(upbeat music) >> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live!, Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, this is Cisco Live 2019, and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost Dave Vellante and John Furrier is here, three days wall-to-wall coverage, and we are absolutely thrilled to welcome to the program, for the first time the CIO of Cisco, Guillermo Diaz, Jr., also a senior vice president. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> What's your key priority today, some of the big challenges that you're focused on, Guillermo? >> Yeah, so I think the key challenges are really around. I would say for me it starts, it's in between, and it ends with the people. And I think it's the cultural shift that happens along this journey as well so, a lot of folks says, "yeah, we're IT, we're the leaders "in technology in the company." And I think moving from that back office to, now every business, the foundation of which, if you're going to be a digital company, is technology, so who in the company is the best suited to really help that conversation is IT. So IT is now becoming part of the business transformation of every business, whether you're in technology, like myself, whether you're in oil and gas, whether you're in retail, whether you're in finance, etc. Technology's driving the digital business transformation. So, it's really about how, that we not only use technology, but what is the impact on our processes, how we digitize, if you will. But more importantly is, how do you bring the people? How do you cultivate the best people and talent so that you can actually move up the stack, and it's not easy for someone that's been hugging routers for many, many years, and now you tell them, "Hey, you have to do drive programmability." And they're like, "What does that mean?" Well you have to learn >> Python and Ansible >> Yeah. >> Code that infrastructure. >> Now you need to code this thing because you need to provide that thing you provided in eight weeks, now you have to provide it in eight minutes. >> Right. >> And that's a big shift in mindset as well. >> Yeah, so, Guillermo, I know that STEM is a passion of yours, talk to us a little bit about that pipeline, and we love large technology companies like Cisco is to, how do you get down to not just the universities, but even some of the more elementary schools and help make sure that they're ready so that when, we're not sitting here saying, "I've got thousands of jobs and nobody "that is prepared to take that job." >> Yeah, well again, when you think about what you just said, with STEM, well what are you cultivating? You're cultivating the pipeline of people, and the more people that you have trained up in those technologies, and we do a lot with not only universities, but even below, even before university. We have a program, a work-study program that we have in Cisco IT, and we have several partners, one of which is called Cristo Rey Academy, and what we do is, part of the curriculum is four days a week you go to school, one day a week you work at Cisco. And these are kids from 14 years old to 17, 18. And they are learning now, some of these kids come from really low income or underserved communities, and now they're coming in and they're learning about, "How do I set up a wireless infrastructure? "How do I set up a telepresence environment?" And when they walk out, they're not only going to a university that they never thought of going to, like Cornell or like Humboldt State or whatever it might be, but they also have this skill, they also have this experience, because now you're putting them in an environment, and they're like sponges, and it's amazing what we can do, and now you fast forward that into a university pipeline. We bring in about, in Cisco IT, and broadly across Cisco many more, but 200 university hires every year, and they're providing instant value, because they're challenging us. They're like, us dinosaurs, I don't like to think of myself as a dinosaur, but I've been there 19 years, and sometimes I think a certain way, and I have to unlearn some things, and when I hear these people talk, I'm learning and I'm relearning things, and I'm unlearning some things. >> Well if you surround yourself with millennials and gamers, you do learn new things, you can't help it. >> Yeah, you learn new ways of thinking, new design thinking methodologies, stuff like that. >> I want to ask you about the organization. When we get the CIOs of large technology companies on, a lot of times you guys have implemented best practice, and we get a lot of questions around, what's the right organization? For instance, do you guys have a Chief Data Officer? Do you have one? >> So, what is the right organization? >> Well, do you have a Chief Data Officer? >> First, I don't know that there's a right organization. >> Is that, you know right, put that in quotes, but so do you have a CDO? >> Yeah. >> And where does that CDO fit in the organization, what's your relationship with her or him? >> Yeah, so why I say there's not a right organization is, we didn't have a real focus on data. Data was the database crew, the people that did the big data platform, and one of the evolutions we did, in about 2015 we actually brought data up to the CIO level, and we said that that was going to be a strategic pillar, along with how do we simplify, how do we automate, how do we get the data insights to be able to make decisions and then secure our business. Those are the five pillars of our digital strategy. So data and the insight was the big key strategic pillar for us. And so that helped us really start to accelerate our agile motion into you know. And as we learned in the last year, we actually elevated that role. We actually moved it from IT into the next level of operations. >> So it's a peer level to you, is that right? >> So now we've taken that role from my team, which was the Chief Data, now it's the Chief Data Officer, named Shanthi Iyer, and Shanthi was working in my team, and now she's working under the COO, because we believe that data's such a critical asset. It's the oil, it's the fuel of the business. >> Yeah. >> You know, it's the foundation, so we've elevated it up to that level, and now, really driving it >> That's awesome. >> From a business perspective. >> Great. Guillermo, we've seen Cloud go through a lot of changes both as an industry as well as Cisco's relationship to what you've been building and where you've been partnering. How's that impacting things on the IT side? >> Oh, I think Cloud is, it's interesting, I get to talk to many of my peers. Every day I'm talking to one of my peers, and many of us go, "We have a Cloud-first strategy" or "We have a Cloud strategy." And a lot of times you'll go, "We have a Cloud Strategy." And it's like, "What's up in the? What's?" Because if you think about it, Cloud is in some data center somewhere, but the impact on that is pretty tremendous because there's so many now "Clouds". And they come in the form of Saas, they come in the form of infrastructure as a service, and so you have put a wrapper around it or it could get out of control. And for us, we have what we call a "multi-cloud strategy." Luckily, we learned Cloud early on, and we initially called it virtualization, right? So we automated network compute and storage, and that wasn't good enough, because then we needed to automate the application infrastructure level, and then we needed to automate how we actually deliver, so as we moved up the stack, we learned how to virtualize, or, fast-forward, how to Cloudify our environment, so we grew up in our private Cloud, and then we extended that to, Okay, now you can go provision if you need to, you can provision public Cloud services if you want to do experimentation or whatever the use case might be, but Cloud is now changing the business. We have to move fast, but at the same time, you have to be secure, because we have in Cisco, just to give you an idea, we have 442 applications in the Cloud. The question is, how do you stitch those together? How do you make them secure? Because data is traversing across that, so it's really about Cloud, data, and security, all in one wrapper that you have to be thinking about. >> Enforcing that consistent policy, the corporate edicts. So it's interesting, you talked about multi-cloud. We saw this week a number of announcements from Cisco around multi-Cloud, ACI anywhere, HyperFlex, At the Edge. Over the years we've seen innovations around, we were talking about this before, programmable infrastructure, are you a Petri dish for those products coming to market? >> We're Cava. We drink our own Cava >> Yeah, not dog food. >> No, we don't like dog food, we like Cava. So we call ourselves "Customer Zero", and so the first order of battle, though, is we have to run our business. We're running a 50 billion dollar business, and that's the first order of battle. The second is, oh by the way can we use our own, what we're talking about here, to run that 50 billion dollar business, and that's sort of our multiple hats that we wear. We're the enabler, but we're also a large consumer. And being able to put that together, we call it "Customer Zero." We used to say, "We're the first and best customer." But for us that's too late, so we said, "We need to be Customer Zero, we need to be the first to take on some of these solutions and products, so that we can provide feedback to our engineering teams, our sales teams, our services teams, but more importantly, how do we become the reference, and we have an IT management program going on right now where we're talking about a lot of these things to 800 customers for a three day period. So those are the kinds of things that we do. >> Right. >> So, we love to hear you're using the products, we're here in the DevNet zone, and we've been hearing a lot over the last four or five years, Susie Wee and the team, how does that >> Right, she's my other partner in crime. >> Great, so talk about how the developer movement, DevNet specifically, DevSecNet, how that impacts your business. >> Yeah, so again, if you go back to programmability, if you go back to Cloud, it's all about having the ability to put all of these components together, so that we can all be productive. And the skill of the future is How do I program this? How do I make all of these things work in the easiest way, and it's coding. And you look around here, and there's coding classes. There's basic coding classes, and a lot of times a network engineer goes, "Why do I need to do that?" And you start to influence them to say, "Well, you need to move up the stack. "You need to be the one that actually provides "an infrastructure in five seconds, versus five weeks, and in order to do that, "you need to develop these new skills." And what Susie and the team have done with DevNet has provided a platform for all of us, around the world, to be able to learn these things, and not just become the network engineer, but become the orchestrator of these capabilities, right? >> When you think about your portfolio. You know, obviously you've got an application portfolio, you've got 400 plus applications in Saas, many more, I'm sure, on Primm. We like to think of this framework of run the business, grow the business, transform the business, and I wonder if you could, first of all, does that framework make sense? It's simple, obviously, but how do you think about your business in terms of running, growing, and transforming, and how you allocate resources to those three areas? >> I think that's been the historical legacy model. And I think when you start to segment it that way, you start to segment innovation as well, because in run the business, as an example, maybe you heard this term, "AI Ops". >> Mm-hmm (affirmative) >> What is the future of operations? Well the future of operations is how do I take all of these monitoring tools that I have, the same thing I've done with network computing storage. How do I stitch them together so that I can actually correlate where an issue is? In order to do that, what we've done is we've taken our operation team, and we've now deployed them into the development teams. This is the, we're not calling it DevOps, it's called DevSecOps, because at the same time, we want you to have a mindset of security first. Think about, as your developing, think about security as you go through the process. So now the operator, the one that used to actually sit there and watch the thing go, now no, I want you to actually be the coder, so that the problem that you're looking for, that you're waiting for, that you're helping solve that proactively. And that you get new skills as well. So the same thing with the network engineer, the operations person now is learning about Python and Ansible and how to stitch the infrastructure, the application, the data, all of that, into more of a monitoring system. >> So what I'm hearing is that you're taking that notion of run the business, grow the business, transform the business, bring it together, and everybody's responsible for running the business, growing the business, and transforming the business. >> And you're responsible for innovation. >> So it's continuous innovation model versus a stovepipe segmentation model. >> Continuous innovation, continuous improvement, continuous learning. >> Guillermo, I want to give you the final word. Here we are at the beginning of 2019. When you talk to your peers, the CIOs out there, whether it be tech, enterprise, startups, what are some of the biggest challenges, biggest opportunities that are on their plate. >> Yeah, I think it's, we're in an interesting time in IT in the world, where technology's foundational to every business. So my call to action is, there's one organization in the company, in every company, that knows technology, and that's IT. And they know the infrastructure and they know the ops. So the more that we can put those together into helping solve the secure digital business transformation, and not just talking about it from a technology perspective, but how do we use that to really articulate and translate that into business outcomes. And there's a lot in that, it's how do we use our own technology, how do we change our skills? How do we unlearn some things to relearn how to communicate with the business so that we can learn to go faster. >> Guillermo Diaz, Jr, thank you so much for sharing the viewpoint of Cisco and the changing role of the CIO. Dave Vellante and I will be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live 2019, in Barcelona, Spain. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)