>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this theCube's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. We've got three days of programming we've been doing. We're heading towards the end, but still going strong. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, John Apostolopousos, who's the vice president and CTO of Enterprise Networking and lab director of the Innovation's Lab with Cisco. It all rolls right off the tongue, right John. >> Yes, yes. >> But welcome to the program, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for joining me, it's a pleasure being here. >> Alright so you and I were rapping, we both have some background in networking in innovation labs. So, you know, it's one of the things I love to talk about, who doesn't love to talk about innovation. Tell us a little bit about your background and what are the innovation labs inside of Cisco? >> Okay, so I've been working in various areas of R and D and innovation for many years. And I joined Cisco about five years ago, both to be CTO and also to create a group, a lab, a group of people to help identify and try to solve problems of a strategic importance to Cisco's future. And by doing these, we believe that we can have a significant effect on our customers and bring great value to them and differentiation for Cisco. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. >> It's kind of a, you know what, one of the things I poked at, I worked in a CTO office at one of the big vendors for a few years, and it's like we need the place where people can play and learn and try and fail, it's okay. There's always a push from this, well it needs to lead to product that leads to revenue. How does that work inside of Cisco? >> So it actually works quite well because there's strong push from the top from Chuck Robbins, Dave Decker, from my boss, Scott Harrel, my junior colleagues, Robby Chandra and so forth, to identify these key problems, invest, try to solve them and so forth. Because they know if we can succeed, it's going to be huge revenues. >> Okay, yeah. John, the level we get a CTO on, there's no shortage of cool and interesting things to look at. What are some of the main areas that you and your team look at? >> Sure, so one of the things which actually I with Robby Chandra and other very talented colleagues across Cisco started about five years ago now, was looking at what are some of the key use cases that customers need to have addressed three to five years down the road? And what architectures do they need to solve it? And we started that work four or five years ago, that leads to what we call the digital network architecture DNA that we are hearing all about today. So that work actually started in December 2013, it would really ramp up in 2014 and 2015. And it takes so long because it takes a long time to figure out what are the real problems customers need to address and then how can you build the ASICs and the operating system and the software on top and the platforms and DNA center and now DNA center platform that's needed. And we have a whole bunch of additional things in the pipe. >> Yeah, so bring us back, because you know in technology three to five years, that's a really long time. >> That's a long time. >> So what were some of the original kind of customer needs that you saw and what was on target and what's changed in that time period? >> Sure, so some of the things the customer needs, is they need to be able to role out new services really fast, okay. Today it takes and it historically takes a long time to role out a new service. Let's say we want to have a tele-present system or let's say you want to bring a new IOT device on the network, and you want to segment it relative to all the other devices so there can't be any security threats. And you want to apply all the best practices for networking and security. Typically that's been really, really hard. It's been really hard because you have to figure out for the new application what network and security requirements do you need. Then how should that, how should the network be architected, how should each device in the network be programmed for QOS or anything else. And then go out and do it. Device by device typically. And then be able to look to say hey, is that actually working the way that I intended? Or is there a problem, if so, where's the problem. How can I fix it? How can I change it? Historically that process has taken a long time. Now what we've done is by taking a more wholeistic view, and with things like DNA center, we have a full understanding of what's happening end to end. So we can role out a new service, we can identify both the network policies that are required, the security policies, figure out what's needed in each element in the network, go out and employ it. Then look to see what's happening, verify if it's doing what's needed, and if not, make recommended fixes and so forth. So this is one of the major fundamental shifts that is occurring and it's something we're very excited about and our customers are also really excited, which is, because it brings them great value. It increases their speed. It increases their security, lowers their costs. It's pretty exciting stuff. >> Yeah, John, if I wind the clock back 10 or 15 years ago, intelligence in the network, using data and analytics in the network, we were talking about it back then. >> We were, we were. >> So tell me why it's different now. Why, you know, I know all the people that work on this, we're quite excited for the things that we can actually accomplish today. Not like we were just talking about it, we were building real solutions, but what's different today? >> It's different at every single level. For example, 10 years ago we did not really have ASICs to be programmable. Today with a lot of the ASICs we have with UADP, unified access data platform ASIC. As new protocols become important, we can go and change more for to support it. Our new Cat9ks actually we have x86's built in, so you have an x86, which you can have a containerized environment there, so third parties can take their applications in a container, deploy it and run it across switches. That was never possible before. So these are some of the major advances that happened that just makes it so much easier to deploy these. >> Yeah, well one of the things that we've been really interested to dig into is some of the new applications that aren't just running on the network but the network is involved in how we build those environments. So when I think about you know just the theme of the show, it's you know, imagine what we can do, and here in the dev net zone, it's customers talking about helping to build those applications. Talk a little bit about that. How does that tie in to some of these mega trends like machine learning, AI, you know, choose your favorite buzz word of choice there. >> Yeah, so what happens is now when you role out a new application, one of the key things you want is visibility and know how it's working. In the past you've had visibility at the server. You may have visibility in the client. You haven't had visibility end to end, and you often haven't had it real time. But now you can actually have end to end visibility and you can be able to automatically self optimize the network to be able to do what needs to be done. For example, here we have thousands of people just on this floor here, and you want to optimize which APs they're talking to and what paths they're taking through their networks. So that whatever they're doing, could it be a Face Time or anything else could be done with very high end to end quality. And all that you want to happen automatically. >> Yeah, the place I've actually been a little critical of Cisco is when we first started talking about IOT, it was like well everything needs a networking part of it. I'm like well a lot of these devices aren't going to have connectivity or have limited connectivity. Transport isn't, you know, the piece of it, but when I take that, when I look at solutions like NFV that are coming out, all of these coming together, this great new term we're talking about, edge computing. So what are you seeing, what's happening today, what are you looking at from a research standpoint? And, you know, where does the edge start? >> Yes, so the edge is a really fun topic. And it's something Cisco cares a lot about because it's often for many applications you have to run them at the edge, especially for IoT. For instance today, you mentioned IoT, you mentioned machine learning. Each of those applications, it's typically a lot of the process ended, the analytics for IoT, the machine learning AI for other sort of applications, that's usually done in the Cloud. However, many times you can't do it in the Cloud or you don't want to do it in the Cloud, because it's too expensive or you just can't get things to the Cloud. >> Yeah, if I'm driving an autonomous vehicle, I can't wait for it to do the round trip before I hit you know whatever that was. >> Yes, and that's a great point. Because what happens is there's a latency issue. There's also scalability. Scalability in the amount of data that's coming for a single IoT device or in a place like this you may have thousands of IoT devices. So it's huge scalability issues. Also reliability. You want your systems, your IOo applications, everything to work. And usually you're counted on being connected to Cloud, but in case you're not connected, in case something breaks down, a storm, a backhoe takes out your internet connection, you still want it to work. So for reliability, you also want to do things at the edge. Also for privacy. You see for privacy, what happens is you want to limit the information that you send to the Cloud. And if it's possible not to send anything, or just to summarize and send only a very small part of information. That could lead to major gains in privacy. So doing processing at the edge, especially with machine learning, AI, can lead to improvements in scalability, lower latency, improved reliability, lower costs, and improvements in privacy. So lots of gains by doing things at the edge of the network. >> Okay, and were does Cisco play in some of these edge solutions? >> Yes, first of all, Cisco has been building computer at the edge with ISRs for many years, okay. I view this as one of the hidden gems that Cisco has. Also we've been working on, what we call, fog commuting for many years. Actually I joined Cisco five years ago, but even before that, my colleagues realized that hey, for some IoT applications, you can't do it in the Cloud. You actually have to do it in the edge. And so they coined the term fog, which basically means taking a part of the Cloud, bringing it to the edge of the network, and a cloud on the ground is called fog, hence the term. And then we've been developing it ever since. And so this is what led to us including for example x86s and containerized frame works on switches and so forth so it makes it much easier for developers to deploy things at the edge of the network. >> Yeah, we just have to make sure enterprises don't choke on it because then it would just be smog. (laughter) >> Luckily we're working really hard on that, and also to make it very secure. Because that's another key component. High scalability, privacy, reliability, low costs, and security. >> Okay, so. >> And no smog. >> No smog. What are some of the things, you know, give us a little inside into the innovation labs, what are some of the things as you look out that maybe we're not yet talking about on the show floor here? >> Sure, for example, some of the major things upcoming is 802.11ax, it's the next generation of wifi. So it gives significant improvements in wifi performance. We've been working on that for a number of years. When I say we, it's myself and other colleagues throughout Cisco. And often colleagues and universities and standards organizations and other companies, wherever it makes sense, because we're trying to push the industry forward. So 802.11ax is a major effort we're working on. Also 5G cellular, you may have heard a lot about it because it's getting a huge amount of attention. And we're also trying to connect these two. Because, for example, in indoor environments like this, wifi is going to be, wifi is the best solution. On the other hand, as you take your mobile device and you go outside, you have 5G, or you will have 5G. As a concrete example, you're familiar with network segmentation, okay, this is incredibly powerful. It's very good for security, for giving the applications the bandwidth allegiance they need and so forth, so very, very powerful. DNA provides that capability within the campus branch, across wired and wireless. And that's what we're shipping today. What happens is with 5G as defined by 3GPP standards, when they come out, you're going to have something very similar, it'll be called network slices, instead of network segmentation. But exact same concept. And it'll be provided on service provider networks. And now what you can do is you can use DNA center to set up the policies in the network segment to go across the enterprise campus and also on the service provider network. So when you go outside with your mobile devices, wherever you are, you'll still have your network segment with your security, you QOS and so forth that they need for applications. >> John I'm just sitting here smiling because I worked in telecom back in the nineties. And there were the trucking companies that was like my phone was a walkie talkie, and then it was also a cell phone, which was pretty cool back in the nineties. When we talk about data, that's been the ultimate promise. It should be ubiquitous, 5G, working with the wireless has been an interesting thing to kind of dig into. So how long until, you know, that becomes reality? >> Well in the enterprise, indoors, campus branch, so forth, end up going to data center. We're working with our data center team very closely to build network segments across both. That's, in some cases it's already available today, in other cases it'll be coming in six months and so forth. With 5G, it depends on the deployment of 5G. And so that's 2020, 2021. But we're already working to make that possible. >> Alright, John, I want to give you the final word. I've worked on some of those projects when it's kind of years in the making, and something comes out the door and then that's what you have with the DNA solution. You know, tell us a little bit about the celebration, the pride, the excitement, that the team is seeing. >> Yeah, it's a lot, right now, it's a great time because as you mentioned, we started some of this work four years ago. We brought some of it out, SDA and DNA center, last summer. Assurance in January. IoT, DNA IoT recently. We just brought out the world's best AP with a 4800. So it's all these sequence of things that finally came out that we've been working on for years, so it's really an awesome feeling. And there's a lot more in the pipe. And so it's going to be a fun, fun future ahead. And our customers are going to get a lot of value. >> John Apostolopousos, really a pleasure. Thank you for joining. You're now a part of theCube alumni here where we always love talking about innovation, driving that pipeline to help customers through all of these new technologies. Stay with us, we got a couple more interviews left. Three days, wall to wall coverage here in Orlando, Florida. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always thank you for watching theCube. (techno sounds)