(funky music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering CISCO Live Europe. Brought to you by CISCO and it's ecosystem partners. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live Europe 2019, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host, Stu Miniman. Our next guest Sachin Gupta, senior vice-president of product management in Cisco's enterprise networking business, it's the crown jewels of Cisco, Sachin got the keys to the kingdom. Runs project management, so we get all the info from you, thanks for joining us. Good to see you again, good to see you again, king alumni. >> Yes, thanks. >> Thanks for coming on, I know you've got a keynote at 12 coming up shortly, thanks for spending the time, I'll get right to it. Networking is being reinvented, David Geckler said that onstage yesterday in the keynote. It's not changing, it's just shaping differently for customer needs intent-based networking, we talked briefly last year at Cisco Live in North America moving up the stack, it's here. Intent-based networking, cloud connections, IOT, all kinds of edge con activity, everything's connected, now on to the network. This is real. >> This is real, and John, look, it's been really exciting, right? We've gone through an 18 month journey here, when we first introduced in tent-based networking we talked about moving away from CLI box by box to really solving the problem at an abstracted, intent layer. Specify what user groups and what segments you want, what experience you want to deliver for those applications, and then the network feeding the data back up so you can learn from it, you can manage it, you can troubleshoot it in a much, much simpler way. We're now into this, as I said, 18 months. We have thousands of customers already using intent based networking we talked about software defining access for automated segmentation in the campus, talked about insurance, and then we've been adding capability along the way. And in just this week, David Geckler had people on stage, talked about more innovations with intent-based networking in the data center with ACI anywhere, with innovations on hyper flex. Liz came on and talked about IOT, and how that fits into the framework. And then Gordon talked about what we're doing with SD Ren, really, really exciting stuff going on there. >> Well, why don't you take a minute and quickly explain for the folks watching want to get us on the record so we can get definition. What is intent-based networking? What does it mean, what's the impact for the customers, what is it? >> Intent-based networking means that you can now express your business intent. Here's the outcome I'm looking for from the infrastructure. The system and the architecture will convert that automatically, provision, all the underlying components get the data and the context back out and prove to you that the intent you wanted was delivered. >> And what is changing now, more than ever, because applications are coming on. We see DevNet, we're in the DevNet zone. Seeing a lot of activity, developers. >> Yeah, so now you've got networks that are preventable instead of individual devices that you have to learn from the ground up, all their bells and whistles, you can now live at that intent layer, add an API layer on top of the controllers and move much more quickly. You can now start thinking about multiple domains, and how you cross those domains. >> What is the big product change, if any, especially software, is key to all of this? We've got plenty of hardware. You mentioned Liz in IOT, still runs router, she takes that software, she packages them. We interviewed her yesterday, she was talking about the synergies between code bases in which she customizes for the IOT market, then you've got the intent-based networking. What's the product look like, what's the products as they get more horizontal? >> Yes, so make no mistake, the hardware is still very important. Silicon ASIC's very important, but the magic now is in the software layer. So it starts with the operating system, and Liz talked about how we now have the Cisco IOS EXE operating system, which is modular hot patchable API driven programmable, and now runs across the entire portfolio. It runs on her ruggedized IOT infrastructure, runs on our switches, run on the wireless controller, runs on the routers and the SDWAN nodes, virtual and physical, same operating system. And then the SD controller layer on top of that. So for the campus, you've got DNA centers. So let's code DNA center, and then for the WAN you've got Cisco, the TeleV manage solution that provides a controller layer for automation, for analytics on top of the infrastructure. >> I wonder if we can unpack that SDWAN piece a bit, because WAN's been around a long time. I think back to the 90s, WAN was something that helped us get the internet. In the 2000s there was WAN optimization, I worked on a lot of replication solutions. I'm not sure that people understand the connection between SDWAN and really enabling the multi-cloud world that we need today, and the portfolio that Cisco has to attract that. >> You mentioned the 90s, I joined Cisco in 97, and I actually worked in WAN technical support. (laughing) So I've been with WAN for a very long time. And the customers aren't waking up and saying hey, I need a new WAN. That's not how the conversation starts. What's happening is it's a business transformation question. The companies, the customers are using infrastructure as a service, AWS services. They're using ACER, they're using Google Cloud platform. They're using all the SaaS products. Webex from Cisco, right, they're using Office 365. They're using all of these new applications and their data is not sitting in the data center. I mean, as we've noticed this week, the data center moves to where your data is. Well now, if your data isn't in it's data center that's conveniently connected through a WAN connection and it's all over the place. It's in the cloud, in many clouds. You have to think about, how do you get traffic in and out, how do you deliver security, and in this world where you may be using internet connections and all kinds of connections, how do you deliver the right application experience, and then oh, by the way, how do you manage all of this? That's what SDWAN is about, I need to transfer my business as I move applications or consume cloud services, I need to re-architect my WAN, and SDWAN helps me go do that. >> A big piece of that is what a network person needs to manage today, a lot of what they need to manage, they don't own. They don't control it, and some of that means I can't necessarily put a box that I can dial into and do this, so I need a software piece that I can put there as part of my overall configuration. >> Yes, you need a software piece, and you need something that scales to something that is cloud delivered. You can't be going to hundreds or thousands of sites and manually provisioning these for these services. You need to be able to have virtual services. If you're consuming a cloud service, you need your router or your service presence, your SDWAN presence in the cloud, right? So virtual network functions, virtual services become really critical in this world. >> Just on scale, you know, I've worked with Cisco on a lot of branch solutions over my career, there's lots of different components of scale that these type of solutions play into. >> Okay, people say if everything is in the cloud, does the scale requirement go down? All you think about is do I have 100 sites and I had one or two data centers. Alright, well now I have the same hundred sites, and I have hundreds of services. SaaS applications I'm consuming, and as I said, infrastructure as a service. And I still have some data centers for my legacy applications as well. So the complexity has actually increased, the scale requirement has increased. I need a much better software method, a software define method, to manage all of this. >> This is a key point, a lot of inflection points in the industry always have an abstraction layer to abstract away complexities. So you got two things going on here that are pretty clear, there's more complexity and more scale. So software's the perfect solution to manage that, is that what you're saying? >> Software's the perfect solution to manage this, and that's sort of one more level to that complexity. Because your traffic isn't neatly going from your branch through sort of a lease line or MPLS circuit that you can VPN into a data center, it's a more complicated traffic flow. I might be connecting directly to the internet securely is a huge concern. >> This is a great point, I was going to ask you the flow question, you know the old expression "follow the money and you'll find your answers." In networking, in this business, follow the traffic. Remember, north, south, east, west. That became a paradigm that helped shape a lot of network architecture. Now you have new traffic patterns. Can you give some color around the new traffic patterns and with cloud, comes with Edge, it's not just north, south, east, west, it's everywhere, so give- >> So a new traffic pattern now can be, instead of from the branch through your headquarters to your data center, now the traffic pattern is direct internet access to the SaaS application. Or go to a regional hub that I have in a co-location facility. Well, in the old world you had a security stack in your DMC. So it had your best firewall, your best IPS solution, all layered in there. Now in this new world with your traffic hitting directly, those applications and data in the cloud, you have to rethink security. So what we did in our SDWAN solution, we embed the best Cisco security technology application firewall, URL filtering, IPS solutions natively in our SDWAN software stack. And so you can deploy this across hundreds of branches now, and so you have assurance that the same level of security that you had in your data center can be delivered in a distributed way, in an easy way. And what happens is, customers also want to consume cloud security. You know, maybe I don't want to run in my branch, I actually have a SaaS application, I want to use the Cisco Umbrella service. Alright, so this is a secure internet gateway that processes this traffic, makes sure things are clean, makes sure we are safe, the customers are safe, and we can now integrate with cloud services in our SDWAN solution with just one click. >> How important is this security paradigm you just mentioned? Because there probably will be consequences. We've seen IOT become a talking point around oh, surface area, more surface area for the security breaches. This security paradigm's different. Why is it important and what are the consequences if not followed? >> If you don't follow this paradigm, I think the risk you run into that first of all, you will make a compromise on application experience because you're so worried about security. Let me give you an example, customers may choose, hey, you know what, I'll continue hair pinning all my traffic through my headquarters because I have a rich security stack there, and suffer an application experience because I'm going this way to get to the cloud asset rather than going directly, and so by enabling that rich security stack to be virtually enabled anywhere you want it, anywhere you need it, we can ensure that you can have the maximum level security that you need in your architectural design, and still get the application experience by selecting the best path for your application. >> And it's good business to be in enabling technology. We've seen that, you guys have lived that at Cisco. What is the most important story coming out of Cisco, out of this show, as you guys move forward that customers and the industry should pay attention to in your opinion? What's the most important story? >> I think the most important part of the story is, intent-based networking and the architectural shift, the reinvention that it's created isn't about any single domain, right? This is happening in the WAN to solve application experience problems, SaaS application experience problems, security problems, automations, scale. It's happening in the campus for segmentation, prevent lateral movement of threats. It's happening in the data center with ACI, and the customers want simple outcomes. What they're looking for is users, devices, things connecting to applications and data, doesn't matter where they sit, and ensuring that from a policy based model, they can automate end to end, and they can get the visibility, the telemetry end to end to solve problems and to learn and to improve the network. >> So cross domain traffic, application probability of the network, and the role of data that plays in that seems to be a common thread. >> Beautifully summarized, John, that's exactly right. >> Well, what's coming up in the keynote? What are you going to talk about at noon here in Barcelona? >> Yeah so in the keynote, I'm going to recap why have we done this, why does it matter, and why isn't CLI still going to work for you, and why did we need to reinvent networking? And then talk about the journey so far, all the new things we've announced, and then what I'm really excited about is I have a partner coming on stage with me talking about how we're delivering SDWAN solutions for our customers, how does that conversation work, and what should you really worry about as you select the service, design the architecture you're going to go with. >> Sachin, I want to go back in time, jog your memory, I remember back in the 90s, multi vendor was a big word, multi vendor improbability. Multi vendor meant working with multiple industry standard stuff. I hear multi cloud, I get a similar vibe. This seems to be the trend that people want to pay attention to just as much as hybrid cloud or maybe more on the multi cloud side, some are even saying, multi cloud is hotter than hybrid cloud. Do you agree with that, and how does multi vendor, multi cloud jive to Cisco? You guys thrived in a multi vendor world. What's your thoughts on this multi cloud? >> I think in both of those situations, customers are looking for freedom. It needs to be open, API driven. I should be able to move my traffic from one place to the other, my applications from one place to the other and not feel locked in. And so it's critical to support open protocols, open APIs and to provide customers that freedom. An SDWAN actually helps provide that. We're using open protocols open APIs, but at the same time, if I need to move my service from here to there, and I still need to deliver security, application experience, scale, automation, you can do that. So we provide that freedom to run that application in the multi cloud environment. >> One of the things that comes up all the time when we have conversations with the geeks out there at the conferences, it's microservices in containers on one side, and then on the networking side it's still latency and cost, you've still got latency issues and cost to move traffic around. Still a dynamic, how are you guys still looking there? 'Cause latency is certainly super important, and networking will be moving packets around, moving traffic around, and cost, there's still cost. Is this the concept of data center moving to the applications? How do you guys look at that cost equation and the latency equation, that's still important, can't change the laws of physics. >> The cost of latency equation is still really important, but the problem has changed, now. As your applications now, your data center is sort of moving with the cloud. Think about Office 365, we still need to help you get the best experience for Office 365 as if you were running an on-prem solution. For that we need to do things very different, we need to manage latency, to manage jitter, to manage cost overall. So what we've done is we use an API integration with Office 365 to give you 40% better performance for that fast application, and we're doing this for many applications. So I think you're right, you're solving for similar things, but now everything's changed on here. The applications are in a different place. So you just have to solve them in a fundamentally new way. >> And that's the traffic patterns, really comes down to it, and that's a tell sign of user expectation, user behavior, application behavior, this is the new normal. >> This is the new normal. >> What are you excited for looking forward as you look at your business, you look at Cisco, positioning style, I like the new position, very tight, very good, I like A Bridge to Tomorrow, A Bridge to the Future, kind of makes sense. Bridge, I like the double entendre there. But as you look at the portfolio coming together with multi cloud, what are you excited about? >> Look, and I've heard this from many customers and partners this week as well at Cisco live, we've been on this journey for many years. Building out intent-based networking for each of these domains, and now we've got thousands of customers already using it. But the conversations are going from hey, why did we need to do this? To, hey, help me perfect my design, and I now need to connect two or three domains together, how do we go do that? So we're now having richer, more mature next phase conversations. So it's working with our customers to realize that value across all of the domains from anywhere where there are users and things start anywhere with data and application sessions. >> And the network is foundational with the security architecture, you can build on that, that's where the magic will happen from your perspective, you see that. >> That's where the magic will happen, and you know what, only Cisco can pull this off. Because we have leadership in every one of those domains, and we're following the same architectural principles across all of them. >> So if someone said Sachin, this is not your grandfather's SDWAN, what do you respond to that? How do you update that narrative? What is the SDWAN new message, what's the new picture for SDWAN, what does that mean? >> The new SDWAN is about connecting to your applications and data in any cloud in a multi cloud environment, SaaS, IOS applications, it doesn't matter. Any private data center, still delivering the best security, best application experience in an automated way at the skill that you need. >> Okay, at the center of the value properties, have been saying on theCUBE for nine years, finally it's happening, a lot of stuff coming together meeting the road, congratulations on your success, and thanks for spending the time to come in. Great to see you, good luck on your keynote. This is theCUBE coverage live in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from Cisco Live after this short break, stay with us. (funky music)