>> Narrator: Live, from San Diego, California, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live, US, 2019. Brought to you by Cisco, and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego, everybody, you're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman, we're covering day two here of Cisco Live, 2019. Anand Oswal is here, he's the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Networking Engineering at Cisco, and John Apostolopoulos. The Italians and the Greeks, we have a lot in common. He is the VP and CTO of Enterprise Networking at Cisco. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. How did I do? >> You did awesome. >> Dave: Not too bad, right? Thank you. (chuckles) All right. Anand, let's start with you. You guys have had a bunch of news lately. You're really kind of re-thinking access to the network. >> Anand: Yeah. >> Can you explain what's behind that, to our audience? >> Yeah. If you think about it, the network is running more and more critical infrastructure. At the same time, it's increasing modern scale and complexity. What we expect, is that you always need wireless on. The workspace is on the move. You're working here, in your office, in the cafe, in the soccer field, everywhere. You want an uninterrupted, unplugged experience. For that, it's wireless first, it's cloud-driven, and it's data-optimized. So, we had to rethink how we do access. It's not just about your laptops and your phones on the wireless network, in the enterprise it's digital management systems. IOD devices, everything's connected wirelessly. And we need to rethink the access, on that part. >> So John, this obviously ties in to, you know, you hear all the buzz about 5G and WIFI 6. Can you explain the connection and, you know, what do we need to know about that? >> Okay, so 5G and WIFI 6 are two new wireless technologies, which are coming about now, and they're really awesome. So, WIFI 6 is the new version of WIFI. It's available today, and it's going to be available predominantely indoors. As we use WIFI indoors, in high-density environments, where we need a large database per square meter. And the new WIFI 6, the coverage indoors. 5G is going to be used predominately outdoors, in the cellular frequency. Replacing conventional 4G or LTE, and it'll provide you the broad coverage as you roam around, outdoors. And what happens though, is we need both. You need great coverage indoors, which WIFI 6 can provide, and you need great coverage outdoors, which 5G will provide. >> So, the 4G explosion kind of coincided with mobile-- >> Anand: Yep. >> Obviously, and that caused a huge social change-- >> Anand: Yep. >> And of course, social media took off. What should we expect with 5G, is it, you know, I know adoption is going to take a while, we'll talk about that, but it feels like it's more, sort of, B-to-B driven, but maybe not. Can you, sort of, give us your thoughts there. >> Well think about it, if you see WIFI 6 and 5G have actually been on some similar fundamental technology building blocks. You know, you've all been at a ball game. Or the Warriors game, like a few weeks ago, when they were winning. And, after a great play, you're trying to send that message, a video to your kid or something, and the WIFI is slow, latency. With WIFI 6, you won't have that problem. 'Cause WIFI 6 has four times the latency, sorry, four times the throughput and capacity as existing WIFI. Lower latency. And also, the battery life. You know, people say that batteries are the most important thing today, like in the Maslow Hierarchy Chart-- >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Three times the battery life, for WIFI 6 endpoints. So, you're going to see a lot of use cases where you have inter-working with WIFI 6 and 5G. WIFI 6 for indoors, and 5G for outdoor, and there'll be some small overlap, but the whole idea is that, how do you ensure that these two disparate access networks are talking to each other? Exchanging security, policy, and there is some visibility. >> Okay, so, well, first of all, you're a Warriors fan, right? >> Anand: Yeah, I am. >> Awesome, we want to see this series keep going. >> Game six, baby! >> That was really exciting. Now of course, I'm a Bruins fan, so we're on the plane the other night, and the JetBlue TV shut down, you know, so I immediately went to the mobile. >> Yeah. >> But it was a terrible experience, I was going crazy. Texting my friends, what's happening? >> Anand: Yeah. >> You're saying that won't happen-- >> Anand: Yeah. >> With 5G and WIFI 6? >> Anand: Yeah. Exactly. >> Oh, awesome. >> So, John, help connect for us, Enterprise Networking. We've been talking about the new re-architectures, you know, there's ACI, there's now intent-based networking, how does this play into the 5G and WIFI 6 discussion that we're having today? >> Okay, so one of the things that really matters to our customers, and to everybody, basically, is that they want the sort of end-to-end capability. They have some devices, they want to talk through applications, they want access to data, they want to talk with other people, or to IoT things. So you need this sort of end-to-end capability, wherever the ends are. So one of the things we've been working on for a number of years now, is first of all intent-based networking, which we announced two and a half years ago. And then, multi-domain, where we try to connect across the different domains. Okay, across campus, and WAN, and data center, all the way to the cloud, and across the service finder network. And to add security, as foundational across all of these. This is something that Dave Goeckeler and Chuck Robbins talked about at their keynote yesterday. And this is a huge area for us, 'cause we're going to make this single-orchestrated capability for our customers, to connect end-to-end, no matter where the end devices are. >> All right, so Anand, I have to believe that it's not the poor, you know, administrator, saying, oh my God, I have all these pieces and I need to manage them. (laughing) Is this where machine learning and AI come in to help me with all these disparate systems? >> Absolutely. Our goal is very simple. Any user, on any device, should have access to any application. Whether it's sitting in a data center, in a cloud, or multiple clouds. Or any network. You want that securely and seamlessly. You also want to make sure that the whole network is orchestrated, automated, and you have the right visibilities. Visibilities for ID, and visibility for business insights. Talk of AI and ML, what's happening is that as the network is growing in complexity and scale, the number of alerts are growing up the wazoo. So you are not able to figure it out. That's where the power of AI and machine learning comes. Think about it. In the industrial revolution, the industrial revolution made sure that you don't have the limitations of what humans can do, right? You had machines. And now, we want to make sure that businesses can benefit in the digital revolution. You're not limited by what I can pass through the logs and scrolls. I want to automate everything. And that's the power of AI and machine learning. >> Are there use cases where you would want some human augmentation, where you don't necessarily want the machine taking over for you, or do you see this as a fully-automated type of scenario? >> Yeah, so what happens is, first of all, visibility is really, really important. The operator of a network wants to have visibility, and they want end-to-end across all these domains. So the first thing we do is we apply a lot of machine learning, to take that immense amount of data, as Anand mentioned, and to translate it into pieces of information, to insights into what's happening. So then we can share to the user and they can have visibility in terms of what's happening and how well it's happening, are they anomalies, or is there a security threat, so forth. And then, we can provide them additional feedback. Hey, this is ananomaly, this could be a problem. This is the root cause of the problem, and we believe these are the solutions for it. What do you want to do? Do you want to actuate one of these solutions? And then they get to choose. >> And if you think about the other way, our goal is really to take the bits and bites of data in the network, convert that data into information. That information into insights. That insights that lead to outcomes. Now, you want to also make sure that you can augment the power of AI and machine learning on those insights, so you can drill down exactly what's happening. So, for example, you want to first baseline your network. What's normal for your environment? And when you have deviations. That's anomalies. Then you narrow down exactly what the problem is. And then you want to automate the remediation of that problem. That's the power of AI and ML. >> When you guys, as engineers, when you think about, you know, applying machine intelligence, there's a lot of innovation going on there. Do you home-grow that? Do you open source it? Do you, you know, borrow? Explain the philosophy there, in terms of from a development standpoint. >> Yeah. From a development point of view it's a combination of all the other aspects. We will not reinvent what already exists, but there's always a lot of secret sauce that you need to apply, because everything flows to the network, right? If everything flows to the network, Cisco has a lot of information. It's not just a data lake. We're a data source as well. So taking this disparate source of information, normalizing it, harmonizing it, creating a language, applying the algorithm of AI and machine learning. For example, we do the model learning and training in the cloud. We do inference in the cloud, and you push the rules down. So it's a combination of all of the aspects we talked about. >> Right, and you use whatever cloud tooling is available. >> Yes. >> But it sounds like from a Cisco engineering standpoint, it's how you apply the machine intelligence, for the benefit of your customers and those outcomes-- >> Anand: Yeah. >> Versus us thinking of Cisco as this new AI company, right? >> Anand: Yeah. >> That's not the latter, it's the former, is that fair? >> So one of the things that's really important is as you know, Cisco's been making, we've been designing our A6 for many years, with really, really rich telemetry. And as you know, data is key to doing good machine learning and stuff. So we've been designing the A6, to do do real time at wire speed telemetry. And also to do various sorts of algorithmic work on the A6 to figure out, hey, what is the real data you want to send up? And then we've optimized the OS, IOS XE, to be able to perform various algorithms there, and also to host containers where you can do more machine learning at the switch, at the router, even in the future, maybe, at the AP. And then with DNA center, we've been able to gather all of the data together, in a single data lake, where we can perform machine learner on top. >> That's a very important point John mentioned, because you want layer one to layer some of the analytics. And that's why the Catalyst 9120 access point we launched has the Cisco RF ASIC, that provides things like clean air for spectrum, we've also got the analytics from layer one level, all the way to layer seven. >> Yeah, I really like the line actually, from Chuck Robbins yesterday, he said, the network sees everything and Cisco wants to you know, give you that visibility. Can you walk us through some of the new pieces, what people, either things that, they might not have been aware of, or new announcements this week. >> So, as part of the Cisco AI network analytics, we announced three things. The first thing is automated baselining. What that really means is that, what's normal for your environment, right? Because what's normal for your own environment might not be the same for my environment. Once I understand what that normal baseline is, then, as I have deviations, I can do anomaly detection. I can correlate and aggregate issues. I can really bring down apply AI and machine learning and narrow down the issues that are most critical for you to look at right now. Once I narrow down the exact issue, I go on to the next thing, and that is what we call machine reasoning. And machine reasoning is all about automating the workflow of all you need to do to debug and fix a problem. You want the network to become smarter and smarter, the more you use it. And all of this is done through model learning and training in the cloud, inference in the cloud, and pushing it down, the rules as we have devices online, on plan. >> So do you see the day, if you think about the roadmap for machine intelligence, do you see the day where the machine will actually do the remediation of that workflow? >> Absolutely. That's where we need to get to. >> When you talk about the automated baselining, I mean there's obviously a security, you know, use case there. Maybe talk about that a little bit, and are there others? Really, it depends on your objective, right? If my objective is to drive more efficiency-- >> Yeah. >> Lower costs, I presume a baseline is where you start, right? So... >> When I say, baseline, what I mean really is like, say if I tell you that on this laptop, to connect to the WIFI network, it took you three seconds. And I ask you is that good or bad? You'll say, I don't know. (laughs) >> What's the baseline for the environment? >> Dave: Yeah. >> What's normal? And next time, if you take eight seconds, and your baseline is three, something is wrong. But, what is wrong? Is it a laptop issue? Is it a version on there, on your device? Is it an application issue? A network issue? An RF issue? I don't know. That's where AI machine learning will determine exactly what the problem is. And then you use machine reasoning to fix the problem. >> Sorry, this is probably a stupid question, but, how much data do you actually need, and how much time do you need, to actually do a good job in that type of use case? >> Well, what happens is you need the right data, okay? And you're not sure where the right data is. (chuckles) >> So originally what we'd do, a lot of our expertise, that Cisco has for 20 years, is figuring out what the right data is. And also, with a lot of the machine learning we've done, as well as machine reasoning, where we put together templates and so forth, we've basically gathered the right data, for the customer, and we refined that over time. So over time, like, this venue here, the way this venue's network, what it is, how it operates and so forth, varies with time, and we need to refine that over time, keep it up to date, and so forth. >> And when we talk about data, we're talking about tons of metadata here, right? I mean, do you ever see the day where there'd be more metadata than data? (laughs) >> Yeah-- >> Rhetorical question. (laughs) >> All right, so-- >> It's true though, it's true. >> Right? (laughing) >> We're here in the DevNet zone, lots of people learning about building infrastructures, code, tell us how the developer angle fits into what we've been discussing here. >> Oh, yes. So what happens is, as part of intent-based networking, a key part's the automation, right? And another key part's the assurance. Well, it's what DevNet's trying to do right now, by working with engineering, with us, and various partners, other customers, is they're putting together, what are the key use cases that people have, and what is code that can help them get that done? And what they're also doing, is they're trying to, they're looking through the code, they're improving it, they're trying to instill best practice and stuff, so it's a reasonably good code, that people can use and start building off of. So we think this can be very valuable for our customers to help move into this more advanced automation, and so forth. >> So, architecture matters, we sort of touched upon it, but I want you to talk more about multi domain architecture. We heard Chuck Robbins, you know, talk about it. What is it, why is it such a big deal, and how does it give Cisco a competitive advantage? >> Think about it, I mean, multi domain architecture's nothing but all the components of a modern enterprise network behind the scenes. From giving access to a user or device, to access to an application, and everything in between. Now traditionally, each of these domains, like an access domain, the WAN domain, can have hundreds of thousands of network nodes and devices. Each of these are configured, generally manually, the the CLI. Multi domain architecture's all about stitching these various domains into one cohesive, data-driven, automated, programmable network. So, your campus, your branch, your WAN, your data center and cloud, with security as an integral part of it, if at all. >> So, it's really a customer view of an architecture, isn't it. >> Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. >> Okay. It's good, I like that answer. I thought you were going to come out with a bunch of Cisco-- >> Anand: No. >> Mumbo-jumbo and secret sauce-- >> No. >> But it really is, you guys thinking about, okay, how would our customers need to architect their network? >> Exactly. Because if you think about it, it's all about a customer use case. For example, like, we talked earlier, today we are working everywhere. Like, on the poolside, in the cafe, in the office, and always on the go. You're accessing your business-critical applications, whether that's Webex, salesforce.com, O365. At the same time, you're reading Facebook, and WhatsApp, and YouTube, and other applications. Cisco's SD-WAN domain will talk to Cisco's ACI domain, exchange SLAs and policies, so now you can prioritize that application that you want, which is business-critical. And place the right part, for the best experience for you. Because you want the best experience for that app, no matter where you are. >> Well, and the security implications too, I mean-- >> Anand: Absolutely. >> You're basically busting down the security silos-- >> Yeah. >> Dave: And sort of the intent here, right? >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Great. All right, last thoughts on the show, San Diego, last year we were Orlando, we were in Barcelona earlier this year, your thoughts about that. >> I think it's been great so far. If you think about it, in the last two years we've filled out the entire portfolio for the new access network. On the Catalyst 9100 access points, with WIFI 6, the switches, next generation campus core, the wireless LAN controller, eyes for unified policy, DNA center for automation, analytics, DNA spaces for business insights, the whole access network has been reinvented, and it's a great time. >> Nice, strong summary, but John, we'll give you the last word. >> What happens here is also, everything Anand says, and we have 5000 engineers who've been doing this over multiple years, and we have a lot more in the pipe. So you're going to see more in six months from now, more in nine months, and so forth. It's a very exciting time. >> Excellent. Guys, it's clear you, like you say, completing the portfolio, positioning for the next wave of access, so congratulations on all the hard work, I know a lot goes into it >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, keep right there, Dave Volante with Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also in the house. We'll be back with The Cube, Cisco Live 2019, from San Diego. (fast electronic music)

(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 everyone. Live here in Barcelona. It's theCubes coverage day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier With Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante. Dave in this segment. Our next guest is Gordon Thompson, Vice President, Global Enterprise Network from Cisco Worldwide. Run a lot of countries here in Cisco. Knows the territory. Knows the lay of the land in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia. Now global. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. Glad to be with you. >> You're on stage in the keynote. You say we're here in Barcelona. Lot of action in Europe. Europe's different than North America, but you start to see them leading the trends on how to handle these complex environments like highly regulated compliance. GDPR, we've been hearing about that. Security, cyber security. So a lot of trends in Europe are actually leading in some areas. That's impacting the network. Your thoughts on this show so far. How's it going? >> Yeah. I think, there's a fundamental phenomenal opportunity for our customer base and for Cisco at the moment in terms of where technology is going. It's mostly being driven by software innovation in the business. For many, many years we built world class hardware and a software operating system that did one thing. It provided connectivity. But it did one thing. Reliable, secure, performance based connectivity but it did one thing. The opportunity now, going back to your question is we're developing software that doesn't do one thing. It's software that does multiple different things. On top of that hardware that therefore helps solve some of the challenges around compliance and all of these sorts of things, but at the same time start to provide much deeper insight and analytics into what's going on in your environment and that then starts to let you say, hey, there's information here in the network that I've never been exposed to before, that I'm now exposed to and I can start to do something meaningful with that data. That's the opportunity, I think, for our customers is how they monetize that. How they use that information. Providing that information on a real time basis is going to be the critical thing. We see lots, it's a very competitive environment Amir, we see lots of business in Amir looking to see how they can use technology to drive differentiation for them in the market and they're beginning to realize that data is the key to being able to do that and they're now seeing how much data they've got on their network that if they can get exposure to they can start to use in a meaningful way. Really exciting. It's very innovative here. We're seeing customers starting to realize how important the network is. >> In your keynote, you made a bunch of people uncomfortable saying you have to change. >> Yeah. >> And then admitted I don't like it when people tell me I have to change, but you need to change. What do they have to change? >> They have to think about truly how they're architecting and designing their networks. As I said earlier, on Ciscos an organization's been phenomenally successful but we've really done one thing in 30 years, provide reliable, secure, connectivity. And over the last four years our innovation strategy has changed to say we're not just going to deliver connectivity, we're going to look at how we can deliver automation on top of the network. We're going to look at how we deliver security embedded in the network. We're going to look at how we take real time analytical insights off of the network. When you think differently about how you use a network you'll then start to think differently about the value the network can bring. I was making that comment 'cause I was wanting customers to think about the network no longer just being something that's going to deliver connectivity. It's something that will absolutely drive business transformation for them if they approach it with that thought process in mind. It was really a challenge to get people to think slightly differently. >> Yeah. Wake up a little bit and say, okay, what's going on here? And I want to get your thoughts on the trend because the tail winds, I think that Cisco's feeling right now is, in every major inflection point there's always complexity and abstraction layers of software always take away the complexities. Software check, big time trend. But cloud scale and horizontal scale now with the Enterprise, HyperFlex out to the edge, ACI Anywhere, so you start to see Cisco as one large scalable network with complexities that's being managed by software across domains. This seems to be a beautiful formula for what customers want which is secure networks. Do you see it that way? Is that a major wave you're riding? Is that what customers are saying? Because I think you're getting at something that's important which is I'm moving packets around, moving data around but I got to put my solution out in front of customers. The applications. How they access and engage. These are big picture items, but what's your thoughts on this? >> Okay. It's interesting, right. 'cause what we've created is, so we've created this software overlay network in various different areas. We've created a fabric. In the data center we've created an ACI fabric. In the Branch and the Campus we've created what we call software defined access fabric. And in the ONE we've created this software defined ONE fabric with our WHIPTAIL acquisition. Also with Meraki. The interesting thing is people have created these software fabrics to drive southbound automation onto the network to save money. To move more quickly. What we are saying to our customers is actually the value isn't just about driving southbound automation onto each of these fabrics, it's about how you take information from each of these fabrics, connect that information together holistically and then start to provide more value around behavioral analytics. To secure your environment more. Et cetera, et cetera. You're going to see individual fabrics, but then what Dave Goeckeler was talking about was how he connects these fabrics or domains together. Connecting them together is going to help us secure the environment even more effectively. It's also going to help us analyze what's going on more effectively as well. This is really the sweet spot, I think, for us to work more closely with our customers. >> Talk about security because I think this is a great point. I think if you guys can, well you have the fabrics now, product portfolio has broadened. It's filled in, but security still is hot. It's still number one. You guys are embedding that foundational into the network and lifting the data up to create insight. What are some of the actionable things that you're seeing enabled from, one the fabrics coming together and talk about the dynamic of security specifically because if you don't fix the security paradigm at the network level, it's a house of cards. Everything crashes. That's my opinion. Your thoughts. Do you agree with that? >> I hope that nothing crashes at entity, but the key thing, I think is, we like to say we put security in the network, whereas we looked at all of the other networking vendors applying security on top of the network. >> What's the difference? Explain the difference. >> In our own, one word each with two letters in them but a massive difference in terms of what they do. Ultimately the network can provide us with loads of contextual information around what's happening in the environment. It's about how you use that information in a real time basis to help make better security decisions. It's really taking the value of networking devices and passing that information from a network switch or a wireless controller to a security policy control capability is really where we start to see value come together. And it sees things that are important to us. For example, I met with a sales leader recently in a very large pharmaceutical company in Europe, and their problem was their salespeople were handing in their resignation but they were doing it the day after they'd taken all the intellectual property out of the company. They had gone and taken all of the customer data base. They'd put it on a stick. They put it in their pocket. And they went away. It happens every day. The challenge is the network should be able to see a behavioral change. If that was you or me we normally perform the same activities on the network every day. We don't really change what we do, but the minute we start to go to old servers to download information that we haven't downloaded in years, you know, that's a behavioral change. And the network should be able to identify that, pass that information to the network administrator and deal with it so we can stop that sort of data leakage from our organization. These are the sorts of things that I think are exciting. >> And Cisco's unique because of the scope of your portfolio or the technology? >> Well, a bit of both. Cisco's unique because of the scope of the technology, but it's also about the amount of information we take off the network. You know, people talked about in this software overlay world the network becoming, hardware becoming commoditized. Oh, Cisco, your hardwire is going to be commoditized. We'll move to white box. The reality is it's the power of our hardware, our ASIC Design that allows us to pull all of this information off the network. People are beginning to realize how important data is now. And now they're beginning to see actually hardware's really important. Although it's the software that does all the sexy stuff, hardware's really important. We're beginning to see customers recognize two things, the breadth of the portfolio, as we mentioned earlier on, but also the power of the hardware to allow the software to do everything it does. >> Gordon, I know you got to go. Thanks for coming on. One final question while you're here 'cause I know you have a unique perspective. Want to get it real quick. Quick soundbite here. Global is now a big part of everyone's plan. Global economy. You have good experience globally with Cisco and also here in Amir, how should companies think about global networking? What's your insight into how people should start thinking about global architectures, global clouds, global networks? Your thoughts. >> I think every organization is looking to build out these capabilities. There's absolutely no doubt they are, but I think the way to approach it nowadays with all of the software capabilities we have, is to build bit by bit, right? To build your networks in different islands and then look to how you join those islands together. I think, ultimately, that's how most organizations are looking to move forward. From our point of view, I think, we'll look to connect those islands or fabrics together with the power of data. Ultimately, I think, we've always said data is the new oil, but I think, truly in the networking industry now, data is the new oil and it's truly how organizations will differentiate themselves in the future. >> Gordon, thank you for spending the time on the Cube. I know you got to hard stop. Appreciate it. >> No problem. >> Thank you for your precious time. It's the Cube live coverage from Barcelona. I'm John Furrier with Dave Elante. More live coverage. Stay with us after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman, my co-host, for the next two more days. We're in three days of coverage. Our next two guests here from Cisco Ronnie Ray, Vice President of Cisco, and Prakash Rajamani, Director of Project Management at Cisco. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> So all the buzz is about the DevNet developer aspect, the rise of the network engineer moving up to the stack while taking care of business in the software-defined data center, software-defined service provider. Everything is software-defined. You guys are involved in the DNA Center Platform. We talked about the DNA Center, the product. This is a real innovation environment for you guys, so take a minute to explain, what is the DNA Center Platform? And how does that compare from the DNA Center? How should customers think about this? What is it? what's the offering? >> Absolutely. So if we just walk back about a year. A year ago we launched DNA Center. DNA Center is the product, and that supported things, like SD-Access, which is absolutely a new innovation about Software-Defined campuses. Through the year, we've launched showrooms, through the year we've launched Enterprise Network Functions Virtualization, we have capabilities in automation, and these are all product capabilities that DNA Center has. What we're doing today and this week in Cisco live and in the DevNet area right now is that we have launched DNA Center platform, which is the ability to open up and expose all of the APIs and the STKs that now makes DNA Center a product that our customers, our partners and developers out there can now work on and create new value. It could be apps, it could be integrations, it could be new devices, third-party devices that Cisco's never supported before, but they can now make that supportable in DNA Center because we're giving them the tools to do that. >> So this is not so much a customer thing, it's more of a partner or app, is that kind of how this goes? So if I'm a partner, makes sense. is this kind of where it's different? I mean, where's the line here, or is it open for everybody? >> It is for everybody. If you are a networking expert and you've done CLI in the past, what we are doing is making API simpler, we are making them intent-based, which means that they can achieve a lot more and this is open to you as a networking expert, you as an application developer, you as a partner that is providing, creating your services for your end customer or client. All of you can now use DNA Center platform to create new value. >> This is great, it's for everyone. So this is where, if I get this right, we love this notion of DevOps on cloud, Susie and you guys have been talking about network programmability. Is this kind of where it is? We're talking about network programmability, is this where the APIs shine, and what's our vision? >> This is truly network programmability, in fact in the past what we've talked about is device programmability, but now what you're doing in DNA Center platform is really expressing intent and using APIs that apply across the whole network. Prakash can probably give you some examples of what these intent APIs look like. >> I think as Ronnie said, we like to call it Network DevOps, I think Susie calls it that too. And this is the way in which Network DevOps is conductible. There are two kinds of target market that we look at. One is the network engineer who understands everything network-centric, who knows all the nuances, and are very comfortable with those, but then being able to achieve those through a programmable API, that's one market. The way we want to go with the intent API is for the software engineers who want to be able to say, I want to prioritize YouTube traffic less than my network, and I want to prioritize my custom-built app as the most critical for my enterprise, as the most critical on my network. And I want to express that as an intent through an API, and then let the DNA Center platform take care of making that real on the network without having to worry about all the technologies and all the, >> How to provision it, what's going on under the hood, essentially to them it's a call. >> To them it's a call, and it's taken care of. >> That is actually seamless to the software developer, by the way, who doesn't want to get in the weeds of networking. The networking guys who are under the hood, what does it mean for them? They get to provide services to the developers, so it sounds like everyone's winning here. What's the benefit to the network engineers? They get scalability? I see the benefits to the software developer, that's awesome, but where's the network engineer, what are they getting out of it? >> They can achieve more things faster, they can get deeper, and this is absolutely making it simpler for them operationally to run their network. So they can basically free up time to do other tasks, like design and architecture that typically is, very hard to explain. >> Cooler tasks. (laughs) Not boring, mundane, cut and paste the scripts, CLI scripts, to another device. >> Absolutely and that's one part. The other part is about the cool new apps that they can create because there are use cases, even if you look at all the show floor, the companies that are here in Cisco Live and that they come every year, there are use cases out there that even collectively as an industry we cannot solve, that needs to be solved in the context of the company and the environment that you're in and so the network expert that's sitting in a customer environment can say, "Okay, I have this problem, let me solve it, "let me go build-" >> But they're gettable problems to solve now. Because now you're taking off more time, but also cloud and some of the software-defined things are now at the disposal to create that creativity. Is that what you're getting at, this is the new opportunity. Is that what Chuck was kind of referring to in his keynote around getting at these new use cases? >> Certainly, this opens up a new use case because this is a new way to program across the entire network in a much more simpler fashion than it's ever been done before. >> So when I hear a new way to program, I want to understand, what's the learning curve for this? If somebody understands the rocky APIs, is this a short learning curve, if they don't, is it a longer learning curve? >> So what we have done from a learning curve perspective, we have worked with a development team, we have learning labs where somebody who's not familiar with programming completely can start with the basics of, okay, how do I get started with DNA Center platform APIs and get started and go through a sequence of learning labs to get them completely familiarized with everything. Somebody like what you said, like a Meraki person, who's already using the Meraki API, for them, anybody who understands REST XML APIs can just turn around and there's a bunch of new APIs available that they can understand, program, try within the product, and then get sample codes and then build on top of that. So it's that easy as that. >> It was interesting, I was walking through the show floor, talking to some of the customers here, and for some of them, what's off the shelf is good, but I hear them griping about, not about Cisco, some of the partners, like "I can't customize what I need." One of the challenges we've always had in IT is, it's great if you can take the off the shelf, but everybody needs to tweak and adjust what they have. How's that addressed with this solution? >> From a customer's perspective, because we provide in our product we provide a specific set of capabilities, but when it comes to API, we make it much, much, much richer and granular so that people can create any workflow that they want. The workflows that we create in the API context is in three formats. We have what we call as tasks, which are individual operations that we perform, and then we group the tasks and offer them as workflows. And we group the workflows and offer them as an intent. So as a user, based on what level of granular they need, you can go to the lowest level task, or you can go all the way up to the intent based on your skillset and then use them and customize them as it fits your needs. >> So they can get up and running pretty quickly, sounds like, and if you know APIs then it's just JSON, it's all the same XML, all the great stuff, but I gotta ask where this goes from here because one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera is, we've been covering all the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF, you've got Docker Containers, and containers now have been a great thing. Pretty much check, standard, everyone's using containers. And it's great, put a container around it, a lot of great things could happen. Kubernetes and then microservices around Service Meshes, Diane Greene mentioned in her keynote with Chuck Robbins, Istio was a big hot, one of the hottest projects in the Linux foundation, so that's kind of microservices, this sounds like it's got a lot of levels of granularity. I love that word because now when you get to that point, you can really make the software targeted and strong and bullet-proof. How is that on the road map, where does someone who's actually looking at microservices as a North Star, what does your offering mean for them? Is it right in line? What's the progression, what's the road map? >> So, from a microservice perspective, DNA Center as a product itself is completely microservice-based architecture. There's 110 microservices today that make up what is DNA Center. This gives us a flexibility to really update every single service, every single capability, and make it almost like giving customers ability to do this every two weeks or every four weeks, new changes, new announcements, in a very simple fashion. That's kind of how the part is being built. What we eventually want to do is extend the platform as an ability for partners and others to build microservices that can be built and deployed within DNA Center over time. That's further down the road, but given that solution and given the strategy where we are as a product architecture that lends us to extend that to them. >> It's natural extension, so basically you're cloudified. You've got all the APIs, so if a customer wants to sling APIs, customers want to integrate in, like you mentioned, ServiceNow, they can do that easily today, and then you've got some extensibility in the road map to be kind of Cloud Native when things start growing. Timing's everything, it's kind of evolving right now heavily at the Cloud Native. >> I mean that's the benefit of this architecture, that you can really pick and choose where you want to run over time. We are right now on a box, an appliance that helps us solve the solution, but there's nothing that stops us from going anywhere. >> So Ronnie, I want you to talk about the significance, this is an open platform. I've watched Cisco my entire career, and always Cisco's been heavily involved in standards, but takes arrows from people as to how they do this. This is open, what does that mean? And what's that mean to your customers? >> Absolutely, this is basically opening up Cisco to industry-wide innovation. So until now, if you look at everything that we've done on DNA Center and on some of the other Cisco platforms that Cisco developed, but we are now getting to a point where with DevNet, now with 500,000 developers registered, we have the critical mass to basically say the industry can come and develop on top of Cisco platforms. And so this is completely new kinds of innovation that we will see, use cases that we've never thought of, and this will happen. And of course we will continue to contribute to all whether it's IETF or whether it's OpenConfig, all of these in with the YANG models that we are doing across the industry, those will continue, the open source confirmations that we do, but this is really saying, okay, let's provide our best customers and our partners and of course the individual developer that's out there a way to today build new creations and maybe tomorrow there's a part to monetize that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, I love the open. We love open, we're open content. You guys are now open networking, for lack of a better description. Chuck Robbins talked about in his keynote, one of the things I was really impressed on, he highlighted something that we've been talking about, is that the geo-political, the geo-technical world, is a huge factor, you look at just cloud computing, you've got Regis, you've got GDPR, I mean all these things going on, you mentioned assurances off camera, this is like a huge deal, right. You've got a global tech landscape, you've got global tech compliance issues, so you got this now open source and it's whatever fourth generation where it's part of the entrepreneurial fabric. So Ronnie, I've got to ask you, you've been an entrepreneur before. With bringing entrepreneurship into networking, what's the guiding principles, what's your inspirational view on this because this is really, not only save time for engineers, it makes them part of an open collaborative culture, like open source which you're used to, bringing an entrepreneurial vibe to it. >> Absolutely. >> This is a big dynamic, what's your view on this? >> It's a huge dynamic and I can talk from personal experience, you know when I've done start-ups and I've raised money or put my own money into it, 70% of your calories go in building a platform. So you're just looking at how do I store data, how do I process data, how to I look at availability of systems, and 30% of it really goes into building a use case. What we are doing with DNA Center platform is basically saying forget about the 70%. We will give you normalized data, whether it's for Cisco equipment or whether it's for third-party equipment. So the STK will allow you to bring in Juniper or Huawei or Aruba or whoever that's out there and you can bring that into DNA Center, so now you have a view of the entire network, Cisco and Non-Cisco. You have normalized data for all of those and you can configure all of those, you can image update all of those. It's very very powerful. Just from an ISV standpoint, individual available standpoint now you are kind of unlocking, making this almost democratic. >> You've done the heavy-lifting. >> Yep, absolutely. >> That's what Cloud is all about, but talk about the creativity because you mentioned that entrepreneurial, a lot of the energy goes into trying to find the fatal flaw, is the product gonna be product-market fit, you do all that heavy-lifting and bootstrap it, right now it's simply, okay, I can sling some APIs together, get a prototype, then the creativity starts. Talk about the creativity impact. How do you see that impacting some of these new use cases, these hard problems. This is gonna come from, not some guy coming out of business school saying, "Hey, I'm gonna go hire "some engineers and solve that big, hard problem." It's gonna come organically, this is a huge deal. >> This is a huge deal, and because we're making it simpler it can come from any quarters, it doesn't have to be an established company, it can be an individual person that can't solve any use case, and then we ask Cisco, not only do we have, and of course the majority share in the market, but will also we have the platforms, like DevNet, and DevNet now has an equal system exchange, so if something that's cool can float up in the exchange can be voted on, can become something that becomes an absolutely easy part to monetization for somebody, that basically saying, "Okay, how do I marry business "and how do I take network and bring them together." >> This is awesome and it's also external to Cisco, but talk about the global impact. Just outside North America, massive growth, you're seeing things going on in Europe, but really in the Asia and China, huge growth markets going on. When you go to China, talk about mobility, they have mobility nailed down. India is absolutely on fire, growing like crazy. The talent, this is a melting pot of tech talent. How do you make all that work from a Cisco standpoint because what you want to do is bring the goods to everybody, that's open source. >> Absolutely, so think about any of the logical place that people go to with, given the way that the platform is already built, which is, it is Cloud Native. We've not in the cloud yet, but at some point the platform will go to cloud. And we are looking at harnessing the creative talent worldwide, whether it be in Asia or whether it be in Europe, or whether it be in the Americas, really doing that new value creation and taking that to the masses. And Cisco has the right to claim this market, we are absolutely in support of folks that want to do that. That's why DevNet has all of the learning labs and the sandboxes and everything else that's there in support, these are free to use. We want people to come and learn and co-create on the platform. >> And making it open and collaborative, the community aspect of it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, final question while you guys are here, obviously you're at the Cisco perspective, but put your industry landscape hat on, people who couldn't make Cisco Live this year here in Orlando, they might be watching this video either live or on demand when it goes up to YouTube. What's the big story, I mean obviously what you guys are doing, across the whole show, what's the most important stories that are developing here this week that people should pay attention to deeply? >> So in terms of looking at the openness of the platform, Cisco is an open platform, API is really the new CLI because that's the way that you'll talk to the network. And think about what Chuck said at the opening keynote, this starts from the user, the things that you want to do to the applications, wherever they live, whether it be in a cloud, in a multi-cloud environment, Cisco is bringing all of that together. >> Prakash, what's your thoughts? >> Adding on to Ronnie's point, the openness and something that new that we are doing, not just from campus perspective, but campus, branch, data center, and making it open across everything, which is what Dave Goeckeler covered today in his keynote, I think that's something that Cisco is not just looking at one infrastructure, but across all of his portfolio and making it unique is really something that people should take away from this one. >> That's awesome. Great stuff, well guys, thanks for sharing. Thanks for co-sharing, co-developing content with us. I gotta say just from the hallway conversations, people are impressed that you guys are taking a very practical approach, not trying to boil over the ocean here with all these capabilities and announcements, focusing on the network value, where it fits in, and being Cloud Native from day one with microservices is a good start, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for sharing. Live coverage here in theCUBER. Day two of Cisco Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage, stay with us here at day two as we start winding down day two here at Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida, be right back.