>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>mhm. >>With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for Hyper Flex at Cisco at Flash for all number four. Love that on Twitter And Deron Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco Mister Hyper flex at Mr Hyper Flex on Twitter. Thanks, guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and and hyper flex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks, David. >>Thanks. Hi, >>Daryn. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud you gotta have on Prem Connection. Right? So you've got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, but you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud, you need a strong foundation. I'm conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building with hyper convergence in particular hyper flex no to make all that work. They need a good, strong Cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that. To be able to connect that around a Saas offering that looks around simplified operations, gives them optimisation and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren, let's stay with you for a minute when you talk to your customers. What are they thinking these days, when it comes to implementing hyper converged infrastructure in both the the enterprise and and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? >>So there's many things they're trying to achieve? Probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyper conversions and storage networking, and we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that, a collapse into hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability. They don't know the end game, so they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper conversions. Very easy is one of the major factors and benefits of hyper conversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around. The simplicity model is the management layer ease of management to make it easier for their operations that we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model, deploying out flex also around the time savings. They make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think that we one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements, and the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper converged, especially with edge edges of major key use case for us and what I want. What our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data centre at the edge without a big investment. They don't compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management employment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deployed hyper conversions. As I said, the savings elements to keep it and again, not always, but obviously those are his studies around about public Cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. We again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers looking for >>Great. Thank you for that, Darrin minutes. We have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >>Yeah, Thanks. Leave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. the first one is a new offer, um, called hyper Flex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Inter site lead and Cisco and decide managed it Hyper flex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AM Iraq, U. C s and Iraq. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local contemporaries witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a very nifty capability to optimise for forage environments. So, you know, this leverages the Ciscos ubiquitous presence. Uh, the networking, um, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyper flex configuration that we have is, uh it do not configuration, which is primarily used in edge environment. Think of a, you know, a back home in a department store or a oil rig. Or it might even be a smaller data centre, uh, somewhere, uh, on the globe. For these two not configurations. There is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for hyper flex as well. The problem that customers faces where you host this witness it cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, um, sort of upgrade rates. Which note gets to survive, so it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environment. So what we've done is we've taken that witness. We've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large a slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from S. R. S R. Texas catalyst, industrial routers, even even a raspberry pi that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any, um, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we're announcing today. >>So I want to ask you about hyper Flex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that? A little bit more Can can hyper flex express help customers respond to some of these issues. >>Yeah, indeed. The, uh, you know, the primary motivation for hyper Flex Express was indeed, uh, an idea that, you know, one of the folks around my team had, which was to build a set of hyper flex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for something in it for customers, for sales as well as our partners. So, for example, you know, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the instal for hyper flex express. These are still hypertext configurations, and you would, at the end of it, get a hyper flex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much much simplifying. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data centre configurations But you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. Um, we've also, you know, already attract attractive price point for these. And of course, you know these will have better lead times because we made sure that, you know, we are using components that are that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, Uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a settled, risky, friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the deceased as well. >>It's interesting many. So I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed this GTR survey again mentioned at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring, uh, server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So so that's encouraging. What about Manisha AMG that's new for hyper flex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, so you know, in the short time that we've had UCS am direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a it's a It's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and hyper flex. Uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from Day one is that it is. It has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage and this we are hoping that will basically unlock, you know, a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper converged experience. >>Yeah, cool. Uh, so, Darren, can >>you can you give us >>an idea as to how hyper flexes is doing in the field? >>Sure, Absolutely So both me and my initial been involved right from the start and before it was called Hyper Flex, and we've had a great journey, and it's very excited to see where we're taking where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they approved the technology and are comfortable with technology. They repeat by for expanding capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an energy perspective, more numbers of science so really good. Endorsement the technology. We get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. Uh, and we are the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers think one example, and I apologise for the worldwide audience. But this resonates with the American audiences the Super Bowl. So the sofa like stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyper Flex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage. Four K video distribution, and it's complete completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few notes across a few racks and have 100 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with High Flex where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases were getting involved in very, very excited. >>Come on, Darren. It's Super Bowl NFL. That's a That's international now. And, you know, the NFL >>NFL. It's >>invading London. Of course I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, But last question for many is give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyper flex? >>Yeah, so you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved the type of flicks since the beginning, Uh, but I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for for hyper Flex. One is in. The site is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the Lifecycle management, which is for hyper flex, which is integrated in winter side today and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of a job. Because Interstate really provides us an ideal platform to gather starts from all the clusters across the globe. Do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer valued, um, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is you'll see us expand the hyper flex portfolio. Go beyond you see us to third party server platforms, and newer, you see a server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is a checks on X CDs. Experience is another thing that we're able to, uh you know, uh, announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But a check sonic series. We'll have that by the end of this calendar year, and that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyper flex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, that we're locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyper flex leader platform. This is the heart of the offering today, Uh, and you'll see the hyper flex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, unique distributed architecture primarily where we get our, you know, record breaking performance from you'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient. And we'll optimise it for, you know, containerised workloads, meaning it will get granular containerised container granular management capabilities and optimised for public. So those are some things that were the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum and maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there and you know many She was talking about the HX on X Series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that, and it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're gonna dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>>live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners >>back. This is the Cube's coverage >>of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, doing about three and 1/2 days of wall to wall coverage here. Stew Minimum. My co host for this segment is Dave Volante. John Furrier is also here, scaring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program. Two first time guests. I believe so. Uh, Derek is the product manager of product marketing for Cloud Computing with Cisco, and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson, who's director of product development, also with the Cisco Cloud Group. David here from Boston. Matt is also from the Boston area, and customers is coming over from London. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so obviously, cloud computing something we've been talking about many years. We've really found fascinating relationship. Cisco's had, with its customers a zealous through the partner ecosystem, had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week. Maybe start a little bit, you know, Cisco's software journey and positioning in the cloud space right now. >>So it's a really interesting dynamic when we started transitioning to multi cloud and we actually deal with Cloud and Compute coming together and we've had whether you're looking at three infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the APS up operations or whether you're looking at, you know, your DEV environment, your security operations. Each organization has to deal with their angle, which they view, you know, multi cloud. Or they view how they actually operate within those the cloud computing context. And so whether you're on the infrastructure side, you're looking at compute. You're looking at storage. You're looking at resources. If you're on an app operator, you're looking at performance. You're looking at visibility assurance. If you are in the security operations you're looking at, maybe governance. You're looking at policy, and then when you're a developer, you really sort of thinking about see I CD. You're talking about agility, and there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective. All those various angles >>of multi cloud >> is definitely a lot of pieces. Maybe up level it for us a little bit. There's so many pieces way talk for so long. You know you don't talk to any company that doesn't have a cloud. Strategy doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time. And it means every company's got a known positioning. But talk about the relationship Cisco has with its customers and really the advisory condition that you want to have with >>its actually a very relevant question. To what? To what Matt is talking about, because Wei talked a lot about multi cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at computing data centers and then expanding to different clouds. You know, public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities. And if you think about it, the it goes back to what Matt said about I t ops and development kind of efforts. Why is this happening? Really, there's There's the study that we did with with an analyst, and there was an amazing a shocking stats around how within the next three years, organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now. And we have been trying to test this, that our events that made customer meetings etcetera, that is a lot of a lot of change for organizations. So if you think about why are they use, why do they need to basically let go and expand to those clouds? Is because they want to service. I T ops teams want to servers with capabilities, their developers faster, right? And this is where you have within the I T ops kind of theme organization. You have the security kind of frame through the compute frame, the networking where, you know Cisco has a traditional footprint. How do you blend all this? How do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual unique application modernization efforts? I think that's what we're hearing from customers in terms of the feedback. And this is what influences our >>strategy to converts the different business units. And it's an area engineering effort, right? >>I want to poke at that a little bit. I mean, a couple years ago, I have to admit I was kind of a multi cloud skeptic. I always said that I thought it was more of a symptom that actually strategy a symptom of shadow I t and different workloads and so forth, but now kind of buying in because I think I t in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene. I often say so I think it is becoming a strategy. So if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy towards multi cloud and how Cisco it was mapping into that, >>yeah, so So when we talk to customers, it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem. And, like you said, that shadow I t. Has been probably around for longer than anybody want, cares to admit, because people want to move faster. Organizations want to get their product out to market sooner. And so what? What really is we're having conversations now about, you know, how do I get the visibility? How do I get you know, the policies in the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for, that I need that connectivity. So I get the bandwidth, and so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is going. I realized that this is going on now I actually have to Now put some governance and controls around. That is their products is their solutions, is there? You know, they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey. Because as much as we talk about cloud and you know, companies that were born in the cloud cloud native there is a tremendous number of I see organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems. >>Yeah, I agree. And they're starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to Okay, we got this thing. But if you think about the competitive landscape, it's kind of interesting. And I want to try to understand where Cisco fits because again, you initially had companies that didn't know in a public cloud sort of pushing multi cloud. You say? Well, I guess they have to do that. But now you see, and those come out with Google, you see Microsoft leaning in way. Think eventually aws is gonna lead in. And then you say I'm kind of interested in working with some of these cloud agnostic not trying to force Now, now Cisco. A few years ago, you didn't really think about Cisco as a player. Now this goes right in the middle. I have said often that Cisco's in a great position John Furrier as well to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength, making a strong argument that we have the most cost effective, most secure, highest performance networks to connect clouds. That seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours. And does that essentially summarize your strategy? And And how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market? >>I would say that I can I can I can take that. Yeah, for sure. It's chewy question for hours. So I was thinking about satellite you mentioned before. Like Okay, that's, you know, the world has turned around completely way seem to talk about Target satellite Is something bad happening? And now, suddenly we completely forgot about it, like let let free, free up the developers and let them do whatever they want. And basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market. So all of the solutions you mentioned in the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least our offering out there. Certainly the Big Three have differences have their strengths on. And I think those things are closer to the developer environment. Basically, you know, if you're looking into something like AI ml, there's one provider that you go with. If you're looking for a mobile development framework, you're gonna go somewhere else. If you're looking for a D, are you gonna go somewhere else? Maybe not a big cloud, but your service provider. But you've been dealing with all this all this time, so you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for. So where does Cisco come in? You know, we're not a public cloud provider way offer products as a service from our data centers and our partners data centers. But at the the way that the industry sees a cloud provider a public cloud like AWS Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, etcetera, we're not that we don't do that. Our mission is to enable organizations with software hardware products SAS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity, security, visibility, observe ability, and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clubs. So way kind of way kind of moved to a point where we flip around the question, and the first question is, Who is your club provider? What? How many? Tell us the clouds you work with, and we can give you the modular pieces you can put we can put together for you. So these, so that you can make the best out of >>your club. Being able to do that across clouds in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent, that represent the edicts of your organization, no matter where your data lives, that's sort of the vision and the way >>this is translated into products into Cisco's products. You naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider networking. That's that's really sort of our, you know, go to in what we're also when we have a significant computing portfolio as well. So connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geography is point A to point B. In the natural routing and switching world, there's connectivity between applications between compute and so this week. You know, the announcements were significant in that space when you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform, that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from an experience journey map so you can actually know where problems might occur in the application domain. You can actually, then go that next level down into the infrastructure level and you can say, Okay, maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource, whether it's compute resource, whether it's memory, whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on Prem, or whether it's in the public cloud, that you have that application residing and then, quite candidly, you have the actual hardware itself. So inter site. It has an ability to control that entire stack so you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer. >>I'm glad you brought up some of the applications. I wonder if we could stay there for a moment. Talk about some of the changing patterns for customers. A lot of talk in the industry about cloud native often gets conflated with micro services, container ization and lots of the individual pieces there. But when one of Our favorite things have been talking about this week is software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces. So help us understand what you're hearing from customers and how you're helping them through this transition to cost. You're saying, Absolutely, there's going to be lots of new applications, more applications and they still have the old stuff that they need to continue to manage because we know in I t nothing ever goes away. Yeah, >>that's that's definitely I was I was thinking, you know, there's there's a vacuum at the moment on and there's things that Cisco is doing from from a technology perspective to fill that gap between application. What you see when it comes to monitoring, making sure your services are observable. And how does that fit within the infrastructure stack, You know, everything upwards of the network layer. Basically, that is changing dramatically. Some of the things that matter touched upon with regards to, you know, being able to connect the networking, the security and the infrastructure of the compute infrastructure that the developers basically are deploying on top. So there's a lot of the desert out of things on continue ization. There's a lot of, in fact, it's one part of the off the shelf inter site of the stack that you mentioned and one of the big announcements. Uh huh. You know that there's a lot of discussion in the industry around. Okay, how does that abstract further the conversation on networking, for example? Because that now what we're seeing is that you have a huge monoliths enterprise applications that are being carved down into micro services. Okay, they know there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native? Is it related to containers? Different kind of things, right? But containers are naturally the infrastructure defacto currency for developers to deploy because of many, many benefits. But then what happens between the kubernetes layer, which seems to be the standard and the application? Who's going to be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying? You know, things like service mesh, network service mess? How is the never evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications? So there's so many things happening at the same time where Cisco has actually a lot of taking a lot of the front seat. Leading that conversation >>is where it gets really interesting. Sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned kubernetes is the de facto standard, but it's a defacto standard that's open everybody's playing with. But historically, this industry has been defined by a leader comes out with a de facto standard kubernetes, not a company. It's an open standard, so but there's so many other components than containers. And so history would suggest that there's going to be another defacto standard or multiple standards that emerge. And your point earlier. You got to have the full stack. You can't just do networking. You can't just do certain if you so you guys are attacking that whole pie. So how do you think this thing will evolve? I mean, you guys obviously intend to put out a stat cast a wide net as possible, captured not only your existing install basement attract, attract others on you're going aggressively at it as a czar. Others How do you see it shaking out? You see you know, four or five pockets, you see one leader emerging. I mean, customers would love all you guys to get together and come up with standards. That's not going to happen. So where it's jump ball right now? >>Well, yeah. You think about, you know, to your point regarding kubernetes is not a company, right? It is. It is a community driven. I mean, it was open source by a large company, but it's community driven now, and that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving. There is so much coming at I t organizations from a new paradigm, a new software, something that's, you know, the new the shiny object that sort of everybody sort of has to jump onto and sort of say, that is the way we're gonna function. So I t organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them and every angle. And I think what starting toe happen is the management and the you know that Stack who controls that or who is helping i t organizations to manage it for them. So really, what we're trying to say is there's elements that have to put together that have to function, and kubernetes is just one example Docker, the operating system that associated with it that runs all that stuff then you have the application that goes right sides on top of it. So now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week. Hx AP the application platform for a check so you have the Compute cluster, but then you have the stack on top of that that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security that's looking at the the actual making opinions about what should go in the stack and managing that for you. So you don't have to deal with that because you just focus on the application development. Yeah, >>I mean, Cisco's in a strong position to do. There's no question about it. To me, it comes down to execution. If you guys execute and deliver on the products and services that you say, you know, you announced, for instance, this weekend previously, and you continue on a road map, you're gonna get a fair share of this market place. I think there's no question >>so last topic before we let you go is love your viewpoint on customers. What's separating kind of leaders from you know, the followers in this space, you know, there's so much data out there. And I'm a big fan of the State of Dev Ops report Help separate, You know, some not be not. Here's the technology or the piece, but the organizational and, you know, dynamics that you should do. So it sounds like you like that report also, love. What do you hear from customers? How do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space? >>Yeah, The State of Dev Ops report was fascinating. I mean, they've been doing that for a number of years now. Yeah, exactly. And really what? It's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or the third paradigm shift. Our journey we're going through, there's the technology side for sure, and so that's getting more complex. You have micro services, you have application explosion. You have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up. But then it's really about the human aspect of human elements, the people about it. And that's really I think, what separates you know, the elites that are really sort of, you know, just charging forward and ahead because they've been able to sort of break down the silos because really, what you're talking about in cloud Native Dev Ops is how you take the journey of the experience of the service from end end from the development all the way to production. And how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain their data, set their operations and then have to translate that or have to sort of you have another conversation with another organization that that doesn't look at that, That has no experience of that? So that is what we're talking about, that end and view. >>And in addition to all the things we've been talking about, I think security's a linchpin here. You guys are executing on security. You got a big portfolio and you've seen a lot of M and A and a lot of companies trying to get in, and it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out. But that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint, and they build out >>Yeah, absolutely. If you follow Dev ops methodologies, security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to 100% gone after anything, just give you the final word. >>I was just a follow up with You. Got some other model was saying, There's so many, there's what's happening out there Is this democracy around? Standards with is driven by communities and way love that in fact, Cisco is involved in many open sores community projects. But you asked about customers and just right before you were asking about you know who is gonna be the winner. There's so many use cases. >>Uh huh. >>There's so much depth in Tim's off. You know what customers want to do with on top of kubernetes, you know, take Ai Ml, for example, something that we have way have some, some some offering services on there's cast. A mother wants to ai ml their their container stuck. Their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else, is doing something just hosting. And there's always going to be a SAS provider that is niche servicing some oil and gas company, you know, which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that instead of just going to a public cloud provider that is more agnostic. Does that make sense? Yeah. >>Yeah. There's relationships that exist that are just gonna get blown away. That add value today. And they're not going to just throw him out. Exactly. >>Well, thank you so much for helping us understand the updates where your customers are driving super exciting space. Look forward to keeping an eye on it. Thanks so much. Alright, there's still lots more coming here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona. People are standing watching all the developer events, lots going on the floor and we still have more. So thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah.

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners come back this is the cubes coverage of Cisco live 2020 here in Barcelona doing about three and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage here I'm Stu minim and my co-host for this segment is Dave Volante John furs also here scouring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program to first-time guests I believe so Ron Daris is the product manager of product marketing for cloud computing with Cisco and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson who's director of product development also with the Cisco cloud group Dave and I are from Boston Matt is also from the Boston area yes and Costas is coming over from London so thanks so much for joining us thanks IBPS all right so obviously cloud computing something we've been talking about many years we've really found fascinating the relationship Cisco's had with its customers as well as through the partner ecosystem had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week maybe start a little bit you know Cisco's software journey and you know positioning in this cloud space right now yes oh so it's a it's a really interesting dynamic when we start transitioning to multi cloud and we actually deal with cloud and compute coming together and we've had whether you're looking at the infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the apps operations or whether you're looking at you know your dev environment your security operations each organization has to deal with their angle at which they view you know multi cloud or they view how they actually operate within those the cloud computing context and so whether you're on the infrastructure side you're looking at compute you're looking at storage you're looking at resources if you're an app operator you're looking at performance you're looking at visibility assurance if you are in the security operations you're looking at maybe governance you're looking at policy and then when you're a developer you really sort of thinking about CI CD you're talking about agility and there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective all those various angles of multi-cloud yeah definitely a lot of piece of cost us maybe up level it for us a little bit there's there's so many pieces you know we talked for so long you know you don't talk to any company that doesn't have a cloud strategy doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time and it means every company's got at home positioning but talk about the relationship cisco has with its customer and really the advisory position that you want to have with them it's actually a very relevant question to what to what Matt is talking about because we talk a lot about multi cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at computing data centers and then expanding to different clouds you know public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities and if you think about it the the it goes back to what Matt said about IT ops and the development kind of efforts why is this happening really you know there's there's the study that we did with with an analyst and there was an amazing a shocking stat around how within the next three years organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now and we have been trying to test this stat our events that made customer meetings etc that is a lot of a lot of change for organizations so if you think about why are they use why do they need to basically what go and expand to those clouds is because they want to service IT Ops teams want ER servers with capabilities their developers faster right and this is where you have within the IT ops kind of theme organization you have the security kind of frame the compute frame the networking where you know Cisco has a traditional footprint how do you blend all this how do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual unique application modernization efforts I think that's what are we hearing from customers in terms of the feedback and this is what influences our strategy to converts the different business units and engineering engineering efforts right couple years ago I have to admit I was kind of a multi cloud skeptic I always said I thought it was more of a symptom than actually a strategy a symptom of you know shadow IT and different workloads and so forth but now I'm kind of buying in because I think IT in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene I often say so I think it is becoming a strategy so if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy toward the multi cloud and how Cisco that was mapping into that yeah so so when we talk to customers it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem in like you said the shadow IT has been probably around for longer than anybody won't cares to admit because the people want to move faster organizations want to get their product out to market sooner and and so what what really is we're having conversations now about you know how do I get the visibility how do I get you know the policies and the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for that I need the connectivity so I get the bandwidth and so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is is is going I realize that this is going on now I actually have to now put some you know governance and controls around that is their products is their solutions is their you know they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey because as much as we talk about cloud and you know companies that were born in the cloud cloud native there is a tremendous number of IT organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems yeah I agree and it's just starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to okay we got this this thing but if you think about the competitive landscape its kind of interesting and I want to try to understand where Cisco fits because again you you initially had companies that didn't know in a public cloud sort of pushing multi cloud and you'd say oh well okay so they have to do that but now you see anthos come out with Google you see Microsoft leaning in we think eventually AWS is going to lean in and then you say I'm kind of interested in working with someone whose cloud agnostic not trying to force now now Cisco a few years ago you didn't really think about Cisco as a player now so this goes right in the middle I have said often that Cisco's in a great position John Fourier as well to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength making a strong argument that we have the most cost-effective most secure highest performance network to connect clouds that seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours and does that essentially summarize your strategy and and how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market I would say that I can I can I can take that ya know it's a chewy question for hours yeah so I I was thinking about a satellite in you mentioned this before and you're like okay that's you know the world is turning around completely because we we seem to talk about satellite e is something bad happening and now suddenly we completely forgot about it like let let free free up the developers gonna let them do whatever they want and basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market so all the solutions you mentioned in the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least are offering out there certainly the big three have differences have their strengths and I think those strengths are closer to the developer environment basically you know if you're looking into something like a IML there's one provider that you go with if you're looking for a mobile development framework you're gonna go somewhere else if you're looking for a dr you're gonna go somewhere else maybe not a big cloud but your service provider that you've been dealing with all these all these times and you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for so where does Cisco come in you know we're not a public cloud provider we offer products as a service from our data centers and our partners data centers but at the - at the way that the industry sees a cloud provider a public cloud like AWS a sure Google Oracle IBM etc we're not that we don't do that our mission is to enable organizations with software hardware products SAS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity security visibility observability and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clouds so we we kind of we kind of moved to a point where we flip around the question and the first question is who is your cloud provider what how many tell us the clouds you work with and we can give you the modular pieces you can put we can put together for you so there's so that you can make the best out of your plan it's been being able to do that across clouds we're in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent that represent the edicts of your organization no matter where your data lives that's sort of the the vision in the way this is translated into products into Cisco's product you naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider networking that's that's really sort of our you know go to in what we're also when we have a significant computing portfolio as well so connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geographies point A to point B in the natural routing and switching world there's connectivity between applications between cute and so this week you know the announcements were significant in that space when you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from a experience journey map so you can actually know where the problems might occur in the application domain you can actually then go that next level down into the infrastructure level and you can say okay maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource whether it's compute resource whether it's memory whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on Prem or whether it's in the public cloud that you have that application residing and then why candidly you have the actual hardware itself so inter-site it has an ability to control that entire stack so you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer I'm glad you brought up some of the applications wonderful we can you know stay there for a moment and talk about some of the changing patterns for customers a lot of talk in the industry about cloud native often it gets conflated with you know microservices containerization and lots of the individual pieces there but you know one of our favorite things that been talked about this week is the software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces so help us understand what you're hearing from customers and and where how you're helping them through this transition to constants as you were saying absolutely there's going to be lots of new applications more applications and they still have the the old stuff that they need to continue to manage because we know an IT nothing ever goes away that's that's definitely true I was I was thinking you know there's there's a vacuum at the moment and and there's things that Cisco is doing from from technology leadership perspective to fill that gap between the application what do you see when it comes to monitoring making sure your services are observable and how does that fit within the infrastructure stack you know everything upwards network the network layer base again that is changing dramatically some of the things that Matt touched upon with regards to you know being able to connect the the networking the security in the infrastructure the computer infrastructure that the developers basically are deploying on top so there's a lot of there's a lot of things on containerization there's a lot of in fact it's you know one part of the of the self-injure side of the stack that you mentioned and one of the big announcements you know that there's a lot of discussion in the industry around ok how does that abstract further the conversation on networking for example because that now what we're seeing is that you have huge monoliths enterprise applications that are being carved down into micro services ok they you know there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native is it related to containers different kind of things right but containers are naturally the infrastructure de facto currency for developers to deploy because of many many benefits but then what happens you know between the kubernetes layer which seems to be the standard and the application who's gonna be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying you know things like service mesh network service mess how is the network evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications so there's so many things happening at the same time where cisco has actually a lot of taking a lot of the front seat this is where it gets really interesting you know it's sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned kubernetes is the de facto standard but it's a de-facto standard that's open everybody's playing with but historically this industry has been defined by you know a leader who comes out with a de facto standard kubernetes not a company right it's an open standard and so but there's so many other components than containers and so history would suggest that there's going to be another de facto standard or multiple standards that emerge and your point earlier is you you got to have the full stack you can't just do networking you can't just do certain few so you guys are attacking that whole pie so how do you think this thing will evolve I mean you guys are obviously intend to put out as Casta as wide a net as possible capture not only your existing install base but attractive attract others and you're going aggressively at it as are as are others how do you see it shaking out deep do you see you know four or five pockets do you see you know one leader emerging I mean customers would love all you guys to get together come up with standards that's not going to happen so we're it's jump ball right now well yeah and you think about you know to your point regarding kubernetes is not a company right it is it is a community driven I mean it was open source by a large company but it's but it's community driven now and that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving there is so much coming at IT organizations from a new paradigm a new software something that's you know the new the shiny object that sort of everybody sort of has to jump on to and sort of say that is the way we're going to function so IT organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them and every angle and I think what's starting to happen is the management and the you know that stack who controls that or who is helping IT organizations to manage it for them so really what we're trying to say is there's elements that you have to put together that have to function and kubernetes is just one example docker the operating system that associated with it that runs all that stuff then you have the application that goes rides IDEs on top of it so now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week HX ap the application platform for HX so you have the compute cluster but then you have the on top of that that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security that's looking at the the actual making opinions about what should go in the stock and managing that for you so you don't have to deal with that because you can just focus on the application development yeah I mean Cisco's in a strong position to do there's no question about it and to me it comes down to execution if you guys execute and deliver on the the products and services that you say you know your nouns for instance this week and previously and you continue on a roadmap you're gonna get a fair share of this marketplace I think there's no question so last topic before we let you go is love your viewpoint on customers what's separating kind of leaders from you know the followers in this space you know there's so much data out there you know I'm a big fan of the state of DevOps report yeah focus you know separate you know some but not the not here's the technology or the piece but the organizational and you know dynamics that you should do so it sounds like Matt you you like that that report also love them what are you hearing from customers how do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space yeah the state of DevOps report was fascinating and I mean they've been doing that for what a number of years yeah exactly and really what it's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or this this this paradigm shift or journey we're going through there's the technology side for sure and so that's getting more complex you have micro services you have application explosion you have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up but then it's really about the human aspect that human elements the people about it and that's really I think what separates you know the the elites that are really sort of you know just charging forward in the head because they've been able to sort of break down the silos because really what you're talking about in cloud native DevOps is how you take the journey of that experience of the service from end to end from the development all the way to production and how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain their data set their operations and then have to translate that or have to sort of you know have another conversation with another organization that it doesn't look at that that has no experience of that so that is what we're talking about that end-to-end view is that in addition to all the things we've been talking about I think Security's a linchpin here now you guys are executing on security you got a big portfolio and you've seen a lot of M&A and a lot of companies now trying to get in and it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out but that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint and then build out yeah absolutely if you follow the DevOps methodology its security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to sit on after do anything Custis give you the final word I was just as follow-up with regard what what Mark was saying there's so many there's what's happening out there is this just democracy around standards which is driven by communities and we will love that in fact cisco is involved in many open-source community projects but you asked about customers and and just right before you were asking about you know who's gonna be the winner there's so many use cases there's so much depth in terms of you know what customers want to do with on top of kubernetes you know take AI ml for example something that we have we have some some offering the services around there's the customer that wants to do AML there their containers that their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else's doing something just hosting yeah and there's always gonna be a SAS provider that is niche servicing some oil and gas company you know which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that instead of just going to a public law provider that is more organized if there's a does that make sense yeah yeah this there's relationships that exist the archer is gonna get blown away that add value today and they're not gonna just throw them out so exactly right well thank you so much for helping us understand the updates where your customers are driving super exciting space look forward to keeping an eye on it thank you thank you so much all right there's still lots more coming here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona people are standing watching all the developer events lots of going on the floor and we still have more so thank you for watching the cute [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back over 17,000 in attendance here for Cisco live 2020 in Barcelona ops to Minh and my co-host is Dave Volante and to help us to dig into of course one of the most important topic of the day of course that security we're thrilled to have back a distinguished engineer Francisco one of our cube alumni TK Kia Nene TK thanks so much for joining us ideal man good good all right so TK it's 2020 it's a new decade we know the bad actors are still out there they're there the the question always is you know it used to be you know how do you keep ahead of them then I've here Dave say many times well you know it's not you know when it's it's not if it's when you know you probably already have been okay you know compromised before so it gives latest so you know what you're seeing out there what you're talking to customers about in this important space yeah it's uh it's kind of an innovation spiral you know we we innovate we make it harder for them and then they innovate they make it harder for us right and round and round we go that's been going on for for many years I think I think the most significant changes that have happened recently have to deal with not essentially their objectives but how they go about their objectives and Defenders topologies have changed greatly instead of just your standard enterprise you now have you know hybrid multi cloud and all these new technologies so while while all that innovation happens you know they get a little clever and they find weaknesses and round and round we go so we talked a lot about the sort of changing profile of the the threat actors going from hacktivists took criminals now is a huge business and nation-states even what's that profile look like today and how has that changed over the last decade or so you know that's pretty much stayed the same bad guys are bad guys at some point in time you know just how how they go about their business their techniques they're having to like I said innovate around you know we make it harder for them they you know on Monday we're safe on Tuesday we're not you know and then on Wednesday it switches again so so it talked about kind of this multi-cloud environment when we talk to customers it's like well I want the developer to be able to build their application and not really have to think too much underneath it that that has to have some unique challenges we know security we knew long ago well I just go to the cloud it doesn't mean they take care of it some things are there some things they're gonna remind you now you need to make sure you set certain things otherwise you could be there but how do we make sure that Security's baked in everywhere and is up as a practice that everybody's doing well I mean again some of the practices hold true no matter what the environment I think the big thing was cognitive is in back in the day when when you looked at an old legacy data center you were part sort of administrator in your part detective and most people don't even know what's running on there that's not true in cloud native environments some some llamó file some some declaration it's it's just exactly what productions should look like right and then the machines instantiate production so you're doing things that machine scale forces the human scale people to be explicit and and for me I mean that's that's a breath of fresh air because once you're explicit then you take the mystery out of what you're protecting how about in terms of how you detect threats right phishing for credentials has become a huge deal but not just you know kicking down the door or smashing a window using your your own credentials to get inside of your network so how is that affected the way in which you detect yeah it's it's a big deal you know a lot of a lot of great technology has a dual use and what I mean by that is network cryptology you know that that whole crypto on the network has made us safer for us to compute over insecure networks and unfortunately it works just as well for the bad guys so you know all of their malicious activity is now private to so it you know for us we just have to invent new ways of detecting direct inspection for instance I think it's a thing of the past I mean we just can't depend on it anymore we have to have tools of inference and not only that but it's it's gave rise in a lot of innovation on behavioral science and as you say you know it's it's not that the attacker is breaking into your network anymore they're logging in ok what do you do then right Alice Alice's account it's not gonna set off the triggers so you have to say you know when did Alice start to behave differently you know she's working in accounting why is she playing around with the source code repository that's that's a different thing right yes automation is such a big trend you know how do we make sure that automation doesn't leave us more vulnerable that's rarity because we need to be able automate we've gone beyond human scale for most of these configurations that's exactly right and and how do how do we I always say just with security automation in particular just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should and you really have to go back and have practices you know you could argue that that this thing is just a you know machine scale automation you could do math on a legal pad or you can use a computer to do it right what so apply that to production if you mechanized something like order entry or whatever you're you're you're automating part of your business use threat modeling you use the standard threaten modeling like you would your code the network is code now right and the storage is code and everything is code so you know just automate your testing do your threat modeling do all that stuff please do not automate for your attacker matrix is here I want to go back to the Alice problem because you're talking about before you have to use inference so Alice's is in the network and you're observing her moves every day and then okay something anomalous occurs maybe she's doing something that normally she wouldn't do so you've got to have her profile in her actions sort of observed documented stored the data has got to be there and at the same time you want to make sure it's always that balance of putting handcuffs on people you know versus allowing them to do their job and be productive at the same time as well you don't want to let the bad guys know that you know that alice is doing something that she didn't be doing is actually not Alice so all that complexity how are you dealing with it and what's the data model look like doing it machines help let's say that machines can help us you know you and I we have only so many sense organs and the cognitive brain can only store so many so much state machines really help us extend that and so you know looking at not three dimensions of change but 7000 dimensions have changed right something in the machine is going to say there's an outlier here that's interesting and you can get another machine to say that's that's interesting maybe I should focus on that and you build these analytical pipelines so that at the end of it you know they may argue with each other all the way to the end but at the end you have a very high fidelity indicator that might be at the protocol level it might be at the behavioral level it might be seven days back or thirty days back all these temporal and spatial dimensions it's really cheap to do it with a machine yeah and if we could stay on that for a second so it try to understand I know that's a high-level example but is it best practice to have the Machine take action or is it is it an augmentation and I know it depends on the use case but but how is that sort of playing out again you have to do all of this safely okay a lot of things that machines do don't return back to human scale stuff that returns back to human scale that humans understand that is as useful so for instance if machines you know find out all these types of in assertions even in medical you know right now if if you've got so much telemetry going into the medical field see the machine tells you you have three weeks to live I mean you better explain what the heck you know how you came about that assertion it's the same with security you know if I'm gonna say look we're gonna quarantine your machine or we're gonna readjust machine it's not I'm not like picking movies for you or the next song you might listen to this is high stakes and so when you do things like that your analytics needs to have what is called entailment you have to explain what it is how you got to that assertion that's become incredibly important in how we measure our effectiveness in in doing analytics that's interesting because because you're using a lot of machine intelligence to do this and in a lot of AI is blackbox you're saying you cannot endure that blackbox problem in security yeah that black boxes is is very dangerous you know I you know personally I feel that you know things that should be open sourced this type of technology it's so advanced that the developer needs to understand that the tester needs to understand that certainly the customer needs to understand it you need to publish papers and be very very transparent with this domain because if it is in fact you know black box and it's given the authority to automate something like you know shut down the power or do things like that that's when things really start to get dangerous so good TK what wondered you know give us the latest on stealthWatch there you know Cisco's positioning when it when it comes to everything we've been talking about here you know stealthWatch again is it's been in market for quite some time it's actually been in market since 2001 and when I when I look back and see how much has changed you know how we've had to keep up with the market and again it's not just the algorithms rewrite for detection it's the environments have changed right but when did when did multi-cloud happen so so operating again cusp it's not that stealthWatch wants to go their customers are going there and they want the stealthWatch function across their digital business and so you know we've had to make advancements on the changing topology we've had to make advancements because of things like dark data you know the the network's opaque now right we have to have a lot of inference so we've just you know kept up and stayed ahead of it you know we've been spending a lot of time talking to developer communities and there's a lot of open-source tooling out there that that's helping enable developers specifically in security space you were talking about open-source earlier how does what you've been doing the self watch intersect with that yeah that's always interesting too because there's been sort of a shift in let's call them the cool kids right the cool kids they want everything is code right so it's not about what's on glass or you know a single pane of glass anymore it's it's what stealth watches code right what's your router as code look at dev net right yeah yeah I mean definite is basically Cisco as code and it's beautiful because that is infrastructure as code I mean that is the future and so all the products not just stealthWatch have beautiful api's and that's that's really exciting I've been saying for a while now it's do you I think you agree is that that is a big differentiator for Cisco I think you you're one of the few if not the only large established player and the enterprise that has figured out that sort of infrastructure is code play others have tried and are sort of getting there but you know start/stop you use a term that really cool is like living off the land you know bear bear grylls like the guy who lives down so bad so and and and threat actors are doing that now they're using your own installed software and tooling to hack you and and steal from you how were you dealing with that problem yeah it's a tough one and like I said you know much respect the the adversary is talented and they're patient they're well funded okay that's that's where it starts and so you know why why bring why bring an interpreter to a host when there's already one there right why right all this complicated software distribution when I can just use yours and so that's that's where the the play the game starts and and the most advanced threats aren't leaving footprints because the footprints are already there you know they'll get on a machine and behaviorally they'll check the cache to see what's hot and what's hot in the cache means that behaviorally it's a path they can go they're not cutting a new trail most of the time right so living off the land is not only the tools that they're using the automation your automation they're using against you but it's also behavioral and so that that makes it you know it makes it harder it's it impossible no can we make it harder for them yes so yeah no I'm having fun and I've been doing this for over twenty five years every week it's something new well it's a hard problem you're attacking and you know Robert Herjavec who came on the cube sort of opened my eyes and you think about what are we securing we're securing everything I mean a critical infrastructure were essentially exerted securing the entire global economy and he said something that really struck me it's an 86 trillion dollar economy we spend point zero one four percent on securing that economy and it's nothing now of course he's an entrepreneur and he's pimping for his is his business but it's true we are barely scratching the surface of this problem yeah I'm and it's changing I mean it's changing it could it be better yes it is changing his board awareness you know twenty years ago then right me to a dinner party they you know what does your husband do I'd say you know cyber security or something they'd roll their eyes and change the subject now they asked me the same question so oh you know my computer's running really slow right these are not this is everyone I'm worried about a life hack yeah how do I protect myself or what about these coming off the bank I mean that's those guys a dinner table cover every party so now now you know I just make something up I don't do cybersecurity I just you know a tort or a jipner's you've been to this business forever I can't remember have I ever asked you the superhero question what is that your favorite superhero that's a tough one there's all the security guys I know they like it's always dreamed about saving the world [Laughter] you're my superhero man I love what you do I think you've a great asset for Cisco and Cisco's customers really thanks TK give us a final word if people want to you know find out more about about what Cisco's doing read more of what you're working on but what's some of the best resource I have to go do you know just drop by the web pages I mean everything's published out that like I said even even for the super nerdy you know we published all our our laurs security analytics papers I think we're over 50 papers published in the last 12 years TK thank you so much always a pleasure to catch alright yeah and a travels thank you so much for de Villante I'm Stu Mittleman John furrier is also in the house we will be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona thanks for watching the keys [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona Spain for Cisco live 2020 I'm John Faria my co-host to many men to great guests here in the dev net studio where the cube is sitting all week long been packed with action mindy Whaley senior director developer experiences but dev net and partner a senior director welcome back to this cube good to see you guys glad to be here so we've had a lot of history with you guys what from day one yes watching def net from an idea of hey we should develop earthing you also have definite create yes separate more developer focused definite is Cisco's developer environment we've been here from the beginning what a progression congratulations on the success thank you thank you so much it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here you know learning in the workshops and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco live and it definitely ate what you mentioned which is coming up in March so it's right around the corner def net zone which we're in it's been really robust spins it's been the top of the show every year and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed because people are learning developers new developers as well as Cisco engineers who were certified coming in getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments are new skills is a technology shift yeah exactly and what we have in the definite zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shift so we have demos around IOT and security and showing how you know to prevent threats from attacking the Industrial routers and things like that we have coding workshops from you know beginning intro to Python intro to get all the way up through advanced like kubernetes topics and things like that so people can really dive in with what they're looking for and this year we're really excited because we have the new definite certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February so a lot of people are here saying I'm ready to skill up for those exams I'm starting to dive into this topic well Susie we was on she's the chief of deaf net among other things and she said there's gonna be a definite 500 the first 500 certifications of deaf net are gonna be kind of like the Hall of Fame or you know the inaugural or founder certifications so can you explain what this it means it's not a definite certification badge it's a series of write different sir can you deeper in then yeah just like we have our you know existing network certifications which are so respected and loved around the world people get CCIE tattoos and things just like there's an associate and professional and expert level on the networking truck there's now a definite associate a definite professional and coming soon definite expert and then there's also specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation IOT WebEx so it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software so there are about 80 80 % software skills 20 percent knowledge of networking and then how you really connect up and down the stock so these are new certifications not replacing anything all the same stuff they're new they're part of the same program they have the same rigor the same kind of tests they actually have ways to enter weave with the existing networking certifications because we want people to do both skill paths right to build this new IT team of the future and so it's a completely new set of exams the exams are gonna be available to take February 24th and you can start signing up now so with the definite 500 you know that's gonna be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get dead note certifications it'll be a lifetime achievement they'll always be in the definite 500 right and I've had people coming up and telling me you know I'm signed up for the first day I'm taking my exams on the first day I'm trying to get into them you and I only always want to be on the lift so I think we might be on them and what's really great is with the certifications we've heard from people in the zone that they've been coming and taking classes and learning these skills but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work you know to have that sort of progression and so with the certifications they really will have that and it's also really important for our partners and par is doing a lot of work with certifications and partners yeah definitely that would love to hear a little bit we've interviewed on the cube over the years some of the definite partners from a technology standpoint of course the the channels ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business gives the update as to you know definite partnering as well as what will these certifications mean to both the technology and go to market partners yeah the wonderful thing about this is it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software and making sure that we're providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together and what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of program ability and this new definite specialization which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint from a recognition standpoint that as a practice they have these skills and look at the end of the day it's all about delivering what our customers need and our customers are asking us for significant help in automation digital transformation they're trying to drive new business outcomes and this this will provide that recognition on on who to partner with in the market it's so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the partner ecosystem build data center practices went from the silos and now embracing you've got the hardware the software we're talking multi cloud it's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with where they're going it really is and and another benefit that we're finding and talking to our partners is we're packaging this up and rolling it out is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint from a practice standpoint and from a competitive differentiation standpoint but it'll also help them attract challenge I mean it's no secret there is a talent shortage right now if you talk to any CEO that's top of mind and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people smart people like working on smart things right and so this has really been a big traction point for them as well it's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles so some of the ways that you can combine the new definite certifications with the network engineering certifications we've looked at it and said you know there's there's a role of Network automation developer that's a new role everyone we ask in one of our sessions who needs that person on their team so many customers partners raise their hands like we want the network Automation developer on our team and you can combine you know your CCNP Enterprise with a definite certification and build up the skills to be that Network automation developer certainly has been great buzz I got to get your guys thoughts because certainly it's for careers and you guys are betting on the the people and the people are betting on Cisco mm-hmm yes this is what's going on submit surety of Devin it almost it's like a pinch me moment for you guys because you continue to grow I got to ask you what are some of the cool things that you're showing here as you mature you still have the start here session which is intro to Python and other things pretty elementary and then there's more advanced things what are some of the new things that's going on yeah that you could share so some of the new things we've got going on and one of my favorites is the IOT insecurity demonstration there's a an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot alarm and then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access you know something that that robot was it was using it's getting in the way of it working so you could detect threats and move forward on that we also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing to how you would deploy automation to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi domain automation so really helping engineers like look at that whole progression that's been that's been really popular Park talked about the specialization which ones are more popular or entry-level which ones are people coming into getting certified first network engineering automation first or what's the yeah so we're so the program is going to roll out with three different levels one is a specialized level the second is an advanced level and then we'll look to that third level again they're anchored in the in the individual certs and so as we look for that entry level it's really all about automation right I mean some things you take for granted but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale and have repeatable scalable benefits from that this the second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that an additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience compliance experiences and then that next level again we'll anchor towards the expert level that's coming out but one thing I want to point out is in addition to just having the certified people on staff they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it so it's not just enough to say I've passed an exam as we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really there's a lot behind it that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if a 500 list I don't know that the cube would end up being specialized its advertising no seriously all fun it's all fun it's Cisco live in Europe is there a difference between European and USD seeing any differences in geographic talent you know in the first couple years we did it I think there was a bigger difference it felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the US slightly different in Europe last year and this year I feel like they have converged it's it's the same focus on DevOps automation security as a huge focus in both places and it also feels like the the interest and level of the people attending has also converged it's really similar congratulations been fun to watch the rise and success of Devon it continues to be strong how see in the hub here and the definite zone behind us pact sessions yes what's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success what's what's jumped out yeah I think you know one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit we're hoping it would happen we just didn't realize it would happen this soon we're attracting new companies new partners so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional bars this is also available for our non resale and we are finding different companies accessing definite resources and learning these skills so that's been a really great benefit of Deb net overall definitely my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what the what they went back and did and the change that they drove and they come in their company and I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement take back some new ideas really create change and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them those are my favorite surprises and I tell you we've known for years how important the developer is but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just oh the developer has some tools that they like in the corner the developer connected to the business and driving things forward exactly so perfect timing congratulations on this certification their thing that's been great is that our at Cisco itself we now have API is across the whole portfolio and up and down the stock so that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers so Cisco's API first company we are building it guys everywhere we can and and that the community is is taking them and finding creative things to build it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco but also impact customers has been great to watch far many thanks for coming up yeah games live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco live 20/20 I'm John Ford Dave Dave Alon face to many men we right back with more after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here at Cisco live 20/20 and partial into Spain I'm John first evening men cube coverage we've got a lot of stuff going on with Cisco multi-cloud and cloud technologies of clarification of Cisco's happening in real time is happening right now cloud is here here to stay we got two great guests to unpack what's going on in cloud native and networking and applications as the modern infrastructure and software evolves we got eugene kim global product marketing and compute storage at cisco global part of marketing manager and fabio corey senior director cloud solutions marketing guys great comeback great thanks for coming back appreciate it thanks very much great to see a lot of guys so probably we've had multiple conversations and usually even out from the sales force given kind of the that the discussion and the motivation cloud is big it's here it's here to stay it's changing Cisco API first we hear and all the products it's changing everything what's the story now what's going on I would say you know the reason why we're so excited about the launch here in Barcelona it's because this time it's all about the application experience I mean the last two years we've been announcing some really exciting stuff in the cloud space right think about all the announcements with the AWS the Google's the Azure so the world but this time it really boils down to making sure that is incredibly hyper distributed world well there is an application explosion ultimately we will help for the right operations tools and infrastructure management tools to ensure that the right application experience will be guaranteed for the end customer and that's incredibly important because at the end what really really matters is that you will ensure the best possible digital experience to your customer otherwise ultimately nothing is gonna work and of course you're going to lose your brand and your customers one of the main stories that we're covering is the transformation of the industry also Cisco and one of the highlights to me was the opening keynote you had app dynamics first not networking normally it's like what's under the hood the routers and the gear no it was about the applications this is the story we're seeing it's kind of a quiet unveiling it's not yet a launch but it's evolving very quickly can you share what's going on behind this all this absolutely it's exactly along the lines of what I was saying a second ago in the end that the reason why we're driving the announcement if you want from the application experience side of the house is because without dynamics we already have a very very powerful application performance measurement tool which it's evolving extremely rapidly first of all after Amex can correlate not just the application performance to some technology kpi's but to true actual business KPIs so AB dynamics can give you for instance the real-time visibility of say a marketing funnel conversion rates transactions that you're having in your in your business operation now we're introducing an incredibly powerful new capability that takes the bar to a whole new level and that's the dynamics experience journey Maps what are those it's actually the ability of focusing not so much on front-ends and backends and databases performances but really focusing on what the user is seeing in front of his or her screen and so what really matters is capturing the journey that a given user of your application is is being and understanding whether the experience is the one that you want to deliver oh you have like a sudden drop of somewhere and you know why that is important because in the end we've been talking about is it a problem of the application performance user performance well it could be a badly designed page how do you know and so this is a very precious information is that were giving to application developers not just to the IT ops guys that is incredibly precious to get this in so you just brought up that journey so that's part of the news so just break down real quick one minute yeah what the news is yeah so we have three components the first one as you as you correctly pointed out is really introduction the application journey Maps right the experience journey Maps that's very very important the second is we are actually integrating after am it's with the inter-site action inter-site optimization manager the workload team is a workload promisor and so because there is a change of data between the two now you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem we have a workload problem or infrastructure problem which is ultimate what you really need to do as quickly as you can and thirdly we have introduced a new version of our hyper flex platform which is hyper-converged flat G flat for Cisco with a fully containerized version we tax free if you want as well there is a great platform for containerized application of parameter so you teen when I've been talking to customers last few years when they go through their transformational journey there's the modernization they need to do the patterns I've seen most successful is first you modernize the platform often HCI is you know and often for that it really simplifies the environment you know reduces the silos and has more of that operational model that looks closer to what the cloud experience is and then if I've got a good platform then I can modernize the applications on top of it but often those two have been a little bit disconnected it feels like the announcements now that they are coming together what are you seeing what are you hearing how is your solution set solving this issue yeah exactly I mean as we've been talking to our customers love them are going through different application modernisations and kubernetes and containers is extremely important to them and to build a container cloud on Prem is extremely one of their needs and so there's three distinctive requirements that they've kind of talked to us about a lot of it has to be able to it's got to be very simple very turnkey and a fully integrated ready to turn on the other one is something that's very agile right very DevOps friendly and the third being a very economic container cloud on Prem as far we mentioned high flex application platform takes our hyper-converged system and builds on top of it a integrated kubernetes platform to deliver a container as a service type capability and it provides a full stack fully supported element platform for our customers and the one of the best great aspects of is that's all managed from inside from the physical infrastructure to the hyper-converged layer to all the way to the container management so it's very exciting to have that full stack management and insight as well yeah it's great to you know John and I have been following this kubernetes wave you know since the early early days Fabio mentioned integrations with the Amazons and Google's the world because you know a few years ago you talked to customers and they're like oh well I'm just gonna build my own urbanity right back nobody ever said that is easy now just delivering at his service seems to be the way most people wanted so if I'm doing it on Amazon or Google they've got their manage service that I could do that or that they're through partners they're working with so explain what you're doing to make it simpler in the data center environment because I'm tram absolutely is a piece of that hybrid equation the customers need yes so essentially from the customer experience perspective as I mentioned it's very fairly turnkey right from the hyper flicks application platform we're taking our hyper grew software we're integrating a application virtualization layer on top of it Linux KVM based and then on top of that we're integrating the kubernetes stack on top as well and so in essence right it's a fully curated kubernetes stack right it has all the different elements from the networking from the storage elements and and providing that in a very turnkey way and as I mentioned the inner site management is really providing that simplicity that customers need for that management ok Fabio this the previous announcement you've made with the public clouds yeah this just ties into those hybrid environments that's exactly you know a few years ago people like oh is there gonna be a distribution that wins in kubernetes we don't think that's the answer but still I can't just move between kubernetes you know seamlessly yet but this is moving towards that direction so a lot of customers want to have a very simple implementation at the same time they want of course a multi cloud approach and I really care about you know marking the difference between you know multi-cloud hybrid cloud there's been a lot of confusion but if you think about it multi cloud is really rooted into the business need of harnessing innovation from whatever it comes from you know the different clouds PV different things and you know what they do today tomorrow it could even change so people want option maladie so they want a very simple implementation that's integrated with public cloud providers that simplifies their life in terms of networking security and application of workload management and we've been executing towards that goal to fundamentally simplify the operations of these pretty complex kind of hybrid environments I want you to nail that operations on ibrid that's where multi cloud comes in absolutely just a connection point absolutely you're not a shitty mice no isn't a shit so in order to fulfill your business like your I know business needs you then you have a hybrid problem and you want to really kind of have a consistent production rate environment between fins on Prem that you own and control versus things that you use and you want to control better now of course there are different school of thoughts but most of the customers who are speaking with really want to expand their governance and technology model right to the cloud as opposed to absorb in different ways of doing things from each and every clock I want to unpack a little bit of what you said earlier about the knowing where the problem is because a lot of times it's a point the finger at the other first and where's it's the application problem isn't a problem so I want to get into that but first I want to understand the hyper flex application platform Eugene if you could just share the main problem that you guys saw what did some of the pain points that customers had what problems does the AP solve yeah as I mentioned it's really the platform for our customers to modernize their applications on right and it addresses those things that they're looking for as far as the economics right really the ability to provide a full stack container experience without having to you know but you know bringing any third party hypervisor licenses as well as support cost so that's fully integrated there you have your integrated hyper-converged storage capability you have the cloud-based management and that's really developing you providing that developer DevOps simplicity from the data Julie that they're looking for internally as well as for their product production environments and then the other aspect is its simplicity to be able to manage all this right in the entire lifecycle management as well so it's the operational side of the whole yeah uncovers Papio on the application side where the problem is because this is where I'm a little bit skeptical you know normally rightfully so but I can see in a problem where it's like whose fault is it gasification is problem or the network I mean it runs into more serious workloads the banking app that's having trouble how do you know where it what the problem is and how do you solve that problem what what's going on for that specific issue absolutely and you know the name of the game here is breaking down this operational side right and I love what our app dynamics VP GM Danny winoker said you know it has this terminology beast DevOps which you know may sound like an interesting acrobatics but it's absolutely true the business has to be part of this operational kind of innovation because as you said you know developer edges you know drops their containers and their code to the IET ops team but you don't really know whether the problem a certain point is gonna be in the code or in how the application is actually deployed or maybe a server that doesn't have enough CPU so in the end it boils down to one very important thing you have to have visibility inside and take action and every layer of the stack I mean instrumentation absolutely there are players that only do it in their software overlay domain the problem is very often these kind of players assume that underneath links are fine and very often they're not so in the end this visibility inside inaction is the loop that everybody is going after these days to really get to the next if you want generational operation where you gotta have a constant feedback loop and making it more faster and faster because in the end you can only win in the marketplace right regardless of your IT ops if you're faster than your competitor well still still was questioning the GM of AppDynamics running observability and he's like no it's not to feature it's everywhere so he his comment was yeah but serve abilities don't really talk about it because it's big din do you agree with that absolutely it has to be at every layer of the stack and only if you have visibility inside an action through the entire stack from the software all the way to the infrastructure level that you can solve the problem otherwise the finger-pointing quote-unquote will continue and you will not be able to gain the speed that you need okay so the question on my mind I want to get both of you guys can weigh in on this is that you look at Cisco as a company you got a lot going on I mean a guy's huge customer base core routers - no applications there's a lot going on a lot of a lot of complexity you got IOT security Ramirez talked about that you got the WebEx rooms got totally popular it's kind of got a lot of glam to it having the WebEx kind of you know I guess what virtual presence was yeah telepresence kind of model and then you get cloud is there a mind share within the company around how cloud is baked into everything because you can't do IOT edge without having some sort of cloud operational things so there's stuff you're talking about is not just a division it's kind of gonna it's kind of threads everywhere across Cisco what's the what's the mind share right now within the Cisco teams and also customers around clarification well I would say it's it's a couple of dimension the first one is the cloud is one of the critical domains of this multi domain architecture that of course is the cornerstone of Cisco's technology strategy right if you think about it it's all about connecting users to applications wherever they are and not just the user the applications themselves like if you look at the latest stats from IDC 58% of workloads is heading to the public cloud and to the edge it's like the data center is literally exploding in many different directions so you have this highly distributed kind of fabric guess what sits in between all these applications and microservices is a secure network and that's exactly what we're executing upon now that's the first kind of consideration the second is if you look at the other silver line most of the Cisco technology innovation is also going a direction of absorbing cloud as a simplified way of managing all the components or the infrastructure you look at the IP flex ap is actually managed by inter site which is a SAS kind of component this journey started a long time ago with Cisco Meraki and then of course we have SAS properties like WebEx everything else is kind of absolutely migrants reporter we've been reporting eugen that from years ago we saw the movement where api's are starting to come in when you go back five years ago not a lot of the gear and stuff at Cisco had api's now you got api's building into all the new products that's right you see the software shift with you know you know intent-based networking to AppDynamics it's interesting it's you're seeing kind of this agile mindset this is some of you and I talk about all the time but agile now is the new model is it ready for customers I mean the normal Enterprise is still got the infrastructure and application it's separated okay how do I bring it together what are you guys seeing the customer base what's going on with with not that not the early adopters heavy-duty hardcore pioneers out there but you know the the general mainstream enterprise are they there yet have they had that moment of awakening yeah I mean I think they they are there because fundamentally it's all about that ensuring that application experience and you can only ensure that application experience right by having your application teams and your structure teams work together and that's what's exciting you mentioned the API is and what we've done there with AppDynamics integrating with inter-site workload optimizer as Fabio mentioned it's all about visibility inside action and what app dynamics is provides providing that business and end-user application performance experience visibility inner sites giving you know visibility on the underlining workload and the resources whether it's on Prem in your you know drive data center environment or in different type of cloud providers so you get that full stack visibility right from the application all the way down to the bottom and then inner side local optimizer is then also optimizing the resources to proactively ensure that application experience so before you know if we talk about someone at a checkout and they're about to have abandonment because the functions not working we're able to proactively prevent that and take a look at all that so you know in the end I think it's all about ensuring that application experience and what we're providing with app dynamics is for the application team is kind of that horizontal visibility of how that application is performing and at the same time if there's an issue the infrastructure team could see exactly within the workload topology where the issue is and insert' aeneas lee whether it be manual intervention or even automatically there's or a ops capability go ahead and provide that action so the action could be you know scaling out the VMS it's on-prem or looking at a new different type of ec2 template in the cloud that's what's very exciting about this it's really the application experience is now driving and optimizing infrastructure in real time and let me flip your question like do you even have a choice John when you think about in the next two years 50% more applications if you're a large enterprise you have 5 to 7,000 apps you have another to 3,000 applications just coming into into the the frame and then 50% of the existing ones that are gonna be refactor lifted and shifted or replace or retired by SAS application it's just like it's tsunami that's that's coming on you and oh by the way because of again the micro service is kind of affect the number of dependencies between all these applications is growing incredibly rapidly like last year we were eight average interdependencies for applications now we are 20 so imaging imaging what happens as as you are literally flooded with the way the scanner really you have to ensure that your application infrastructure fundamentally will get tied up as quickly as you can still and I have been toilet for at least five years now if not longer the networking has been the key kind of last changeover - clarification and I would agree with you guys I think I've asked the question because I wanted to get your perspective but think about it it's 13 years since the iPhone so mobile has shown people that a mobile app can change business but now if you look at the pressure the network's bringing the pressure on the network or the pressure for the network to be better than programmable is the rise of video and data I mean so you got mobile check now you've got video I mean more people doing video now than ever before videos of consumer oil as streaming you got data these two things absolutely forced yeah the customers to deal with it but what really tipped the the balance John is is actually the SAS effect is the cloud effect because as you know it's in IT sort of inflection points nothing is linear right so once you reach a certain critical mass of cloud apps and we're absolutely there already all of a sudden you're traffic pattern on your network changes dramatically so why in the world are you continuing kind of you know concentrating all of your traffic in your data center and then going to the internet you have to absolutely open the floodgates at the branch level as close to the users as possible and that implies a radical change I would even add to that and I think you guys are right on where you guys are going it may be hard to kind of tease out with all the complexity with Cisco but in the keynote the business model shifts come from SAS so you got all this technical stuff going on now you have this Asif ocation or cloud that's changes the business models so new entrants can come in and existing players can get better so I think that whole business model conversation yeah never was discussed at Cisco live before yeah in depth as well hey run your business connect your hubs campus move packets around that was applications in business model yeah but also the fact that there is increasing number of software capabilities and so fundamental you want to simplify the life of your customers through subscription models that help the customer by now using what they really need right at any given point in time all the way to having enterprise agreements I also think that's about delivering these application experiences for your business small different type experience that's really what's differentiating you from your different competitors right and so I think that's a different type of shift as well well you guys are good got some good angle on this cloud I love it I got to ask you the question what can we expect next from Cisco more progression along clarification what's next well I would say we've been incredibly consistent I believe in the last few years in executing on our cloud strategy which again is centered around helping customers really gluon this mix set of data centers and clouds to make it work as one write as much as possible and so what we really deliver is networking security and application of performance management and we're integrating there's more and more on the two sides of the equation right the the designer side and the powerful outside and more more integrating in between all of these layers again to fundamentally give you this operational capability to get faster and faster we'll continue doing so and you set up before we came on camera that you were talking to the sales teams what are they what's their vibe with the sales team they get excited by this what's that oh yeah feedback oh yeah absolutely from the inner side were claw optimizer and they have dynamics that's very exciting for them especially the conversations they're having with their customers really from that application experience and proactively insuring it and on the hyper flex application platform side this is extremely exciting with providing a container cloud to our customers and you know what's coming down is more and more capabilities for our customers to modernize their applications on hyper flex you guys are riding some pretty big waves here at Cisco I get a cloud way to get the IOT Security wave it's pretty exciting pretty big stuff thanks for coming in thanks for sharing the insights Fabio I appreciate it thank you for having us your coverage here in Barcelona I'm John Force dude Minutemen be back with more coverage fourth day of four days of cube coverage we right back after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] why Trump Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back to Barcelona everybody we're here at Cisco live and you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we got to the events and extract the signal from the noise this is day one really we started a zero yesterday Eric Hertzog is here he's the CMO and vice president of storage channels probably been on the cube more than [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone's two cubes live coverage day four of four days of wall-to-wall action here in Barcelona Spain Francisco live 2020 I'm John Ferrier with mykos Dave Volante with a very special guest here to wrap up Cisco live the president of Europe Middle East Africa and Russia Francisco Wendy Mars cube alumni great to see you thanks for coming on to kind of put a bookend to the show here thanks for joining us right there it's absolutely great to be here thank you so what a transformation as Cisco's business model of continues to evolve we've been saying brick by brick we still think is a big move coming I think there's more action I can sense the walls talking to us like let's just go live in the US and more technical announcements in the next 24 months you can see you can see where it's going it's cloud its apps yeah its policy based program ability it's really a whole nother business model shift for you and your customers the technology shift and the business model shift so I want to get your perspective of this year opening key no you let it off talking about the philosophy of the business model but also the first presenter was not a networking guy it was an application person yeah app dynamics yep this is a shift what's going on with Cisco what's happening what's the story well you know if you look for all of the work that we're doing is but is really driven by what we see from requirements from our customers the change that's happening in the market and it is all around you know if you think digital transformation is the driver organizations now are incredibly interested in how do they capture that opportunity how do they use technology to help them but you know if you look at it really there's the three items that are so important it's the business model evolution it's actually the business operations for for organisations plus their people there are people in the communities within that those three things working together and if you look at it with you know it's so exciting with application dynamics there because if you look for us within Cisco that linkage of the application layer through into the infrastructure into the network and bringing that linkage together is the most powerful thing because that's the insight and the value our customers are looking for you know we've been talking about the in the innovation sandwich you know you got you know date in the middle and you got technology and applications underneath that's kind of what's going on here but you I'm glad you brought up the year the part about business model business operations and people in communities because during your keno you had a slide that laid out three kind of pillars yes people in communities business model and business operations there was no 800 series in there there was no product discussions this is fundamentally the big shift that business models are changing I tweeted provocatively the killer app and digital the business model because you think about it the applications are the business and what's running under the covers is the technology but it's all shifting and changing so every single vertical every single business is impacted by this it's not like a certain secular thing in the industry this is a real change can you describe how those three things are operating with that constitute think if you look from you know so thinking through those three areas if you look at the actual business model itself our business models as organizations are fundamentally changing and they're changing towards as consumers we are all much more specific about what we want we have incredible choice in the market we are more informed than ever before but also we are interested in the values of the organizations that were getting the capability from as well as the products and the services that naturally we're looking to gain so if you look in that business model itself this is about you know organizations making sure they stay ahead from a competitive standpoint about the innovation of portfolio that they're able to bring but also that they have a strong strong focus around the experience that their customer gains from an application a touch standpoint that all comes through those different channels which is at the end of the day the application then if you look as to how do you deliver that capability through the systems the tools and the processes as we all evolve our businesses you have to change the dynamic within your organization to cope with that and then of course in driving any transformation the critical success factor is your people and your culture you need your teams with you the way teams operate now is incredibly different it's no longer command and control its agile capability coming together you need that to deliver on any transformation never never mind let it be smooth you know in the execution there so it's all three together what I like about that model and I have to say we this is you know ten years to do in the cube you you see that marketing in the vendor community often leads what actually happens not surprising as we entered the last decade it was a lot of talk about cloud well it kind of was a good predictor we heard a lot about digital transformations a lot of people roll their eyes and think it's a buzzword but we really are I feel like an exiting this cloud era into the digital era it feels real and there are companies that you know get it and are leaning in there are others that maybe you're complacent I'm wondering what you're seeing in in Europe just in terms of everybody talks digital yeah be CEO wants to get it right but there is complacency there when it's a services say well I'm doing pretty well not on my watch others say hey we want to be the disruptors and not get disrupted what are you seeing in the region in terms of that sentiment I would say across the region you know there will always be verticals and industries that are slightly more advanced than others but I would say that then the bulk of conversations that I'm engaged in independence of the industry or the country in which we're having that conversation in there is a acceptance of transfer digital transformation is here it is affecting my business i if I don't disrupt I myself will be disrupted and be challenged help me so I you know I'm not disputing the end state I need guidance and support to drive the transition and a risk mythic mitigated manner and they're looking for help in that and there's actually pressure in the boardroom now around a what are we doing within within organizations within that enterprise the service right of the public said to any type of style of company there's that pressure point in the boardroom of come on we need to move it speed now the other thing about your model is technology plays a role in contribute it's not the be-all end-all but plays a role in each of those the business model of business operations and developing and nurturing communities can you add more specifics what role do you see technology in terms of advancing those three spheres so I think you know if you look at it technology is fundamental to all of those spheres in regard to the innovation the differentiation technology can bring then the key challenges one of being able to reply us in a manner where you can really see differentiation of value within the business so in then the customers organization otherwise it's just technology for the sake of technology so we see very much a movement now to this conversation of talk about the use case the use cases the way by which that innovation can be used to deliver the value to the organization and also different ways by which a company will work look at the collaboration capability that we announced earlier this week of helping to bring to life that agility look at the app D discussion of helping to link the layer of the application into the infrastructure the network's to get to root cause identification quickly and to understand where you may have a problem before you thought it actually arises and causes downtime many many ways I think the agility message has always been a technical conversation a gel methodology technology software development no problem check that's ten years ago but business agility mmm it's moving from a buzzword to reality exactly that's what you're kind of getting in here and teams how teams operate how they work you know and being able to be quick efficient stand up stand down and operate in that way you know we were kind of thinking out loud on the cube and just riffing with Fabio gory on your team on Cisco's team about clarification with Eugene Kim around just just kind of real-time what was interesting is we're like okay it's been 13 years since the iPhone and so 13 years of mobile in your territory in Europe Middle East Africa mobilities been around before the iPhone so with in more advanced data privacy much more advanced in your region so you got you out you have a region that's pretty much I think the tell signs for what's going on in North America and around the world and so you think about that you say okay how is value created how the economics changing this is really the conversation about the business model is okay if the value activities are shifting and be more agile and the economics are changing with sass if someone's not on this bandwagon it's not an in-state discussion where it's done deal yeah it's but I think also there were some other conversation which which are very prevalent here is in in the region so around trust around privacy law understanding compliance you look at data where data resides portability of that data GDP are came from Europe you know and as ban is pushed out and those conversations will continue as we go over time and if I also look at you know the dialogue that you saw so you know within World Economic Forum around sustainability that is becoming a key discussion now within government here in Spain you know from a climate standpoint and many other areas as well Dave and I've been riffing around this whole where the innovation is coming from it's coming from Europe region not so much the u.s. I mean us discuss some crazy innovations but look at blockchain us is like don't touch it pretty progressive outside United States little bit dangerous to but that's where innovation is coming from and this is really the key that we're focused on I want to get your thoughts on how do you see it going next level the next level next-gen business model what's your what's your vision so I think there'll be lots of things if we look at things like with the introduction of artificial intelligence robotics capability 5g of course you know on the horizon we have Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona in a few weeks time and if you talked about with the iPhone the smartphone of course when 4G was introduced no one knew what the use case would that would be it was the smartphone which wasn't around at that time so with 5g in the capability there that will bring again yet more change to the business model for different organizations and the capability and what we can bring to market when we think about AI privacy data ownership becomes more important some of the things you were talking about before it's interesting what you're saying John and when the the GDP are set the standard and and you see in the u.s. there are stovepipes for that standard California is going to do one every state is going to have a different center that's going to slow things down that's going to slow down progress do you see sort of an extension of a GDP are like framework of being adopted across the region and that potentially you know accelerating some of these you know sticky issues and public policy issues that can actually move the market forward I think I think the will because I think there'll be more and more you know if you look at there's this terminology of data is the new oil what do you do with data how do you actually get value from that data and make intelligent business decisions around that so you know that's critical but yet if you look for all of ours we are extremely passionate about you know where is our data used again back to trust and privacy you need compliance you need regulation you know I think this is just the beginning of how we will see that evolve you know when do I get your thoughts does Dave and I have been riffing for 10 years around the death of storage long live storage and but data needs to be stored somewhere networking is the same kind of conversation just doesn't go away in fact there's more pressure now forget the smartphone that was 13 years ago before that mobility data and video now super important driver that's putting more pressure on you guys and so hey we're networking so it's kind of like Moore's law it's like more networking more networking so video and data are now big your thoughts on video and data video but if you look at the Internet of the future you know what so if you look for all of us now we are also demanding as individuals around capability and access to that and inter vetted the future the next phase we want even more so there'll be more and more - you know requirement for speed availability that reliability of service the way by which we engage and we communicate there's some fundamentals there so continuing to to grow which is which is so so exciting for us so you talk about digital transformation that's obviously in the mind of c-level executives I got to believe security is up there as a topic what other what's the conversation like in the corner office when you go visit your customers so I think that there's a huge excitement around the opportunity realizing the value of the of the opportunity you know if you look at top of mind conversations are around security around making sure that you can make tank maintain that fantastic customer experience because if you don't the custom will go elsewhere how do you do that how do you enrich at all times and also looking at markets adjacencies you know as you go in and you talk at senior levels within within organizations independent of the industry in which they're in there are a huge amount of commonalities that we see across those of consistent problems by which organizations are trying to solve and actually one of the big questions is what's the pace of change that I should operate at and when is it too fast and when is what am I too slow and trying to balance that is exciting but also a challenge for companies so you feel like sentiment is still strong even though we're 10 years into this this bull market you know you got Briggs it you get you know China tensions with the US u.s. elections but but generally you see Tennessee sentiment still pretty strong and demand so I would say that the the excitement around technology the opportunity that is there around technology in its broadest sense is greater than ever before and I think it's on all of us to be able to help organizations to understand how they can consume I see value from us but it's you know it's fantastic science it tastes trying to get some economic indicators but really the real thing I'm trying to get you is Minh set of the CEO the corner office right now is it is it we're gonna we're gonna grow short-term by cutting or do we do are we gonna be aggressive and go after this incremental opportunity and it's probably both you're seeing a lot of automation yeah and I think if you look fundamentally for organizations it's it's that the three things helped me to make money how me to save money keep me out of trouble you know so those are the pivots they all operate with and you know depending on where an organization is in its journey whether a start-up there you know in in the in the mid or the more mature and some of the different dynamics and the markets in which they operate in as well there's all different variables you know so it's it's it's mix Wendy thanks so much for spending the time to come on the cube really appreciate great keynote folks watching if you haven't seen the keynote opening sections that's a good section the business model I think it's really right on I think that's going to be a conversation it's going to continue thanks for sharing that before we look before we leave I want to just ask you a question around what you what's going on for you here at Barcelona as the show winds down you had all your activities take us in the day of the life of what you do customer meetings what were some of those conversations take us inside inside what what goes on for you here well I'd say it's been an amazing it's been an amazing few days so it's a combination of customer conversations around some of the themes we just talked about conversations with partners and there's investor companies that we invest in a Cisco that I've been spending some time with and also you know spending time with the teams as well the DEF net zone you know is amazing we have this afternoon the closing session where we've got a fantastic external guest who's coming in it's going to be really exciting as well and then of course the party tonight and we'll be announcing the next location which I'm not gonna reveal now later on today we kind of figured it out already because that's our job and there's the break news but we're not gonna break it for you you can have that hey thank you so much for coming on really appreciate Wendy Martin expecting the Europe Middle East Africa and Russia for Cisco she's got our hand on the pulse and the future is the business model that's what's going on fundamental radical change across the board in all areas this the cue bringing you all the action here in Barcelona thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2020, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host for this segment is Dave Volante. John Furrier is also in the house. We're doing a little more than three days wall-to-wall coverage. One of the big themes we're talking about this week is in this complicated world, networking, containerization, applications going through transformation. Future work simplification is something that is very important and helping us to really tease through and understand some of the integration, some of the announcements where Cisco is helping to simplify the environment, happy to welcome back to the program one of our Cube alumni, Kaustubh Das who is a Vice President of Product Management at Cisco. KD, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, I'm delighted to be here, it's great to be here. >> All right. So but up on the main stage, they walk through a number of the announcement. Listen Tony, I was talking about some of the pieces and two of the announcements from the main stage are under your purview. So why don't we start there, walk us through the news. >> Yeah, so there's two two major announcements. The first one's called Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. And what it is, it's a way to have visibility into your data center, all the way from the applications and in fact, the user journeys within those applications, all the way down through the virtualization there, through the app servers, through the container platforms down into the servers, the networks, storage lands. So you have a map of the data center. You have a common data set that the application owner and the infrastructure owner can both look at and you finally have a common vocabulary so that it helps them to troubleshoot faster so on a fast reactor way, they talking the same language not pointing fingers at each other or do things proactively to prevent problems from happening when you see a server running hot, a virtual machine running hot, an application server running hot. You can diagnose it and have that conversation before it happens. >> My understanding is that Intersight and there's also some integrations with AppDynamics there, AppD which of course we know we talk to that team at the Amazon Cloud shows a lot. So that common vocabulary spans between my hybrid and multi cloud environments. Am I getting that right? >> Correct and there's two pieces even within that. So certainly that's integrations with AppD so from AppD we get information about the application performance. We get information about the business metrics associated with the application performance. We get information about the journeys that user take within the application and then we take that data then we stitch it together with infrastructure data to map how many applications are dependent on which application servers, how many VMs are those dependent on, what does those VMs run on? What hosts are they dependent on, what networks do they Traverse, what lands do they run on? And each one of these is an API call into that element in the infrastructure stack. Each API call gives us a little bit of data and then we piece together this data to create this map of the of the entire data center. There's a multi cloud aspect to it obviously and so we also make API calls into AWS and Azure and clouds out there and we get data about utilization of the various instance types. We get data about performance from the cloud as well. >> So two announcements. Insight Workload Optimizer and HyperFlex AppDynamics, is that right or they are separate? >> HyperFlex application platform. >> Okay. >> So if we look at the, let me just put these two in context. Every enterprise is doing two things. It's trying to run application that it already hosts and then it's writing some bespoke new applications. So the first announcement, the Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer and the integration of the AppD, that helps us be more performant for applications we're running, to have troubleshoot faster, to have reduced cost in a multiply cloud environment. The second announcement Dave, the HyperFlex application platform, it's really targeted towards developers who are writing new applications on a container platform. And for those developers, IT needs to give them a simple appliance like easy to use container as a service platform. So what HX AP HyperFlex application platform is is a container as a service platform driven from the cloud so that the developer gets the same experience that they get when they go to an AWS and and request a pod. But they get it on-prem and it's fully 100% upstream Kubernetes compliant. It's curated by us so it's very simple appliance like feel for development environments on container. >> Okay. So Insight Workload Optimizer, it really attacks the problem of sort of the mystery of what goes on inside VMs and the application team, the infrastructure team, they're not talking to each other. You're bringing a common, like you said parlance together. >> Kaustubh: Correct. >> Really so they can solve problems and that that trickles down to cost optimization as well as performance. >> It does, aha. >> And I understand hyper HyperFlex app platform it's really bringing that cloud experience to on-prem for hybrid environments. >> For our new development. So if you're developing on containers, you're probably using Kubernetes but you're probably using this entire kind of ecosystem of open source tools. >> Yeah. >> And we make that simple. >> Okay. >> We make it simple for developers to use that and variety to provide that to developers. >> Okay. since underneath, there's HyperFlex. is there still virtualization involved in there and how does this tie in with the rest of the Kubernete solutions that we were talking about with your cloud partner? >> Great, great. Great question. So yes, there is HyperFlex underneath this. So to develop, you need a platform. The best platform we think is the elastic platform that is hyper-convergence. And with type of flex, we took storage networking and compute, packaged it together, made it super simple. We're doing the same thing with Kubernetes. So it's the same concept that how do you take complex things, package it together and make it almost appliance like. We said we're doing the same thing with Kubernetes. Now Stu, the point about virtualization is a good one. A lot of container deployments today are run in virtual machines. And they run in virtual machines for good reason, for isolation, for multi-tenancy, for all these kinds of ignition. However, the promise of containers was to sort of get rid of the tax that you pay when you deploy a virtualization environment. And what we're giving out right now is no tax, no virtualization tax virtualization environment. So we have a layer over transition in there. It's designed for this use case so it does give the isolation, it does give the multi-tenancy benefits but you don't need to need to pay additionally for it if you're deploying on containers-- >> Job wise it is some KB and base type solution >> Kaustubh: Correct. >> Underneath, it makes a lot of sense if you look at the large virtualization player out there. It's been talking about how do I enable the infrastructure that's all virtualized and everything and bring them along to that journey >> Correct. >> For that bridge if you will to the environment? Sure containerization sometimes I want to be able to spin it up super fast. It leaves, it dies, but if I'm putting something in my data center, probably the characteristics I'm looking at are a little bit different. >> Correct, correct. The other thing it does and you touched on it a little bit was we have a homogeneous environment with the major clouds out there. So one of the things developers want to do is they want to develop in one place and they want to deploy in another place so develop on Amazon and deploy on-prem or Azure. We've got an environment with very native integrations so that it's natively integrated into EKS and AKS. And we facilitate that develop anywhere, deploy anywhere motion for developers who are trying to build on this. >> So okay. What does the customer have to do to consume these solutions? >> So our customer right now for this one is IT operations. It maybe helps to bit back a little bit on why we did this. I had a lot of customers come to me and they said listen, I'm IT, I'm in the business of taking shrink-wrap software, taking enterprise-grade resilient infrastructure, putting that together. I'm not in the business of getting open source drops, every week, every day, every month, putting them together by making sure all the versions line up and doing that again and again and again. So the putting together an Ikea piece part of open source software has not been traditionally the IT operator's business. So our customer is that IT operator. What they need to do is they buy a, if they may have a HyperFlex system already, or they buy a HyperFlex effect system. They add on a license for the HyperFlex application platform. They have an Intersight license. This is delivered from the cloud so Intersight manages that deployment, manages the lifecycle, manages the upgrades and so forth. If they have a state that spreads across multiple sites, Intersight is cloud-based so it can actually reach all those sites and so they're in business. >> Okay, so very low prerequisite. You just got to have the product and you can add on to it. >> Yeah, I have the HyperFlex system, add on to the license, you're done. >> So I'm curious. How unique do you see this in the marketplace? I think the keynotes this morning is that there's no other company that can actually do this. I wonder if you can sort of add some color to that and just help our viewers understand the uniqueness of Cisco's offer. >> Sure. So I think it's unique on a number of different dimensions. The first dimension is HyperFlex itself. We've had an appliance mentality to this for a long time and we really co-designed the software and the hardware to build the most performance hyper-converged system out there. We took the same approach when we went down the path of Kubernetes and building this container platform. And so it's called design software and infrastructure together. The second thing is we said we're going to be 100% upstream Kubernetes compliant right, so if you look at the major offerings out there in this space, they're often several months actually behind where the open source is, where the upstream of the sources and developers don't want that. They want the latest and greatest, they want they want to be current, right. So we are far ahead of most of the other offerings out there in terms of how close they are to their upstream commodities. The final piece is Intersight. Intersight gives us immense ability to have scale where especially if you're developing on containers and micro services, you're talking tens of thousands, many tens of thousands of N nodes, maybe more. And being in the cloud, we have the scale and we have reached so a lot of our customers have distributed assets and branches and you know, hotel chains with hotels and so forth. Intersight allows us the ability to actually deploy across a distributed asset class with with the centralized kind of provisioning. >> You see a huge uptake right now and containers generally Kubernetes, specifically. It's sort of across the board but I wonder if you could comment on how much of that demand and activity is coming from sort of the traditional IT roles versus with other hoody developers? >> Yeah, that's that's a great question. So yes, there is a on a hype cycle it's at the top of the hype cycle. Everybody's in actual adoption. I think it's pretty good as well right. So that is every company I talk to is doing something in containers, every company. But usually, it starts at the developers. It starts with like you described with the folks in the hoodies and that's great. I mean they're experimenting, they're getting this thing. What hasn't happened is it hasn't gotten mainstream. And things can mainstream is when IT picks it up. It certifies hey this is resilient, this is enterprise-grade, I can stand behind it, I can manage the lifecycle of it. That's what we're enabling here. I'm giving IT a path to mainstream containers, to mainstream Kubernetes so that the adoption kind of takes it from that pipe cycle to mainstream adoption. >> Do you see K.D. new sort of data protection approaches or thinking as containers come into play? I mean they're ephemeral, you know microservices sometimes aren't so micro. Like you say, they're running often times inside a VM. So how are people thinking about protecting containers? >> Yeah, yeah, that's a big topic in itself. I mean one of the things that we found is even though they were supposed to be ephemeral, they require persistent storage so we've implemented within hyperflex a CSI plugin that provides that persistent storage layer to containers. Then once you do that, all of the data protection mechanism of HyperFlex come into play. So within the cluster, the resiliency, the triple replication, the backups, the partnerships we have with their other data protection pairs, all of those mechanisms become available instantly and those are enterprise-grade. Those are ones that IT knows and can stand behind. Those become available to containers right away >> Great. >> But it's great, great question. >> Awesome. >> Just want to go back to when you were talking about Intersight and the reach and the scale of the solution reminds me that Cisco has a strong legacy in global environment. What I'm curious about, we've talked a little bit about Edge computing in the past. >> Kaustubh: Yes. >> Where are you seeing Edge today? Where is that going? What should we be looking at in that space when it comes to Edge? >> Yeah, no, it's a big part of our customer demand. In fact, we haven't seen I think all flash was the other technology that took place so fast but Edge has been really phenomenal in its growth rate. Over the last year, we've seen I think probably up to 15% to 20% of my engagements are in this space on at least the hyper convert side. So we see that as a big growth area. More and more deployments are happening. They're being centrally managed, deployed at the edges and so the only solution that scales to something like that is something that's based on the cloud. But it's not just enough to be based in the cloud. You've got to maintain that entire lifecycle right? You've got to make sure you can do installs, upgrades, you know OS installs, health monitoring and so as we built that Intersight platform, we've added all those capabilities to it over time So we started with hey this is a SAS-based management platform and then we added telemetry and then we said if we can actually match signatures, now machines can manage machines. So a good amount of my support calls are now machines calling each other and then fixing themselves. So that's just path-breaking from an informant Edge environment. You don't have an IT person, add an Edge location. You want to drop, ship an appliance there, and you want to be able to see it remotely. So I think it's a completely new operating model. >> I know we got to go but I want to run your scenario by K.D.'s. Do share with me from one of my breaking analysis. Look Dave, you mentioned Flash, that's what triggered me. (laughing) So think of containers and Kubernetes, think of like Flash. Remember Flash used to be the separate thing which we used to think it was a separate market and now it's just everywhere, it's embedded in everything. >> Kaustubh: Yes. >> So the same thing is going to happen with Kubernetes. It's going to be embedded in solutions. This is exactly what it is. By 2023, we're probably not going to be talking about it as a separate thing, maybe that's sooner. It's really just going to be ubiquitous, yeah. >> No, I totally agree. I think the underpinnings that you need for that future, you need a common infrastructure platform and a common management platform. So you don't want to have a new Silo creator and this has been our philosophy even for hyperconvergence. We said hey, there's going to be converging infrastructure that will be hyper converted. But they need to be the same management system, they need to be the same fabric. And so if it's Silo is not going to work. Same thing for containers you know. It's got to be the same platform in this case, it's HyperFlex. Hyperflex runs virtualization, it runs containers with HXAP. You get all of those benefits that I've talked about. It's all management insights, it's a common management platform across both of those. At some point, these are all tools in somebody's tool kit and you pick the right one for the job. >> Kaustubh, it is wonderful to hear the company that has been dominant in one of the silos for so long of course helping to bring the silos together work across the domains. Congratulations on that good news, always great to have you. >> Yeah, always great to be here, thank you. >> Dave: Thank you. >> For Dave Folante, I'm Stu Miniman back from lunch where we hear more from Cisco live in Barcelona 2020. Thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante we are on day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019. Welcoming a couple of guests to theCube. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure, Nathan welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks, thanks very much. >> Lisa: And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Sutliff, director of systems engineering and the America's data center, welcome to the Cube Tom. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: It's howdy you all. >> Howdy you all, okay. Thank you, it took the wicked smart guy from Boston to figure that out. >> A local. >> All right, so you all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure, you guys have been partners now since, Nathan we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco, Pure partnership evolution, better together? What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? >> Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment and think about Charlie Giancarlo from Cisco we've got a lot of just common, cross pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level, Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well, we had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco intersight, so we are first and only to have storage integration of the Cisco intersight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console, so a lot of simplicity, just single SaaS interface for managing everything. >> Tom why Pure, why first with them? >> Well you know Nathan he articulated it well, we can look at the executive level, we talked about Charlie, but even, you know all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churn them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done, our customers see that and it's really helped drive our goal to market together it's really a very strong strategy. >> So there's a CVD around this is that right? >> Yeah there's many there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially we might do one or two things well, we do a lot of things well I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVD's but more than that. >> So this really started in the field if I understand correctly is that right? [Nathan] - Yes. >> So I always look for these deals and say is it a Barney deal, you know Barney deal I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on then you say okay it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what, hey we should you know a customer wants us to work together and then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources and what does that look like? >> I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective we fill in a lot of each others gaps so that's really where it started was having the success in the field and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVD's, the intersight integration, et cetera. >> So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI for audience members who it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? >> I say it's another better together story, for example we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape we have Cisco hyper flex the HX managing the database portion, we have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the Hanna portion, and really it all comes down to single console which is intersight. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. >> So from a customer conversation perspective let's go back to you know we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment. Going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, FEEdi, and there's FlashStack like 31 flavors of FlashStack right. What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI when you guys come into play? Obviously FlashStack being I mentioned a number of flavors of that have been around for awhile, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? >> You know there's a clear delineation between a hyper convergence, our HX platform, a hyper flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStacks. If you look at a FlashStack it's an all in one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's you know scalable, something that's a highly dense tier one application. Latency obviously plays into this you know, I'd say it's a little less with the hyper flex platform and hyper convergence, much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play it does many of the similar same things but you know we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space so. But it's really about scalability, ease of use, some of them are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise. But we can sell them across anywhere whether it be public sector, commercial, mid market, smaller customers. But they each have use cases that they fit in very well. >> This morning in the key notes we heard a lot about API's, I want to get into Multi Cloud in a second but before I do we talk a lot about infrastructures code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet I've often said on theCUBE that they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructures code, how does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on the roadmap? >> Nathan: So from DevNet can you take that one? >> Well I can say yes it is a play, if you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually working with our API's, API's that we work with separate with other vendors too that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago and it was really built off of that development effort so that's critical for us going forward here there's a lot that we're doing I know we're going to talk about intersight and some other things where that was a key element of it. >> Yeah so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. >> And Cisco DevNet. >> And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember, you had many many booths, very specialized, then you have CCIE's learning python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, edge comes in. Anything you'd add Nathan to sort of programmability? >> So I think just from day one from Pure Storage just having our restful API interface, having code.purestorage.com we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy for to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly, and honestly evidence of that is in intersight itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that restful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI Ops of Pure One and bring it into intersight, be able to get intersight to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. >> What do we need to know about intersight? Add some color there, what is it, how's it work, what's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? >> So if I look at, going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper converge, it's often really a story of simplicity right? Customers want something simple for the data center, they know they can get it out in the Cloud but they can't always run their workloads out in the external Cloud. So simplicity is for intersight, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it, to get really specific imagine a VMware administrator is able to in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console so doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles, gets that Cloud like experience and that's what intersight delivers. So you get that simplicity whether its converged or hyper converged with intersight. >> Whether it's in the Cloud, it's the Edge, it's the Branch, Hybrid Cloud, instead of having to manage it I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage, compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console world wide no matter where they sit. >> So I want to talk about Multi Cloud if we can. So if I look at the players in Multi Cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, you partner with all of those pretty much I think. AWS is not on the list but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the Multi Cloud scene but they're not going after Multi Cloud, Cisco was a relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a Cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate, you've got companies that don't have a Cloud like Cisco that want to participate, where does Pure fit in to that Multi Cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? >> Well I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and Multi Cloud is the same approach to Multi Cloud and that is I'd call it open Multi Cloud. As opposed to having, forcing a single type of hyper visor on one side or a single Cloud, external Cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app, anywhere? How do we appear and provide the data fabric having the most efficient amenity of fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads, and we do that now with Pure Flash right on premises, Cloud block store out in the Cloud, our ability to Cloud snap to Azure, to AWS, and that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI anywhere really that compeletes the any workload anywhere story, and keeping it open so it's not just one hyper visor or one Cloud provider on the other side. >> So you be the data plane in that equation, with the management of that data plane, and Cisco is the overall management framework the control plane I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well, and we're part of essentially the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really upleveling for example EBS to an enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before, now we have something that whether you're on hardware on premises or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. >> So let's look at this in the real world in a customer environment, talk to me about whatever kind of whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you, what are the business benefits that, we'll use delta Airlines as an example, what would they get out of this if they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers? What's that you know TCO, ROI, what are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? >> So I'd say they get essentially a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic gap, the sync would take days, the SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice. You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application and I know it could run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere, and it's the same story essentially now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep essentially the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it consistent no matter where it is, freeze that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. >> So internal operations can be dialed way up which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects, and the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of this stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. >> Exactly, yeah you can manage if you look at ACI you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric again wherever it may be, and there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application you look at the robustness of that on the network and the network here us absolutely critical, none of this is going to run I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the Cloud, it could be in the Branch, you still want the same level of performance the SLA, the five nines and that's where the network comes in that's what's critical. >> Well and the security piece as well. >> Absolutely. >> You guys are largely coming at the Multi Cloud from of course the network strength that you have but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Talk about security and it's importance and so on. >> Well I think the security I mean one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make realtime decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally obviously you have firewall and you try to keep everything out but a lot of what will happen a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. So this is able to look at all of the flows, at every single packet the flow of the application and the information to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power a lot of storage and a lot of capacity but you know that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play, our security team is actually out selling that in addition to the data center teams. >> So is Wallingford Yankee's country or Red Sox country? >> Oh it's right on the border so I've got my in laws Yankee's, my parents Redsox, so it's very difficult at home. >> You're a Pat's fan of course, did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? >> Tom: No not at all. >> Oh you felt good? >> Maybe 19 and O this year we'll see. >> And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? >> I try to be it's hard. >> Well you know this company is Warrior's so we can talk NBA too. >> You bet! >> There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now. Not so much for our team but. (laughter) >> Lisa: You never know! >> You never know. >> I had to try to be Switzerland too cause I was the West Coaster with the East Coaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom last question for you, whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today as we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has we talked about that, that Cisco has as well, what are some of the things that as a partner as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there, what is Ciscos reaction to that news? >> Well the thing with Pure and it preceded this conference but you know I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas, it's just the innovation which is pretty incredible. You know you kind of have the big four products here but primarily with the Flash arrays the CI platforms, the Flash blades, what's going on with Pure one, that's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi Cloud. We talked about the validated designs, this is really going to lead us to almost like it's kind of funny when you have an innovative partner you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing work at them or what have you. It's like now we really innovated again, 12, 15 months later we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. >> Alright well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE today we appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of this Cisco Pure partnership, thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE ya'll from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas. (upbeat music)

>> 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 we're here at the San Diego convention center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman we've had three days wall to wall coverage my co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house and I'm really excited to actually sit down one on one with one of the users at this user conference the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco with their users and partners over 28,000 so speaking for all of them right? We have Sebastien Morissette who's an IT architect specialist at Intact Financial Corporation come to us from beautiful Montreal Canada. >> Exactly. >> All right thank you so much for joining us so Sebastien first of all how many Cisco Lives have you been too? >> Honestly this is my first. >> Oh absolutely exciting for that, my first one I came too was actually 10 years ago I joked at the 20th anniversary they went back 20 years to have some 80's bands they had The Bangles and Devo on and now on the 30 year they moved 10 years forwards they have two great bands from the 90's Wheezer and Foo Fighters so your first time at Cisco Live give us your general impressions of the show. >> Well actually it's been very great I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well so I got some sessions in I did some work as well so it's amazing to see how these events unfold right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths how many technical sessions you can have so, I was very pleased I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intact so you know we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well so it's interesting right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love which is technology but at the same time spend some time together outside of work. >> That's awesome, we've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego hope you definitely get to see the sights before we geek out on some of the technology just give our audience a little bit about Intact and the insurance business but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. >> Okay well Intact is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions we've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010 and afterwards we were publicly traded now so we're Intact Financial Corp. Typically we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative which is kind of a new offering of you know modern IT services within Intact. >> Okay great and just to, your purview in the company and just the comment about the company is you know when you talk about those transformations you know MNA is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're doing that but tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people however you measure you know what, boxes or ports or whatever. >> Okay well you know typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America Intact through acquisition we actually bought OneBeacon Insurance last year, so typically we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines so typically whenever we're looking at different technologies we look at the skills sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to you know accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology so in some cases whatever we're looking at building up these new features like I was talking for data center 2.0 it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco which is why we are here today with the team. >> All right so Sebastien you talk about data center 2.0 and transformation there at the organizational level is it branded data center transformation does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? >> Yeah data center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years but it really is at the essence a digital transformation, what we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the Cloud so we're building an on-prem private Cloud offering with multi-sites so we have three sites in the scope right now and the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the Cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment when we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public Cloud our software engineering teams our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there so it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team so we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team and that we can share with them so they can actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VM's or stuff so trying to accelerate that. >> Awesome I love that 'cause sometimes you hear okay we're going to 2.0 it's basically a fancy refresh but we're going to keep things mostly the same when I hear DevOps I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that, I have to ask you without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private Cloud that's in your data center we understand some of the covenants and reasons what you have but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a Cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? >> I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president typically we were looking at how can we access the Cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go what I asked him to do is say you know trust me I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for Cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services so typically in the end we didn't overhaul anything that we had we built a brand new sandbox for Intact to be able to work with so we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move we've built a three site approach because when I was looking at kind of my capex expenditure if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity when you go to three sites it seems awkward but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements, so in the end you're actually spending 150% of your capacity, or your capex to buy the compute, so there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely it's very easy for us to see how it's a Cloud because we're not operating it the same way we're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch every process has been revised we haven't kept everything we had before so we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software engineering groups were asking us to do. >> All right that's exciting stuff there when you look at these multi-site deployments I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments, management, security and networking are absolutely critical, I hear oh okay I've got 50% in each oh my God what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two so luckily I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your rollout, we're obviously here at Cisco Live so give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially you know what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? >> All right well you know typically the way that our story started was kind of weird the first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ but actually rebuild our whole design to you know integrate ACI into the fabric and then when you start talking about firewalls or switches they tell you well with ACI you have contracts so it really started that way so we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure as our compute layer so typically think of it as Intact is building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that we have all the components so we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier which is running like you know VMware on site, on top of the HyperFlex and then we have the ACI since we had three sites we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites and in the end we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that and when we were looking at it early on it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker we were looking at finding a Cloud management platform, so we ended up using CloudCenter which is now CloudCenter Suite and in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using CloudCenter today we're taking it into the data center and out to the Cloud whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week he was saying you know what sometimes our clients buy it more for the Cloud first and I was like well we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite but it works as well, so typically where we stand today I have the three sites we're able to deploy with CloudCenter we've got multi-site on top of that and the idea it really is that, I spoke about training wheels earlier well we're taking them off right? In the next couple of weeks we're starting to look into negotiations with public Cloud providers trying to move towards the public Cloud and you know there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now you know they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS and now they have all the three major Cloud providers covered with ACI Anywhere so that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all, everywhere so to be honest I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back I think we're in our sweet spot right now. >> Yeah and you're right it's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers which is I have all of these public Cloud's and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the CloudCenter Suite is there so you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public Cloud or public Cloud you choose are you at the point there that do you know which public Cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? >> Well to be honest you know we're keeping our options open you know we have different providers that are offered, you know the major public one there's Amazon there's Google Cloud we're not closing any options it's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure that we get all the information back so I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating but in the end we're not limiting ourselves we just want to be able to scale. >> Right you're confident that the Cisco solution that you choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or need to make switches along the way? >> Yeah. >> Question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-Cloud one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skillsets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected but understanding how I manage each of those environments so do you feel CloudCenter Suite's going to help you through that? You know what do you see as you look out over your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for you know your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public Cloud? >> Actually I'm feeling really confident because you know especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and Kip have announced for the data center and for the Cloud piece we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different Cloud providers. So for me what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a Cloud we need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products you know Cisco's branding it the Anywhere right? They have the HX Anywhere the ACI Anywhere and typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skillsets and allow the people to use it one thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the Cloud First ACI right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the Cloud I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the Cloud you're going to be able to to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on prem or anywhere in other Clouds afterwards so I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to you know transparently migrate apps between sites. >> All right so Sebastien you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco you talk about the HX the ACI the CloudCenter Suite what advice do you give to your peers out there and they say you know I've used Cisco products for a long time Cisco makes great products but you know simplicity and management across the product lines was something that you know needed some work what does the Cisco of today look like you know what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? >> Well you know for us one of the things that was nice like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield so I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built so my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment there's nothing in Cloud native applications that is you know symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center, it's completely different ways of working we have one week sprints we patch everything as it comes out if an application goes into the environment it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every time we're at n or n-1 so, my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure, let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere right? So that's one of the things I would say, from what you said about Cisco and the integration you were right, we have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half, however I've noticed that these new software components like CloudShare and everything not necessarily the hardware part Cisco nails hardware like it works they've been doing it for years the thing is with these software teams they're very customer driven we have access to the engineers now I mean we've had meetings with the Canadian execs Roland Acra's team we were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US so, every company has challenges I would be lying if I told you that even at Intact we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together but I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. >> Well it's interesting Sebastian you bring that up because I look at you say okay, you've got a greenfield environment awesome, we can go do some new tech, well let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces you're like completely overhauling your environment how much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that or you know I look people, process and technology sounded like you were taking it all on at once, did that work well? Would you have if you looked back would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe you know gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of you know start brand new start fresh and get everything going? >> Well I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh however, it helped us get really good pace and work you know it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group so all of that was great learning experience the only thing I would say is you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach but where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get onboard. because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups here's a new area where you can play in but you know typically I'd say that it's been well received we have not had the need to build new skillsets because we're doing infrastructure as code so typically a lot of the stuff we're building we're making sure it's automated so that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy so lessons learned like you've asked me I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of Intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology it's fine for the time it took and everything it's fine, it's really people the change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts it's like if we were disrupting our own company right? So typically I'd say, that would be something that I would say to people manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. >> Well Sebastien I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation I want to just give you the final word sounds like you've got great access to Cisco really hope you're happy with what you've done final word is to you know your expectations coming into a show like this and you know what your take aways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego? >> Well outside from the amazing weather you mean or yeah? so you know typically I like the event I've been to other events before, like I said this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology so they're really present so I really liked how you know we were given the opportunity to do hands on labs and actually learn new technologies so typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. >> Well Sebastien Morissette congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. >> Thank you so much. >> All right we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall to wall coverage Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. 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(upbeat music) >> Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it theCUBE. Covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host Keith Townsend. And while this is the North America show, we've seen the expansion of it, we actually have two guests coming in from the Asia-Pacific region. Happy to welcome Rod Lappin. Rod, SVP with Lenovo, thank you so much for joining us all the way from Singapore. >> Yep, absolutely, great to be here. >> Stu: And we have Deepu George, who's the Senior Director with Capgemini Group IT, in from Bangalore Thank you also for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so Deepu, let's start with you. We always love conferences like this. We get to talk to the users. Tell us a little bit about your group inside Capgemini, some of the challenges that your IT team's been tackling. >> Yes. So I'm part of the group IT, responsible for handling all the data centers, group data centers within Capgemini, and we are responsible for delivering data sorting services and processing services, et cetera. So, one of the key ideas we started last year was DC modernization and consolidation. And one of the key strategies we were looking at was hybrid cloud and extra DC stack, completed as revision stack, support for that and plus, you know, automation. So these were the three areas where, which was a key strategic areas for that data center modernization and consolidation. And when we looked at the various options available, one thing stood out from the Nutanix side was, I mean it checked all the boxes and they had a very good roadmap on certain areas which were not available at this particular point of time. So then we chose, okay let us have a PoC done, we did a PoC along with Lenovo and it was successful. And then we went ahead with this relationship with Nutanix. >> Great, Rod just want to bring you in here, we've been talking about really the growth and expansion of Netanix, one of the big pieces is the OEM. Lenovo have been hearing good growth rates. Give us a little bit of a customer viewpoint, what you've been seeing. Nutanix in general and the Lenovo HX specifically. >> Yeah I think obviously Stuart, the very exciting thing is Nutanix is the leader in the industry, right, and with them Lenovo this last year, we grew about 197%, year-on-year. So it makes us their fastest-growing partner. And in the North American channel environment, for example, you're at 280% actually, so we're growing very, very rapidly with them, and there's real reasons. Customers are seeing the value obviously in the solution, the consolidation of the data center footprint, and obviously as customers are being pushed more, as Deepu just mentioned, to the hybrid cloud, or what we're calling really the multi-cloud these days, right, because customers are really looking at and choosing their cloud solutions based more on the workloads and what they're actually trying to do longer-term. You know I think we're best positioned to do that with Nutanix, it's a great solution, I think Capgemini's really one of our great global, strategic global systems, integrated partners, that's taken a choice to run with Lenovo and Nutanix. It's been a great HX solution for us. >> So Rod, before we get too deep, let's ask a basic question. Lenovo, tier one server provider. You guys consistently in one of the leadership positions, and in number of units shipped, obviously you guys have the chops to field a similar solution. Why partner with Nutanix? >> Yeah I think Nutanix, firstly from a software perspective I think that's definitely where we're seeing, you know, if you jump back sort of 10, 15 years, that three-tiered architecture was where everyone was going, SAN and all that sort of stuff. Now when you're seeing the solutions that Nutanix and the hyper-converged market is growing so rapidly at, you're really seeing customers recognize that they get a lot more value out of the software suite, data center consolidation, data center footprint consolidation, and really the ability to manage on-prem and off-prem workloads seamlessly, you know with the prism solution and we integrate that with our Xclarity offering, our management suite, and as a result, it's a real match made in heaven. It's actually doing really well. >> So Deepu? >> I'll talk to that, if you look at software-defined, and that is a key area where we are going right now. Most of the organizations for this data consolidation, they are looking at software-defined, and when you look at the network stack, you have SDNs and all these things, so when you have Nutanix with an NCI, with the complete SD stack, it all ties up together. It's pretty easy for us to, you know, completely scale out the data centers. It's flexibility we have with software-defined and it's a good match, it's a good fit. >> Deepu can you walk us through a little bit of the application side of what you're doing? What did you start with? What have you rolled out? What haven't you touched yet? >> Yeah so once we started our PoC, once we know that data centers, so what we did was, we had our first data center consolidation exercise, modernization exercise, which just happened in Brazil. We had our own three data centers which we wanted to consolidate into one as part of our consolidation and modernize strategy. So we had a mix of upload there, we had basic things, we had normal applications, we had VMs running, we had physical nodes running. And what we did was we consolidated, moving into a single data center on 10 nodes of Nutanix, and we closed down all the other data centers and it was a pretty good experience that we had. The support we received from Lenovo and Nutanix and most of this work was done completely from off-shore. So we had a couple of our engineers posted in Brazil for the coordination activities, but the physical work was completely done from off-shore interfaced our support engineers. So it was a pretty good exercise. We got very good support from Nutanix. We got very good support from Lenovo to get consolation done in the correct time. >> So Deepu, Capgemini has a pretty capable consulting firm, I'm sure you guys got plenty of advice internally as you set out to select the vendor. Let's talk about that selection process. How did that conversation initially go, where you guys kind of threw out Nutanix and Lenovo as potential solutions? >> So if you look at the commercialization world right, I mean it's already pretty much standard. So when we looked at the key modernization initiatives, I already talked about this with VC and stuff like that. We came out with a list of parameters that we wanted to look at, just so that there cannot be any compromise on that. And then what we are looking for in the future when we, so modernization cannot happen in a day or two. So it is a journey. So we have a two- to three-year window in which we wanted to consolidate all our data centers, modernize everything, so the Nutanix roadmap on the various automation, STDC, as to the complete hybrid cloud journey, was pretty strong. And we had the complete management commitment from Nutanix, that they will stick to this particular roadmap and these features will not be compromised in any way. So that is one of the key decisions for us to go with the Nutanix way. >> Well let's talk about performance. You guys have been Nutanix customers for a while, how has the roadmap matched with the promises? >> So from a performance point-of-view, so if you look at only the pure CIA performance, right, wherever you have a high-performance workload, we have an option to go with a complete full SDN stack, where the BIOS in not absolutely a challenge or anything there's a huge throughput available. So from a performance point-of-view, we don't think, that's not an issue as of now. Even for the traditional storage, performance has never been an issue but the actual issue is how do we make the complete software available? How do we make the completely controlled from the software point-of-view. So there is where we found that that the CI use of very good challenging, you know, what do you call, user complete flexibility in how you want to define your data centers. >> Actual performance performance, that's really great. But I meant from the promises Nutanix made from a roadmap thing. This feature will be available on what day, you know, three months from now, a year from now. Were they actually able to deliver based on your own internal roadmap, and the capability you needed? >> Let me put it now this way. So if you look at the kind of investment that we have been making, in Nutanix and Lenovo, so you can be pretty much assured that these promises are kept 'cause otherwise we would not be making that. So Brazil was just a start that we are just going ahead. We are just looking at different workloads now. We have already looked at exchangeable close, which is currently in January and getting installed now. We have looked at video close one of the largest in Capgemini, we have 42 nodes of Nutanix running for 410,000 medias. So based out of Bangalore and Mumbai. So if we just, the performance, if it was not met I don't think we would have expanded the way we have expanded. >> Changed decisions. I think really ultimately, as Deepu mentioned, they started off with a pilot, as you mentioned, obviously in Brazil, and he's ended up taking this globally, which has been a great success story for both of our organizations. >> Right, could you give some more color on the partnership? >> Yeah sure, so I think Capgemini's a great global systems integrator for us. Both to sell to, obviously, as well as sell through, and they're doing some pretty amazing things with their customers and I think one of the great things that we're seeing in this particular instance, as we mentioned, Nutanix, leader in the hyper-converged space, and Deepu's made a call on them, based on their performance, and their basic feature set in their suite. And then ultimately Lenovo, who's number one customer service, number one reliability, number one quality in industry on independence, so you put 'em together, we ended up having a great relationship from that point, and then it's built confidence inside Capgemini now, for us to be going out to their customers and driving this solution out into their customer base. So it's once again, a great outcome for both of our organizations. >> Lenovo's been a traditional partner for us, it's not that new to us, so one of the major reasons is that they want a global reach and we have global data centers, and we have got global footprints, and it's a pretty good time. >> Deepu, how are you measuring the relationship? Any success metrics, from either the application deployments or you know, how do you measure internally and share that with your teams? >> So we have timelines on our consolidation, modernization, et cetera, as long as that is met, together with Lenovo, Nutanix, we are very good. >> So I'd love to hear about day two operations. What are some of the benefits you've seen from a people, resource talent, have you seen resources freed up to do other projects? What are some of the interesting projects that you've done as a result of freeing up time? >> So currently we are progressing through this particular journey, so this year we have a huge focus on the automation piece of the data center. So we are in the beginning stages of getting automation, automation in the sense that the normal proactive activates, all are given. So we are not talking about that, we are talking about the repetitive task, which is less part of the data center and that we have started. So basically we are looking around for any virtually reduction in our ticket volumes, our, you know, the normal work which is being done by the normal engineers so that the can be freed up for these kind of modernization projects. So that's what we are looking at, so let's see how it goes. >> Deepu, one of the things that we're talking about at this show is beyond just the HCI, it's cloud, even edge, what kind of futures do you see for Capgemini in general, and maybe with Nutanix and Lenovo relationship. >> As I said in the beginning, hybrid cloud was one of the requirements for choosing the correct partner for our data center modernization. So currently as we are beginning this part of the journey so moving the data seamlessly into the cloud is one of the key requirements of Capgemini. From an applications standpoint, from a visibility standpoint, et cetera, so we will be looking at which applications easy target for moving into the cloud, and we will be doing that and we believe that Nutanix, hybrid cloud technology will be able to help us in achieving that. >> And I think Stu, that's a really good point because I think what Deepu's just describing is effectively what we see happening in the industry everywhere. You know, we go back 20 years in the industry, a few of us have been around that long, and we remember like a homogeneous environment, everyone would say, I'm this vendor shop, they've got network administrators patching servers, when we're getting hardware put on site and customers are doing all of the integration on site themselves. That's just what the industry did back then. Now, as we see workloads changing it's a little bit like cloud. Three years ago everyone was like, I'm going to be this cloud vendor. That's it, that's my cloud vendor solution, right. However now it's become really acquiring the workload infrastructure and the software suites in line with customers' specific workload requirements, and so now, instead of going after the one cloud provider, now you've got a cloud provider in marketing, you've got a cloud provider in ERP, you've got a cloud provider in IT. So that's why this whole multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, type scenario's really starting to proliferate throughout the customer base. And you really find that, as Deepu just mentioned, they're starting, customers are really looking for how do they manage cloud, multiple clouds in multiple ways, with different workloads, and they're really going out and looking and exploring, how to best address that and I thing once again the Nutanix-Lenovo solution's fantastic for that. I mean you're going to see that proliferate more and more in the industry over the next couple of years. >> So one of the, sorry Stu, one of the comments throughout the show has been, you know what, and this is not a pick on Nutanix or anyone else, I just, both of you guys are not from North America or Western Europe, is that the focus, a lot of vendor's focus has been on Western Europe and America, from a cloud perspective. How do you feel that Nutanix relationship from both a customer and as a partner, has been, on expanding capability beyond North American and Western Europe clouds? >> Rod: Why don't you go first, Deepu. >> Yeah, so if you look at, traditional Amazon Azure, so we have their clouds which are already available in India. So we have been checking that now, we have been looking at various options for the biggest workloads. But predominantly, our predominant workloads have been on the European and the North American cloud for lots of reasons, because if you look at Amazon or Azure, they're coming recently into the Asian footprint with (mumbles) if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, but I mean I think we will get there. >> So I think from our perspective, we break the world into five different geographies. So China, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America and South America. And when you look at our earnings this last quarter, I'm only about two weeks away from our next earnings so I can't say anything about Q1, but the Q4, calendar Q4, we grew about 17% year-on-year but we grew double-digit growth in every one of those geographies, consistently. So in Nutanix, with our HX solution, which is really what we're talking about today, my Asia-Pacific team is growing just as fast, if not actually a little bit faster, than my North America teams. So we see that this technology actually being a real world-wide phenomenon and it's really growing everywhere. Japan is fantastic, India's fantastic for me. Obviously Western Europe. Deepu's a great example, 'cause he's deploying this globally across all of the geographies and I think we're seeing a lot of our G2000 customers, really addressing that, that way. But we see a lot of local companies as well, driving it across the geographies. Asia-Pacific's a great example. >> So if you look at, again, from a CA Nutanix-Lenovo standpoint, we have been going evening everything out so we have recently done that on 16 nodes within Bangalore and Mumbai, so that's a pretty good story. >> Alright, well, Deepu George, thank you so much for joining us, Rod Lappin, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> Thanks Stu, thanks Keith. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we've got a full day of Day 2 coverage here of theCUBE and Nutanix .NEXT 2018, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017, Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. >> The sun is shining here in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Happy to welcome back to the program two guests that we have had on before, Bob Wallace with Nutanix and Wilfredo Sotolongo who's with Lenovo. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, we're gettin' towards the end of another Nutanix .NEXT show. I've had the pleasure of being in all five of the shows, so a lot to kind of go through. Bob, we've had you on the program a couple of times. You've been involved with all the OEM relationships there. Bring us up to speed as to kind of you know, where does OEM fit in the overall Nutanix story? >> It's a big part of how we're going to market now. It really ties in with our interest in providing customers with choice like we do from a hypervisor perspective. We also do from a platform perspective to give customers the ability to, they love the goodness, let's say, of Nutanix and all the things that the Nutanix solution brings and then they get the opportunity to then connect with, connect that with the relationship they may have with Lenovo as a partner to tie in with that to truly work through the Lenovo goodness from a support perspective and everything like that. So, we see it as a broader theme in how Nutanix kind of goes to market which is providing a maximum amount of choice to our customers. >> So, Wilfredo, we've had the pleasure of kind of documenting some of the changes going on. You came in to Lenovo through the IBM X86 acquisition. We've watched Lenovo build out the data center group. I've interviewed Kirk Skaugen three times this year already and you know, have seen partner events at Lenovo events so talk to us just a little bit about how's your role changed and how do we think of Lenovo today, before we even get into the Nutanix piece of it. >> Well, Lenovo has a very different approach to the segment, right. We see a tremendous opportunity in tripling of our addressable market, primarily driven by the shift to software define architectures with Nutanix being one of the primary software define architectures and we see ourselves as having a technology disrupter responsibility, i.e., rather than being the legacy provider with protecting the status quo, we see ourselves as the challengers trying to shift the discussion to the future. And, it actually feeds right in to why we partner with Nutanix almost two years ago now, right. We saw Nutanix as an emerging, aggressive, forward looking provider of technology and new options and with that common vision and common role in the industry we decided to partner with them to accelerate the process. So, different role, new relationship, actually not as new anymore, almost two years, but the same common desire. >> What I think and I'd just build on that, it ties in perfectly with Nutanix disruptive technology and approach and I personally as a sales leader and sales rep myself overtime you should have a perspective and Lenovo has made choices to have a perspective in how they're approaching the market with the technology rather than some of the vendors that have kind of a menu approach and I think it's the right thing that serves the customers needs to be able to be a trusted advisor to the customer and not say, I can offer you anything, but to say, here's what I believe is the right solution for you, and Lenovo does a great job at that. >> Wilfredo, we've heard from Nutanix a lot this week. Their goal is to be an iconic software company. So, that means they're going to need hardware, they're going to need someone to help complete some of the pieces there. Why is Nutanix best in partnership with Lenovo? >> Okay, that's a perfect question, but you said something that triggered a comment that I made to you earlier today. I like the shift I'm seeing in the messaging and the strategy and the product direction that Nutanix has embarked upon the last six to 12 months because aspiring to be much more than a hyperconversion of such a provider is key, right, for the success. This multi-cloud hybrid environments, right, you need to play, to be much more than just the virtual storage player, right. Now, with that said, we got together with Nutanix and we started building our portfolio, right. The first few months of the relationship we were just trying to catch up to what was already there. The good news is we've been investing consistently in this two years and now instead of trying to catch up we're actually leading the transformation. So, to answer your very specific question, point number one, we're the first ones to market with Skylake, Intel Skylake versions of their solution. Even your own is not going to, is coming in a few months. Ours is already in market since last month. Point number two, we recognize the need to virtualize not only the server and the storage capability but also the network. And we invested in software in our switches, in the Lenovo switches that allow us to virtualize all three of them in Nutanix implementations. So, as a Nutanix system administrator you have the choice now with Lenovo, and only with Lenovo, to manage even the network and when there are unfortunate circumstances that create a failure all of that, the migration, all the workloads are completely automated including the networking changes required, right. Number three, this one I didn't even know til one of my Nutanix colleagues pointed it out today, is our latest version of hardware where we run the Nutanix workloads has unique resiliency and availability features that none of my competitors have, like unstoppable fans. Fans are actually the number one item that breaks in infrastructure. So, unstoppable fans makes a big difference for them, right. And then last but not least, there is the one that has characterized us the most over the almost two year long relationship is support, right. We come from a heritage of enterprise great support, right. Things don't go down. The quality of the hardware, the quality of the software, the quality of the support structure, that make sure that the client has peace of mind in terms of if anything goes wrong. Four points. >> Bob, one of the reasons of course Nutanix partners with companies like Lenovo is to help with reach. Can you speak to kind of the global go to market that they help with? >> Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, I've recently also taken on our channel organization from the sales perspective and from my perspective we really have, we have regional partners, we have national partners and we have global partners, and those global partners are OEMs like Lenovo. They had the ability to allow us to engage with global customers that have operations all over the world to not only get the right product in the right place, but also from a support perspective support those customers in place because just like Lenovo, Nutanix and we talk a lot about our NPS score and our support organization, but it really is that ties together in such a good way. Our 90 plus NPS score our customers depend and count on us for that and when they're looking at the underlying hardware platform they need something that keeps that level of commitment to the customer there and that's what Lenovo brings. And, from a global perspective, it gives us a reach frankly a company the size that we've been over the last two years, just couldn't serve some areas of the world. >> In a specific area where I think we can make a big difference together is in global Fortune 500. This is also part of my responsibility inside Lenovo and which I picked up recently, in the last few months, and as the Nutanix technology is maturing and proven into the largest, most complex environments, we're helping support their reach into those biggest accounts where we already tend to be a large provider of either PC or server technology, right. So, and it happens to be by the way, one of the strongest capabilities that Lenovo has as compared to what I expected when I first came in here, right. We're pretty good in terms of the global accounts program. >> Wilfredo, I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit 'cause absolutely goin' up market. You know every company wants to go up market. Is the enterprise, have they just not felt the maturity was there? Are they a little nervous about young companies or why is it now ready for those type of engagements? >> I'm not seeing that much resistance anymore. To be very candid I'm not sure why there was any resistance in the first place, maybe because of a young company. Right now it's more about the discipline to come in, pick a use case, demonstrate into approval concept and execute it flawlessly, right. Where we do that, which by the way, we most of the time do through systems integrators, like IBM, like Capgemini, like APMG, it works very well and we're beginning to see some I'm going to say, fairly large deployments that we hope to build on for the future. >> We had some meetings here this week with some of those, a lot of those customers here, those large organizations that we're partnering up on. >> Any specific verticals or geographies that you're especially excited for kind of catchin' fire lately? >> Well, AMIA, I think we've AMIA for Lenovo is the, if I had to rank the fastest growing market for Lenovo and I think we've had a lot of, Wilfredo and our team, have been working closely together over the last two years to really build that out. So, I'd say AMIA is very strong. I think we're seeing a lot of growth. But, with Lenovo clearly Asia, the Asian region, PRC is a huge market for them. It's, they obviously have a deep legacy there. So, we're doing a lot in Apak as well. >> From an industry perspective I actually don't pick up a pattern. I see your, our, technology quite applicable in almost all industries. I mean, earlier in the conference we had one of our customers speak, right, one of our young customers speak, right, one of the hospital in a server, right. Healthcare, state of the art hospital, state of the art IT infrastructure, running everything, running everything, right, from the hospital information system to the medical imaging OEM software, everything, right and we see more and more institutions, right, making the migration, making the jump to state of the art architectures technologies and running the totality of the workloads. >> And, that's a core government project and very important project for the government of Azerbaijan and having a trusted partner in Lenovo in that scenario not only gives us the reach to reach into Azerbaijan but to have the trust level with an institution that ultimately has to be successful. A hospital, you just, there's no room for error. >> Want to give you both really the final word here. Wilfredo, if somebody didn't come to the event, what might they not know about HX and the offering of that that you'd want to make sure that they dig in and learn a little more about? >> Lenovo is all about disrupting the status quo and helping you get to the future faster. Nutanix is about the same thing. Together we've actually created an offering now that is differentiated against all the OEMs. Come talk to both of us about it. >> I'd say if you weren't here at the show the thing you might have missed is Nutanix bringing our one click simplicity that we're known for to the cloud era and really helping customers manage what we call an enterprise cloud that includes multiple cloud offerings on prem and public cloud with our one click simplicity and removing a lot of the barriers and complexity that customers are dealing with today as they look at how to manage their infrastructure between the different clouds that are out there. >> Bob Wallace, Wilfredo Sotolongo, thank you gentlemen both for joining us again. We're getting towards the end of two days of live coverage but be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage for this and all upcoming shows. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is Lenovo Transform. Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappin. (upbeat instrumental) >> Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go. I was out the back having a chat. A bit faster than I expected. How are you all doing this morning? (crowd cheers) >> Good? How fantastic is it to be in New York City? (crowd applauds) Excellent. So my name's Rod Lappin. I'm with the Data Center Group, obviously. I do basically anything that touches customers from our sales people, our pre-sales engineers, our architects, et cetera, all the way through to our channel partner sales engagement globally. So that's my job, but enough of that, okay? So the weather this morning, absolutely fantastic. Not a cloud in the sky, perfect. A little bit different to how it was yesterday, right? I want to thank all of you because I know a lot of you had a lot of commuting issues getting into New York yesterday with all the storms. We have a lot of people from international and domestic travel caught up in obviously the network, which blows my mind, actually, but we have a lot of people here from Europe, obviously, a lot of analysts and media people here as well as customers who were caught up in circling around the airport apparently for hours. So a big round of applause for our team from Europe. (audience applauds) Thank you for coming. We have some people who commuted a very short distance. For example, our own server general manager, Cameron (mumbles), he's out the back there. Cameron, how long did it take you to get from Raleigh to New York? An hour-and-a-half flight? >> Cameron: 17 hours. >> 17 hours, ladies and gentleman. That's a fantastic distance. I think that's amazing. But I know a lot of us, obviously, in the United States have come a long way with the storms, obviously very tough, but I'm going to call out one individual. Shaneil from Spotless. Where are you Shaneil, you're here somewhere? There he is from Australia. Shaneil how long did it take you to come in from Australia? 25 hour, ladies and gentleman. A big round of applause. That's a pretty big effort. Shaneil actually I want you to stand up, if you don't mind. I've got a seat here right next to my CEO. You've gone the longest distance. How about a big round of applause for Shaneil. We'll put him in my seat, next to YY. Honestly, Shaneil, you're doing me a favor. Okay ladies and gentlemen, we've got a big day today. Obviously, my seat now taken there, fantastic. Obviously New York City, the absolute pinnacle of globalization. I first came to New York in 1996, which was before a lot of people in the room were born, unfortunately for me these days. Was completely in awe. I obviously went to a Yankees game, had no clue what was going on, didn't understand anything to do with baseball. Then I went and saw Patrick Ewing. Some of you would remember Patrick Ewing. Saw the Knicks play basketball. Had no idea what was going on. Obviously, from Australia, and somewhat slightly height challenged, basketball was not my thing but loved it. I really left that game... That was the first game of basketball I'd ever seen. Left that game realizing that effectively the guy throws the ball up at the beginning, someone taps it, that team gets it, they run it, they put it in the basket, then the other team gets it, they put it in the basket, the other team gets it, and that's basically the entire game. So I haven't really progressed from that sort of learning or understanding of basketball since then, but for me, personally, being here in New York, and obviously presenting with all of you guys today, it's really humbling from obviously some of you would have picked my accent, I'm also from Australia. From the north shore of Sydney. To be here is just a fantastic, fantastic event. So welcome ladies and gentlemen to Transform, part of our tech world series globally in our event series and our event season here at Lenovo. So once again, big round of applause. Thank you for coming (audience applauds). Today, basically, is the culmination of what I would classify as a very large journey. Many of you have been with us on that. Customers, partners, media, analysts obviously. We've got quite a lot of our industry analysts in the room. I know Matt Eastwood yesterday was on a train because he sent a Tweet out saying there's 170 people on the WIFI network. He was obviously a bit concerned he was going to get-- Pat Moorhead, he got in at 3:30 this morning, obviously from traveling here as well with some of the challenges with the transportation, so we've got a lot of people in the room that have been giving us advice over the last two years. I think all of our employees are joining us live. All of our partners and customers through the stream. As well as everybody in this packed-out room. We're very very excited about what we're going to be talking to you all today. I want to have a special thanks obviously to our R&D team in Raleigh and around the world. They've also been very very focused on what they've delivered for us today, and it's really important for them to also see the culmination of this great event. And like I mentioned, this is really the feedback. It's not just a Lenovo launch. This is a launch based on the feedback from our partners, our customers, our employees, the analysts. We've been talking to all of you about what we want to be when we grow up from a Data Center Group, and I think you're going to hear some really exciting stuff from some of the speakers today and in the demo and breakout sessions that we have after the event. These last two years, we've really transformed the organization, and that's one of the reasons why that theme is part of our Tech World Series today. We're very very confident in our future, obviously, and where the company's going. It's really important for all of you to understand today and take every single snippet that YY, Kirk, and Christian talk about today in the main session, and then our presenters in the demo sections on what Lenovo's actually doing for its future and how we're positioning the company, obviously, for that future and how the transformation, the digital transformation, is going ahead globally. So, all right, we are now going to step into our Transform event. And I've got a quick agenda statement for you. The very first thing is we're going to hear from YY, our chairman and CEO. He's going to discuss artificial intelligence, the evolution of our society and how Lenovo is clearly positioning itself in the industry. Then, obviously, you're going to hear from Kirk Skaugen, our president of the Data Center Group, our new boss. He's going to talk about how long he's been with the company and the transformation, once again, we're making, very specifically to the Data Center Group and how much of a difference we're making to society and some of our investments. Christian Teismann, our SVP and general manager of our client business is going to talk about the 25 years of ThinkPad. This year is the 25-year anniversary of our ThinkPad product. Easily the most successful brand in our client branch or client branch globally of any vendor. Most successful brand we've had launched, and this afternoon breakout sessions, obviously, with our keynotes, fantastic sessions. Make sure you actually attend all of those after this main arena here. Now, once again, listen, ask questions, and make sure you're giving us feedback. One of the things about Lenovo that we say all the time... There is no room for arrogance in our company. Every single person in this room is a customer, partner, analyst, or an employee. We love your feedback. It's only through your feedback that we continue to improve. And it's really important that through all of the sessions where the Q&As happen, breakouts afterwards, you're giving us feedback on what you want to see from us as an organization as we go forward. All right, so what were you doing 25 years ago? I spoke about ThinkPad being 25 years old, but let me ask you this. I bet you any money that no one here knew that our x86 business is also 25 years old. So, this year, we have both our ThinkPad and our x86 anniversaries for 25 years. Let me tell you. What were you guys doing 25 years ago? There's me, 25 years ago. It's a bit scary, isn't it? It's very svelte and athletic and a lot lighter than I am today. It makes me feel a little bit conscious. And you can see the black and white shot. It shows you that even if you're really really short and you come from the wrong side of the tracks to make some extra cash, you can still do some modeling as long as no one else is in the photo to give anyone any perspective, so very important. I think I might have got one photo shoot out of that, I don't know. I had to do it, I needed the money. Let me show you another couple of photos. Very interesting, how's this guy? How cool does he look? Very svelte and athletic. I think there's no doubt. He looks much much cooler than I do. Okay, so ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it gives me great honor to obviously introduce our very very first guest to the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, our chairman and CEO, Yuanqing Yang. or as we like to call him, YY. A big round of applause, thank you. (upbeat techno instrumental) >> Good morning everyone. Thank you, Rod, for your introduction. Actually, I didn't think I was younger than you (mumbles). I can't think of another city more fitting to host the Transform event than New York. A city that has transformed from a humble trading post 400 years ago to one of the most vibrant cities in the world today. It is a perfect symbol of transformation of our world. The rapid and the deep transformations that have propelled us from the steam engine to the Internet era in just 200 years. Looking back at 200 years ago, there was only a few companies that operated on a global scale. The total value of the world's economy was around $188 billion U.S. dollars. Today, it is only $180 for each person on earth. Today, there are thousands of independent global companies that compete to sell everything, from corn and crude oil to servers and software. They drive a robust global economy was over $75 trillion or $1,000 per person. Think about it. The global economy has multiplied almost 450 times in just two centuries. What is even more remarkable is that the economy has almost doubled every 15 years since 1950. These are significant transformation for businesses and for the world and our tiny slice of pie. This transformation is the result of the greatest advancement in technology in human history. Not one but three industrial revolutions have happened over the last 200 years. Even though those revolutions created remarkable change, they were just the beginning. Today, we are standing at the beginning of the fourth revolution. This revolution will transform how we work (mumbles) in ways that no one could imagine in the 18th century or even just 18 months ago. You are the people who will lead this revolution. Along with Lenovo, we will redefine IT. IT is no longer just information technology. It's intelligent technology, intelligent transformation. A transformation that is driven by big data called computing and artificial intelligence. Even the transition from PC Internet to mobile Internet is a big leap. Today, we are facing yet another big leap from the mobile Internet to the Smart Internet or intelligent Internet. In this Smart Internet era, Cloud enables devices, such as PCs, Smart phones, Smart speakers, Smart TVs. (mumbles) to provide the content and the services. But the evolution does not stop them. Ultimately, almost everything around us will become Smart, with building computing, storage, and networking capabilities. That's what we call the device plus Cloud transformation. These Smart devices, incorporated with various sensors, will continuously sense our environment and send data about our world to the Cloud. (mumbles) the process of this ever-increasing big data and to support the delivery of Cloud content and services, the data center infrastructure is also transforming to be more agile, flexible, and intelligent. That's what we call the infrastructure plus Cloud transformation. But most importantly, it is the human wisdom, the people learning algorithm vigorously improved by engineers that enables artificial intelligence to learn from big data and make everything around us smarter. With big data collected from Smart devices, computing power of the new infrastructure under the trend artificial intelligence, we can understand the world around us more accurately and make smarter decisions. We can make life better, work easier, and society safer and healthy. Think about what is already possible as we start this transformation. Smart Assistants can help you place orders online with a voice command. Driverless cars can run on the same road as traditional cars. (mumbles) can help troubleshoot customers problems, and the virtual doctors already diagnose basic symptoms. This list goes on and on. Like every revolution before it, intelligent transformation, will fundamentally change the nature of business. Understanding and preparing for that will be the key for the growth and the success of your business. The first industrial revolution made it possible to maximize production. Water and steam power let us go from making things by hand to making them by machine. This transformed how fast things could be produced. It drove the quantity of merchandise made and led to massive increase in trade. With this revolution, business scale expanded, and the number of customers exploded. Fifty years later, the second industrial revolution made it necessary to organize a business like the modern enterprise, electric power, and the telegraph communication made business faster and more complex, challenging businesses to become more efficient and meeting entirely new customer demands. In our own lifetimes, we have witnessed the third industrial revolution, which made it possible to digitize the enterprise. The development of computers and the Internet accelerated business beyond human speed. Now, global businesses have to deal with customers at the end of a cable, not always a handshake. While we are still dealing with the effects of a digitizing business, the fourth revolution is already here. In just the past two or three years, the growth of data and advancement in visual intelligence has been astonishing. The computing power can now process the massive amount of data about your customers, suppliers, partners, competitors, and give you insights you simply could not imagine before. Artificial intelligence can not only tell you what your customers want today but also anticipate what they will need tomorrow. This is not just about making better business decisions or creating better customer relationships. It's about making the world a better place. Ultimately, can we build a new world without diseases, war, and poverty? The power of big data and artificial intelligence may be the revolutionary technology to make that possible. Revolutions don't happen on their own. Every industrial revolution has its leaders, its visionaries, and its heroes. The master transformers of their age. The first industrial revolution was led by mechanics who designed and built power systems, machines, and factories. The heroes of the second industrial revolution were the business managers who designed and built modern organizations. The heroes of the third revolution were the engineers who designed and built the circuits and the source code that digitized our world. The master transformers of the next revolution are actually you. You are the designers and the builders of the networks and the systems. You will bring the benefits of intelligence to every corner of your enterprise and make intelligence the central asset of your business. At Lenovo, data intelligence is embedded into everything we do. How we understand our customer's true needs and develop more desirable products. How we profile our customers and market to them precisely. How we use internal and external data to balance our supply and the demand. And how we train virtual agents to provide more effective sales services. So the decisions you make today about your IT investment will determine the quality of the decisions your enterprise will make tomorrow. So I challenge each of you to seize this opportunity to become a master transformer, to join Lenovo as we work together at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, as leaders of the intelligent transformation. (triumphant instrumental) Today, we are launching the largest portfolio in our data center history at Lenovo. We are fully committed to the (mumbles) transformation. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Thanks YY. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Fantastic, so how about a big round of applause for YY. (audience applauds) Obviously a great speech on the transformation that we at Lenovo are taking as well as obviously wanting to journey with our partners and customers obviously on that same journey. What I heard from him was obviously artificial intelligence, how we're leveraging that integrally as well as externally and for our customers, and the investments we're making in the transformation around IoT machine learning, obviously big data, et cetera, and obviously the Data Center Group, which is one of the key things we've got to be talking about today. So we're on the cusp of that fourth revolution, as YY just mentioned, and Lenovo is definitely leading the way and investing in those parts of the industry and our portfolio to ensure we're complimenting all of our customers and partners on what they want to be, obviously, as part of this new transformation we're seeing globally. Obviously now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado once again, to tell us more about what's going on today, our announcements, obviously, that all of you will be reading about and seeing in the breakout and the demo sessions with our segment general managers this afternoon is our president of the data center, Mr. Kirk Skaugen. (upbeat instrumental) >> Good morning, and let me add my welcome to Transform. I just crossed my six months here at Lenovo after over 24 years at Intel Corporation, and I can tell you, we've been really busy over the last six months, and I'm more excited and enthusiastic than ever and hope to share some of that with you today. Today's event is called "Transform", and today we're announcing major new transformations in Lenovo, in the data center, but more importantly, we're celebrating the business results that these platforms are going to have on society and with international supercomputing going on in parallel in Frankfurt, some of the amazing scientific discoveries that are going to happen on some of these platforms. Lenovo has gone through some significant transformations in the last two years, since we acquired the IBM x86 business, and that's really positioning us for this next phase of growth, and we'll talk more about that later. Today, we're announcing the largest end-to-end data center portfolio in Lenovo's history, as you heard from YY, and we're really taking the best of the x86 heritage from our IBM acquisition of the x86 server business and combining that with the cost economics that we've delivered from kind of our China heritage. As we've talked to some of the analysts in the room, it's really that best of the east and best of the west is combining together in this announcement today. We're going to be announcing two new brands, building on our position as the number one x86 server vendor in both customer satisfaction and in reliability, and we're also celebrating, next month in July, a very significant milestone, which will we'll be shipping our 20 millionth x86 server into the industry. For us, it's an amazing time, and it's an inflection point to kind of look back, pause, but also share the next phase of Lenovo and the exciting vision for the future. We're also making some declarations on our vision for the future today. Again, international supercomputing's going on, and, as it turns out, we're the fastest growing supercomputer company on earth. We'll talk about that. Our goal today that we're announcing is that we plan in the next several years to become number one in supercomputing, and we're going to put the investments behind that. We're also committing to our customers that we're going to disrupt the status quo and accelerate the pace of innovation, not just in our legacy server solutions, but also in Software-Defined because what we've heard from you is that that lack of legacy, we don't have a huge router business or a huge sand business to protect. It's that lack of legacy that's enabling us to invest and get ahead of the curb on this next transition to Software-Defined. So you're going to see us doing that through building our internal IP, through some significant joint ventures, and also through some merges and acquisitions over the next several quarters. Altogether, we're driving to be the most trusted data center provider in the industry between us and our customers and our suppliers. So a quick summary of what we're going to dive into today, both in my keynote as well as in the breakout sessions. We're in this transformation to the next phase of Lenovo's data center growth. We're closing out our previous transformation. We actually, believe it or not, in the last six months or so, have renegotiated 18,000 contracts in 160 countries. We built out an entire end-to-end organization from development and architecture all the way through sales and support. This next transformation, I think, is really going to excite Lenovo shareholders. We're building the largest data center portfolio in our history. I think when IBM would be up here a couple years ago, we might have two or three servers to announce in time to market with the next Intel platform. Today, we're announcing 14 new servers, seven new storage systems, an expanded set of networking portfolios based on our legacy with Blade Network Technologies and other companies we've acquired. Two new brands that we'll talk about for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, a new set of premium premiere services as well as a set of engineered solutions that are going to help our customers get to market faster. We're going to be celebrating our 20 millionth x86 server, and as Rod said, 25 years in x86 server compute, and Christian will be up here talking about 25 years of ThinkPad as well. And then a new end-to-end segmentation model because all of these strategies without execution are kind of meaningless. I hope to give you some confidence in the transformation that Lenovo has gone through as well. So, having observed Lenovo from one of its largest partners, Intel, for more than a couple decades, I thought I'd just start with why we have confidence on the foundation that we're building off of as we move from a PC company into a data center provider in a much more significant way. So Lenovo today is a company of $43 billion in sales. Absolutely astonishing, it puts us at about Fortune 202 as a company, with 52,000 employees around the world. We're supporting and have service personnel, almost a little over 10,000 service personnel that service our servers and data center technologies in over 160 countries that provide onsite service and support. We have seven data center research centers. One of the reasons I came from Intel to Lenovo was that I saw that Lenovo became number one in PCs, not through cost cutting but through innovation. It was Lenovo that was partnering on the next-generation Ultrabooks and two-in-ones and tablets in the modem mods that you saw, but fundamentally, our path to number one in data center is going to be built on innovation. Lastly, we're one of the last companies that's actually building not only our own motherboards at our own motherboard factories, but also with five global data center manufacturing facilities. Today, we build about four devices a second, but we also build over 100 servers per hour, and the cost economics we get, and I just visited our Shenzhen factory, of having everything from screws to microprocessors come up through the elevator on the first floor, go left to build PCs and ThinkPads and go right to build server technology, means we have some of the world's most cost effective solutions so we can compete in things like hyperscale computing. So it's with that that I think we're excited about the foundation that we can build off of on the Data Center Group. Today, as we stated, this event is about transformation, and today, I want to talk about three things we're going to transform. Number one is the customer experience. Number two is the data center and our customer base with Software-Defined infrastructure, and then the third is talk about how we plan to execute flawlessly with a new transformation that we've had internally at Lenovo. So let's dive into it. On customer experience, really, what does it mean to transform customer experience? Industry pundits say that if you're not constantly innovating, you can fall behind. Certainly the technology industry that we're in is transforming at record speed. 42% of business leaders or CIOs say that digital first is their top priority, but less than 50% actually admit that they have a strategy to get there. So people are looking for a partner to keep pace with that innovation and change, and that's really what we're driving to at Lenovo. So today we're announcing a set of plans to take another step function in customer experience, and building off of our number one position. Just recently, Gartner shows Lenovo as the number 24 supply chains of companies over $12 billion. We're up there with Amazon, Coca-Cola, and we've now completely re-architected our supply chain in the Data Center Group from end to end. Today, we can deliver 90% of our SKUs, order to ship in less than seven days. The artificial intelligence that YY mentioned is optimizing our performance even further. In services, as we talked about, we're now in 160 countries, supporting on-site support, 50 different call centers around the world for local language support, and we're today announcing a whole set of new premiere support services that I'll get into in a second. But we're building on what's already better than 90% customer satisfaction in this space. And then in development, for all the engineers out there, we started foundationally for this new set of products, talking about being number one in reliability and the lowest downtime of any x86 server vendor on the planet, and these systems today are architected to basically extend that leadership position. So let me tell you the realities of reliability. This is ITIC, it's a reliability report. 750 CIOs and IT managers from more than 20 countries, so North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa. This isn't anything that's paid for with sponsorship dollars. Lenovo has been number one for four years running on x86 reliability. This is the amount of downtime, four hours or more, in mission-critical environments from the leading x86 providers. You can see relative to our top two competitors that are ahead of us, HP and Dell, you can see from ITIC why we are building foundationally off of this, and why it's foundational to how we're developing these new platforms. In customer satisfaction, we are also rated number one in x86 server customer satisfaction. This year, we're now incentivizing every single Lenovo employee on customer satisfaction and customer experience. It's been a huge mandate from myself and most importantly YY as our CEO. So you may say well what is the basis of this number one in customer satisfaction, and it's not just being number one in one category, it's actually being number one in 21 of the 22 categories that TBR talks about. So whether it's performance, support systems, online product information, parts and availability replacement, Lenovo is number one in 21 of the 22 categories and number one for six consecutive studies going back to Q1 of 2015. So this, again, as we talk about the new product introductions, it's something that we absolutely want to build on, and we're humbled by it, and we want to continue to do better. So let's start now on the new products and talk about how we're going to transform the data center. So today, we are announcing two new product offerings. Think Agile and ThinkSystem. If you think about the 25 years of ThinkPad that Christian's going to talk about, Lenovo has a continuous learning culture. We're fearless innovators, we're risk takers, we continuously learn, but, most importantly, I think we're humble and we have some humility. That when we fail, we can fail fast, we learn, and we improve. That's really what drove ThinkPad to number one. It took about eight years from the acquisition of IBM's x86 PC business before Lenovo became number one, but it was that innovation, that listening and learning, and then improving. As you look at the 25 years of ThinkPad, there were some amazing successes, but there were also some amazing failures along the way, but each and every time we learned and made things better. So this year, as Rod said, we're not just celebrating 25 years of ThinkPad, but we're celebrating 25 years of x86 server development since the original IBM PC servers in 1992. It's a significant day for Lenovo. Today, we're excited to announce two new brands. ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. It's an important new announcement that we started almost three years ago when we acquired the x86 server business. Why don't we run a video, and we'll show you a little bit about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. >> Narrator: The status quo is comfortable. It gets you by, but if you think that's good enough for your data center, think again. If adoption is becoming more complicated when it should be simpler, think again. If others are selling you technology that's best for them, not for you, think again. It's time for answers that win today and tomorrow. Agile, innovative, different. Because different is better. Different embraces change and makes adoption simple. Different designs itself around you. Using 25 years of innovation and design and R&D. Different transforms, it gives you ThinkSystem. World-record performance, most reliable, easy to integrate, scales faster. Different empowers you with ThinkAgile. It redefines the experience, giving you the speed of Cloud and the control of on-premise IT. Responding faster to what your business really needs. Different defines the future. Introducing Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. (exciting and slightly aggressive digital instrumental) >> All right, good stuff, huh? (audience applauds) So it's built off of this 25-year history of us being in the x86 server business, the commitment we established three years ago after acquiring the x86 server business to be and have the most reliable, the most agile, and the most highest-performing data center solutions on the planet. So today we're announcing two brands. ThinkSystem is for the traditional data center infrastructure, and ThinkAgile is our brand for Software-Defined infrastructure. Again, the teams challenge themselves from the start, how do we build off this rich heritage, expanding our position as number one in customer satisfaction, reliability, and one of the world's best supply chains. So let's start and look at the next set of solutions. We have always prided ourself that little things don't mean a lot. Little things mean everything. So today, as we said on the legacy solutions, we have over 30 world-record performance benchmarks on Intel architecture, and more than actually 150 since we started tracking this back in 2001. So it's the little pieces of innovation. It's the fine tuning that we do with our partners like an Intel or a Microsoft, an SAP, VMware, and Nutanix that's enabling us to get these world-record performance benchmarks, and with this next generation of solutions we think we'll continue to certainly do that. So today we're announcing the most comprehensive portfolio ever in our data center history. There's 14 servers, seven storage devices, and five network switches. We're also announcing, which is super important to our customer base, a set of new premiere service options. That's giving you fast access directly to a level two support person. No automated response system involved. You get to pick up the phone and directly talk to a level two support person that's going to have end-to-end ownership of the customer experience for ThinkSystem. With ThinkAgile, that's going to be completely bundled with every ThinkAgile you purchase. In addition, we're having white glove service on site that will actually unbox the product for you and get it up and running. It's an entirely new set of solutions for hybrid Cloud, for big data analytics and database applications around these engineered solutions. These are like 40- to 50-page guides where we fine-tuned the most important applications around virtual desktop infrastructure and those kinds of applications, working side by side with all of our ISP partners. So significantly expanding, not just the hardware but the software solutions that, obviously, you, as our customers, are running. So if you look at ThinkSystem innovation, again, it was designed for the ultimate in flexibility, performance, and reliability. It's a single now-unified brand that combines what used to be the Lenovo Think server and the IBM System x products now into a single brand that spans server, storage, and networking. We're basically future-proofing it for the next-generation data center. It's a significantly simplified portfolio. One of the big pieces that we've heard is that the complexity of our competitors has really been overwhelming to customers. We're building a more flexible, more agile solution set that requires less work, less qualification, and more future proofing. There's a bunch of things in this that you'll see in the demos. Faster time-to-service in terms of the modularity of the systems. 12% faster service equating to almost $50 thousand per hour of reduced downtime. Some new high-density options where we have four nodes and a 2U, twice the density to improve and reduce outbacks and mission-critical workloads. And then in high-performance computing and supercomputing, we're going to spend some time on that here shortly. We're announcing new water-cooled solutions. We have some of the most premiere water-cooled solutions in the world, with more than 25 patents pending now, just in the water-cooled solutions for supercomputing. The performance that we think we're going to see out of these systems is significant. We're building off of that legacy that we have today on the existing Intel solutions. Today, we believe we have more than 50% of SAP HANA installations in the world. In fact, SAP just went public that they're running their internal SAP HANA on Lenovo hardware now. We're seeing a 59% increase in performance on SAP HANA generation on generation. We're seeing 31% lower total cost to ownership. We believe this will continue our position of having the highest level of five-nines in the x86 server industry. And all of these servers will start being available later this summer when the Intel announcements come out. We're also announcing the largest storage portfolio in our history, significantly larger than anything we've done in the past. These are all available today, including some new value class storage offerings. Our network portfolio is expanding now significantly. It was a big surprise when I came to Lenovo, seeing the hundreds of engineers we had from the acquisition of Blade Network Technologies and others with our teams in Romania, Santa Clara, really building out both the embedded portfolio but also the top racks, which is around 10 gig, 25 gig, and 100 gig. Significantly better economics, but all the performance you'd expect from the largest networking companies in the world. Those are also available today. ThinkAgile and Software-Defined, I think the one thing that has kind of overwhelmed me since coming in to Lenovo is we are being embraced by our customers because of our lack of legacy. We're not trying to sell you one more legacy SAN at 65% margins. ThinkAgile really was founded, kind of born free from the shackles of legacy thinking and legacy infrastructure. This is just the beginning of what's going to be an amazing new brand in the transformation to Software-Defined. So, for Lenovo, we're going to invest in our own internal organic IP. I'll foreshadow: There's some significant joint ventures and some mergers and acquisitions that are going to be coming in this space. And so this will be the foundation for our Software-Defined networking and storage, for IoT, and ultimately for the 5G build-out as well. This is all built for data centers of tomorrow that require fluid resources, tightly integrated software and hardware in kind of an appliance, selling at the rack level, and so we'll show you how that is going to take place here in a second. ThinkAgile, we have a few different offerings. One is around hyperconverged storage, Hybrid Cloud, and also Software-Defined storage. So we're really trying to redefine the customer experience. There's two different solutions we're having today. It's a Microsoft Azure solution and a Nutanix solution. These are going to be available both in the appliance space as well as in a full rack solution. We're really simplifying and trying to transform the entire customer experience from how you order it. We've got new capacity planning tools that used to take literally days for us to get the capacity planning done. It's now going down to literally minutes. We've got new order, delivery, deployment, administration service, something we're calling ThinkAgile Advantage, which is the white glove unboxing of the actual solutions on prem. So the whole thing when you hear about it in the breakout sessions about transforming the entire customer experience with both an HX solution and an SX solution. So again, available at the rack level for both Nutanix and for Microsoft Solutions available in just a few months. Many of you in the audience since the Microsoft Airlift event in Seattle have started using these things, and the feedback to date has been fantastic. We appreciate the early customer adoption that we've seen from people in the audience here. So next I want to bring up one of our most important partners, and certainly if you look at all of these solutions, they're based on the next-generation Intel Xeon scalable processor that's going to be announcing very very soon. I want to bring on stage Rupal Shah, who's the corporate vice president and general manager of Global Data Center Sales with Intel, so Rupal, please join me. (upbeat instrumental) So certainly I have long roots at Intel, but why don't you talk about, from Intel's perspective, why Lenovo is an important partner for Lenovo. >> Great, well first of all, thank you very much. I've had the distinct pleasure of not only working with Kirk for many many years, but also working with Lenovo for many years, so it's great to be here. Lenovo is not only a fantastic supplier and leader in the industry for Intel-based servers but also a very active partner in the Intel ecosystem. In the Intel ecosystem, specifically, in our partner programs and in our builder programs around Cloud, around the network, and around storage, I personally have had a long history in working with Lenovo, and I've seen personally that PC transformation that you talked about, Kirk, and I believe, and I know that Intel believes in Lenovo's ability to not only succeed in the data center but to actually lead in the data center. And so today, the ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile announcement is just so incredibly important. It's such a great testament to our two companies working together, and the innovation that we're able to bring to the market, and all of it based on the Intel Xeon scalable processor. >> Excellent, so tell me a little bit about why we've been collaborating, tell me a little bit about why you're excited about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile, specifically. >> Well, there are a lot of reasons that I'm excited about the innovation, but let me talk about a few. First, both of our companies really stand behind the fact that it's increasingly a hybrid world. Our two companies offer a range of solutions now to customers to be able to address their different workload needs. ThinkSystem really brings the best, right? It brings incredible performance, flexibility in data center deployment, and industry-leading reliability that you've talked about. And, as always, Xeon has a history of being built for the data center specifically. The Intel Xeon scalable processor is really re-architected from the ground up in order to enhance compute, network, and storage data flows so that we can deliver workload optimized performance for both a wide range of traditional workloads and traditional needs but also some emerging new needs in areas like artificial intelligence. Second is when it comes to the next generation of Cloud infrastructure, the new Lenovo ThinkAgile line offers a truly integrated offering to address data center pain points, and so not only are you able to get these pretested solutions, but these pretested solutions are going to get deployed in your infrastructure faster, and they're going to be deployed in a way that's going to meet your specific needs. This is something that is new for both of us, and it's an incredible innovation in the marketplace. I think that it's a great addition to what is already a fantastic portfolio for Lenovo. >> Excellent. >> Finally, there's high-performance computing. In high-performance computing. First of all, congratulations. It's a big week, I think, for both of us. Fantastic work that we've been doing together in high-performance computing and actually bringing the best of the best to our customers, and you're going to hear a whole lot more about that. We obviously have a number of joint innovation centers together between Intel and Lenovo. Tell us about some of the key innovations that you guys are excited about. >> Well, Intel and Lenovo, we do have joint innovation labs around the world, and we have a long and strong history of very tight collaboration. This has brought a big wave of innovation to the marketplace in areas like software-defined infrastructure. Yet another area is working closely on a joint vision that I think our two companies have in artificial intelligence. Intel is very committed to the world of AI, and we're committed in making the investments required in technology development, in training, and also in R&D to be able to deliver end-to-end solutions. So with Intel's comprehensive technology portfolio and Lenovo's development and innovation expertise, it's a great combination in this space. I've already talked a little bit about HPC and so has Kirk, and we're going to hear a little bit more to come, but we're really building the fastest compute solutions for customers that are solving big problems. Finally, we often talk about processors from Intel, but it's not just about the processors. It's way beyond that. It's about engaging at the solution level for our customers, and I'm so excited about the work that we've done together with Lenovo to bring to market products like Intel Omni-Path Architecture, which is really the fabric for high-performance data centers. We've got a great showing this week with Intel Omni-Path Architecture, and I'm so grateful for all the work that we've done to be able to bring true solutions to the marketplace. I am really looking forward to our future collaboration with Lenovo as we have in the past. I want to thank you again for inviting me here today, and congratulations on a fantastic launch. >> Thank you, Rupal, very much, for the long partnership. >> Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Okay, well now let's transition and talk a little bit about how Lenovo is transforming. The first thing we've done when I came on board about six months ago is we've transformed to a truly end-to-end organization. We're looking at the market segments I think as our customers define them, and we've organized into having vice presidents and senior vice presidents in charge of each of these major groups, thinking really end to end, from architecture all the way to end of life and customer support. So the first is hyperscale infrastructure. It's about 20% on the market by 2020. We've hired a new vice president there to run that business. Given we can make money in high-volume desktop PCs, it's really the manufacturing prowess, deep engineering collaboration that's enabling us to sell into Baidu, and to Alibaba, Tencent, as well as the largest Cloud vendors on the West Coast here in the United States. We believe we can make money here by having basically a deep deep engineering engagement with our key customers and building on the PC volume economics that we have within Lenovo. On software-defined infrastructure, again, it's that lack of legacy that I think is propelling us into this space. We're not encumbered by trying to sell one more legacy SAN or router, and that's really what's exciting us here, as we transform from a hardware to a software-based company. On HPC and AI, as we said, we'll talk about this in a second. We're the fastest-growing supercomputing company on earth. We have aspirations to be the largest supercomputing company on earth, with China and the U.S. vying for number one in that position, it puts us in a good position there. We're going to bridge that into artificial intelligence in our upcoming Shanghai Tech World. The entire day is around AI. In fact, YY has committed $1.2 billion to artificial intelligence over the next few years of R&D to help us bridge that. And then on data center infrastructure, is really about moving to a solutions based infrastructure like our position with SAP HANA, where we've gone deep with engineers on site at SAP, SAP running their own infrastructure on Lenovo and building that out beyond just SAP to other solutions in the marketplace. Overall, significantly expanding our services portfolio to maintain our number one customer satisfaction rating. So given ISC, or International Supercomputing, this week in Frankfurt, and a lot of my team are actually over there, I wanted to just show you the transformation we've had at Lenovo for delivering some of the technology to solve some of the most challenging humanitarian problems on earth. Today, we are the fastest-growing supercomputer company on the planet in terms of number of systems on the Top 500 list. We've gone from zero to 92 positions in just a few short years, but IDC also positions Lenovo as the fast-growing supercomputer and HPC company overall at about 17% year on year growth overall, including all of the broad channel, the regional universities and this kind of thing, so this is an exciting place for us. I'm excited today that Sergi has come all the way from Spain to be with us today. It's an exciting time because this week we announce the fastest next-generation Intel supercomputer on the planet at Barcelona Supercomputer. Before I bring Sergi on stage, let's run a video and I'll show you why we're excited about the capabilities of these next-generation supercomputers. Run the video please. >> Narrator: Different creates one of the most powerful supercomputers for the Barcelona Supercomputer Center. A high-performance, high-capacity design to help shape tomorrow's world. Different designs what's best for you, with 25 years of end-to-end expertise delivering large-scale solutions. It integrates easily with technology from industry partners, through deep collaboration with the client to manufacture, test, configure, and install at global scale. Different achieves the impossible. The first of a new series. A more energy-efficient supercomputer yet 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. With over 3,400 Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, each performing over two trillion calculations per second, giving us 11.1 petaflop capacity. Different powers MareNostrum, a supercomputer that will help us better understand cancer, help discover disease-fighting therapies, predict the impact of climate change. MareNostrom 4.0 promises to uncover answers that will help solve humanities greatest challenges. (audience applauds) >> So please help me in welcoming operations director of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, Sergi Girona. So welcome, and again, congratulations. It's been a big week for both of us. But I think for a long time, if you haven't been to Barcelona, this has been called the world's most beautiful computer because it's in one of the most gorgeous chapels in the world as you can see here. Congratulations, we now are number 13 on the Top500 list and the fastest next-generation Intel computer. >> Thank you very much, and congratulations to you as well. >> So maybe we can just talk a little bit about what you've done over the last few months with us. >> Sure, thank you very much. It is a pleasure for me being invited here to present to you what we've been doing with Lenovo so far and what we are planning to do in the next future. I'm representing here Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I am presenting high-performance computing services to science and industry. How we see these science services has changed the paradigm of science. We are coming from observation. We are coming from observation on the telescopes and the microscopes and the building of infrastructures, but this is not affordable anymore. This is very expensive, so it's not possible, so we need to move to simulations. So we need to understand what's happening in our environment. We need to predict behaviors only going through simulation. So, at BSC, we are devoted to provide services to industry, to science, but also we are doing our own research because we want to understand. At the same time, we are helping and developing the new engineers of the future on the IT, on HPC. So we are having four departments based on different topics. The main and big one is wiling to understand how we are doing the next supercomputers from the programming level to the performance to the EIA, so all these things, but we are having also interest on what about the climate change, what's the air quality that we are having in our cities. What is the precision medicine we need to have. How we can see that the different drugs are better for different individuals, for different humans, and of course we have an energy department, taking care of understanding what's the better optimization for a cold, how we can save energy running simulations on different topics. But, of course, the topic of today is not my research, but it's the systems we are building in Barcelona. So this is what we have been building in Barcelona so far. From left to right, you have the preparation of the facility because this is 160 square meters with 1.4 megabytes, so that means we need new piping, we need new electricity, at the same time in the center we have to install the core services of the system, so the management practices, and then on the right-hand side you have installation of the networking, the Omni-Path by Intel. Because all of the new racks have to be fully integrated and they need to come into operation rapidly. So we start deployment of the system May 15, and we've now been ending and coming in production July first. All the systems, all the (mumbles) systems from Lenovo are coming before being open and available. What we've been installing here in Barcelona is general purpose systems for our general workload of the system with 3,456 nodes. Everyone of those having 48 cores, 96 gigabytes main memory for a total capacity of about 400 terabytes memory. The objective of this is that we want to, all the system, all the processors, to work together for a single execution for running altogether, so this is an example of the platinum processors from Intel having 24 cores each. Of course, for doing this together with all the cores in the same application, we need a high-speed network, so this is Omni-Path, and of course all these cables are connecting all the nodes. Noncontention, working together, cooperating. Of course, this is a bunch of cables. They need to be properly aligned in switches. So here you have the complete presentation. Of course, this is general purpose, but we wanted to invest with our partners. We want to understand what the supercomputers we wanted to install in 2020, (mumbles) Exascale. We want to find out, we are installing as well systems with different capacities with KNH, with power, with ARM processors. We want to leverage our obligations for the future. We want to make sure that in 2020 we are ready to move our users rapidly to the new technologies. Of course, this is in total, giving us a total capacity of 13.7 petaflops that it's 12 times the capacity of the former MareNostrum four years ago. We need to provide the services to our scientists because they are helping to solve problems for humanity. That's the place we are going to go. Last is inviting you to come to Barcelona to see our place and our chapel. Thank you very much (audience applauds). >> Thank you. So now you can all go home to your spouses and significant others and say you have a formal invitation to Barcelona, Spain. So last, I want to talk about what we've done to transform Lenovo. I think we all know the history is nice but without execution, none of this is going to be possible going forward, so we have been very very busy over the last six months to a year of transforming Lenovo's data center organization. First, we moved to a dedicated end-to-end sales and marketing organization. In the past, we had people that were shared between PC and data center, now thousands of sales people around the world are 100% dedicated end to end to our data center clients. We've moved to a fully integrated and dedicated supply chain and procurement organization. A fully dedicated quality organization, 100% dedicated to expanding our data center success. We've moved to a customer-centric segment, again, bringing in significant new leaders from outside the company to look end to end at each of these segments, supercomputing being very very different than small business, being very very different than taking care of, for example, a large retailer or bank. So around hyperscale, software-defined infrastructure, HPC, AI, and supercomputing and data center solutions-led infrastructure. We've built out a whole new set of global channel programs. Last year, or a year passed, we have five different channel programs around the world. We've now got one simplified channel program for dealer registration. I think our channel is very very energized to go out to market with Lenovo technology across the board, and a whole new set of system integrator relationships. You're going to hear from one of them in Christian's discussion, but a whole new set of partnerships to build solutions together with our system integrative partners. And, again, as I mentioned, a brand new leadership team. So look forward to talking about the details of this. There's been a significant amount of transformation internal to Lenovo that's led to the success of this new product introduction today. So in conclusion, I want to talk about the news of the day. We are transforming Lenovo to the next phase of our data center growth. Again, in over 160 countries, closing on that first phase of transformation and moving forward with some unique declarations. We're launching the largest portfolio in our history, not just in servers but in storage and networking, as everything becomes kind of a software personality on top of x86 Compute. We think we're very well positioned with our scale on PCs as well as data center. Two new brands for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, without the legacy shackles of our competitors, enabling us to move very very quickly into Software-Defined, and, again, foreshadowing some joint ventures in M&A that are going to be coming up that will further accelerate ourselves there. New premiere support offerings, enabling you to get direct access to level two engineers and white glove unboxing services, which are going to be bundled along with ThinkAgile. And then celebrating the milestone of 25 years in x86 server compute, not just ThinkPads that you'll hear about shortly, but also our 20 million server shipping next month. So we're celebrating that legacy and looking forward to the next phase. And then making sure we have the execution engine to maintain our position and grow it, being number one in customer satisfaction and number one in quality. So, with that, thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you in the breakouts today and talking with many of you, and I'll bring Rod back up to transition us to the next section. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> All right, Kirk, thank you, sir. All right, ladies and gentlemen, what did you think of that? How about a big round of applause for ThinkAgile, ThinkSystems new brands? (audience applauds) And, obviously, with that comes a big round of applause, for Kirk Skaugen, my boss, so we've got to give him a big round of applause, please. I need to stay employed, it's very important. All right, now you just heard from Kirk about some of the new systems, the brands. How about we have a quick look at the video, which shows us the brand new DCG images. >> Narrator: Legacy thinking is dead, stuck in the past, selling the same old stuff, over and over. So then why does it seem like a data center, you know, that thing powering all our little devices and more or less everything interaction today is still stuck in legacy thinking because it's rigid, inflexible, slow, but that's not us. We don't do legacy. We do different. Because different is fearless. Different reduces Cloud deployment from days to hours. Different creates agile technology that others follow. Different is fluid. It uses water-cooling technology to save energy. It co-innovates with some of the best minds in the industry today. Different is better, smarter. Maybe that's why different already holds so many world-record benchmarks in everything. From virtualization to database and application performance or why it's number one in reliability and customer satisfaction. Legacy sells you what they want. Different builds the data center you need without locking you in. Introducing the Data Center Group at Lenovo. Different... Is better. >> All right, ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause, once again (mumbles) DCG, fantastic. And I'm sure all of you would agree, and Kirk mentioned it a couple of times there. No legacy means a real consultative approach to our customers, and that's something that we really feel is differentiated for ourselves. We are effectively now one of the largest startups in the DCG space, and we are very much ready to disrupt. Now, here in New York City, obviously, the heart of the fashion industry, and much like fashion, as I mentioned earlier, we're different, we're disruptive, we're agile, smarter, and faster. I'd like to say that about myself, but, unfortunately, I can't. But those of you who have observed, you may have noticed that I, too, have transformed. I don't know if anyone saw that. I've transformed from the pinstripe blue, white shirt, red tie look of the, shall we say, our predecessors who owned the x86 business to now a very Lenovo look. No tie and consequently a little bit more chic New York sort of fashion look, shall I say. Nothing more than that. So anyway, a bit of a transformation. It takes a lot to get to this look, by the way. It's a lot of effort. Our next speaker, Christian Teismann, is going to talk a lot about the core business of Lenovo, which really has been, as we've mentioned today, our ThinkPad, 25-year anniversary this year. It's going to be a great celebration inside Lenovo, and as we get through the year and we get closer and closer to the day, you'll see a lot more social and digital work that engages our customers, partners, analysts, et cetera, when we get close to that birthday. Customers just generally are a lot tougher on computers. We know they are. Whether you hang onto it between meetings from the corner of the Notebook, and that's why we have magnesium chassis inside the box or whether you're just dropping it or hypothetically doing anything else like that. We do a lot of robust testing on these products, and that's why it's the number one branded Notebook in the world. So Christian talks a lot about this, but I thought instead of having him talk, I might just do a little impromptu jump back stage and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about. So follow me for a second. I'm going to jaunt this way. I know a lot of you would have seen, obviously, the front of house here, what we call the front of house. Lots of videos, et cetera, but I don't think many of you would have seen the back of house here, so I'm going to jump through the back here. Hang on one second. You'll see us when we get here. Okay, let's see what's going on back stage right now. You can see one of the team here in the back stage is obviously working on their keyboard. Fantastic, let me tell you, this is one of the key value props of this product, obviously still working, lots of coffee all over it, spill-proof keyboard, one of the key value propositions and why this is the number one laptop brand in the world. Congratulations there, well done for that. Obviously, we test these things. Height, distances, Mil-SPEC approved, once again, fantastic product, pick that up, lovely. Absolutely resistant to any height or drops, once again, in line with our Mil-SPEC. This is Charles, our producer and director back stage for the absolute event. You can see, once again, sand, coincidentally, in Manhattan, who would have thought a snow storm was occurring here, but you can throw sand. We test these things for all of the elements. I've obviously been pretty keen on our development solutions, having lived in Japan for 12 years. We had this originally designed in 1992 by (mumbles), he's still our chief development officer still today, fantastic, congratulations, a sand-enhanced notebook, he'd love that. All right, let's get back out front and on with the show. Watch the coffee. All right, how was that? Not too bad (laughs). It wasn't very impromptu at all, was it? Not at all a set up (giggles). How many people have events and have a bag of sand sitting on the floor right next to a Notebook? I don't know. All right, now it's time, obviously, to introduce our next speaker, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope I didn't steal his thunder, obviously, in my conversations just now that you saw back stage. He's one of my best friends in Lenovo and easily is a great representative of our legendary PC products and solutions that we're putting together for all of our customers right now, and having been an ex-Pat with Lenovo in New York really calls this his second home and is continually fighting with me over the fact that he believes New York has better sushi than Tokyo, let's welcome please, Christian Teismann, our SVP, Commercial Business Segment, and PC Smart Office. Christian Teismann, come on up mate. (audience applauds) >> So Rod thank you very much for this wonderful introduction. I'm not sure how much there is to add to what you have seen already back stage, but I think there is a 25-year of history I will touch a little bit on, but also a very big transformation. But first of all, welcome to New York. As Rod said, it's my second home, but it's also a very important place for the ThinkPad, and I will come back to this later. The ThinkPad is thee industry standard of business computing. It's an industry icon. We are celebrating 25 years this year like no other PC brand has done before. But this story today is not looking back only. It's a story looking forward about the future of PC, and we see a transformation from PCs to personalized computing. I am privileged to lead the commercial PC and Smart device business for Lenovo, but much more important beyond product, I also am responsible for customer experience. And this is what really matters on an ongoing basis. But allow me to stay a little bit longer with our iconic ThinkPad and history of the last 25 years. ThinkPad has always stand for two things, and it always will be. Highest quality in the industry and technology innovation leadership that matters. That matters for you and that matters for your end users. So, now let me step back a little bit in time. As Rod was showing you, as only Rod can do, reliability is a very important part of ThinkPad story. ThinkPads have been used everywhere and done everything. They have survived fires and extreme weather, and they keep surviving your end users. For 25 years, they have been built for real business. ThinkPad also has a legacy of first innovation. There are so many firsts over the last 25 years, we could spend an hour talking about them. But I just want to cover a couple of the most important milestones. First of all, the ThinkPad 1992 has been developed and invented in Japan on the base design of a Bento box. It was designed by the famous industrial designer, Richard Sapper. Did you also know that the ThinkPad was the first commercial Notebook flying into space? In '93, we traveled with the space shuttle the first time. For two decades, ThinkPads were on every single mission. Did you know that the ThinkPad Butterfly, the iconic ThinkPad that opens the keyboard to its size, is the first and only computer showcased in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, right here in New York City? Ten years later, in 2005, IBM passed the torch to Lenovo, and the story got even better. Over the last 12 years, we sold over 100 million ThinkPads, four times the amount IBM sold in the same time. Many customers were concerned at that time, but since then, the ThinkPad has remained the best business Notebook in the industry, with even better quality, but most important, we kept innovating. In 2012, we unveiled the X1 Carbon. It was the thinnest, lightest, and still most robust business PC in the world. Using advanced composited materials like a Formula One car, for super strengths, X1 Carbon has become our ThinkPad flagship since then. We've added an X1 Carbon Yoga, a 360-degree convertible. An X1 Carbon tablet, a detachable, and many new products to come in the future. Over the last few years, many new firsts have been focused on providing the best end-user experience. The first dual-screen mobile workstation. The first Windows business tablet, and the first business PC with OLED screen technology. History is important, but a massive transformation is on the way. Future success requires us to think beyond the box. Think beyond hardware, think beyond notebooks and desktops, and to think about the future of personalized computing. Now, why is this happening? Well, because the business world is rapidly changing. Looking back on history that YY gave, and the acceleration of innovation and how it changes our everyday life in business and in personal is driving a massive change also to our industry. Most important because you are changing faster than ever before. Human capital is your most important asset. In today's generation, they want to have freedom of choice. They want to have a product that is tailored to their specific needs, every single day, every single minute, when they use it. But also IT is changing. The Cloud, constant connectivity, 5G will change everything. Artificial intelligence is adding things to the capability of an infrastructure that we just are starting to imagine. Let me talk about the workforce first because it's the most important part of what drives this. The millennials will comprise more than half of the world's workforce in 2020, three years from now. Already, one out of three millennials is prioritizing mobile work environment over salary, and for nearly 60% of all new hires in the United States, technology is a very important factor for their job search in terms of the way they work and the way they are empowered. This new generation of new employees has grown up with PCs, with Smart phones, with tablets, with touch, for their personal use and for their occupation use. They want freedom. Second, the workplace is transforming. The video you see here in the background. This is our North America headquarters in Raleigh, where we have a brand new Smart workspace. We have transformed this to attract the new generation of workers. It has fewer traditional workspaces, much more meaning and collaborative spaces, and Lenovo, like many companies, is seeing workspaces getting smaller. An average workspace per employee has decreased by 30% over the last five years. Employees are increasingly mobile, but, if they come to the office, they want to collaborate with their colleagues. The way we collaborate and communicate is changing. Investment in new collaboration technology is exploding. The market of collaboration technology is exceeding the market of personal computing today. It will grow in the future. Conference rooms are being re-imagined from a ratio of 50 employees to one large conference room. Today, we are moving into scenarios of four employees to one conference room, and these are huddle rooms, pioneer spaces. Technology is everywhere. Video, mega-screens, audio, electronic whiteboards. Adaptive technologies are popping up and change the way we work. As YY said earlier, the pace of the revolution is astonishing. So personalized computing will transform the PC we all know. There's a couple of key factors that we are integrating in our next generations of PC as we go forward. The most important trends that we see. First of all, choose your own device. We talked about this new generation of workforce. Employees who are used to choosing their own device. We have to respond and offer devices that are tailored to each end user's needs without adding complexity to how we operate them. PC is a service. Corporations increasingly are looking for on-demand computing in data center as well as in personal computing. Customers want flexibility. A tailored management solution and a services portfolio that completes the lifecycle of the device. Agile IT, even more important, corporations want to run an infrastructure that is agile, instant respond to their end-customer needs, that is self provisioning, self diagnostic, and remote software repair. Artificial intelligence. Think about artificial intelligence for you personally as your personal assistant. A personal assistant which does understand you, your schedule, your travel, your next task, an extension of yourself. We believe the PC will be the center of this mobile device universe. Mobile device synergy. Each of you have two devices or more with you. They need to work together across different operating systems, across different platforms. We believe Lenovo is uniquely positioned as the only company who has a Smart phone business, a PC business, and an infrastructure business to really seamlessly integrate all of these devices for simplicity and for efficiency. Augmented reality. We believe augmented reality will drive significantly productivity improvements in commercial business. The core will be to understand industry-specific solutions. New processes, new business challenges, to improve things like customer service and sales. Security will remain the foundation for personalized computing. Without security, without trust in the device integrity, this will not happen. One of the most important trends, I believe, is that the PC will transform, is always connected, and always on, like a Smart phone. Regardless if it's open, if it's closed, if you carry it, or if you work with it, it always is capable to respond to you and to work with you. 5G is becoming a reality, and the data capacity that will be out there is by far exceeding today's traffic imagination. Finally, Smart Office, delivering flexible and collaborative work environments regardless on where the worker sits, fully integrated and leverages all the technologies we just talked before. These are the main challenges you and all of your CIO and CTO colleagues have to face today. A changing workforce and a new set of technologies that are transforming PC into personalized computing. Let me give you a real example of a challenge. DXC was just formed by merging CSE company and HP's Enterprise services for the largest independent services company in the world. DXC is now a 25 billion IT services leader with more than 170,000 employees. The most important capital. 6,000 clients and eight million managed devices. I'd like to welcome their CIO, who has one of the most challenging workforce transformation in front of him. Erich Windmuller, please give him a round of applause. (audience applauds). >> Thank you Christian. >> Thank you. >> It's my pleasure to be here, thank you. >> So first of all, let me congratulation you to this very special time. By forming a new multi-billion-dollar enterprise, this new venture. I think it has been so far fantastically received by analysts, by the press, by customers, and we are delighted to be one of your strategic partners, and clearly we are collaborating around workforce transformation between our two companies. But let me ask you a couple of more personal questions. So by bringing these two companies together with nearly 200,00 employees, what are the first actions you are taking to make this a success, and what are your biggest challenges? >> Well, first, again, let me thank you for inviting me and for DXC Technology to be a part of this very very special event with Lenovo, so thank you. As many of you might expect, it's been a bit of a challenge over the past several months. My goal was really very simple. It was to make sure that we brought two companies together, and they could operate as one. We need to make sure that could continue to support our clients. We certainly need to make sure we could continue to sell, our sellers could sell. That we could pay our employees, that we could hire people, we could do all the basic foundational things that you might expect a company would want to do, but we really focused on three simple areas. I called it the three Cs. Connectivity, communicate, and collaborate. So we wanted to make sure that we connected our legacy data centers so we could transfer information and communicate back and forth. We certainly wanted to be sure that our employees could communicate via WIFI, whatever locations they may or may not go to. We certainly wanted to, when we talk about communicate, we need to be sure that everyone of our employees could send and receive email as a DXC employee. And that we had a single-enterprise directory and people could communicate, gain access to calendars across each of the two legacy companies, and then collaborate was also key. And so we wanted to be sure, again, that people could communicate across each other, that our legacy employees on either side could get access to many of their legacy systems, and, again, we could collaborate together as a single corporation, so it was challenging, but very very, great opportunity for all of us. And, certainly, you might expect cyber and security was a very very important topic. My chairman challenged me that we had to be at least as good as we were before from a cyber perspective, and when you bring two large companies together like that there's clearly an opportunity in this disruptive world so we wanted to be sure that we had a very very strong cyber security posture, of which Lenovo has been very very helpful in our achieving that. >> Thank you, Erich. So what does DXC consider as their critical solutions and technology for workplace transformation, both internally as well as out on the market? >> So workplace transformation, and, again, I've heard a lot of the same kinds of words that I would espouse... It's all about making our employees productive. It's giving the right tools to do their jobs. I, personally, have been focused, and you know this because Lenovo has been a very very big part of this, in working with our, we call it our My Style Workplace, it's an offering team in developing a solution and driving as much functionality as possible down to the workstation. We want to be able, for me, to avoid and eliminate other ancillary costs, audio video costs, telecommunication cost. The platform that we have, the digitized workstation that Lenovo has provided us, has just got a tremendous amount of capability. We want to streamline those solutions, as well, on top of the modern server. The modern platform, as we call it, internally. I'd like to congratulate Kirk and your team that you guys have successfully... Your hardware has been certified on our modern platform, which is a significant accomplishment between our two companies and our partnership. It was really really foundational. Lenovo is a big part of our digital workstation transformation, and you'll continue to be, so it's very very important, and I want you to know that your tools and your products have done a significant job in helping us bring two large corporations together as one. >> Thank you, Erich. Last question, what is your view on device as a service and hardware utility model? >> This is the easy question, right? So who in the room doesn't like PC or device as a service? This is a tremendous opportunity, I think, for all of us. Our corporation, like many of you in the room, we're all driven by the concept of buying devices in an Opex versus a Capex type of a world and be able to pay as you go. I think this is something that all of us would like to procure, product services and products, if you will, personal products, in this type of a mode, so I am very very eager to work with Lenovo to be sure that we bring forth a very dynamic and constructive device as a service approach. So very eager to do that with Lenovo and bring that forward for DXC Technology. >> Erich, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to work with you, today and going forward on all sides. I think with your new company and our lineup, I think we have great things to come. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure, great pleasure, thank you very much. >> So, what's next for Lenovo PC? We already have the most comprehensive commercial portfolio in the industry. We have put the end user in the core of our portfolio to finish and going forward. Ultra mobile users, like consultants, analysts, sales and service. Heavy compute users like engineers and designers. Industry users, increasingly more understanding. Industry-specific use cases like education, healthcare, or banking. So, there are a few exciting things we have to announce today. Obviously, we don't have that broad of an announcement like our colleagues from the data center side, but there is one thing that I have that actually... Thank you Rod... Looks like a Bento box, but it's not a ThinkPad. It's a first of it's kind. It's the world's smallest professional workstation. It has the power of a tower in the Bento box. It has the newest Intel core architecture, and it's designed for a wide range of heavy duty workload. Innovation continues, not only in the ThinkPad but also in the desktops and workstations. Second, you hear much about Smart Office and workspace transformation today. I'm excited to announce that we have made a strategic decision to expand our Think portfolio into Smart Office, and we will soon have solutions on the table in conference rooms, working with strategic partners like Intel and like Microsoft. We are focused on a set of devices and a software architecture that, as an IoT architecture, unifies the management of Smart Office. We want to move fast, so our target is that we will have our first product already later this year. More to come. And finally, what gets me most excited is the upcoming 25 anniversary in October. Actually, if you go to Japan, there are many ThinkPad lovers. Actually beyond lovers, enthusiasts, who are collectors. We've been consistently asked in blogs and forums about a special anniversary edition, so let me offer you a first glimpse what we will announce in October, of something we are bring to market later this year. For the anniversary, we will introduce a limited edition product. This will include throwback features from ThinkPad's history as well as the best and most powerful features of the ThinkPad today. But we are not just making incremental adjustments to the Think product line. We are rethinking ThinkPad of the future. Well, here is what I would call a concept card. Maybe a ThinkPad without a hinge. Maybe one you can fold. What do you think? (audience applauds) but this is more than just design or look and feel. It's a new set of advanced materials and new screen technologies. It's how you can speak to it or write on it or how it speaks to you. Always connected, always on, and can communicate on multiple inputs and outputs. It will anticipate your next meeting, your next travel, your next task. And when you put it all together, it's just another part of the story, which we call personalized computing. Thank you very much. (audience applauds) Thank you, sir. >> Good on ya, mate. All right, ladies and gentlemen. We are now at the conclusion of the day, for this session anyway. I'm going to talk a little bit more about our breakouts and our demo rooms next door. But how about the power with no tower, from Christian, huh? Big round of applause. (audience applauds) And what about the concept card, the ThinkPad? Pretty good, huh? I love that as well. I tell you, it was almost like Leonardo DiCaprio was up on stage at one stage. He put that big ThinkPad concept up, and everyone's phones went straight up and took a photo, the whole audience, so let's be very selective on how we distribute that. I'm sure it's already on Twitter. I'll check it out in a second. So once again, ThinkPad brand is a core part of the organization, and together both DCG and PCSD, what we call PCSD, which is our client side of the business and Smart device side of the business, are obviously very very linked in transforming Lenovo for the future. We want to also transform the industry, obviously, and transform the way that all of us do business. Lenovo, if you look at basically a summary of the day, we are highly committed to being a top three data center provider. That is really important for us. We are the largest and fastest growing supercomputing company in the world, and Kirk actually mentioned earlier on, committed to being number one by 2020. So Madhu who is in Frankfurt at the International Supercomputing Convention, if you're watching, congratulations, your targets have gone up. There's no doubt he's going to have a lot of work to do. We're obviously very very committed to disrupting the data center. That's obviously really important for us. As we mentioned, with both the brands, the ThinkSystem, and our ThinkAgile brands now, highly focused on disrupting and ensuring that we do things differently because different is better. Thank you to our customers, our partners, media, analysts, and of course, once again, all of our employees who have been on this journey with us over the last two years that's really culminating today in the launch of all of our new products and our profile and our portfolio. It's really thanks to all of you that once again on your feedback we've been able to get to this day. And now really our journey truly begins in ensuring we are disrupting and enduring that we are bringing more value to our customers without that legacy that Kirk mentioned earlier on is really an advantage for us as we really are that large startup from a company perspective. It's an exciting time to be part of Lenovo. It's an exciting time to be associated with Lenovo, and I hope very much all of you feel that way. So a big round of applause for today, thank you very much. (audience applauds) I need to remind all of you. I don't think I'm going to have too much trouble getting you out there, because I was just looking at Christian on the streaming solutions out in the room out the back there, and there's quite a nice bit of lunch out there as well for those of you who are hungry, so at least there's some good food out there, but I think in reality all of you should be getting up into the demo sessions with our segment general managers because that's really where the rubber hits the road. You've heard from YY, you've heard from Kirk, and you've heard from Christian. All of our general managers and our specialists in our product sets are going to be out there to obviously demonstrate our technology. As we said at the very beginning of this session, this is Transform, obviously the fashion change, hopefully you remember that. Transform, we've all gone through the transformation. It's part of our season of events globally, and our next event obviously is going to be in Tech World in Shanghai on the 20th of July. I hope very much for those of you who are going to attend have a great safe travel over there. We look forward to seeing you. Hope you've had a good morning, and get into the sessions next door so you get to understand the technology. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (upbeat innovative instrumental)