>> 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 to San Diego, everybody. You're watching Cisco Live 2019. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. Our third host, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Dave Malik is here. He's a fellow and Chief Architect at Cisco. David, good to see you. >> Oh, glad to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. First of all, congratulations on being a fellow. What does that mean, a Cisco Fellow? What do you got to go through to achieve that status? >> It's pretty arduous task. It's one of the most highest technical designations in Cisco, but we work across multiple architectures in technologies, as well as our partners, as well, to drive corporate-wide strategy. >> So you've been talking to customers here, you've been presenting. I think you said you gave three presentations here? Multi-cloud, blockchain, and some stuff on machine intelligence, ML. >> Yes. >> Let's hit those. Kind of summarize the overall themes, and then we'll maybe get into each, and then we got a zillion questions for you. >> Sure, excellent. So multi-cloud, I think one of the customers, we're clearly hearing from them is around, how do we get a universal policy model and connectivity model, and how do you orchestrate workloads seamlessly? And those are some of the challenges that we trying to address at this conference. On blockchain, a lot of buzz out there. We're not talking about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, it's really about leveraging blockchain from a networking perspective, or an identity and encryption, and providing a uniform ledger that everything is pervasive across infrastructure. And then ML, I think it's the heart of every conversation. How do we take pervasive analytics and bring it into the network so we can drive actionable insights into automation? >> So let's start with the third one. When you talk about ML, was your talk on machine learning? Did it spill into artificial intelligence? What's the difference to you from a technology perspective? >> Machine learning is really getting a lot of the data and looking at repetitive patterns in a very common fashion, and doing a massive correlation across multiple domains. So you may have some things happening in the branch, the data set, or a WAN in cloud, but the whole idea is how do you put them together to drive insight? And through artificial intelligence and algorithms, we can try to take those insights and automate them and push them back into the infrastructure or to the application layer. So now you're driving intelligence for not just consumers or devices, but also humans as well to drive insight. >> All right. So Dave, I wonder if you'd help connect with us what you were talking about there, and we'll get to the multicloud piece because I was at an Amazon show last week from Amazon, talking about how when they look at all the technologies that they use to get packages, their fulfillment centers, everything that they do as a business, ML and AI, they said, is underneath that, and AWS is what's driving that technology from that standpoint. Now, multicloud, AWS is a partner of yours. >> Yes. >> Can you give us how you work in multicloud and does ML and IA, is that a Cisco specific? Are you working with some of the standards out there to connect all those pieces? Help us look at some of the big picture of those items. >> So we believe we're agnostic, whether you connect to Amazon, Azure, Google, et cetera, we believe in a uniform policy model and connectivity model, which is very, very arduous today. So you shouldn't have to have a specific policy model, connectivity model, security model for that matter, for each provider. So we're normalizing that plane completely, which is awesome. Then, at a workload level, regardless of whether your workload is spun up or spun down, it should have the same security posture and visibility. We have certain customers that are running as single applications across multiple clouds, so your data is going to be obviously on-prem, you may be running analytics in TenserFlow, compute in EC2, and connecting to O365, that's one app. And where we're seeing the models go is are you leveraging technology such as this? Do you offer service mesh? How do we tie a lot of these micro-services together and then be able to layer workload orchestration on top? So regardless of where your workload sits, and one key point that we keep hearing from our customers is their ungovernance. How we provide cloud-based governance regardless of where their workload is, and that's something we're doing in a very large fashion with customers that have a multicloud strategy. >> So Stu, I think there's still some confusion around multicloud generally, and maybe Cisco's strategy. I wonder if we could maybe clear it up a little bit. >> Dave, it's that big elephant in the room, and I always feel like everybody describes multicloud from a different angle. >> So let's dig into this a little bit, and let's hear from Cisco's perspective. So you got, to my count, five companies really going after this space. You got Cisco, VMware, IBM Red Hat, Microsoft, and Google with Anthos. Probably all those guys are partners of yours. >> Yes. >> Okay, but you guys want to provide the bromide or the single pane of glass, okay. I'm hearing open and agnostic. That's a differentiator. Security, you're in a good position to make an argument that you're in a good position to make things secure. You got the network and so forth. High-performance network, and cost-effective. Everybody's going to make that argument relative to having multiple stovepipes, but that's part of your story as well. So the question. Why Cisco? What's the key differentiator and what gives you confidence that you can really help win in this marketplace? >> So our core competencies are our networking and security. Whether it's cloud-based security or on-prem security, it's uniform. From a security perspective, we have a universal architecture. Whether it's the endpoint, the edge, the cloud, they're all sharing information and intelligence. That's really important. Instead of having bespoke products, these products and solutions need to communicate with each other, so if someone's sick in one area, we're informing the other one. So threat intelligence and network intelligence is huge. Then more importantly, after working with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, we have on-prem solutions as well, so as customers are going on their multicloud journey, and eventually the workload will transition, you have the same management experience and security experience. So Anthos was a recent announcement, AWS as well, where you can run on-prem Kubernetes, and you can take the same workload and move it to AWS or GCP, but the management model and the control pane model, they are extremely similar and you don't have to learn anything new from a training perspective. >> Okay, but I used the term agnostic, oh, no. You did agnostic, I said open. But you don't care if it's Anthos or VMware, or OpenShift, you don't care. >> Don't care. >> And, architecturally, how is it that you can successfully not care? >> Because the underlying, fundamental principles is you can load any workload you want with this, bare metal, virtualized, or Kubernetes-based containers, they all need the same. For example, everyone needs bread and water. It's not different. So why should you be able to discriminate against a workload or OpenShare if they're using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, for example? The same model, all applications still need security, visibility, networking, and management, but they should not be different across all clouds, and that's traditionally what you're seeing from the other vendors in the market. They're very unique to their stovepipe, and we want to break down those stovepipes across the board, regardless of what app and what workload you have. >> Dave, talk a little bit about the automation that Cisco's delivering to help enable this because there's skill set challenges, just the scale of these environments are more than humans alone can take care of, so how does that automation, I know you're heavily involved in the CX beast of Cisco. How does that all tie together? >> So we're working on a lot of automation projects with our large enterprises and SPs, I mean, you see Rakuten being fairly prominent in the show, but more importantly, we understand not everyone's building a greenfield environment, not everything is purely public cloud. We have to deal with brownfield, we have to deal with third-party ecosystem partners, so you can't have a vertically tight single-vendor solution. So again, to your point, it's completely open. Then we have frameworks, meaning you have orchestrators that can talk down to the device through programmatic interfaces. That's why we see DevNet surrounding us, but then more importantly, we're looking at services that have workflows that could span on-prem, off-prem, third-party, it doesn't really matter. And we stitch a lot of those workloads southbound, but more importantly, northbound to security at ITSM Systems. So those frameworks are coming into life, whether you're a telecom cloud provider or you're a large enterprise. And they slowly fall into those workflows as they become more multi-domain. You saw David Goeckeler the other day, talking about SD-WAN, ECI, and campus wired and wireless. These domains are coming together and that's where we're driving a lot of the automation work. >> So automation is a linchpin to what business outcome? Ultimately, what are customers trying to achieve through automation? >> There's a couple of things. Mean time to value. So if you're a service provider, to your internal customers or external, time to value and speed and agility are key. The other ones are mean time to repair and mean time to detect. If I can shorten the time to detect and shorten time to react, then I can take proactive and preemptive action in situations that may happen. So time to value is really, really important. Cost is a play, obviously, 'cause when you have more and more machines doing your work, your OPEX will come down, but it's really not purely a cost play. Agility and speed are really driving automation to that scale as we're working with folks like Rakuten and others. >> What do you see, Dave, as the big challenges of achieving automation when customers, first of all, I was talking like, 10, 15 years ago people, they were afraid of automation. Some still are. But they I think understand as part of a digital transformation, they got to automate. So what are the challenges that they're having and how are you helping them solve them? >> So typically, what people have thought about automation has been more network-centric, but as we just discussed multicloud, automation is extending all the way to the public cloud, at the workload or at the functional level, if you're running in Lambda, for example. And then more importantly, traditionally, customers have been leveraging Python scripts and things of that nature, but the days of scripters are there, but they cannot scale. You need a model-driven framework, you need model-driven telemetry to get insight. So I think the learning curve of customers moving to a model-driven mindset is extremely important, and it's not just about the network alone, it's also about the application. So that's why we're driving a lot of our frameworks and education and training. And talent's a big gap that we're helping with with our training programs. >> Okay, so you're talking about insights. There's a lot of data. The saying goes, "data is plentiful, insights aren't." So how do you get from data to insights? Is that where the machine intelligence comes in? Maybe you can explain that. >> There's a combination. Machines can process much faster than humans can, but more importantly, somebody has to drive the 30 or 40 years of experience that Cisco has from our tech, our architects and CX, and our customers and the community that we're developing through DevNet. So taking trusted expertise from humans, from all that knowledge base, combining that with machine learning so we get the best of both worlds. 'Cause you need that experience. And that is driving insight so we can filter the signal from the noise, and then more importantly, how do you take that signal and then, in an automated fashion, push that down to an intent-based architecture across the board. >> Dave, can you take us inside a little bit of your touchpoints into customers? In the old days, it was a CCIE, his job, his title, it was equipment that he would touch, and today, talking about this multicloud and the automation, it's very dispersed as to who owns it, most of what I am managing is not something that's under their purview, so the touchpoints you have into the company and the relationship you have changed a lot in the last three, five years or so. >> Absolutely, 'cause the buying center's also changing, because folks are getting more and more centric around the line of business and want the outcome we want to drive for their clients. So the cloud architecture teams that are being built, they're more horizontal now. You'll have a security person, an application, networking, operations, for example, and what we're actually pioneering, a lot of the enterprises and SPs, is building the site reliability engineering teams, or SRE, which Google has obviously pioneered, and we're bringing those concepts and teams through a CX framework, through telecos, and some of their high-end enterprises initially, and you'll see more around that over the coming months. Our SRE jobs, if you go on LinkedIn, you'll probably see hundreds of them out there now. >> One of the other things we've been watching is Cisco has a very broad portfolio. This whole CX piece has to make sure that, from a customer's standpoint, no matter where the portfolio, whether core, edge, IOT, all these various devices, I should have a simplified experience today, which isn't necessarily, my words, Cisco's legacy. How do you make sure, is software a unifying factor inside the company? Give us a little bit about those dynamics inside. >> Absolutely, so we take a life cycle approach. It's not one and done. From the time there's a concept where you want to build out a blueprint, but there's no transformation journey, we have to make sure we walk the client through preparation, planning, design, architecture optimization, but then making sure they actually adopt, and get the true value. So we're working with our customers to make sure that they go around the entire life cycle, from end to end, from cradle to grave, and be able to constantly optimize. You're hearing the word continuous pretty much everywhere. It's kind of the fundamental of CICD, so we believe in a continuous life cycle approach that we're walking the customers end to end to make sure from the point of purchase to the point of decommissioning, making sure they're getting the most value out of the solutions they're getting from Cisco. >> All right Dave, we'll give you the last word on Cisco Live 2019. Thoughts? Takeaways? >> I think there's just amazing energy here, and there's a lot more to come. Come down to the CX booth and we'll have to show you some more gadgets and solutions where we're taking our forward customers. >> Great. David, thank you very much for coming to The Cube. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> All right, 28,000 people and The Cube bringing it to you live. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Lisa Martin is also in the house. We'll be right back from Cisco Live San Diego 2019, Day 3. You're watching The Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's the cube covering Cisco Live, U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to sunny San Diego. Lisa Martin with the Cube live at Cisco Live in the U.S. here. I'm here the next three days with Stu Miniman and Dave Volante. Gentlemen, great to see you. >> It is sunny. >> It is very sunny. >> Lisa, big 30th anniversary celebration here at Cisco live. Where were you in 1989, you don't have to answer that. >> But I thought about that this morning, I know exactly where I was. So the 30th year of them doing a customer partner event. Other 30 year anniversary notables this year, Tetris is 30, Seinfeld premiered 30 years ago. That's kind of scary when you remember exactly where you were. So we came from the keynote just a minute ago, not a lot of news here, but Stu, let's start with you. In terms of where Cisco is, you guys were in Cisco Live Barcelona just a few months ago, John and I covered Cisco DevNet about six weeks ago, lots of excitement around these waves of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, Compute architectures, your thoughts on Cisco where are they are today, where they are in their transition to becoming more software services? >> Yeah, so lately say a great place to start you. We've been watching the last two years that we've done theCube at their European and U.S. events, this transformation to become a software company. It's really interesting to see Chuck Robbins bring out this 30 year old box, and he's like, it's ribbon cables and multi-protocol routers and everything, and then most of the keynotes, most of the things that they're discussing, sure they had some boxes out there on display, I saw somebody on Twitter, they let all the cats out of the bag, 'cause they're all, Cat. 9000, Cat 6300, things like that, but it's software driven. The point they want to make is that cloud and software defined networking was going to destroy Cisco, well and here we are five or 10 years into some of these waves, and Cisco's still going strong. they have positioning in a lot of these environments. Cisco still does have a lot of hardware. When I look at how we track Cisco, it is more about the ports in the boxes than it is the software revenue, but they are climbing up the charts there, and they are being more software. They are showing up at all the cloud shows. When we were at Google Next, we talked to Cisco there. At AWS we talked to AppDynamics and many of the software pieces, and here in the DevNet zone, it's all about enabling developers which is at the core of so much of what's happening for that software transformation. So Cisco, making good measurable progress. Still a nice robust mix of hardware and software, and I personally, 30 years, I was actually at the 20 year reunion. I bumped into a friend of mine that we'd done a video with 10 years ago. We're comparing how we both have a little bit less hair than we did there, but amazing to think about the technologies we were looking at 10 years ago. Cloud was so early in some of these spaces, so a lot has changed in 10 years, and Cisco continually matriculating the ball down the field as they would say in the old analogy. >> And in terms of revenue, Dave, I was looking at their Q3 2019 report which was just a few weeks ago, sixth consecutive revenue growth quarter under Chuck Robbins, your thoughts on where they are from a revenue perspective? >> Well, Cisco's been doing very well. the Stock's been crushing it since 2011. After the downturn Cisco came out of the downturn as a stronger company. They're about almost 50 billion dollars in annual revenue. They've got a 250 billion dollar market cap, which as, Stu, you and I were talking about, it's almost a 5X revenue multiple, and that's software-like revenue multiples. Hardware companies don't typically get that. I mean unless you're like a pure storage, and your growing super fast. But so, this is a company with 60, almost 65% gross margins, it's got a 25% operating income. Again, that's like AWS. AWS is an incredibly profitable company. Just to put that into perspective, Oracle which is predominantly a software company even though it has some hardware, has operating margins in the low to mid 30s, and that's an extremely profitable company. Cisco's got a net of 10 billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet, actually more, but it's got some debts if you're talking about the net debt, and it's growing at 5 or 6% a year. For a 50 billion dollar company, that's quite impressive. So I think to answer your question Lisa, they're doin' quite well from a revenue standpoint. Chuck has done a great job with Wall Street. They obviously trust him. The stock's up. It's on a, I wouldn't say a rocket ship, but Cisco is a cashflow machine. Now where do they allocate that capital? Obviously they spend some on R and D and operations. they spent seven and a half billion dollars last year on stock buybacks, and dividends. So that's a big nut, and so Cisco's going to continue, in my opinion, to use it's funds to obviously fund R and D, but also do stock buybacks, dividends, prop up the stock. >> Stu: And acquisitions. >> And acquisitions. Is that a good move? Well, so balancing organic R and D with acquisitions is good. We talked about the Meraki acquisition earlier. Obviously Cisco's done a lot of growth through it's acquisition, but I would say this. Stock buybacks are a good idea when your stock is undervalued. Is Cisco undervalued, I don't know. Everything's up these days, hard to predict, but the concern that I have for companies like Cisco and Oracle, who do a lot of big buybacks is when the market sentiment flips, and shifts toward profit based companies like a Cisco or an Oracle, cashflow based companies, stocks tend to depress, and then the market sentiment shifts. So there might be some better buying opportunities ahead, but companies today who have a lot of cash, they have to do buybacks because they got to keep Wall Street happy. >> So as we look at these big waves of the explosion of 5G, 400 gigabit ethernet, GPUs, AI everywhere, one of the things that Chuck Robbins said this morning was that, and it made me think of the network as this common denominator in this changing architectural world we live in, hybrid multi-cloud. So going from their first show 30 years ago that was called Networker, what are your thoughts, Stu, we'll start with you, about where they're positioned with the network as really this common denominator in changing architectures, and the network that data that traverses it can be gleaned by organizations to extract insights, new value, new business models, where does Cisco sit in your opinion? >> Great question Lisa. So first of all we need to look at where does Cisco play, and where do they win? If you talk about the enterprise, switching and routing, they are dominant in that environment. We're going to be digging into some of the service providers. Service providers is not, Cisco is not nearly as dominant with service providers as they are in the enterprise. Then if you talk in the hyperscale players, they don't do as much gear, and that's where they're looking to have their software in there. Cisco wants to make sure that in this new hybrid multi-cloud world, wherever you live, there's going to be some piece of the stack that Cisco is part of. But there are opportunities for growth, but there are risks. Some of the traditional business, enterprises are not building as many data centers, and they're going to go to hosting providers, and therefore the network that most companies manage, most of what they're managing isn't under their purview. they don't touch it, they don't cable it, they don't put any of that together, and so Cisco needs to be extending who they work with, help with common interfaces across them. An area we spend a lot of time looking at is this multi-cloud management where Cisco is going up against some of their traditional partners. People like VMware and Microsoft used to just be the software pieces that ran on top of Cisco, now they're going for some of that same piece of the market because that is a control point, and Cisco needs to have leverage there, so can they be strong there? So it's interesting some of these waves that we have where Cisco plays, and where they will have a lot of competition. >> So guys, I think as Cisco moves from just a purely data center player to all these other opportunities, and they talk about the bridge to possible, I see it as Cisco's in a position to connect all the world's data sources. When you talk about multi-cloud, Cisco's got an opportunity and a challenge to convince the world that it's networks are higher performance, more cost effective, and more secure than everybody else, and you saw David Goeckeler today put up a slide, and he talked about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 things. He said, automated, secure, agile, cheaper, easier to manage, drives of business outcomes. Now easier to manage, cheaper, automated, those are all cost efficiency sort of plays. So Cisco is in a good position because it's such a huge piece of the market, you know two thirds of the market, and it's been able to maintain that. It doesn't have a monopoly quite, but it's been able to maintain that huge market share for a long time. >> And Dave, if I can, just a comment that number one is Cisco has not been known to have the simplest networks out there, nor in the past it was the best network I could do, I would buy Cisco only. Today, as you've said it many times Dave. Today's multi-cloud is the old multi-vendor. Cisco, sure they would do interops, and they would make sure to test it out, and they follow all the standards, and they drive all of the standards, but in today's world, if Cisco is not the dominant player in the market, will they win in those environments, and you look at something like 5G. Cisco's not the leader in 4G and LTE roll outs. they're working with the telecom providers, but they have a strong position with Meraki on the WiFi, so something like WiFi 6 and their strong connection between the WiFi 6 and the 5G to be able to make sure my indoor and outdoor can now work seamlessly, but there's areas where Cisco's trying to go into that have not necessarily been their stronghold in the past, and at the end of the day, it's frictionless and simplicity is what's driving a lot of these cloudways, and that's not Cisco traditionally. >> Well to that point, you know complexity means cash historically in this business, and so 25% of Cisco's revenue comes from professional services, and 60% from infrastructure, and then the balance is for other stuff. What's the point? The point is that Cisco is transitioning it's business to more of a subscription model. Now they talk about that they had huge growth in the subscriptions business, but they don't really tell you how much of their business is software. It's sort of opaque. You got to kind of dig through that, but it's clearly on a big upswing. So Cisco's got to transition it's business from, you know back in 1989 it was a lot of break/fix right, then it's become a lot more sort of consulting and other professional services. Now it's going more toward an as a service model, and maybe still some of the professional services to, how do I secure my network, how do I architect that, what about cloud, what about multi-cloud, a lot of opportunities there for services value add, but it has to transition. >> Speaking of security, wanted to kind of touch on that for a second, Dave. They just announced the intent to acquire Sentryo SAS, which is a cybersecurity company out of France for industrial control. Their cybersecurity's one of their fastest growing businesses. Is that an opportunity for Cisco to differentiate itself with respect to network security? >> Well, it's imperative. I mean their security business grew 21% last quarter which is what, triple, more than triple the overall company. What they set at around that acquisition, it made total sense to me, is that it used to be you would just invest in protecting the perimeter. That's where all the money went. Now with things like the Edge, and that's part of this acquisition, you've got to really secure the devices, and the applications that are out there, but also I think increasingly the big opportunity is how do we respond? So things like Stealthwatch, and other machine machine intelligence and analytics help organizations that are ultimately, we know they're going to get breached, but the question is how do they respond? >> Yep, excellent. Well guys, I'm looking forward to three days of wall to wall coverage with you, talking with Cisco folks, DevNet folks, customers, partners. It's going to be bright. I think we can guarantee that, but it's going to be good. >> Yeah, we should say that we're here in the DevNet zone, right? So stop by and see us. A lot of action here. there'll be a lot of takeovers, and we'll be coverin' it. >> Yes, the Sails Pavilion which feels just like that. All right guys, going to be a great week. I'm Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman and Dave Volante, you're watching the Cube Live from Cisco Live in sunny San Diego. Stick around, our guests lineup begins in just a minute. (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)

(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)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the CUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and the CUBE's ecosystem partnership. >> Hello there, and welcome back to the CUBE's exclusive live coverage of Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with cohost Stu Miniman. This is the third day of three days of live interviews. Go to thecube.net, siliconangle.com for all the great stories. Of course it'll be on YouTube after as well. Our next guest is Christine Heckart, head of global marketing for all Cisco's business units in a really great role, focusing on the outcomes. Christine, great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> You're wearing the DevNet hat that says DevNet Social Club which is very interesting, because they had a huge party last night celebrating with 500,000 developers. Quite a social party. >> Right. >> And they had the hats, looking good. >> Unbelievable, unbelievable milestone. Really changes the nature of the industry, you know. The network is becoming an open platform for business innovation. It's time. It's high-impact. We're very excited. >> It's a new Cisco you're seeing. You have a new role. You're trying to get a holistic view across all the business units which have marketing, but the interesting thing about the DevNet success is in only four years, the success on the numbers is really kind of amazing to see that kind of growth of, you know, real, active developers. This points to the digital transformation. Cloud native companies like Airbnb, these are proven case studies. Now the enterprise is moving there. What's your view of that? How do you look at the digital transformation? >> Everybody's talking digital transformation. You know, it's like, I've been in the industry 30 years. To me, the digital transformation happened in the '90's when we truly went from analog to digital. This is wave two, maybe three, and it's not so much that we are digitally transforming. It's more that we are now learning to harness networks in new ways. And I don't just mean like technology networks, but networks of customers and partners and developers and allowing them to co-create value for each other. And when that happens, you know, more usage creates more value, creates more usage. You get this virtuous cycle, this network effect that's happening. That's the big network. And of course, if you're going to do that as a business, you need a different kind of architecture, small n. You need a new business architecture to build that new business model on. And that to me is the really big transformation that's happening. It's what makes it fun to be in this industry again. Very exciting. >> Yeah, Christine, I love that. I say most of my career is like I talk about networks of networks because I'm a networking guy by back ground, but, you know, at the CUBE, we're about community. Talking about that network effect, we've had on some of the research from MIT talk about this second machine age and how you're gonna be able to leverage some of these things, so just speak a little more of some of the cultural changes we see, and, you know, how the different networking and networking play together. >> Yes, I love the network of networks, 'cause that's another way to say network effect. There's a guy in MIT, in the MIT media lab, named David Rose. He wrote this book called Enchanted Objects, and I just love that concept of, you know, living in an enchanted world. That sounds amazing. But he talks about kind of a ladder of enchantment or a ladder of connected value, and the way I internalize it is when you connect an object, you change its nature. But we're not just connecting things back to a central data center anymore. David Goeckeler kinda talked about this. Chuck in his keynote referenced it. The whole world has changed. It's now about connecting things to each other, and it's creating the context and the socializing of things, the network of networks. And then how do you let those things and let people interacting with those things co-create value for each other? And DevNet comes in there, opening up the API's, opening up the data, allowing people to create new applications that have never been thought of before. But this, to me, is the big opportunity that we all have together, and we're. This is the age of networks. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote that book Seventh Sense, which I think should be the bible of everybody in this industry, and it says we are truly in the golden age of networks and probably just at the beginning of it. There's a lot of change to happen. >> We love network effect, so we totally love where you're going with this because our business has got a network effect dynamic in how we do our media, but I think, more importantly, you're talking about value creation with networks. This is a fundamental, new trend that's now taking the connected world to another level. So we're all connected. >> Right. >> Audiences are out there. People are out there. So people who are building the networks are the ones that are creating the value. >> Right. >> The question that we're looking at and trying to understand is where is the value capture? We see open source as a great example of co-creation. How do you view that in your mind? Is network effect capture, is it collaboration? What's your thoughts and what's your reaction to the notion of if we're connected, how do we come together and how do we capture it? >> So, the way I've been thinking about it recently. I don't know if this is the right way, but companies are at different stages of this. You've got companies that are very traditional. You've got companies like Cisco and Microsoft that are transitional, and then you've got companies that have transformed. And for any of those companies, you can create. You can harness that value of network effect. You can do it at the infrastructure level. So we talked about that a lot in the keynotes, like with security, where one person gets sick, everybody gets inoculated because of what we did with Talos, and that's a network effect, but it's captured inside your infrastructure. When you're using AINML or you're automating things, that's a network effect inside your business infrastructure. You can do it at the product and service level. Just a single product. You can do it at the internal people level. How do I get my people collaborating in new ways and creating better value, co-creation of value, network effects among the people? You can transform the company, and your business model can be based on that. Or you can transform the whole industry. You know, if you look at what all the normal examples, Airbnb and Uber, they didn't digitize. They created network effects by having a network of drivers and riders or a network of people who own houses and people who want to rent houses. It's the capital N, right, that's at the business level, and ultimately it's transforming whole industries. >> I got to get your thoughts 'cause this is right in line with Chuck Robbins's keynote around an open new, modern era. >> Right. >> He put the classic network architecture slide up. Hey, firewall, old way. Let's go look at the new way. This is really kind of a thought leadership point that's super important because as we engage with intent networking changes, the outcomes are driving a lot of the architectures. It used to be the other way around. >> Right, exactly. >> Here's what you've got and here's what you can do with it. Now it's what do you want to do? >> Right. >> How does that affecting change? Obviously DevNet is a great example. That's a freight train. It's gonna go another inflection point, we believe, but this new mindset is changing how people are organizing, and the future of work is involved. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you know, it's so many layers, but ultimately it's about harnessing the wonder and taming the chaos of this hyper-connected world, and I don't think you can build a new business on an old architecture. If your business infrastructure was built 30, 20, even 10 years ago, it's just not built for the modern age. And it's about mindset shifts and architectural shifts, but going from hardware to software because you need that realtime agility. Going from closed to open. Going from CLI to API, right? The DevNet orientation. There are these big shifts that we have to make in the way we fundamentally think about architecture, and then there are shifts we have to make in the way we architect networks, in the way we build applications, and all of that is what we have to do together as an industry. >> So Christine, you know, we've been in the networking world for awhile. One of the challenges we saw for businesses many times is the network was slow to change, and, you know, enterprises would be like, oh no, I can't do that because, you know, it's a bottleneck for innovation. So we've been excited to see Cisco moving up the stack. The DevNet momentum here, explain how we can flip that bit and make sure that, you know, networking is now a driver for innovation rather than an anchor? >> Right, it should be the driver. We say the network is now open for business. The network needs to be the platform for business innovation so I could answer in a technical level, but where I'm gonna go is higher level. You think about Cisco's logo as a bridge, and what bridges do in the physical world, is bridges collapse space and time. Right? If I live in the bay area, to get from San Francisco to Pleasanton, you used to have to go all the way around the bay. And you built a bridge, and you gain time. You collapse space, and you accelerate things. And that's what technical bridges do, too. It doesn't matter if we're collaborating with people around the world, we're collapsing space. It doesn't matter if we're trying to accelerate the pace at which we bring something to market, we're accelerating time, time to market. Technology bridges collapse space and time, and you get that acceleration effect, that small world effect, as a result. Now ultimately, that's what these technologies have to do. We do it through automation. We've gotta simplify things. We've gotta make it possible to program a network in the language of business, which is what intent-based networking is about. And you take an API, and you say what you want to do, and it automatically calls up those resources from the network and makes it happen. >> Talk about Cisco's role in that vision. By the way, it's a beautiful vision. We see it the same way, but the language of business is changing. You mentioned outcomes. These are new things. You mentioned API's, intent-based. What are some of the things Cisco's playing in the role of that future innovation? What's the role for Cisco? >> Well, Cisco has to play a couple of roles. Well, two of them at the same time. One, we're transforming our own business, and while we do that, we have to help all of our customers transform their businesses. And to me, we play two really important roles. One is as technology leaders and visionaries and evangelists. That's what this whole show is about. Like, the smartest people in the world are doing this stuff. How do you bring them all together, and how do you collectively move forward, collectively make each other smarter? We've got a network effect just here, right? Because we all make each other smarter. We learn from each other, and we learn how to take things forward. So Cisco with its R&D engine, and, you know, everything we do to automate and automate business and kind of create that hidden magic that makes the modern world possible, we gotta be doing that. But at the same time, companies and cities and governments look to Cisco as somebody to help show the way at the business level, at the human level, at the impact on the world, and, you know, that's where all of our social responsibility stuff comes in. We talk about everything from connected rhinos that help to preserve the ecosystem in Africa and make sure that there's not as much poaching going on with the rhinos, all the way to how we change education or change health care, and we have to play a role in all of that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, because, you know, the statistics we look at, certainly it's been well-documented that millennials want to work for a mission-driven organization, but you're bringing up something where a mission-driven organization actually impacts network effect. >> Yes. >> So it's more than ever now having a mission. Not only do you attract people who want to work for a mission-driven company, there's actually a benefit and impact through that. Can you expand on that? Because I think you're really off to something with network effect. I think network effect is a new dynamic that isn't just a paper exercise to think about, and looking at it as a formula or gamification kind of growth hack. It's actually a real business dynamic. Talk about that. >> It is. Well first of all, network effects are timeless, and frankly, they don't even need people. Bees and flowers create a network effect. It just means more usage creates more value for all users. It's been cities, language. Network effects tend towards kind of natural monopolies. You tend to get oligopolies, smaller numbers with big impact, and, you know, it does go to mission, because what I see happening is every industry right now is being transformed. Just like we saw back in the 90's, the Internet kind of went through every industry, and it changed it drastically and ultimately changed the whole world. And we see that happening now, but where we see it is at the whole ecosystem level because you're seeing network effects happening in entire industries. And our mission is to help every company in the world find its relevance, and really every person in the world, certainly every person in our industry, find their relevance. People are searching for how to become relevant in this very hyper-connected, changing time, and Cisco can help people in this industry find their relevance. We can help each company and each industry find their way and find their relevance, and when you do that, goodness is created. And when you fail to do that, a lot of people, jobs get impacted, companies get impacted, communities get impacted. And we want to see the positive impact, not the negative. >> It's so interesting. Cisco's core competency. I'm just seeing some of the signs around here, 25 years of CCIE. It's a networking company, but you're bringing network effects at a whole nother level. It's a business architecture. >> It's a capital N, not just a small n. >> You're bridging the network effects of technical with business network effects, and that's where the secret sauce is. >> That's where the magic happens. >> Christine, great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Thank you for having me. >> See you supporting DevNet with the hat there. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. Good to see you. Great stuff here. Network effect is a business dynamic influenced by actual technical network. Cisco's at the center of it. So CUBE with our network effect is bringing the data to you in realtime. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be back with more after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's The Cube. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and The Cube's ecosystem partner. >> Hey welcome back, everyone. This is The Cube live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE co-host of The Cube with my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Riaz Raihan, who's the global VP and general manager of Cisco IoT, Internet of Things Division. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, John. >> Great to see you. New to Cisco, IoT, I was commenting on the keynote to Stu today, I mean Cisco got it right ten years ago in their initial vision. And it's now happening in real time in front of our eyes. We see cars, we see connected people, we see connected everything. Everything's connected with an IP address or some connection point with power. That is IoT world, it's massive. You're in charge. Are you having fun yet? >> Absolutely. I mean, I joined in May last year, and I can tell you it's been an eventful eight and a half months. Cisco has a huge commitment to its IoT. They've made a massive investment, of people, of funds, and of intent. I mean, this is one of the top strategies for the company. Right from our CEO Chuck Robbins down, everyone's really committed to IoT. We've made a few important changes. We're making it real. And as you said, IoT today is ubiquitous. So it's very important for Cisco, as a leader in this field, to demonstrate that leadership, and I'm honored to be leading the charge. >> So define what's happening at Cisco. If you could put a stake in the ground right now, as someone who's coming in fresh, and, again, you've inherited a good position. As we say in the NASCAR business, whole position. What are you doing? How do you look at it and how would you explain Cisco's view of IoT, because everyone seems to have a different view of how they're attacking IoT. What's the strategy for Cisco? How are you going after it? >> You're right. I mean, IoT means different things to different people. But the one common thing is that it's very context-based. Right? IoT within the context of manufacturing, as an example, is different from within a context of roadways and transportation. So we've done a couple of things to get that context right. First of all, we've defined how we're going to go after the market. So we've got two platforms. We've got Jasper, which was acquired by Cisco, which is IoT for everything to do with cellular networks. So if you're on a public cellular network, Jasper is the platform you'll use. And then we've got Kinetic, which is our platform for IT and OT networks. So first we defined our strategy around product. Next, we've defined which industries we'll go after. And there's five key verticals that we've decided are crucial for Cisco. Number one is cities. We have full position in that. Number two is manufacturing. Number three is energy, which includes both oil and gas as well as utilities. Number four is transportation. That includes roadways as well as fleet. And number five is retail. So that's really our go-to market strategy. We are kind of focusing on specific use cases and specific industries. >> And you view the network, we were talking before we went on camera, there's certainly cloud, which is not competitive to you guys, or are they? But how do you, is the network more important than the edge, is the edge where the action is? Cause a device on the network technically is a device, it's a thing. The internet of things, people are things. Machines are things. >> Absolutely. >> John: So where is the edge, scent or does it matter? Your philosophy on this. >> So, you know, IoT, the "T" stands for "things." And everything is connected to something, right? And that's where the data's coming from. So whether it's a machine, whether it's a moving vehicle, whether it's a vending machine, or a side center, they're all things. Cisco has owned the network for a long time, right? And a lot of these things that we talk about are the last point of a network, and they're connected to some network in some capacity. So we approach IoT from the bottom up. We have, I believe, a great position to approach IoT from. We understand the network, we understand what's on the network, we've got visibility to the techs on the network, we have secured the network, and it gives us a great perspective on how to approach IoT. To your other point around cloud, we are not competitive at all with the cloud business. As a matter of fact, we are complementary. We work with all the big guys out there. We have figured out how best to work with them, because at the end of the day, their mission is to drive as much data to the cloud as possible. Our mission is to help extract data from difficult to extract places. So it's actually a pretty good marriage. >> And what's the best way to work with them? You said you've figured out the best way to work with the clouds, what is that best way? >> So you mentioned the edge. I think the edge is where we had to define clear rules of engagement. Our theory on the edge is that we will bring data, as I said, from difficult to extract places, and compute it at the edge, right? And then we'll actually transport it to wherever the customer wants it to go. And, as you heard in the keynotes today, we live in a multi-cloud world. Very few customers are with one cloud. They either have, you know, two more more of the big puppet cloud guys, or they have their own private clouds, or they have a combination thereof. So in that sense, we'll do all the edge compute, and then when the data has to be transferred or moved to the cloud, that's when we'll kind of help figure out what the customer wants to do, and then move it to where the customer wants it to be. >> So Riaz, your background's software, and I want you to give us a little bit of insight as to where we are with IoT today. Specifically, think about go to market and sales cycle. Some of the things I've heard is there's a lot of customers interested, but it's really early. And there's a lot of consultative activity there, it's not to the point where, you know, oh okay, you're this industry, this is the solution, let's shrink-wrap it and go sell it. So it takes a little bit longer. Where are we, how are we along that maturity cycle, and how does that fit into Cisco's selling model and partners? >> You're absolutely right, Stu. IoT is still very nascent. Customers are still trying to figure out not just how to do things, but what to do. And I think Cisco has a leadership role, because of our legacy and because of our brand, and frankly because of our top leadership. While I come from the software world, I recognize that Cisco has had great leadership in the networking area, great leadership in security, and great leadership in software. We are transitioning into becoming a software company, we've had great strength in software, our CEO has often said that 80% plus of our engineers are software engineers. With that said, what we are doing for customers is we are helping define what we call "industry solutions." Let me give you an example. If you're talking to a manufacturing customer, who's trying to connect a number of their machines, both green field and brown field, to sensors, these are actual devices that we partner with and that we install for customers, and then extract data from those sensors onto an edge compute device, there's software involved, but equally there's networking hardware involved in making this happen. And then there's of course virtualization and connection to the cloud, as we just talked about. So to make all that, to make that value chain come to life, we are doing two things. Number one, we are defining what that data flow looks like, and number two, we are defining for the customer what the end-to-end solution looks like, because we think that's critical. And in all the verticals that I've mentioned, we've actually gone down to the level of use case. So if you look at manufacturing, to stick with that example, we have got a use case for equipment health monitoring, we've got a use case for energy monitoring, we've got a use case for track and trace, and each use case has a combination of software, networking, hardware, security, and services. So Cisco's taking a leadership position in defining that, by industry. >> So, you mentioned Kinetic was an acquisition? No, no, Jasper was. >> Riaz: Jasper was, yes. >> Okay, Kinetic was for IT OT, information technology and operational technology. We've reported, and we've observed, the culture clash between OT and IT. OT guys, they're like IT, get out of my face, I don't want an IT connection anywhere near my hardened system. Usually around industrial IoT. How is Cisco bringing those worlds together? 'Cause it feels like dev ops again, is it a collision, is it smooth? Your view? Does it matter? How are you seeing that? >> It's evolving. Going back to Jasper, which Cisco acquired a couple of years ago. And by the way, a very successful acquisition, the device growth has grown from about 20 million devices to 60 billion plus today, in just over eighteen months, and continues to grow rapidly. Jasper, most of Jasper's go-to-market motion was focused at the business user. What you would call OT. Jasper, one of the big verticals in Jasper is the connected car. All of the big, they do a lot of different verticals, they empower a lot of different industries, and anything to do with cellular IOT is served by Jasper. >> And that's mostly sensors. >> Riaz: That's mostly sensors. >> So you're saying, the OT's kind of covered with the Jasper side. >> Riaz: Yeah, yeah. >> So you win at both sides. >> Yeah, we have a lot of OT coverage with Jasper. And there's a lot of great skills that Jasper brought into Cisco. It's not just the technology and the massive user base, there's a lot of great skills as well. Now, coming to Kinetic, this one's interesting, because when we've worked with, going back to manufacturing as an example, we have to work with the OT guys. This is a good thing for Cisco, 'cause it gives us a completely new set of buyers in the corporate world to interact with, and by definition we're actually bringing IT into a lot of these OT conversations. Now, some of them - >> Well they've got the data, too. You've got to bring it back home, right? >> Yeah, but there's also minor other things like security to deal with, right? So we've got to kind of bridge that gap, and OT and IT are kind of playing a big role in defining that. >> You mentioned the key word that I'm surprised it took us so long to get to. Security. Talk about the ever-expanding attack radius. In the keynote this morning they talked about all the new agents are in there, IoT's huge risk out there. What's Cisco's role there, what's the ecosystem partner? How does Cisco maintain a leadership position in this place? >> So let me start by saying something that could be quite sobering. IoT devices are some of the most hackable devices on the planet, right? Research study after research study bears this out. That said, Cisco's point of view is very simple. Security is something we start with, it is not an afterthought. So to that end, we have integrated security into our strategy, but more importantly into our products. Let me give you two examples. Jasper is one of the most secure IoT platforms on the planet, if not the most secure. Jasper is delivered through our service provider network, that we call JPO, so Jasper Partner Operators. In the US it happens to be AT&T, globally we've got about fifty partners to do this. And we work with them to make that rock solid and robust. We also offer additional security offerings on top of what comes with Jasper. Now, coming to the OT IT side, that's a big challenge as well. If you guys had gone to the Walder Solutions, which you probably did, you would have seen that we have a specific offering called IoT Tech Defense. We take this very seriously. We've baked this into our architecture right when are designing the starter solutions, and then we also stress test our solutions as those solutions grow. >> I can see the OT being very secure, end-to-end, enclosed, I should say first licensed spectrum with cellular, and then an end-to-end endpoint. Cool, I can lock that down. Here's the problem. A wifi device as a light bulb, it's got a computer in it, it's got multi-threaded processes, I mean computers are this big. That's going to require a policy on the network. It's an IP device. This is where the threat factor is. This is an area you guys can help. So this is more on the IT side, because that wifi light bulb in my house, which has processes, could be hacked, and actually spawn a lot of malware from there. So how do you take that dumb device, that wants to be a little bit smart, that's too smart right now with all this processing power? >> Too smart and - >> I mean it's a dumb device, all it needs to do is just flash lights, it's got to be on and off. You know what I'm saying? So when is that going to be throttled back? Can you guys help with the network layer? >> You know, we recognize the volatibility of some of these devices, and as David Goeckeler mentioned in his keynote today, security for us is a massive business, but it's also something we think about constantly. Like, going back to your example, what we can bring is the IT security depth that we have. Whether it's wifi, a wired connection, or a combination thereof. I think we've got the network chops and the security chops to secure those devices, and we're doing that. The important thing is we're doing that, baking it into our project strategy. >> I just want to get philosophical for a second with you, because it's a great conversation and IoT's certainly important. Let's kind of zoom out, kind of go in the clouds a little bit, no pun intended, and look down at the industry. Architecturally there's a debate, and we've said that the data center's going to get shrunk down so small that the edge device is going to be a data center some day. How do you see that? Because that changes the data equation, we all know the cost of moving data around the network. So ultimately you have to have a lot of compute at the edge. Your thoughts? How does that play out architecturally, how should customers grok that and think about it? Is it too early? >> So I've seen a shift happening in this as recently as the last twelve months. The emphasis on edge, I know it's very topical, it's been in the business press for a long time, but I think if you look at the ground reality, it is true. A lot of the data consumed by customers today is consumed very close to the point of generation. A classic industry that does this repeatedly is manufacturing. One of the studies indicated that almost 72% of the data generated on the shop floor in an IoT context is consumed in the shop floor. So a lot, a lot of this is going to the cloud. There's other industries, but a lot of data is going to the cloud. But the reality is the edge is getting more and more important. Compute, as you said, is going to the edge. This is trend we'll see, that will continue to happen. It's not going to lessen, it's probably going to deepen. And from Cisco's perspective, I think we're well-positioned to take advantage of this, and to serve our customers as this trend evolves. >> Awesome. Well, so much. Thanks so much for spending the time with The Cube. We really appreciate it. It's illuminating for the folks watching. What's your mission as you head up the division? What's your marching orders to the troops? Honestly, you've got to look at it and reign things in, double down where it's working, and evolve with this wave that's coming, that's here. You've got decentralized apps down, out in the road. You've got immutable block chain entries potentially. Crazy stuff happening. How do you look at this? How do you motivate the team? What's your marching orders? What are your top goals? >> So we've got three key objectives, right? Number one, we want to get to a billion connected devices. And Jasper is really helping drive that charge. We're at 60+ million, growing to a hundred million in this calendar year. We want to get to a billion, because once you get to that level of scale, you become the de facto standard in many ways. So that's number one. Number two, on the Kinetic side, we want it to be ubiquitous. We want to have Kinetic in all of those industries that I've mentioned, and then some. We want to own the use case. And number three, we want to make sure that we're leading with IoT and helping drive great growth for the company, 'cause that's Cisco's number one imperative. >> Awesome. Riaz, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Great conversation about IoT. Great thought leadership at the helm at IoT. A confusing but massively growing opportunity. It's a connected world, this is what we live in today, it's pervasive and software's going to be running it, and it's going to be secure. And of course The Cube's breaking it down for you here, we are secured in Barcelona with The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here, exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain for theCUBE Day one wrap of our two days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman, and we're going to break down day one, Stu? >> I can go for a couple more hours, who else we got? >> But Stu, we'll go live for a marathon session. No, let's wrap it up. We got a full day tomorrow, got some great guests here. At the keynote, Cisco laying out their vision and the story's kind of coming together, and I think Cisco has clarity. So my takeaway, I learned a lot. I learned that Cisco is not just talking, they're walking. They got a lot of work to do. I think that the signs of great progress with Cisco, Stu: one is Rowan put out a great keynote that looks forward not back. They didn't lean on their base and saying we're going to milk this cow until it's dead, meaning the networking engineers and the position. They're looking forward and putting a vision out there that says here's how the network will transform applications and they had a lot of use cases from IoT to multi-cloud and more. And two, they're cracking the code on IoT because they bought Jasper, which is back haul, essentially using cellular to the classic OT market, which is a classic end-to-end. To me, that was a revelation to me and I think that might be the unique creative thinking that could bring IoT into IT and transform the highly unsecure IoT WiFi IP market because anyone can throw a smart light bulb or whatever device. Full processing, multi-threading capabilities, and that can be hijacked and taken over and spewing malware and ransomware and everything else in between. >> John, if anything what I critique a little bit is he gives the vision of 2050. Go to a show like Amazon, they're like hey builders, here's what we have for you today that's really cool. And I think, we heard a lot from Cisco today, the cool things they have. Big acquisitions like AppD. We've talked a lot about, in the IoT discussion today, you talked about it was a $1.4 billion acquisition they made in that space. Here in the DevNet Zone, they're not talking about the future, they're talking about what they're building today. >> Well Stu-- Stu, you know how I feel about this. I kind of roll my eyes when I get that kind of futuristic with no meat on the bone. If you're going to have sizzle, you better have some steak on the grill. That's the critique for me is I'm looking and squinting through the hype and use cases. Oh, we got the future's going to be upon us to reality. What do they got now? That's the progress that I see and the signals that are showing to me are DevNet, active transformation of classic network engineer operator to programmer, one. Two, Susie Wee pointed out a new concept that we love called Net DevOps, which is programming the network for microservices and these new services with Kubernetes as the linchpin. Heard a little bit about Google, so in line with Google. Of course, Cisco's got billion dollar partners in the ecosystem. The certainly great fertilizer if you will, for this growth. They got a lot of things coming together. I think the challenge for Cisco and the strategic imperative that I see for the management team is show progress now. Now you've got the vision, that's the sizzle. Show the stink, that's what's happening now if they can bring that Amazon like mojo, I would think they'd hit a home run. >> John, we've got the Learning Lab behind you in DevNet area here. It's the first time in two whole days I haven't seen it packed and that's just because 15 minutes ago the World of Solutions reception opened. They've got snacks, they've got beer and wine, the music's going over there, so everybody's kind of moved over there but this area's been hopping. A day before the rest of the show really started, before the key notes. Absolutely, I'd love to have Susie talk about the four year transformation internally. We'd watched some of the people inside Cisco beating the drum, talking about making change. Cisco's made investment in Open Source. They've tried to move the needle some, but this developer wave, absolutely, they need to be a part of it. I think back to John Chambers talking about all the adjacencies, some of the failed acquisitions, flip acquisition, some the set top box type stuff. IoT, is the message they've had. I think you laid it out well. They had a good vision upfront but the market needed to mature some. Now we're ready for this to be real. Partner ecosystem, absolutely. Cisco is still a behemoth in this space and they've got strong partnerships a lot of way. There's a lot of transitions. There's some things they need to be careful about how they make the moves, but absolutely, there's interesting times here. >> Stu, you and I always love to talk about this because the network is where the bottleneck has always been. You mentioned in one of the questions, I forget who the guest was, what's going on with some of defined networking? Well, guess what, microservices changes that game. With Kubernetes now as a integration layer, it kind of splits the line between app developers and under the hood software engineering, all the way down to network engineering. Those are okay personas, but now you have policy programmability at the network level that services could take advantage of Those app developers that are slinging APIs, doing no JS, they're used to IOs. They're used to programming these functions. This kind of feels a little bit like serverless is coming to the table. I haven't heard that word here, but kind of getting that vibe. >> Absolutely, we haven't heard serverless. We have talked about containers some. Obviously, we talked about Kubernetes in area we've won, but the multi-cloud is still a little bit early for where Cisco plays at that M and O piece of it, Cisco has had a number of plays over the years and they make an acquisition. We'll see how it is. My friends in the networking space, the line is the single pain of glass, John, is spelled P-A-I-N. I'm glad I didn't hear that term from Cisco. >> John: I heard it once only. >> In general, they understand some of the challenges. They touch a lot of the pieces and they're not being overly dogmatic. They're not bashing the public Cloud. Yes, they have a lot more revenue in the data centers in the service providers, but they're not coming out here as a Cloud denier. >> That's a great point for a couple things. You know how I feel about multi-cloud. I think multi-cloud's BS right now. I think it's one of those moon shots down the road and I don't think anything's going to happen in multi-cloud for awhile. Your "True Private Cloud" report on Wikibon.com kind of validates that. The thing about the pain of class, Cisco actually has a lot of that on the management side. What needs to happen is that pain of glass management has to move up the stacks, Stu. This is where I think the test will be for them. That's going to be key. The thing that I did not hear that I'm surprised about is I didn't hear anything about data-driven anything. There's a lot of stuff being talked about. Programmable networking, kind of implies data. You even heard the IoT general manager talk about IoT feeds AI. I think AI's fed by data. Certainly, IoT supports data. I didn't hear about how their data is driving either policy, automation, not enough of that. I think that's a weak area, I'll say, they've got to do some work on. >> John, some of that I think is just terminology cause if you look inside the intent-based networking pieces that Cisco talks about, David Goeckeler this morning in the key note. He said it's about learning and security. Learning, it's all about data. How do we train those models? They didn't throw out the AI and MO buzzwords out there, but underneath, that's what's happening. It is about data, just networking people don't talk about data nearly as much as the compute or storage people. You're right, serverless, how will that impact the network? Because underneath infrastructure matters. Teagan's going to have to move around a lot more. I would've expected to hear some mention of it. >> Well, you made a good point, I agree with you. I love this intent-based networking. It really changes the conversation. If you say, what is that, what is intent in context? Huge conversation point, huge area to explore. This truly will make an adaptive network, a flexible network. It'll make it programmable. That's what people want. App developers need to have the services on the network side and they need the automation. Really, really key point. Any other learnings for you, Stu? >> Really John, it's going through that shift in model as we talked about in the intro. Cisco heavily moving towards that software model. Riaz who they brought in, heavy software background. You've got that balance of Cisco has strong history. They are trusted. Network provider, Trust and risk are absolutely the number one things that customers hear about. Security is something they bang on, but they need to undergo those transformations. People like Susie, like Riaz, coming in, helping to drive what's happening there. It's been nice to see very different from when the last time I came to Cisco, very heavy gear, and people plugging and running around, dealing with all those challenges. You think back to customers always-- What do they spend, 70 to 80% on keeping the lights on? Most of the activities we talk about here aren't the, oh, how do we keep the lights on? It's about growing the business and transforming the business, which is the imperative for CIOs today. >> The other thing I liked today is we had storage on, IBM and NetApp with a Cisco partner and ecosystem managing executives. Here's the thing that I learned and I'm happy to see this. You see storage going through the haves and have nots. There is a line going on, maybe its NV, NVFE over-- >> Stu: NVME over Fabrics. >> MVME over Fabric is causing a line that's going to define history, either on the wrong side of history or the right side. We're seeing storage start-ups struggling. We're seeing a lot of companies that we knew that went public, going out of business, start-ups cratering. But there's winners. Hearing the Cisco guys with NetApp and IBM, you're starting to see the storage vents who continue to make it, doing well and they're differentiating. What Cisco has actually done masterfully in my opinion, is they've balanced the ecosystem with the storage guys so that they can let everyone win. It's like a race car. Do you want the Lamborghini or the Ferrari or Porsche? You have different versions of storage. Each one can stand on their own and use Cisco and the better mousetrap wins, the better engine, will win for the use cases of the storage guys. Seeing kind of some swim lanes for storage. That's a good sign, Stu, for Cisco. >> Yeah, absolutely. That's how Cisco really drove that wave of converged infrastructure. I heard from lots of the partners at the (mumbles). CI, even though it's not the sexiest thing anymore cause it's over eight years old now, we've been talking about it, billions of dollars, that's what drove UCS, Cisco has a little bit of fear that they missed out on some of the core verbalization so they're not going to miss the container trend. They're not going to miss microservices. They're all over these pieces. But absolutely, they understand the value of ecosystems and they're very smart about how they target that. >> I agree with you, they got the container magic going on. DevNet certainly is looking good from a developer's standpoint. We will be covering the DevNet Create Event, which is a non-Cisco ecosystem. It's a new territory that Susie Wee has taken down, which is to get real Cloud native developers that aren't necessarily in the ecosystem, so that's going to be a positive. The thing I want to ask you, Stu, to end day one wrap up because this is kind of coming up as the NVME over Fabric. What's the impact of Cisco because we see the impact on the market place, with David Floyer would be chiming away if he was here, but I'd like to get your thoughts because you covered it closely, how is that going to help Cisco? Does it hurt Cisco, does it enable them, is it a game changer? What's the impact of NVME over Fabric? >> Cisco, remember not just a networking company, they're a compute supplier with UCS here. They have the M5, they have their latest that they have. Cisco's all over this, they're involved. It's how do I really bring that HPC kind of environment we've been talking about in the networking space. RDMA options out there. iWARP and Roce and NVME over Fabrics is going to be able to give me even higher speed, really low latency, getting scuzzy out of the way, which has been something that we've been trying to do for over a decade now in the storage world. I don't think-- We talked to Eric Herzog this morning and I really agree with him. This is evolutionary and this is not something that's catching anyone by surprise. It's not like-- >> It's on their radar. >> We're going from wire to wireless, or hey, this is now ethernet instead of token ring. >> So not a massive shift. >> It is similar to disk and Flash. It's absolutely, it's the next generation and there will be companies that implement it better, but we've all seen it coming. All the big guys are involved in it. Cisco, it relates to them and their ecosystem, and you expect them to not be a huge shift. >> One of the things we did not hear about. It's not a main theme here, it's certainly an undercurrent. It's certainly mainstream in the tech industry, both on the enterprise and emerging tech, certainly on AI and software, Stu, is the role of open source software. Not a lot going on here. I looked for sessions, I didn't see any birds of a feather or any meetups around open source. I know it's a DevNet show, Cisco show. DevNet creates a little bit more open source with Cloud found. We've interviewed folks like that and others. But if they're going to be talking to Google, and we're talking about Kubernetes, you cannot ignore the role of open source in the Cisco ecosystem. Your thoughts. Miss, not relevant to the show, kind of the back burner? Maybe Cisco's boiling something up? What's happening with their role and impact with open source? >> John, we heard that there's a presentation tomorrow in STO, they're working with Google on that. I'm not surprised not to see heavy open source in here. It would fit into the Cloud messaging, absolutely Cisco. On that Kubernetes train. We talked about in the containers that ecosystem when Docker announced the networking pieces, Cisco was right up there, wanted to make sure they're there. Cisco's doing it. John, they've had middling success to where they've been able to roll that into their products. We've covered a lot of it because we're big proponents of it but the typical customer here, I don't think that they're like oh hey, I didn't see this. There's other places where those communities, the builders and the contributors in those environments know where Cisco goes. >> Cisco's got billions of dollars they've got to focus on that I agree, but open source is important. You know, Stu, we think Kubernetes could possibly unlock the multi-cloud path. We're constantly watching it. I think it's important to them, they have to be there. They're talking Kubernetes. They're talking about that line in the stack that creates an app developer, very cohesive app developer ecosystem, and then under the hood, engineering, software engineering mindset. They got to play. If you're going to play with Google in multi-cloud, Google's all in open source. They want to be on Amazon, they got to be open source. They got to be there, so we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Okay, day one wrap up here. theCUBE, live in Barcelona for exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018. We'll be here all day tomorrow as well. Thanks for watching, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Thanks for watching. (techno music)