator's interesting to me. What is that? What does it mean? Is that, like, just cloud-enabled? What is that, what does that mean? Action Orchestrator. >> It's really a dynamic workflow engine that allows you to either create customizable workflows or, if you've already invested in things like script libraries, in your application routine, it can reach out to say, go do a snapshot of the data and then reach back into the application technology. Or reach out to a third party tool, like an ITSM tool, or reach out to their CMDB and update their CMDB to do capacity management. So it gives you all of that flexibility. And, by the way, in all of this, while we were on-prem only, now we're going to provide both on-prem and CloudCenter Suite as a SaaS so now it really makes it nice. It also is available in three tiers, so it's never been easier to start simple and grow. Could be one app, one cloud, and then you could expand clouds, apps, and users, and functionality as you grow. >> But what if I have other systems under other management systems? Does it integrate into those? >> Yes. >> Do I have to toggle between them? What's the-- >> No, it will actually integrate into those management systems. But the whole idea is, if you think about the average Global 2000 company, today they have more than four public cloud providers, and many more regions than that, and this does not include SaaS apps, so what I think most companies realize is they don't want to have siloed management environments where they have to have expensive skills to manage everything. >> Yeah, we spent a lot of time talking about those technical pieces. How do we get something to work in multiple clouds or move them? But one of the biggest challenges I hear from users is the skillset. You know, I'm CCIE certified, I understand how to mange my environment. I've gone through my AWS certification and there's that. I need to learn a new language when I go, you know, go do Azure. So how are you, from a management standpoint, going to help, no matter which point I'm coming from, understand and use this tool simply? >> Yeah, it's sort of interesting. So a very large media company, I can't use their name, but you'll find this analogies, they found that, on average, they needed two fairly highly-paid skilled individuals for every target cloud environment. The other thing, by the way, is sort of interesting they measured, is that without sort of a cloud management platform, for every pairing of an app to a cloud, they had to custom-write about 1,200 lines of script. And every time the app or the cloud changed, and they did, they had to re-write 20% of those script libraries. So, between skilled resources and these manual script libraries, it just becomes unmanageable to have diverse apps across diverse cloud environments. >> And what's the status, just a quick update on the multicloud relationships? Google, AWS, Azure. The recent announcement we covered was the Amazon Kubernetes deal, congratulations, great deal. What's the status of the relationship with Cisco multicloud strategy for your customers that have Google, Azure, and AWS? >> Sure, well first of all, more broadly, CloudCenter today allows you to deploy and manage applications across all of the popular private and public clouds, and I think that adds up today to be about 15. So you can do that. From time to time, we'll see new technologies, in this case, Kubernetes, where we'll provide specific strategic partnership solutions to let our customers take advantage of that. So we announced the hybrid Kubernetes solution with Google and that with AWS. And these are very interesting because now we're taking Kubernetes, which is evolving from really a cool developer thing and now starting to move into production where IT ops gets involved and they say, how do I apply policies? How do I have governance, security? And these solutions with Google and AWS create really that transparency of the data center and those cloud environments. >> We were talking before we came on camera here about your history, and I want to get your perspective a little bit more on the entrepreneurial side in a bit, but I got to ask you, you go back, seen the early waves of IT. It started out single vendor, big mainframe, you know the history there, then it became the whole open systems, networking, the web and the internet. >> Client-server along the way. >> Client-server. But the one thing that was consistent over those decades was the word multi-vendor. Multi-vendor was important. Support multiple vendors, that became the interoperability and then growth happened. So good things came behind that. We're seeing the same trend with multicloud. Similar dynamic, >> I think you're right, yeah. >> But different environment, obviously cloud. If that's the case, multi-vendor created a lot of opportunities, how do you see multicloud creating opportunities for customers who are changing, as well as people building apps? >> I think we have actually seen that shift in the cloud, so I think for a lot of people the cloud may be reducing costs or shifting from CAPEX to OPEX, but today what I see is it's about accessing innovation and that these clouds are often becoming an extension of their engineering organizations and you never know where that innovation is going to be able to occur. And so I may want an Alexa API for a voice-driven application, or access AIML from, say, Google. And so now I think multiclouds, multi-vendor, is driven by access to innovation and it's also about optionality. CFOs talk a lot about optionality and maintaining purchasing power and they'll often put a value on that, 10 to 15% value. Just having that optionality as innovation occurs I can take advantage of it. >> And the speed too, on the agility. >> Oh yeah. >> I mean, this is like, real competitive advantage. People are building management practices around encouraging versus discouraging experiments or tests. >> Well think about where we started this talk, is that, it was just 10 years ago where there was really one person, there was AWS EC2, and today there are a lot of choices and a lot of technology and innovation. The whole idea is, how do I easily access that? >> Well I want to get your perspective, since you're here, on, people might not know that Dave has an entrepreneurial background, done eight startups. Last one was sold to Cisco, so you're now in the big company with a great product, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> But customers have to be entrepreneurial. We were just talking about being agile, that's an entrepreneurial vibe or spirit, >> Right. >> and you're starting to see agile really be very tactically like entrepreneurs. You know, taking new territory, trying things, failing, iterating. This is kind of the dog whistle for entrepreneurship. >> Right. >> How can customers, Cisco customers, be more entrepreneurial with this new set of technologies from Cisco and the cloud? Because that's really what's happening. I got to refactor my existing resources and be entrepreneurial. How can a customer be entrepreneurial? What's your advice? >> Well, I probably have a bit of a jaded position today, but I would say that technology enables that agility because now I can start to have an abstracted access to some of these capabilities. So we talked about hard wiring into different environments, once I did that, I made that investment, and I could not be very agile. Today, whether it's things like cloud management platforms, or things like Kubernetes, it gives me that agility to develop and deploy anywhere. Things like data hub technologies, like SAP's Data Hub that says, now I have apps anywhere accessing data anywhere, I no longer have to hard wire everything, multicloud doesn't have to mean lifting and shifting or refactoring everything, I can now start stretching these configurations across multiple environments which gives me that agility to set it up and to change as things change. >> So, more creative thinking probably going to come to the table. >> Well, more creative thinking, but more agile abilities to implement your creative thinking. I think technology-- >> Very valuable solutions. >> Exactly. >> You know, you got to make money. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And fun. >> Yeah. >> Dave, thanks so much for coming on. Great to see you, congratulations. Dave Cope is senior director, he's talking about CloudCenter here among other things, at Cisco Live! Barcelona. This is theCUBE, I'm Jeff Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE, covering the Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we're here in Barcelona. Welcome to theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2019. Cisco Live! Europe. I'm John Furrier with my hosts this week Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante breaking down all the action. Keynotes over. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, guys, Cisco Live! Introducing some new innovations, Stu and Dave, around reinventing networking. Couple key themes big announcements around ACI, anywhere application-centric, infrastructure, HyperFlex and the new CloudCenter Suite where they're doubling down on Cloud, redefining the network. Stu, we've been here last year. We've been watching Cisco. Policy-based, intent-based networking, Cisco's tying it all together with new branding, The Bridge to Tomorrow, your thoughts. >> Yeah John, I actually, I like some of the new branding The Bridge to Tomorrow, I've been critical of Cisco. Cisco always said, oh well networking's everywhere and it's really important, and it's like, well okay but where's the meat? Where's the detail behind this? They've done a number of acquisitions in the space. They're making sure that they understand where they are. And they had some failures along the way. I mean, call a spade a spade, John, they are going to be a leader in multi-cloud is where they want to be, but, they had some falters along in being a public cloud. The inter-cloud message that they had, they confused the service providers, they didn't understand how they played with they hyper-scale players and now they're understanding where they sit, S.D. Wayne critically important, where they live in the data center and it's interesting we talk about the, do we talk about the data center? Or do we care where the data is centered? And of course that is not in one place but it is many places. We know customers today live in a multi-cloud word, how I get to my data how I leverage my data is critically important and the networking and management is something that is critical across all those so right, as you said, ACI and HyperFlex, the CloudCenter suite I know is an area we're going to dig into a bunch this week Because Cisco has an opportunity to play across these environments, but, Cisco has been trying for a long time to be the manager of managers in these environments, I mean, I think back to things Dave Vellante and the Wikibon team and I have done for years talking about, how do you manage this heterogeneous world and it's just, instead of multi-vendor, we're now talking multi-cloud. >> And you know what, everything is coming together, Dave, we've been covering Cisco we're looking at the timing of the positioning it's seems to be coming together, and around the re-branding, which by the way, I agree with Stu, I like it. The bridge to tomorrow, it resinates with me maybe because I'm from the Bay Area but, the bridging two worlds, a bridging on premises and cloud together in a very seamless way and an elegant way architecturally, so the branding ties in with really much a rounding out of the portfolio so a lot of story lines to follow the new branding, Chuck Robbins getting his sea legs now as Cisco goes to the next level And clearly they see multi-cloud as their positioning because this has been Cisco's core positioning for many, many years this idea of enabling other people to do innovation whether its applications and work loads now they're connecting two worlds Your thoughts on the timing and their position vis-a-vis industry. >> Well Cisco talked this morning in the keynote about another bridge on one side of the network is users and devices and the other side of the network are application and data and we've talked for years about how the network is flattening and traffic is going east-west etc. But, inter-clouding, if you will, puts increased pressure on that and that is clearly Cisco's strategy to be the best at connecting whether its on prim and public clouds and between public clouds. Cisco's got to make the case that on our networks, you're going to be higher performance and more secure. And that's certainly what they are implying. They're also making a big transition from being a hardware company to a software company. When you listen to VMware, they talk about Cisco they talk about oh they make the best hardware, the best switches and Cisco's like no. They're talking software capabilities across the network, new architectures, reinventing, coming at it from the network, which is obviously their strong point and it just really sets up an interesting competitive dynamic between Cisco, certainly VMware who's trying to do to networking and storage what it did to servers, and know you've got IBM and Red Hat coming at it from applications, and the development perspective. We're here in the DevNet zone and I think that's the other piece of the announcements that we're hearing today is developers can actually program with things like IoT, and new use cases, so pretty exciting times. >> Stu, story lines around the data center you made a comment that was kind of a play on words on the key note, data is centered, so center dash ed, center-ed, so the data center concept is moving into data being center of the value proposition. This has been interesting because if you look at what DevNet has spawned and DevNet created under Susie Wee's leadership you saw the role of API's. So if data moves around the network and that's the core competency of Cisco moving packets from point A to point B Adding automation, adding intelligence, with intent based networking and cloud enabling on the other side, you got to have access to the data, the data's got to be traversing and interoperating with multiple environments. This is now a architectural standard. Is Cisco, from a product portfolio stand point whether it's security, analytics, cloud app management, IoT, networking, does it all come together? Your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, first of all, Cisco plays in a lot of these environments. We talked not just data center, but, when you talk about branch office something Cisco has been doing for a really long time, and how do I network between all of those remote applications and my central location, and my central location might not be the data center, it might be a or multiple public clouds out there. So Cisco's been attacking this back when optimization many years ago. SD-Wan really has taken that and much more you know, super important when we talk about this multi-cloud environment and how I get that connectivity so they're there and Cisco from the ground up has gone through a lot of rebuild. So, the CloudCenter suite that we talk about, Microservice's architecture built with Kubernetes into that API economy that we're talking about which is a lot about what we talk about here in the DevNet zone. So, absolutely, Cisco has, they're known as space, they have a lot of the skills, they have a very broad platform of products out there. David Goeckeler this morning, he's just reeling off all the different areas they play to and saying, we've got like 6,000 people in the opening keynote, and he's like, I came and looked at this room, and I've got like four x the amount of engineers working on your networking security issues that were here. It's like 24,000 people it's an army, there's very few companies outside of Google, Amazon and Microsoft, that can call on that engineering strength and that's just the internal piece what we love, we talked to Susie Wee and she's like, we've got 500,000 on our community platform helping to build, IT, OT, IoT, all the network, all the security pieces so, Cisco is not new to a lot of these but, is re-focused on a lot of what they are doing. >> So the big news obviously is the ACI anywhere in hyperfex anywhere and putting the data center, connecting those two worlds and you got the cloud as well so the role of hyper-convergence is certainly key in this announcements here today. ACI application center infrastructure just code words for policy based, intent-based networking, all the stuff that Cisco's used to doing. Then when you connect to the cloud, you got data center, on premises, cloud, and then hyper-convergence at the edge. This is the core, right, they got the edge, multiple environments, you got cloud, and you got the data center, legacy environment which is evolving, Those are all coming together, Stu. This is cross-domain challenge. Is Cisco prepared? David I'd love to get your comments on this as well, to be that cross-domain vendor? Because multi-cloud truly will require data to be moving around, policies to be automated and deployed across domains. This is a huge challenge. >> Yeah, I mean, John, it is challenging, and if you look at the hyper-convergence infrastructure space, where Cisco plays with HyperFlex goes up against VMware vSAN, Nutanix and the rest there, the people that sell that and build that, are necessarily the ones that really understand multi-cloud. We've seen that space maturing for the last couple of years. Obviously Cisco's got a right to be at the table there and they're moving in that direction, but, to the data center folks, and they are data center folks that have done networking and storage and all that, are they getting trained up and and helping to help bridge to that multi-cloud environment? I think there's still a lot of work to go and I talked to the channel, when I talked to the people who are out there going to market on that. >> Well that's the big challenge, is how do you move the base, how do you get them from point A to point B without, spending a billion dollars? You heard Gordon today stand up there and say, you got to change. Now, and he admitted, anytime somebody tells me I have to change, I kind of get defensive about it. But some of the things that I. Well obviously this end-to-end architecture, they're in a position, in theory anyway to do that, what choice do they have? A couple of things that struck me is they've got a new consumption model, SaaS-based consumption model, they also announced four validated designs for OT from IoT apps. It's good to see some actually meat on that bone. You got like utility sub-stations and mining operations and fleet management, I mean, it's stuff that you would'nt traditionally think about from coming from a data center company. So they're making some moves that I think are substantive and necessary. >> Well I took some notes down I wanted to get your comments on this guys, cause, to me, this is the core news here, is that Cisco is truly trying to put that end-to-end architecture around cross-domains, you seeing their core data center business continue to be robust, that's they're bread and butter. You got the Edge that's developing nicely with IoT and Enterprise Edge and other places around campus. Then you got multi-cloud, so you got the three-legged stool. Core data center, multi-cloud, and Edge. Does this address the industries demand for apps changing, work loads being distributed, and then, management across these multiple domains or multi-cloud, because you got to manage this stuff. So cost to ownership, these are now the table stakes, your thoughts on those three areas, Stu, core data center, multi-cloud, and Edge? >> Yeah, I mean we've been talking about for the last year, the move from hardware to software is not an easy one. There are things that you need to change for product that you need to change how their field handles it, the whole. The compensation and how they support their channel, is super challenging. At VMworld last year, we really highlighted how that inter-cloud networking, what a critical piece it was. I was so excited, that the original vision of what Nicira had pre-acquisition was starting to come out there, because VMware's coming after Cisco in that manner. Cisco, not like they're trying to create high providers, they are going to live in all those worlds, but, there definitely is some conflict there and something I always look at, Cisco's got a gigantic ecosystem. They have, hundreds of thousands of certified Cisco engineers and they've got a great ecosystem here. >> And a strong channel. >> And a strong channel. Right, that go to market, partners as well as the technology partners, and they're still strong. We're going to have on this week a lot of those players here, but, that change is something that is tough to go through, and, it's this journey that they're on. >> Well, this, Dave brought up to consumption, I want to dig into the consumption piece because how people consume the cloud obviously means that they got to stand up the cloud, multi-cloud. Cisco's clearly got Azure AWS and Google Cloud. Google seems to be a strategic partner as well as Amazon, Azure, but I think Google, kind of feels like this more strategic alliance there, I'm just speculating from my opinion, but, if I'm a Cisco customer, it's pretty easy now to go multi-cloud, I don't need to a lot of things differently. The question is, how do I manage it, what's the cost, and how do I consume it? This is going to be critical. Your thoughts? >> Well, so, Cisco's claiming they're going to extract that complexity, and whatever API's and software infrastructure, infrastructure's a service that your using, they're going to make that simple, simplify that and allow you to have a, single management console. So that, I said before, they're coming at it from a networking perspective, VMware is coming at it from the traditional hypervisor and trying to elbow its way into the networking against storage space and as I said, you got other companies like IBM and Red Hat now coming at it from the application space and Kubernetes is obviously an important role there. I think personally, I think that networking is a right place, a good place to come from. The problem for customers is still going to be complexity. Because the cloud providers are going to have their own, management framework obviously, vSphere is a big player here and now you got Cisco at all, and a bunch of start-ups saying hey, ours are even better. >> Well in the IBM, Red Hat accommodation. >> Right, so I don't foresee a day where your going to have one single painted glass, we've never had in this industry, it's always been nirvana, and so, then comes down to Cisco getting its fair share. I think Cisco's in a very good position to get its fair share for the reasons that Stu just mentioned. >> Stu, so I want to get your thoughts we're in the DevNet zone, that's where theCUBE is. It's our second year at Cisco Live! We'll be at the North America show again this year, it's on the schedule, but the role of the developer, the role of infrastructure as code now is in place, actually happening within Cisco's customer base. So if your a Cisco customer, you're looking at this saying, okay, I've been running the Cisco network, I've got all the portfolios, services, what is the role of the network engineer? Is there a renaissance coming? We've said this last year, I kind of see it happening here, the network is now the computer, the network is the data. This is a great opportunity for Cisco. Your thoughts on the culture of the Cisco customer base and that vibe of infrastructure as code? >> Yeah, so, John, I used to bristle a little bit, when you said, well, we're going to turn all the network engineers and they're going to become coders, and I said, well, I know a lot of network engineers and some of them love and thrive that, but, a lot of them, they're in the CLI, they're doing their thing. If you walk around this DevNet zone, a lot of the stuff that happening isn't networking. They are builders. This reminds me of going to AWS Reinvent, taking about people here, the tools, the skills you need to have to be a builder. And absolutely, networking is a part of it, that management, orchestration, security, all the things that touch into the network, but it's not, oh how do I manage my network switch better? Which was kind of the hardware focus view, and maybe code this, but, it really is, how am I building API's, how am I leveraging things, I've got IoT demos out there and it's networking is in there, but, it's not necessarily the thing, and, so therefore, you've got this wave of developers and builders and, John, we know that's the future, you need to be a builder, how can you create faster, things like server lists, or moving in that direction where I don't need, it's less about the coding, it's more about my application, my data and my building. >> You bring up a great point, Stu, and this is something that I always, I point to when I look at who's kind of BSing the market place in terms of speeds and feeds, and announcements. When you see people actually coding and being enabled to do some creative value, you start to see that's a good signal, and here in the DevNet zone, I saw four-five demos that were writing software apps, to take advantage of the hardware, to take advantage of the network, so know the network is enabling through APIs to extend the data. This is kind of changing the the concept of how packets will move around the networks, so this is truly a tell sign, that in my opinion, of the modern infrastructure. The question is, Dave, how fast will the customers migrate to being true devops or infrastructure as code customers, writing apps, building new things, to create that value? >> Well, I would say this, that of all the sort of traditional large scale call them, whatever, legacy, enterprise, data center companies, I think Cisco is the only one that I can really point to that has kind of got developers right. I mean IBM, Bluemix, StartStop, remember the EMC Code initiative, that was kind of a joke, and so, Oracle owns Java, and it still sort of struggles with developers, so, I think Cisco got it right, and I think the reason they got it right is cause they're focused. I mean that's what I do like about Cisco's strategy and the reason why, you, know, obviously you give them high chances, it's because they're really focused on that networking piece. They're not trying to be all things to all people, even though you forecasted they're kind of heading in that direction, but they're still starting from a position of strength. >> Well, you made a good point. The success and failure of developer programs is about creating an environment where it's compatible with how they're expectations are. Microservices, containers, these abstraction layers that they're used to dealing with create value. Developers will love that. The other thing I would say is is that as developers look at what they can do, the worlds changed. It used to be the network that used to dictate what can happen to applications, now applications need to program the network. I think this was a shift we saw with DevNet Create and DevNet two years ago, where they started moving from the command line interface to more software abstractions or applications interfaces where, say hey, lets just do more with the network, so applications now require program ability. This is the shift, it's upside down from what it was when the industry started, so this new bridge has to be application-centric and to me, that's what I get out of the cloud announcement around multi-cloud. You're starting to see to see the portfolio up and down their stack, from security, they got stealthwatch tetration, that's, SaaS, analytics, app dynamics, among other things data center, HyperFlex, UCS, Nexus, all lined up. CloudCenter, container platform, on multiple clouds, IoT, Kinetic, Vedge, cloud services router, this is now a portfolio. They got the products too. >> Absolutely, John. >> Okay guys, we're going to have a great day, three days of wall-to-wall coverage kicking off here in Barcelona, stay with us for more coverage here at Cisco live, it's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)