(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCube's Ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. It's theCube's exclusive coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. It's day three of three days of live coverage. Go to thecube.net, siliconANGLE.com, to get all of the stories. And of course, I'm here with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon, my co-host for the week. Our next guest is Gary Harrison, Head of Technology Services, Metsi Technologies, welcome to theCube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you guys, it's good to be here. >> So, you're in the Cisco Ecosystem, so Stu and I have been talking about this all week. A couple of big trends: open, Cisco's opening up, you've got DevNet success with developers. Cloud is a new architecture, okay. Intent driven architectures are huge. Sounds like outcomes to me, so I hear a lot of these conversations about "what's the outcome?", and then building a technology. So I wanted to get your thoughts on that, from your perspective, what does that mean to you? When you hear that, intent networking, developer community, it sounds a lot like a different Cisco. >> It's a different model. It's changing, I think, the way business processors are today, and getting organizations to understand the process of capturing what they want the infrastructure intent, and their application intent look like. And then understanding how that drives different models for deploying services, as well as the operations behind it. >> You guys do a lot of stuff with customer, I want you to take a minute to explain what you guys do, your company. What are some of the things you guys get involved in? Where are you in the ecosystem? What kinds of projects are you engaging on? >> We're a company, so we're a professional services partner, we're a service only integration partner with Cisco. So it's just through, we don't resell, so we get to focus on purely customer success, and we help enable the channel and the partners directly. And the focus is the Enterprise Cloud Suite. So it's really around helping customers understand how to get the most out of those technologies, how to choose the right element of the cloud suite for the job. >> Gary, so you're in an interesting position, to watch some of the transformations going on in Cisco. We said the old way of measuring Cisco was boxes and ports, and the new way is, you know, software, to open and those things. Since you're not one of the, you know, not in a derogatory way, box sellers, you know, give us your viewpoint as to how Cisco's going through that transformation and how your customers are reacting to that. >> So it's definitely a good shift towards those softer elements of it. And we're seeing the strength of the software and the products that come out, and the capabilities, it's rapidly changing. And you're seeing the increase in the product suite recently, the number of, the move towards analytics and other software to support operational life cycles as well as just the provisioning cycles. I think a challenge for the customers is a lot of complexities introduced. A lot of the new tools out of the box out there. And the difficult question is always how to best use each particular tool to get value for the business. >> Yeah, it's one of the big questions is it used to be, I really understood my network because I built it. I racked it, stacked it, wired it, you know. Configured it in the CLI, today a lot of the pieces of the network you're managing, you don't own. They're in the cloud, they're extending beyond. How do your services and solutions help customers get their arms around this, kind of, multi-cloud world? >> It's always the focus on, I guess, is reducing that complexity. There's a lot you can do with the different software that's out there. And really, to try and step back from just the solo tools, and looking at the cloud stack as a whole, and starting small, starting simple. Identifying those early use cases that will help drive cloud adoption in an organization, and then understanding how the software and the tools benefit them to do that. You know as you say, you can't see inside the software easily. If you're going to bare the infrastructures code, you need a way to make sure that as you build that code and those processors that you keep that visibility into what that softwares meant to be doing for you. >> Gary, on that point, I want to just double down on that concept holistically. We hear that, all week we've heard from interviews, from Cisco executives as customers, that it's the systems view almost, it's not the box view. What does that mean to the customer today, and how far along are your customers in that mindset? Are they there, are they kicking the tires? 'Cause you got to engage on real frontline projects where there's outcomes involved and the plumbing's in place. Okay, so how do you get there without disrupting? Right, that's the question we hear. But so how do I get the holistic view without disrupting the business? What's your thoughts on customer's position on that? >> I think to get the holistic view, it's about the business needs I think embrace that. And understanding, though, it's about delivering applications and services now. And the infrastructures there to support that. And not focus on these infrastructure-centric models. So that's the first journey, is understanding, you know, what are the services that are important to the business, and how those services are involved. And then I think the challenge we see from the customers is actually, you know, intend to your organizational and process challenges. The technology itself is not necessarily all the complexities, it's how that aligns to the organization. And so I think those early wins and those early outcomes are a organization that's aware of those challenges. >> Like almost getting a little stepping stone, you get a little success, you know, don't take a big project. What's your take on road-mapping in that? Because that's challenging. What have you seen for success use cases that customers can take right out of the gate to get this intent thing going? What are some of the low-hanging-fruit opportunities? >> So one thing we focus on, I guess, is changing our engagement model with the customers. It's something we sort, I guess, of pride ourselves on. Is we're a lot more flexible and agile, ourselves, as a, in terms of delivering infrastructure services. So again, we try to communicate to our customers find used cases that deliver value and return on investment early. And focus on delivering that, sort of, one use case. It doesn't matter what it is in the cloud-sect, whether it's through automation of network infrastructure, orchestration of services on top of there. We pick a very clear use case and develop that first, and then once you understand how the technology's stitched together end to end, you can then start to grow that inside the organization. >> Is there any use cases that pop out that you can just point to, anecdotally, that seem to be popular? >> So there's a couple different extremes, so ACI is a massive enabler at the moment. You know, it's really, since SDN's come along it's a catalyst to drive the rest of the cloud change infrastructure. So we have some very specific use cases around automating that infrastructure. Not just what ACI does itself, but to create that automation layer on top of that. So, you know, people are deploying lots of infrastructure, so that's one of the specific use cases we see. >> Gary, I really like what you said about it's changing the engagement model, because it used to be "I'm gonna' roll out a new application, "okay, I need to figure out the plumbing." Now when I look at intent based offerings there, it's really more about I'm building new applications and the network is a critical piece of it, it actually helps me drive some of these new, you know, modern micro architectures there. You've got to, I'm sure, be talking to a little bit of a broader, you know, jobs inside the customer. How does that change your engagement? Who are the roles that you're talking to today? >> Well actually this is what we find, is tools like Cloud Sender, and for me one of it's strengths is it's fine ability to tangibly capture intent in a application blueprint. And I find that's a good way to bring organizations together, because now we have a focal point for your network and infrastructure, your platforms teams, and your application teams to come together. And it provides a common language to talk about it. And that's one of the real strengths we find to start having those conversations with those different teams within the organizations. >> Gary talk about the old way and new way. We always like to kind of break things down in a very simplistic way. And Chuck Robbins, the CEO, on stage said "that's the old way", it looked like an architecture, hey, firewall, I get that. And he's like, some people actually have this today. And he's kind of looking at the modern cloud, obviously the circle with all the different services. So kind of Cisco plug. But from your standpoint, when you talk to customers, what was the older conversations, that you could point to saying "we used to do it this way", this is what we would talk about, these are the meetings we would have, now the shift is towards this. What's the old way, and what's it transforming into, when you actually have those conversations, what is it like? >> So the big difference for the infrastructure projects, where they were projects, they're very traditional waterfall model. You work out what you want to buy, where you want to be, you put a project plan around that and deliver that. But the engagement we have today to say to people, all the importance is in the software. It's the services you're delivering on the software, and the capability to develop in the software. And that's not something out of the box. It's very difficult to say: where do I want to be in six months, or where do I want to be in a year? So again the way we encourage and the way we engage with our customers is to put a roadmap together, but to identify something in a much shorter term that you can deliver. Start delivering something, and then take a more agile approach around it, to come back, review, and re-plan again, and look at what your priorities are. >> What's the role of the solution architect on this, 'cause a lot of the things we're seeing and then we're trying to, kind of, connect the dots here. Holistic roadmaps are interesting, because you've got have to have a foundational architecture. What is the preferred kind of consistent theme you're seeing around architectural decisions? Are there table stakes, are there certain things that are always going to be in flux? How do you view the big picture on the solution architect piece of it? Is there certain things that are must-haves, weight on this? What's your reaction to that? >> I think a solution, I think it's a challenging piece. I think it's probably where you see organizations are probably weaker, is having a cloud-solution architecture function. We still see infrastructure architecture, enterprise architecture, but that solution architecture for the cloud model, I think that's actually more a challenging piece. I don't think there's any obvious answer in what, you know, for the customers we see, there's no common answer. >> That's a really hot area right now. >> Gary, one of the biggest challenges we see in multi-cloud, is no two customers are alike. >> No. >> But through the customers that you're talking to, what are some of the common stumbling blocks or hurdles for really getting, you know, full value out of their solutions that you see from customers today? >> I think it's understanding the end to end life cycle of a service. So we can do a lot with a multi-cloud capabilities, in deploying when an internal infrastructure to external. But the processes have to be the same, with security, compliance, these other aspects that come into it add a lot of complexity. And also it's not just the way the applications and the infrastructure are built, patching life cycles, you know, post-deployment of, you know, virtual images. The way people then update and maintain them and that life cycle around it. And I think it's different in a virtualized world, in a containerized world we see a lot more advancements around it, and multi-cloud is easier. I think it's for people to take their legacy applications and try and move them into a cloud-native scenario, which is a real challenge. >> Gary, pretend that I'm a friend of yours and I come to you and say "hey Gary, you know, "I'm new to this whole intent-based networking thing, what is it?", how would you describe it? What's your definition of, what is intent based networking really mean? >> There's two parts of it: one is to identify somewhere to capture what the definition of your applications and services are, and what that means, and the infrastructure that lies underneath. Say cloud centers one part of it, other organizations may have other models, but it's rather than working two traditional high level design, low level design, and we see your requirements analysis, now capturing that intent in somewhere that's both software consumable and can be software defined. You can use software to push intent in there, and you can consume it through software. And the next major bit of the puzzle is to provide that freedom to the infrastructure layers underneath so they get to decide how they implement that intent. And that's what gives you this multi-cloud freedom, you know, how we're implemented in our public cloud can be different to how we're implemented in the private cloud. The tools, the processes, the infrastructure, the software, can be different, but the outcome that's delivered is the same. >> Yeah it's interesting to show, you mentioned SDN earlier, we see a lot of activity on software defined data center, architectural things, and again, it's challenging because not everything looks the same, but it's super important. But then we hear things like Google Cloud on stage, and we hear Kubernetes, we hear ISTIO, which is a service mesh, so you start to see up the stack, the applications taking, kind of, almost a network services-like mindset. I mean, micro services are basically, have the same feel as networking, but it's more up higher in the stacks. So you've got some really interesting dynamics. You've got the SDN thing going on, and then you've got in the middle of the stack, towards the application, these cool Micro services with cloud native. This is an opportunity for network engineers. I mean, how would you describe to the audience out there the opportunity for a network engineer, or someone who's in the network game, to take advantage of that, this new trend that's coming very fast? >> It's a different model of networking. And again, the good thing about containers is they do provide this very application-centric focus. Networking is now about providing a service for the application sit on there. And Container Frameworks make that very obvious. So I'd say network engineer, it's a good place to understand that model and that ecosystem. And then see how that can be applied to what we've done in virtualization. And as SDN comes along in a more traditional private cloud infrastructure, on top of the data center infrastructure we have today, take some of those models that we learned from things like Container Frameworks and how do we apply them to virtualization. >> That's a great point about the virtualization, it's almost a roadmap to how to understand the impact and interplay between the networks. It really is. Okay final question for you is, you know, Cisco Live this year seems to be different, what's the vibe of the show, what's your, if you had to, for someone who didn't come here that's watching, say "hey, I missed it this year, "heard there's a lot of action, DevNet's got 500,000 developers", what's different about this year for Cisco Live, what's the most important story? Can you share your opinion on what's happening? >> I guess for us, being the definite village, it is about the definite zone. The buzz we're seeing, the people, the types of questions we get asked on the stand now, there's definitely a lot more interest in this development side of it. >> What's some of the questions you're getting? What are the hot topics if you stack ranked them? >> People just want to understand, you know, new trends in software, coding, you know, how can I apply my coding skills to coding the network, or where do I learn about that, and we get asked lots of questions as people pass the stands. >> Gary, thanks so much for coming on theCube, great to see you, thanks for coming on and sharing your commentary here. Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, this is the live Cube cover day three here at Cisco live, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we're here breaking all the action down, we'll be back with more. Stay with us for day three coverage. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)