from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation welcome to the cube studios for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology I'm your host Peter Burris every Enterprise wants the modern wireless experience and by now most should know that that's going to be a combination of 5g and Wi-Fi six it's not either/or it's how do we apply both of them to achieve the technological outcomes that we want within our business but it requires new thinking because there are a lot of new technologies here that are going to be applied to make that modern wireless experience happen what will be those new technologies how hard will they be to adopt and what kinds of new use cases will be will be utilized well to have that conversation we're here with Eric McLaughlin who's the GM of the wireless solutions group at Intel and Matt fierson who's the CTO of Cisco wireless Eric Matt welcome to the cube Thanks beer to hear all right so you know what let's start with you Matt when we think about this notion of the modern wireless experience I've assert it's going to be both but there's a lot of new technology behind these things give us some insight into what are some of those new technologies that folks are gonna have to start worrying about yeah you know when we're looking at something like a next generation technology there's certain areas that you expect right you expect it to be a little bit faster you expect it to connect to maybe a broader set of devices but what's interesting I think about Wi-Fi six versus previous generations is really there's new technology enhancements that really broaden the set of use cases that that technology can be applied to for example in the old days which actually isn't that long ago I think today you might even say today right um what you would do is when you go to implement a wireless technology at an enterprise what you're doing is you're trying to control a collision domain so that you get it known experience right and what you would tend to do is you tend to over provision the work and hope that it was undersubscribed and there was a lot of Technology a lot of best practices in order to do that a lot of administrative overhead politics associated exactly right and you're doing these RF walks and all these things right with something like Wi-Fi sex and the ability to schedule the air interface this becomes much much simpler you can get it more deterministic result you can map applications that might be mission-critical to lower delay characteristics and this is something that the protocol accommodates right so I think that's in the net and that is even though the technology is more sophisticated it's actually going to be easier for IT administrators to get to where they need to be for the applications they need to serve so I'm gonna dig into that in a second but let's start with you know Eric what are some of the underlying new technologies is this a big leap is that a small leap is it you know we've always talked about how you know some new thing was going to be bigger than you know best thing since sliced bread and where is this on that spectrum well from our perspective we from our perspective we see this as a significant leap in technology some of the underlying things that are coming as Matt mentioned moving from contention based to a scheduled network enables a much more efficient network from a client perspective which is where I spend my time you can you can deliver data over the network faster due to OFDM a implementation which allows huge amounts of throughput you've got larger channelization coming along with this and the combination of those things is going to to allow use cases lower power and things that we haven't been able to do with Wi-Fi in the past or at least not at the user experience level that that everybody needs in laws so to get to that user experience level it means that someone's gonna have to make some adjustments to how networks work network administrator's from practices evolve that always scares CIOs that always scares Network people Matt is this going to be one of those cases where a large leap in technology translates into you know and even bigger leap and the adoption practices some processes to actually exploit it yeah I think it's one of the things that you know a company like Cisco we pay a lot of attention to because we do see that the technologies can become more complex and if the individual IT department or the systems integrator is responsible for that complexity what happens is they actually implement less and less features so that they can get to the result with less guessing on whether or not things are actually going to work or how one feature impacts another what we're doing at Cisco within ten pages intent-based networking is basically we're pushing this policy down into the network through an abstraction that allows you to push that policy in such a way that the network then figures out how to accommodate what you're asking for and then in the reverse you're reading these analytics back that tells the administrator whether or not that experience is actually achieved so the technology is more capable for sure but it's actually going to be easier to use deploy and apply the policies that you need so one of the first place is where we really exploit the new technology is in the discovery metrics etc associated administration so it's easier to adopt it for everybody else exactly and that'll accelerate the curve so we got we got a significant advance in the quality of the technology a modest advance in the adoption characteristics or you know limited barriers and leaps we have to take here that suggests that there's going to be an explosion in the number of use cases Eric what do you think yeah we definitely see that you know today when you think of Wi-Fi in an enterprise you essentially think of access getting your device your client connected into the network so that you can have access to the data that you need and share the data that you have with others what we see and and and we kind of coined this term internally of office of the future we see Wi-Fi being used in a variety of ways to deliver experiences that a user needs and wants but doesn't know how to get today things like where are you located where are you at within an office you go to a new office you're in a new location you're able to pull up maps and see what's happening where's the conference room that you want to go to what cubes are open and those kinds of things we also see other cases where you can use Wi-Fi for sensing what's happening in the room around you what's what's happening in the environment that you're in and how does the user and the device that you're using react to those new environmental characteristics and how do you make sure that you're delivering the best possible bandwidth the best possible experience so that new things can happen connecting devices in a different way and getting to your data and they're much more seamless and easy fashion so one of the things that everybody talks about is security hmm and it's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate security from networking in fact we're seeing in a lot of enterprises I'm sure you guys are too the NOC and the Sox start to slowly merge together into a secure infrastructure that's capable of moving data around how does security play into some of these new use cases I think it's a key question I mean when you when you look at security and you know even when you look at some of the new devices like IOT some of those devices can be sophisticated some of them not so much and so one of the things that you want to do with security is be able to differentiate that different use cases or maybe even the different equipment onto different segments of the network so how do you isolate some of these use cases from each other I mean especially around technologies like IOT which could be every light bulb in your building right somebody hacks into that light bulb and next thing you know it's spreading across and you know it could take down the whole network right so the fact that you have OFDM a and you can schedule the air interface means you can segment it if you can segment it you can secure it right so this becomes a fundamental function of the underlying technology in the case of Wi-Fi six so if I've got the opportunity to secure things better and I can support greater densities with greater performance and lower latencies that suggests that the devices themselves can get born numerous and more interesting very IOT so talk a bit about some of these use cases Matt about related to IOT and and how that's how these technologies are going to liberate some new capabilities within organizations yeah you know in in organizations today you got this IT administrator and what is he doing he's he's dealing with less staff right and oftentimes less funding yet he has to address more and more devices and sometimes users on that network well we know that IOT is going to drive this to the next order of magnitude right so we have to implement easy simple ways to push the policy into the network and you know what it might not be done by the IT administrator it might be done by the OT department and so when we look at these types of the operational segments that but not exactly exactly so you might want the operational department to have the capability to onboard these IOT devices but they have to onboard them within the policy of the IT department so that the network remains secure again the OT department right you have to onboard them in the policy of the OT Department well both both because I t's also fundamentally responsible for securing the network right right right here so as we think about the new IOT use use cases we think about greater security is there a particular area or class of application you mentioned the office of the future is there another one that we think about when you talk to customers that is likely to catalyze a lot of the excitement yeah I can give you a couple of examples when we talk to our customers especially in enterprise you can ask a very simple question do you have mission-critical applications and you know every enterprise believes it has mission-critical applications now depending on who you're talking to if it's if you're in a manufacturing plant and you're moving robot arm that's pretty mission-critical right you don't want to stop the assembly line but you know you're going to something like healthcare right you have a heart monitor or you have a palm or yes that's pretty mission-critical to but even when you go into carpeted space you know if you're over it at Cisco for example we live and breathe WebEx collaboration tools and we want to be able to prayer our prioritize that experience and make sure that we're giving our not only our customers but our employees the experience they need so that they're not focused on the function of the network but they're focused on their business right they're focused on what they're trying to do but I want to take this example of mission critical and and and see if I can wrap this up and I'll use a healthcare example so healthcare is provisioned inside a hospital or inside a doctor's office but as we think about IOT with greater densities more performance more reliability more security I can actually think about utilizing some of these technologies Wireless to provision health care to where the person is now you know I got my little apple watch that's got to be a first that's a first step but it's pedestrian compared to where we're going to be in the future talk about that for a second is it possible that we will see a business be able to extend itself and the services that provide using these technologies all the way out to their customer and so that they so anybody anywhere at anytime can have that engaging experience if it's required is that really where we're going with these technology I think it's an i man it's a spot-on question I mean if you look at what's happening in the industry services are moving into the cloud that's clear we've all seen it the numbers are there right well we want the cloud to move to where the service exactly so you say you have these services moving in the cloud mate and maybe that cloud is distributed right so there's all sorts of technologies around that right and the users are definitely going mobile right so what happens is in the IT department is what what they used to have completely contained they have their computer room and they have their network and they have their access is now actually spread out into this these mobile environments much more much more distributed and when in the example that you were talking about with IOT you give it an example of your watch but I wonder when all these things that we're wearing start to become more and more intelligent I think what's going to happen is that there's going to be services that come from the cloud that extend into that access network that's managed by an entity that's different than the cloud service but will be able to produce a predictable experience because of the ability to segment and to apply equality a service and to have predictable delay all those types of characteristics right so this technology is really preparing you for these types of shifts that we're seeing in in the users use case and in the industry Eric Matt great conversation thank you thanks very much for being on commit thank you to be here thank you for joining us for another cube conversation on Peterborough's see you next time [Music]