(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE 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 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 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 datasets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think that give our customers kind of some, you know, pose 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 rightsize 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 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 rightsized 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 a 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. >> Dave: All 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 had 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 workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed so how is 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, 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 exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned which is one infrastructure that can run any application into 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 as 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 leapfrog 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 brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, space 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 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 references of their own. As a result we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really, seeing a slowness in their agility, and high burdened 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 these issues. 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 rightful footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model. Where they can 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 issues. >> 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 5th 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 HCI workload, the SDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular farm 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 this 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, may it be ethernet adapter, may it be with fiber channel adapters, or may it be 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 the smart 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 is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced 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 every, 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 you, 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 to, that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? It 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 of 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 developments 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. X, 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 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 we, 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, talk, 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 James 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 PCA in less than four to five to six, without rip and replace, as they embrace CXL without rip and replace, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI 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. (bright 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 watchword 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)

>> 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)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It's transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model, which also should be high margin through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It's doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital in the cloud. We believe Cisco's dominant position in networking combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. However, there are clear challenges ahead for Cisco, not the least of which is the growing complexity of its portfolio, a large legacy business, and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it transitions into a new business model. Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki-bond cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, who's the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, long time Cisco watcher who together with me crafted the premise of today's session. Zeus, great to see you welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. >> Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today, set the agenda. The catalyst for this session, Zeus and I attended Cisco's financial analyst day. We received a day and a half of firehose presentations, drill downs, interactions, Q and A with Cisco execs and one key customer. So we're going to share our takeaways from these sessions and add our additional thoughts. Now, in particular, we're going to talk about Cisco's TAM, its transformation to a subscription-based model, and how we see that evolving. As always, we're going to bring in some ETR spending data for context and get Zeus' take on what that tells us. And we'll end with a summary of Cisco's cloud strategy and outlook for how it could win in the cloud. So let's talk about Cisco's sort of structure and TAM opportunities. First, Zeus, Cisco has four main lines of business where it's organized it's executives around sort of four product areas. And it's got a large service component as well. Network equipment, SP routing, data center, collaboration that security, and as I say services, that's not necessarily how it's going to market, but that's kind of the way it organizes its ELT, its executive leadership team. >> Yeah, the in fact, the ELT has been organized around those products, as you said. It used to report to the street three product segments, infrastructure platforms, which was by far the biggest, it was all their networking equipment, then applications, and then security. Now it's moved to five new segments, secure agile networks, hybrid work, end to end security, internet for the future and optimized app experiences. And I think what Cisco's trying to do is align their, the way they report along the lines of the way customers buy. 'Cause I think before, you know, they had a very simplistic model before. It was just infrastructure, apps, and security. The ELT is organized around product roadmap and the product innovation, but that's not necessarily the way customers purchase things and so, purchase things so I think they've tried to change things a little bit there. When you look at those segments though, you know, by, it's interesting. They're all big, right? So, by far the biggest distilled networking, which is almost a hundred billion dollar TAM as they reported and they have it growing a about a 9% CAGR as reported by other analyst firms. And when you think about how mature networking is Dave, the fact that that's still growing at high single digit CAGR is still pretty remarkable. So I think that's one of those things that, you know, watchers of Cisco historically have been calling for the network to be commoditized for decades. For as long as I've been watching Cisco, we've been, people have been waiting for the network to be commoditized. My thesis has always been, if you can drive enough innovation into things, you can stave off commoditization and that's what they've done. But that's really the anchor for them to sell all their other products, some of which are higher margin, some which are a little bit sore, but they're all good high margin businesses to your point. >> Awesome. We're going to dig into that. So, so they flattened the organization when Geckler left. You've got Todd Nightingale, Jonathan Davidson, Liz Centoni, and Jeetu Patel who we heard from and we'll make some comments on what we heard from them. One of the big takeaways at the financial analysts meeting was on the TAM, as you just mentioned. Liz Centoni who also is heavily involved in strategy and the CFO Scott Herren, showed this slide, which speaks to the company's TAM and the organizational structure that you were just talking about. So the big message was that Cisco has got a large and growing market, you know, no shortage of available market. Somewhere between eight and 900 billion, depending on which of the slides you pull out of the deck. And ironically Zeus, when you look at the current markets number here on the right hand side of this slide, 260 billion, it just about matches the company's market cap. Maybe an interesting coincidence, but at any rate, what was your takeaway from this data? >> Well, I think, you know, the big takeaway from the data is there's still a lot of room ahead for Cisco to grow, right? Again, this is a, it's a company that I think most people would put in the camp of legacy IT vendor, just because of how long they've been around. But they have done a very good job of staving off innovation. And part of that is just these markets that they play in continue to grow and they continue to have challenges that they can solve. I think one of the things Cisco has done though, since the arrival of Chuck Robbins, is they don't fight these trends anymore, Dave. I know prior to Chuck's arrival, they really fought the tide of software defined networking and you know, trends like that, and even cloud to some extent. And I remember one of the first meetings I had with Chuck, I asked him about that and he said that Cisco will never do that again. That under his watch, if customers are going through a market transition, Cisco wants to lead them through it, not try and hold them back. And I think for that reason, they're able to look at, all of those trends and try and take a leadership position in them, even though you might look at some of those and feel that some of them might be detrimental to Cisco's business in the short term. So something like software defined WANs, which you would throw into secure agile networks, certainly doesn't, may not carry the same kind of RPOs and margins with it that their traditional routers did, but ultimately customers are going to buy it and Cisco would like to be the ones to sell it to them. >> You know, you bring up a great point. This industry is littered, there's a graveyard of executives who fought the trend. Many people, some people remember Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation. "Unix is snake oil," is what he said. IBM mainframe guys said, "PCs are a toy." And of course the history, they were the wrong side of history. The other big takeaway was the shift to software in subscription. They really made a big point of this. Here's a chart Cisco showed a couple of times to make the point that it's one of the largest software companies in the world. You know, in the top 10. They also made the point that Chuck Robbins, when he joined in 2015, and since that time, it's nearly 4x'ed it's subscription software revenue, and roughly doubled its software sales. And it now has an RPO, remaining performance obligations, that exceeds 30 billion. And it's committing to grow its subscription business in the forward-looking statements by 15 to 17% CAGR through 25, which would imply about a doubling of these, the blue lines. Zeus, it's unclear if that forward-looking forecast is just software. I presume it includes some services, but as Herren pointed out, over time, these services will be bundled into the product revenue, same way SAS companies do it. But the point is Cisco is committed, like many of their peers, to moving to an ARR model. But please, share your thoughts on Cisco's move to software subscriptions and how you see the future of consumption-based pricing. >> Yeah, this has been a big shift for Cisco, obviously. It's one that's highly disruptive. It's one that I know gave their partners a lot of angst for a long time because when you sell things upfront, you get a big check for selling that, right? And when you sell things in a subscription model, you get a much smaller check for a number of months over the period of the contract. It also changes the way you deal with the customer. When you sell a one-time product, you basically wipe your hands. You come back in three or four years and say, "it's time to upgrade." When you sell a subscription, now, the one thing that I've tried to talk to Cisco and its partners about is customers don't renew things they don't use. And so it becomes incumbent on the partner, it becomes incumbent upon Cisco to make sure that things that the customer is subscribing to, that they do use. And so Cisco's had to create a customer success organization. They've had to help their partners create those customer success organizations. So it's really changed the model. And Cisco not only made the shift, they've done it faster than they actually had originally forecast. So during the financial analyst day, they actually touted their execution on software, noting that it hit it's 30% revenue as percent of total target well before it was supposed to, it's actually exceeded its targets. And now it's looking to increase that to, it actually raised its guidance in this area a little bit by a few percentage points, looking out over the next few years. And so it's moved to the subscription model, Dave, the thing that you brought up, which I do see as somewhat of a challenge is the shift to consumption-based pricing. So subscription is one thing in that I write you a check every month for the same amount. When I go to the consumption-based pricing, that's easy to do for cloud services, things like WebEx or Duo or, you know, CloudLock, some of the security products. That that shift should be relatively simple. If customers want to buy it that way. It's unclear as to how you do that when you're selling on-prem equipment with the software add-on to it because in that case, you have to put metering technology in to understand how much they're using. You have to have a minimum baseline to start with. They've done it in some respects. The old HCS product that they sold, the Telcos, actually was sold with a minimum commit and then they tacked on a utilization on top of that. So maybe they move into that kind of model. But I know it's something that they've, they get asked about a lot. I know they're still thinking about it, but it's something that I believe is coming and it's going to come pretty fast. >> I want to pick up on that because I think, you know, they made the point that we're one of the top 10 software companies in the world. It's very difficult for hardware companies to make the transition to software. You know, HP couldn't do it. >> Well, no one's done it. >> Well, IBM has kind of done it, but they really struggle. It's kind of this mishmash of tooling and software products that aren't really well-integrated. But, I would say this, everybody now, Cisco, Dell, HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, pretty much all the traditional hardware players are trying to move to an as a service model or at least for a portion of their business. HPE's all in, Dell transitioning. And for the most part, I would make the following observation. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. They're pretty much following a SAS like model, which in my view is outdated and kind of flawed from a customer standpoint. All these guys say, "Hey, we're doing this because "this is what the customers want." I think the cloud is really a true consumption based model. And if you look at modern SAS companies, a lot of the startups, they're moving to a consumption based model. You see that with Snowflake, you see that with Stripe. Now they will offer incentives. But most of the traditional enterprise players, they're saying, "Okay, pay us upfront, "commit to some base level. "If you go over it, you know, "we'll charge you for it. "If you go under it, you're still going to pay "for that base level." So it's not true consumption base. It's not really necessarily the customer's best interest. So that's, I think there's some learnings there that are going to have to play out. >> Yeah, the reason customers are shying away from that SAS type model, I think during the pandemic, the one thing we learned, Dave, is that the business will ebb and flow greatly from month to month sometimes. And I was talking with somebody that worked for one of the big hotel chains, and she was telling me that what their CRM providers, she wouldn't tell me who it was, except said it rhymed with Shmalesforce, that their utilization of it went from, you know, from a nice steady level to spiking really high when customers started calling in to cancel hotel rooms. And then it dropped down to almost nothing as we went through that period of stay at home. And now it's risen back up. And so for her, she wanted to move to a consumption-based model because what happens otherwise is you wind up buying for peak utilization, your software subscriptions go largely underutilized the majority of the year, and you wind up paying, you know, a lot more than you need to. If you go to more of a true consumption model, it's harder to model out from a financial perspective 'cause there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the business, but over a longer period of time, it's more cost-effective, right? And so the, again, what the pandemic taught us was we don't really know what we're going to need from a consumption standpoint, you know, nevermind a year from now, maybe even six months from now. And consumption just creates a lot more flexibility and agility. You can scale up, you can scale down. You can bring in users, you can take out users, you can add consultants, things like that. And it just, it's much more aligned with the way businesses are run today. >> Yeah, churn is a silent killer of a software company. And so there's retention is the key here. So again, I think there's lots of learning. Let's put Cisco into context with some of its peers. So this chart we developed compares five companies to Cisco. Core Dell, meaning Dell, without VMware. VMware, HPE, IBM, we've put an AWS, and then Cisco as, IBM, AWS and Cisco is the integrated plays. So the chart shows the latest quarterly revenue multiplied by four to get a run rate, a three-year growth outlook, gross margin percentage, market cap, and revenue multiple. And the key points here are that one, Cisco has got a pretty awesome business model. It's got 60% gross margin, strong operating margins, not shown here, but in the mid twenties, 25%. It's got a higher growth rate than most of its peers. And as such, a much better, multiple than say, for instance, Core Dell gets 33 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE is double that. IBM's below two X. Cisco's revenue multiple rivals VMware, which is a pure software company. Now in a large part that's because VMware stock took a hit recently, but still the point is obvious. Cisco's got a great business. Now for context, we've added AWS, which blows away any company on this chart. We've inferred a market cap of nearly 600 billion, which frankly is conservative at a 10 X revenue multiple given it's inferred margins and growth rate. Now Zeus, if AWS were a separate company, it could have a market cap that approached 800 billion in my view. But what does this data tell you? >> Well, it just tells me that Cisco continues to be a very well-run company that has staved off commoditization, despite the calling for it for years. And I think the big lesson, and I've talked to financial analysts about this over the years, is that if, I don't really believe anything in this world is a commodity, Dave. I think even when Cisco went to the server market, if you remember back then, they created a new way of handling memory management. They were getting well above average margins for service, albeit less than Cisco's network margins, but still above average for server margins. And so I think if you can continue to innovate, you will see the margin stay where they are. You will see customers continue to buy and refresh. And I think one of the challenges Cisco's had in the past, and this is where the subscription business will help, is getting customers to stay with the latest and greatest. Prior to this refresh of network equipment, some of the stuff that I've seen in the fields, 10, 15 years old, once you move to that sell me a box and then tack on the subscription revenue that you pay month by month, you do drive more consistent refresh. Think about the way you just handle your own mobile phone. If you had to go pay, you know, a thousand dollars every three years, you might not do it at that three-year cycle. If you pay 40 bucks a month, every time there's a new phone, you're going to take it, right? So I think Cisco is able to drive greater, better refresh, keep their customers current, keep the features in there. And we've seen that with a lot of the new products. The new Cat 9,000, some of the new service provider products, the new wifi products, they've all done very well. In fact, they've all outpaced their previous generation products as far as growth rate goes. And so I think that is a testament to the way they've run the business. But I do think when people bucket Cisco in with HP and Dell, and I understand why they do, their businesses were similar at one time, it's really not a true comparison anymore. I think Cisco has completely changed their business and they're not trying to commoditize markets, they're trying to drive innovation and keep the margins up, where I think HP and Dell tend to really compete on price versus innovation. >> Well, and we are going to get to this point about the tailwinds and headwinds and cloud, and how Cisco to do it. But, to your point about, you know, the cell phone analogy. To the extent that Cisco can make that seamless for customers could hide that underlying complexity, that's going to be critical for the cloud. Now, but before we get there, I want to talk about one of the reasons why Cisco such a high multiple, and has been able to preserve its margins, to your point, not being commoditized. And it's been able to grow both organically, but also has a strong history of M and A. It's this chart shows a dominant position in core networking. So this shows, so ETR data within the Fortune 500. It plots companies in the ETR taxonomy in two dimensions, net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending velocity, and market share on the horizontal axis, which is a measure of presence in the survey. It's not like IDC market share, it's mentioned market share if you will. The point is Cisco is far and away the most pervasive player in the market, it's generally held its dominant position. Although, it's been under pressure in the last few years in core networking, but it retains or maintains a very respectable net score and consistently performs well for such a large company. Zeus, anything you'd add with respect to Cisco's core networking business? >> Yeah, it's maintained a dominant network position historically. I think part of because it drives good products, but also because the competitive landscape, historically has been pretty weak, right? We saw companies like 3Com and Nortel who aren't around anymore. It'll be interesting to see moving forward now that companies like VMware are involved in networking. AWS is interested in networking. Arista is a much stronger company. You know, Juniper bought Mist and is in better position. Even Extreme Networks who most people thought was dead a few years ago has made a number of acquisitions and is now a billion dollar company. So while Cisco has done a great job of execution, they've done a great job on the innovation side, their competitive landscape, looking out over the next five years, I think is going to be more difficult than it has been over the previous five years. And largely, Dave, I think that's good for Cisco. I think whenever Cisco's pressed a little bit from competition, they tend to step on the innovation gas a little bit more. And I look back and even just the transition when VMware bought Nicira, that got Cisco's SDN business into gear, like nothing else could have, right? So competition for that company, they always seem to respond well to it. >> So, let's break down Cisco's net score a little bit. Explain why the company has been able to hold its spending momentum despite its large size. This will give you a little insight to the survey. So this chart shows the granular components of net score. The lime green is new adoptions to Cisco. The forest green is spending more than 6%. The gray is flat plus or minus 5%. The pink is spending drops by more than 5%. And the red is we're chucking the platform, we're getting off. And Cisco's overall net score here is 25%, which for a company of its size speaks to the relationships that it has with customers. It's of course got a fat middle in the gray area, like all sort of large established companies. But very low defections as well, it's got low new adoptions. But very respectable. So that is background, Zeus. Let's look at spending momentum over time across Cisco's portfolio. So this chart shows Cisco's net score by that methodology within the ETR taxonomy for Cisco over three survey periods. And what jumps out is Meraki on the left, very strong. Virtualization business, its core networking, analytics and security, all showing upward momentum. AppD is a little bit concerning, but that could be related to Cisco's sort of pivot to full stack observability. So maybe AppD is being bundled there. Although some practitioners have cited to us some concerns in that space. And then WebEx at the end of the chart, it's showing some relative strength, but not that high. Zeus, maybe you could comment on Meraki and any other takeaways across the portfolio. >> Yeah, Meraki has proven to be an excellent acquisition for Cisco. In fact, you might, I think it's arguable to say it's its best acquisition in history going all the way back to camp Kalpana and Grand Junction, the ones that brought up catalyst switches. So, in fact, I think Meraki's revenue might be larger than security now. So, that shows you the momentum it has. I think one of the lessons it brought to Cisco was that simpler is better, sometimes. I think when they first bought Meraki, the way Meraki's deployed, it's very easy to set up. There's a lot of engineering work though that goes into making a product simple to use. And I think a lot of Cisco engineers historically looked at Meraki as, that's a little bit of a toy. It's meant for small businesses, things like that, but it's not for enterprise. But, Rocky's done a nice job of expanding the portfolio, of leveraging the cloud for analytics and showing you a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily get from traditional networking equipment. And one of the things that I was really delighted to see was when they put Todd Nightingale in charge of all the networking business, because that showed to me that Chuck Robbins understood that the things Meraki were doing were right and they infuse a little bit of Meraki into the rest of the company. You know, that's certainly a good thing. The other areas that you showed on the chart, not really a surprise, Dave. When you think of the shift hybrid work and you think of the, some of the other transitions going on, I think you would expect to see the server business in decline, the storage business, you know, maybe in a little bit of decline, just because people aren't building out data centers. Where the other ones are related more to hybrid working, hybrid cloud, things like that. So it is what you would expect. The WebEx one was interesting too, because it did show somewhat of a dip and then a rise. And I think that's indicative of what we've seen in the collaboration space since the pandemic came about. Companies like Zoom and RingCentral really got a lot of the headlines. Again, when you, the comment I made on competition, Cisco got caught a little bit flat-footed, they've caught up in features and now they really stepped on the gas there. Chuck joked that he gave the WebEx team a bit of a blank check to go do what it had to do. And I don't think that was a joke. I think he actually did that because they've added more features into WebEx in the last year then I think they did the previous five years before that. >> Well, let's just drill into video conferencing real quick here, if we could. Here's that two dimensional view, again, showing net score against market share or pervasiveness of mentions, and you can see Microsoft Teams in the upper right. I mean, it's off the chart, literally. Zoom's well ahead of Cisco in terms of, you know, mentions presence. And that could be a spate of freemium, you know, but it's basically a three horse race in this game. And Cisco, I don't think is trying to take Zoom head on, rather it seems to be making WebEx a core part of its broader collaboration agenda. But Zeus, maybe you could comment. >> Well, it's all coming together, right? So, it's hard to decouple calling from video from meetings. All of the vendors, including Teams, are going after the hybrid work experience. And if you believe the future is hybrid and not just work from home, then Cisco does have a pretty interesting advantage because it's the only one that makes its own end points, where Teams and Zoom doesn't. And so that end to end experience it can deliver. The Microsoft Teams one's interesting because that product, frankly, when you talk to users, it doesn't have a great user score, like as far as user satisfaction goes, but the one thing Microsoft has done a very good job of is bundling it in to the Office365 licenses, making it very easy for IT to deploy. Zoom is a little bit in the middle where they've appealed to the users. They've done a better job of appealing to IT, but there is a, there is a battleground now going on where video's not just video. It includes calling, includes meetings, includes room systems now, and I think this hybrid work friend is going to change the way we think about these meeting tools. >> Now we'd be remiss if we didn't spend a moment talking about security as a key part of Cisco's business. And we have a graphic on this same kind of X, Y. And it's been, we've seen several quarters of growth. Although, the last quarter security growth was in the low single digits, but Cisco is a major player in security. And this X, Y graph shows, they've got both a large presence and a solid spending momentum. Not nearly as much momentum as Okta or Zscaler or a CrowdStrike and some of the smaller companies, but they're, these guys are on a rocket ship, but others that we featured in these episodes, but much more than respectable for Cisco. And security is critical to the strategy. It's a big part of the subscriber base. And the last thing, Zeus, I'll say about Cisco made the point in analyst day, that this market is crowded. You can see that in this chart. And their goal is to simplify this picture and make it easier for customers to secure their data and apps. But that's not easy, Zeus. What are your thoughts on Cisco's security opportunities? >> Yeah, I've been waiting for Cisco go to break up in security a little more than it has. I do think, I was talking with a CSO the other day, Dave, that said to me he's starting to understand that you don't have to have best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, there's a lot of buyers now will tell you that if you try and have best of breed everywhere, it actually creates a negative when it comes to threat protection because keeping all the policies and things up to date is very, very difficult. And so the industry is moving more to a platform model, right? Now, the challenge for Cisco is how do you get that, the customer to think of the network as part of the platform? Because while the platform model, I think, is starting to gain traction, FloridaNet, Palo Alto, even McAfee, companies like that also have their own version of a security platform. And if you look at the financial performance of companies like FloridaNet and Palo Alto over the past, you know, over the past couple of years, they've been through the roof, right? And so I think an interesting and unique challenge for Cisco is can they convince the security buyer that the network is as important a part of that platform as any other component? If they can do that, I think they can break away from the pack. If not, then they'll stay mixed in with those, you know, Palo, FloridaNet, Checkpoint, and, you know, and Cisco, in that mix. But I do think that may present their single biggest needle moving opportunity just because of how big the security TAM is, and the fact that there is no de facto leader in security today. If they could gain the same kind of position in security as they have a networking, who, I mean, that would move the needle like no other market would. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that they're coming at security, obviously from a position of networking strength. You've got, to your point, you've got best of breed, Okta in identity, you got CrowdStrike in endpoint, Zscaler in cloud security. They're all growing like crazy. And you got Cisco and you know, Palo Alto, CSOs tell us they want to work with Palo Alto because they're the thought leader and they're obviously a major player here. You mentioned FloridaNet, there's a zillion others. We could talk all day about security. But let's bring it back to cloud. We've talked about a number of the piece in Cisco's portfolio, and we haven't really spent any time on full stack observability, which is a big push for Cisco with AppD, Intersight and the ThousandEyes acquisition. And that plays into this equation. But my take, Zeus, is Cisco has a number of cloud knobs that it can turn, it sells core networking equipment to hyperscalers. It can be the abstraction layer to connect on-prem to the cloud and hybrid and across clouds. And it's in a good position with Telcos too, to go after the 5G. But let's use this chart to talk about Cisco's cloud prospects. It's an ETR cut of the cloud customer spending. So we cut it by cloud customers. And they're are, I don't know, 800 or so in the survey. And then looking at various companies performance within that cut. So these are companies that compete, or in the case of HashiCorp, partner with Cisco at some level. Let me just set this up and get your take. So the insert on the chart by the way shows the raw data that positions each dot, the net score and the shared n, i.e. the number of accounts in the survey that responded. The key points, first of all, Azure and AWS, dominant players in cloud. GCP is a distant third. We've reported on that a lot. Not only are these two companies big, they have spending momentum on their platforms. They're growing, they are on that flywheel. Second point, VMware and Cisco are very prominent. They have huge customer bases. And while they're often on a collision course, there's lots of room in cloud for multiple players. When we plotted some other Cisco properties like AppD and Meraki, which as we said, is strong. And then for context, we've placed Dell, HPE, Aruba, IBM and Oracle. And also VMware cloud and AWS, which is notable on its elevation. And as I say, we've added HashiCorp because they're critical partner of Cisco and it's a multi-cloud play. Okay, Zeus, there's the setup. What does Cisco have to do to make the cloud a tailwind? Let's talk about strategy, tailwinds, headwinds, competition, and bottom line it for us. >> Yeah, well, I do think, well, I talked about security being the biggest needle mover for Cisco, I think its biggest challenge is convincing Wall Street in particular, that the cloud is a tailwind. I think if you look at the companies with the really high multiples to their stock, Dave, they're all ones where they're viewed as, they go along with the cloud ride, Right? So the, if you can associate yourself with the cloud and then people believe that the cloud is going to, more cloud equals more business, that obviously creates a better multiple because the cloud has almost infinite potential ahead of it. Now with respect to Cisco, I do think cloud has presented somewhat of a double-edged sword for Cisco. I don't believe the current consumption model for cloud is really a tailwind for Cisco, not really a headwind, but it doesn't really change Cisco's business. But I do think the very definition of cloud is changing before our eyes, Dave. And it's shifting away from centralized clouds. If you think of the way customers bought cloud before, it might have used AWS, it might've used Azure, but it really, that's not really multi-cloud, it's just multiple clouds in which I put things in these centralized resources. It's shifting more to this concept of distributed cloud in which a single application can be built using resources from your private cloud, for AWS, from Azure, from Edge locations, all the cloud providers have built their portfolios to support this concept of distributed cloud and what becomes important there, is a highly agile dynamic network. And in that case with distributed cloud, that is a tailwind for Cisco because now the network is that resource that ties all those distributed cloud components together. Now the network itself has to change. It needs to become a lot more agile and microservices and container friendly itself so I can spin up resources and, you know, in an Edge location, as fast as I can on-prem and things like that. But I do think it creates another wave of innovation and networking, and in that case, I think it does act as a tailwind for Cisco, aside from just the work it's done with the web scalers, you know, those types of companies. So, but I do think that Cisco needs to rethink its delivery model on network services somewhat to take advantage of that. >> At the analyst meeting, Cisco made the point that it does sell to the hyperscalers. It talked about the top six hyperscalers. You know, you had mentioned to me, maybe IBM and Oracle were in there. I always talk about four hyperscalers and only four, but that's fine. Here's my question. Practitioners have told me, buyers have told me, the more money and more workloads I put in the cloud, the less I spend with Cisco. Now, even though that might be Cisco gear powering those clouds, do you see that as a potential threat in that they don't own that relationship anymore and value will confer to the cloud players? >> Yeah, that's, I've heard that too. And I don't, I believe that's true when it comes to general purpose compute. You're probably not buying as many UCS servers and things like that because you are putting them in the cloud. But I do think you do need a refresh the network. I think the network becomes a very important role, plays a very important role there. The variant, the really interesting trend will be, what is your WAM look like? Do you have thousands of workers scattered all over the place, or do you just have a few centralized locations? So I think also, you know, Cisco will wind up providing connectivity within the cloud. If you think of the transition we've seen in other industries, Dave, as far as cloud goes, you think of, you know, F5, a company like that. People thought that AWS would commoditize F5's business because AWS provides their own load balancers, right? But what AWS provides is a very basic, very basic functionality and then use F5's virtual edition or a cloud edition for a lot of the advanced capabilities. And I think you'll see the same thing with the cloud that customers will start buying versions of Cisco that go in the cloud to drive a lot of those advanced capabilities that only Cisco delivers. And so I think you wind up buying more Cisco over time, although the per unit price of what you buy might be a little bit lower. If that makes sense here. >> It does, I think it makes a lot of sense and that fits into the cloud model. You know, you bring up a good point, the conversation with the customer was Rakuten. And that individual was essentially sharing with us, somebody was asking, one of the analysts was asking, "Well, what about the cloud guys? "Aren't they going to really threaten the whole Telco "industry and disrupt it?" And his point was, "Look at, this stuff is not trivial." So to your point, you know, maybe they'll provide some basic functionality. Kind of like they do in a lot of different areas. Data protection is another good example. Security is another good example. Where there's plenty of room for partners, competitors, of on-prem players to add value. And I've always said, "Look, the opportunity "is the cloud players spend 100 billion dollars a year "on CapEx." It's a gift to companies like Cisco who can build an abstraction layer that connects on-prem, cloud for hybrid, across clouds, out to the edge, and really be that layer that is that layer that takes advantage of cloud native, but also delivers that experience, I don't want to use the word seamlessly, but that experience across those clouds as the cloud expands. And that's fundamentally Cisco's cloud strategy, isn't it? >> Oh yeah. And I think people have underestimated over the years, how hard it is to build good networking products. Anybody can go get some silicon and build a product to connect two things together. The question is, can you do it at scale? Can you do it securely? And lots of companies have tried to commoditize networking, you know, White Boxes was looked at as the existential threat to Cisco. Huawei was looked at as the big threat to Cisco. And all of those have kind of come and gone because building high quality network equipment that scales is tough. And it's tougher than most people realize. And your other point on the cloud providers as well, they will provide a basic level of functionality. You know, AWS network equipment doesn't work in Azure. And Azure stuff doesn't work in Google, and Google doesn't work in AWS. And so you do need a third party to come in and act as almost the cloud middleware that can connect all those things together with a consistent set of policies. And that's what Cisco does really well. They did that, you know back when they were founded with routing protocols and you can think this is just an extension of what they're doing just up at the cloud layer. >> Excellent. Okay, Zeus, we're going to leave it there. Thanks to my guest today, Zeus Kerravala. Great analysis as always. Would love to have you back. Check out ZKresearch.com to reach him. Thank you again. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Now, remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Braking Analysis" podcast, and you can connect on Twitter at DVallante or email me David.Vallante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for the comments on LinkedIn. Check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> In 2009, Cisco made a major announcement in the form of UCS. It was designed to attack the IT labor problem. Cisco recognized that, data center professionals were struggling to be agile and provide the types of infrastructure services that lines of business were demanding for the modern applications of that day. The value proposition was all about, simplifying infrastructure deployment and management and by combining networking compute and storage with virtualization and a management layer, Cisco changed the game for running applications on premises and the era of converged infrastructure was born. Now fast forward a dozen years, and a lot has changed. The cloud has gone mainstream, forcing new requirements on organizations to bridge their on-prem environments to public clouds and manage workloads across clouds. Now to address this challenge, Cisco earlier this month, announced a series of offerings, that meaningfully expands its original vision, to support the more demanding requirements of today's dev sec ops teams. In particular Cisco, with this announcement is enabling customers to deploy a full stack cloud-like operating model that leverages modern platforms such as Kubernetes, new integrations and advanced tooling to bring automation, visibility and better security for both hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Now the underpinning of this solution, is a new UCS architecture called the X series. Cisco claims this new system gives customers a trusted platform for the next decade to support their hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Gents, great to see you, welcome. >> Hey, thank you. Good to be here. >> Thanks for having a us Dave. I appreciate. >> My pleasure. Looking forward to this. So look, we've seen the X series announcement and it looks to be quite a new approach. What are the critical aspects of the X series that you want people to understand? Maybe James, and you can take that. >> Sure I think that, you know, overall, there is a lot of change coming in the marketplace, right? We're seeing we're looking at and we're seeing from a technology standpoint, a significant amount of change. Look at CPU's and GPU's, the power draw alone is becoming, you know, it basically at the trajectory, it is, it may be untenable for some, you know, of the current configurations that people are consuming, right? So some of these current architectures just can't deal with that, right? Or at least they can't deal with what's coming in the future. We're also seeing the relevance of other types of architectures like maybe arm to start to become something that our customers want to take advantage of, right? Or maybe want to see how that scale fits into their environment on a totally different level. At the same time, the fabrics are really evolving at lightning speed here, right? So we're seeing PCI express, we've gone from gen three to gen four, gen five is coming in the very near future. We're layering on top of that, things like CXL to take that, that fabric to the next level for capabilities and be able to do things that we couldn't do before. To connect things together, we couldn't do before. Beyond that, we probably are just a few years away from even more exciting developments in the fabric space around some of the high performance low latency fabrics that are that are again on the drawing board today just around the corner. Take that and you, you look at the kind of the evolution of the the admin, right? So we're seeing the admin developer emerge. No longer is this just a guy who's sitting in front of a dashboard and managing systems, keeping them up and down, we're now seeing a whole class of developers that are also administrators, right? So all of this together is starting to push us well beyond what human scale really can manage, what human scale can consume. So, there's a lot of change coming and I think that we're taking a look at that and realizing that something like X series has to be able to deal with that change and the challenges that it brings, but also and do so in a simple manner that we can allow automation orchestration and some of these new capabilities to enhance what our customers can do, not to drown them in technology. >> You know, that taught, that's kind of interesting what James was saying about beyond human scale. I mean, I think my little narrative upfront, it was sort of, hey, we recognize as an IT labor problem. We're going to address that. And it really wasn't about massive scale back then, it is now. We really what we've learned from the cloud guys, right? >> Definitely. I mean, people are moving from pets to cattle to now with containers, they're saying that it's mosquitoes, right? Cause they're so ephemeral, they come and go and on a single host, you could have, you know, hundreds if not thousands of containers. And so the application environment has influenced the infrastructure design and really changed the role of the infrastructure operator to one that necessitates automation, necessitates operations at scale, even on prem everyone's trying to operate in that cloud like model and they're trying to bridge, the big challenge I see is, they're trying to bridge their existing environment big monolithic applications they've got on-prem with those data lakes that they built around them over the past decade, but they're also trying to follow their developers as they go out into the public cloud and innovate there. That's really where the nexus of all the application innovation is. So the IT teams who are already strapped for resources it's not like their budgets are going up every year, are now taking on a new front out in the cloud while they're still trying to maintain the systems that they've built with on-prem. That's the challenge. >> Yeah that's really the hard part and where some of the innovation here is, is anybody that lives in an old house knows that connecting old to new is very challenging much more challenging than building from scratch. But James I wonder if we'd come back to the to the architecture of the X series and what's really unique about it and what's in it for your customers? >> Yes, absolutely. So we're, when were looking at at kind of redesigning this thing from the ground up, we recognized that, you know from a timing standpoint, we're sitting at a place with the development of future fabrics and some of these other technologies that we finally have the opportunity to hit the timing perfectly to start to do composability right. So we've heard a lot of noise, you know in the market for the last several years about composability and how that's going to be the salvation or change the game here. But at the end of the day, the technology hasn't been there in those offerings, right? So we're sitting at the edge of some of the development of those technologies that are going to allow us to do that. And what we've done with X series, is we've taken a construct that we call the UCS X fabric, which is the ability to consume these technologies today as like a effectively a chassis fabric that can allow us to connect resources together within the chassis and future external to the chassis. But it also allows us to take advantage of the change in fabric that's coming. So as fabrics evolve, as we see new technologies like CXL and the PCI express gen five and beyond, come into play here and eventually physical technologies like Silicon Photonix, those are constructs that are going to allow our customers to do some amazing things and we have the construct to be able to consume those. Our goal here is like, to effectively look out at these disruptive technologies on the horizon and make sure that they're not disrupting our customers that we give our customers the ability to disrupt their competitors and to disrupt their markets, but by consuming those technologies in an easy way. >> You know, you didn't use the term future-proof. And I usually don't like that phrase because a lot of times people go that's future-proof and I'm like, well, what's future proof? Well, it's really fast. Well, okay. And in two years, it's going to be, you know really slow compared to everything else. But what you, what you just laid out is an architecture that's really taking advantage of some of these new capabilities that are driving latency down. So that's so, thank you for that. Now, Todd I get how the X series is going to enable customers you know, today I just mentioned the future but how does it play into Cisco's hybrid cloud vision? >> Well I mean, our customers aren't looking for, you know, point solutions or bolt on layers of software to manage across the hybrid cloud landscape. That's the fundamental challenge and so what we're doing with intersite, if you really think about all the systems that we have in our portfolio, like X series, really it's just extensions of our inner site platform. And there we're bridging the gaps between fundamental infrastructure prem, with all of those services that you need to optimize workloads and infrastructure, both in that on-prem environment but also out in the public cloud and even moving up the stack now into serverless. So we know that customers again are trying to bolt together a cohesive environment that allows them to manage those existing workloads on prem but also support the innovation going on out in the cloud and to do that, you have to have services to manage Kubernetes. You need hooks into modern tool chains like a Hashi corks Terraform, we did that a few months back and we recently brought in something we call our service mesh manager that came out of an acquisition of a Bonzai cloud. So what we're doing is, we're kind of spanning that entire spectrum from physical infrastructure, to the workload and that could be extracted in any number of ways either in containers or containers around VMs or bare metal running applications run on bare metal or just virtual machine applications encapsulation. So, you got all these different modalities that customers are going to run applications in and it's our intent to create a platform here that supports all of them, both on their on-prem environment and also all the resources they're managing out in the cloud. So that's a big deal for us. You know, one thing I want to go back to the X series for a second, something James mentioned, right? Is you know as we see subsystems in computing, start to decompose and break apart, you know, we have intersite as the mechanism to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and that's really, I think composability and district's options bar, but that's okay. But so I'll read it together. And like James said, you know be able to take on whatever fabrics, low latency fabrics, ultra low latency fabrics we need in coming years to sew these systems together, we're kind of breaking a barrier that didn't, that wasn't, you know people have trouble breaking through in the past, right? And that's this idea of true infrastructure as code or true software defined infrastructure. Cause now we're talking about being able to apply policy and automation, to the actual construct of a server. How do you build that thing to the needs of the workload? And so if you talk to an SRE or a developer today and you say infrastructure, they're thinking of Kubernetes cluster, but ultimately we want to push that boundary or that frontier between the world software to find it abstracted as far down in the infrastructure, as we can. And with intersite and X fabric and X series, we're taking it all the way down to the individual drive or CPU or ultimately breaking memory apart and sewing that back together. So it's kind of exciting time for us, cause really, pushing that frontier of what is software defined further and further down into the infrastructure and that just gives people a lot more flexibility in what they build. >> So I want to play something back to you and see if it resonates. Essentially, I look at what you just said is you're building a layer across my on-prem, whatever public cloud across clouds at the conventionally, you know, get to the edge, but let's hold off on that, let's park that for now. But that layer obstructs the underlying technical complexity and allows that infrastructure to be, you said programmable, infrastructure is code essentially. So that's one of my other questions, it's like, how programmable is this infrastructure, you know, today and in the future? But is that idea of an abstraction layer kind of how you're thinking about hybrid and multi-cloud? >> It is in terms of the infrastructure that customers are going to run on prem right in the public cloud the cloud providers are already abstracting that for them. And so what we want to do is bring that same type of public cloud experience to managing infrastructure on prem. So being able to have pools of resources that you allocate out to workloads, shifted as things change. So it's absolutely a cloud-like approach to on-prem infrastructure and you know, one of the things I like to say is, you know, friends don't let friends, build their own private cloud platforms from scratch, right? We're productizing this, we're bringing it as a cohesive system that customers don't need to engineer on their own. They can focus on their operations and James actually, he's a pilot, and one of the things he observed about Intersight a couple of years ago was, this idea of Intersight as a co-pilot and kind of, you know, adding a person to your team almost when you have intersite in your data center, because some very, what feels like rudimentary things are incredibly impactful day-to-day for our customers. So we have recommendation engines. If it, if like, you know, maybe it says some interplay between bios and firmware and operating system and we know that there's an issue there rather than letting customers stumble upon that on their own we're going to flag it, show them the correction, go implement it for them. So that it starts to feel a lot more like what they're accustomed to in a public cloud setting where the system has some intelligence baked in, the system is kind of covering them and watching their back and acting like a co-pilot day-to-day operations. >> Okay, so I get that, you know, the cloud guys will abstract the complexity you guys are focused on prem, but is it, so my question then is multi-cloud across clouds because we have some cloud providers, you know you're partners with Google they do some things with Antho, so I know Microsoft with Ark, but even near-term. Should we think about Cisco as playing that role of my, across cloud, you know, partner if you will? >> Absolutely. You know, cloud agnosticism is core to our approach because we know that, you know if you dial the clock way back to the early odds, right? When cloud first started emerging it was kind of an efficiency play. And you had folks like Nicholas Carr, right? The author that they put out the big switch, kind of envisioning a world where there'd be this ultimate consolidation to maybe one or two or three cloud platforms worldwide. But what we're seeing, you know we had data sovereignty kind of emerge over the past decade but even the past year or two, it's now becoming issues of actual cloud sovereignty. So you have governments in Australia and in India and in Europe actually asserting control over the cloud providers and services that can be used by their public sector organizations and so that's just leading to actually cloud fragmentation. It's not nearly as monolithic of future as we thought it would be. It's a lot of clouds and so as customers want to move around geographically or if they want to go harvest innovation that maybe Google is really good at something like machine vision, or they want to use AWS or Azure for different applications that they're going to go build. We're seeing customers really being put in a place where they're going to deal with multiple cloud providers and the data supports that. So it's definitely our approach especially on the networking technology side to make it very easy for our customers to go out and connect these different clouds and not have to repeat the integration process every time they want to go, you know, start using another public cloud provider. So that's absolutely our strategies to be very agnostic and build everything in mind for customers they're going to be using in multiple providers. >> Thank you for that touch. So James, I want to come back and talk a little bit about sort of your competitive posture here. I mean, you guys, when you made the announcement, I inferred that you were feeling like you were in a pretty good position relative to the competition that you were putting forth, not just you know, core infrastructure in hardware and software but also all these other components around it that we talked about, observability extending out to the, you know, beyond the four walls of my data center, et cetera. But talk a little bit about why you think this gives you such competitive advantage in the marketplace. >> Well I mean, I think first of all, back to where Todd was going as well, is that, you know if you think about trying to be, to work in this hybrid cloud world, that we're clearly living in, the idea of burrowing features and functions as far down the stack as possible, doesn't make a lot of sense, right? So intersite is a great example. We want to manage and we want to orchestrate across clouds, right? So how are we going to have our management and infrastructure services buried into the chassis, down at the very lowest level, that doesn't make sense. So we elevated our, you know, our operating model to the cloud, right? And that's how we manage across clouds from the cloud. So, building a system and really we've done this from the ground up with X series, building a system that is able to take advantage of all these two technologies. And you mentioned, you know, how being future proof was probably you know, a derogatory term almost and I agree with you completely. I think we're future ready. Like, we're ready to embrace it because we're not trying to say that nothing is going to change beyond what we've already thought of, we're saying, bring it on. We're saying, bring on that change because we're ready for it. We've we can accommodate change. We, we're not saying that the technology we have today is to going to ride us for 10 years, we're saying,, we're ready for the next 10 years of change. Bring it. We can do that in a simple way. That is, you know, I think, you know going to give us the versatility and the simplicity to allow the technology to go beyond human scale without having to you know drown our customers in administrative duties, right? So that co-pilot that Todd mentioned is going to be able to take on a lot more of the work, just like an airplane where you know, the pilot has functionality that he has to absolutely be part of and those are the our developers, right? We want those admin developers to develop, to build things and to do things and not get bogged down in the minutiae that exists. So I think competitively, you know, our architecture top to bottom, you know, all the way up the stack, all the way to the bottom is unique and it is focused on not just the rear view mirror but what's coming in the future. >> So my takeaway there is that, okay, I get it. The new technologies will come along but this architecture is the architecture for the decade. You're not going to have to redo the architecture in a few years. That's really the key point here. Todd, I'll give you last word might just taking some notes here and takeaways that I heard, I heard upfront. Chip diversity really take advantage of all the innovations that are coming out. You're ready for that. You're kind of blurring the lines between blade and rack, giving some optionality there. Scale is a big theme. I mean, the cloud has brought that in and, you know people want to scale, they don't want to be, you know provisioning lawns all day and they won't be able to scale if that's what their job is. Developer friendly, particularly as it relates to infrastructure as code. And you've got a roadmap. So Todd, that's my summary. I'll give you the last word. >> No, it's really good. I mean, you hit it, right. We're thinking about this holistic operating environment that our customers are building for hybrid cloud and we're pre-engineering that environment for them. So our Intersight platform, all of our systems that connect to that, are really built to tackle that hybrid environment from end to end, and with systems like X series, we're giving them a more simple, efficient landing spot for their workloads on prem but crucially it's fully integrated with this hybrid cloud platform so as they have workloads on prem and workloads in the cloud, it's kind of a transparent environment between those two, between those two, two worlds there. So bringing it together so that our customers don't have to build it themselves. >> Excellent. Well, gents thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the details of this announcement. Congratulations, I know how much work and thought goes into these things, really looking forward to its progress and adoption in the marketplace. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for time. >> And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe. It's theCube. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay we're here with Kaustubh Das, Who is the senior vice president and general manager of cloud and compute at Cisco and Vijay Venugopal who is the senior director of product management for cloud compute at Cisco KD, Vijay, Good to see you guys. Welcome. >> Great to see you Dave. >> Good to be here. >> KD, let's talk about cloud. You- you and I last time we were face-to-face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud. And I always say to people, look Cisco is not a hyperscaler but the big public cloud players they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost- actually over a hundred billion dollars last year on CapEx, the big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about Hybrid Cloud. So help us understand the strategy there and maybe how you can leverage that build out and importantly, what a customer is telling you they want out of Hybrid Cloud. >> Yeah, no, that's, that's that's a perfect question to start with Dave. So yes, so the hyperscalers have invested heavily building out their assets. That's a great, a lot of innovation coming from that space um there is also great innovation- sort of innovation coming from open source. And, and that's another source of a of a gift in fact to the IT community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well how do I, in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage in terms of my contemporary workloads, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DevOps and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud that is built an open source that is built internally to me, and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Cisco's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest, most powerful platform to deliver Hybrid Cloud. And that platform is Intersight. We've been investing in Intersight, it's a it's a SaaS service. Intersight delivers to them that bridge between the states of today, their workload of today the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility that's needed for the future, the embracing of cloud native of new paradigms of DevOps models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an opensource and bridging those two is what Intersight has been doing. That's kind of, that's kind of, the crux of our strategy of course we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any- any version of that whether that is on prem in the Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud and so forth. >> But, but, but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today the Intersight is really a linchpin of that strategy. Is it not? >> It really is. And may take a second to, to to really familiarize those who don't know Intersight with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we, we built it ground up to be an immensely scalable SAS super simple hybrid cloud platform. And it's a platform that provides a slew of services inherently And then on top of that, there's suites of services there's suites of services that are tied to infrastructure automation, Cisco as well as Cisco partners, the suites of services that have nothing to do with Cisco products from a hardware perspective. And it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and Intersight and its suite of services continue to kind of increase in, in pace and velocity of delivery. Well just, over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things. We'll go a little bit deeper into some of those but they span everything from infrastructure automation to Kubernetes, and delivering Kubernetes that service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate how much it's costing into your on prem state into your workloads and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling, with both Cisco as well as non-Cisco assets. And then, and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day the job of IT is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient. And that includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this then do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation like infrastructures code and so forth. So it includes a self service that, so that spanned that but Intersight, the world's simplest Hybrid Cloud platform rapidly evolving, rapidly delivering new services. And we will talk about some more of those today. >> Great. Thank you, KD Vijay let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with HashiCorp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre-COVID, I ma- in my predictions post, I said Hashi was a name to watch, our data partners ETR You look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi-cloud discussion and as well they're attractive to customers they have open source offerings, You can very easily experiment smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever you can plug right in not a big complicated migration. So very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? >> Absolutely Dave And spot on every single thing that you said. Let me just start by paraphrasing what our mission statement is in the cloud and compute group, right? Our mission statement is to enable a cloud operating model for Hybrid Cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation, orchestration, and observability across your Hybrid Cloud IT operations. Now we- so developers and applications teams get a great amount of agility in public clouds. And we are on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And Intersight is a key key platform and linchpin to enable that kind of operations cloud- like operations in the private clouds. And a key- as you rightly said- HashiCorp is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of Infrastructure as Code and in telephone, they have the world's number one Infrastructure as Code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with HasiCorp to integrate Intersight with HashiCorp's Terraform to bring the benefits of Infrastructure as Code to the two hybrid cloud operations. And we entered into a very tight integration and a partnership where we allow in our developers DevOps teams and infrastructure administrators to allow the use of Infrastructure as Code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private cloud. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed IAC to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we're very, very happy and proud to be partnering with HasiCorp on that iniative >> Yeah, Terraform gets very high marks from customers. The- a lot of value there the Intersight integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native. KD was sort of mentioning before you got the- the core apps. You want to protect those make sure they're enterprise grade but they got to be cool as well for developers you're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this cloud native trend? What are the moves you are making in this regard? >> I mean, cloud native is the is one of the paramount IT trends of today. And you're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architectures in all modern applications now cloud native has become synonymous with Kubernetes these days. And Kubernetes has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we've created a brand new SaaS delivered Kubernetes service that is integrated with Intersight. We call it the Intersight Kubernetes service for IKS and this just g'd a little over one month ago. Now what Intersight Kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered Kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure. It could be a third-party infrastructure or it could even be public cloud. But think of it as Kubernetes anywhere Delivered as SaaS managed from Intersight. So very powerful capability that we've just released into Intersight to enable the power of Kubernetes and cloud native to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important announcement Because we have today, announced the brand new Cisco service Mesh Mangager The Cisco service mesh manager which is available as an extension to IKS or to Intersight basically we see service meshes as being the future of networking, right? In the past, we had layer two networking and layer three networking. And now with service meshes application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age, very differently how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be very developer friendly and developer centric And so what we've done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the Service Mesh Manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking to the consumers like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud, and we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and delivered the Cisco service mesh manager as an extension to IKS that brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development teams. >> Got it. Thank you, Vijay. And so KD let's-let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >> Absolutely. So a couple of things to close on first of all, Intersight is the simplest most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that- that cloud operating model that that Vijay talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it's SAS, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encourage anybody Who's not familiar with it to try it out. And anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again because there are probably services in there that you didn't notice, or didn't know last time you looked at it because we were moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'll close with is we- we've been talking about this bridge. This kind of bridging- bridging your- your on prem your open source, your- your cloud estates. And it's so important to- to make that mental leap because in p- in past generation we used to talk about integrating technologies together. And then with public cloud we started talking about move to public cloud. But it's really, how do we integrate? How do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyperscale and everything they're doing to innovate super fast. All of that innovation has come from open source. All of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world, including Cisco how do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud ops team if you're an IT ops team, your job is to deliver an outcome. And our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. So that's the mission we're on. And we're hoping that everybody is as excited as we are about how simple they made that. >> Great. Thank you a lot, a lot in this announcement today. I appreciate you guys coming back on and helping us unpack some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. >> Thank you Dave >> Thank you >> And thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCube the leader in tech event coverage. (Closing 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. Our third year of the show, over 17,000 in attendance between the Cisco people, their large partner ecosystem, and the customers, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for this segment is Dave Vellante. John Furrier's scouring the show for all of the news at the event, and joining us, we have two first time guests on the program, first, sitting to my left is Patrick Smith, who is the field CTO for EMEA with Pure Storage. Sitting to his left is Eric Greffier, who is the managing director of EMEAR specialists with Cisco, so you have a slightly larger region than Patrick does, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Patrick: Great to be here. >> All right, so, we know this show, we were talking that broad ecosystem, and of course Cisco in the data center group has very strong storage partnerships, highlighted by their converged infrastructure stacks. I wrote my research many many years ago, Cisco's brilliant job was when they entered the server market, they made sure that that fragmented storage ecosystem, they made partnerships across the board. And of course, when Pure's ascendancy with the flash era made the stack, so helping to paint those data centers orange with your Cisco partnership, so Patrick, give us the update here, 2020, what's interesting and important to know about Pure Storage and Cisco customer base? >> You know, we continue to see significant adoption of FlashStack, our converged infrastructure with Cisco. Driving just great interest and great growth, both for Pure and for Cisco with the UCS platform, and the value that the customers see in FlashStack, bringing together storage, networking and compute together with overall automation of the stack, and that really gives customers fantastic time to value. And that's what they're looking for in this day and age. >> All right, and Eric, what differentiates the partnership with Pure, versus, as you said, you do work with many of the storage companies out there. >> Well, we had a baby together, it was called FlashStack, and it was couple of years ago now, and as you said, I think the key element for us is really to have those CVDs, those Cisco Validated Designs together, and FlashStack was a great addition to our existing partnership at that time, talking about a couple of years ago. And of course, with the flash technology of Pure, we've seen the demand that we'd say going and going, and it has been amazing, amazing trajectory together. >> But talk a little bit more about the CVDs, the different use cases that you're seeing. You don't have to go through all 20, but maybe pick a couple of your favorite children. >> Well, just to make sure that people understand what CVD means, it's Cisco Validated Design, and this is kind of an outcome in the form of a document, which is available for customers and partners, which is the outcome of the partnership from R&D to R&D, which is just telling customers and partners what they need to order and have in it to fit all of this together for a specific business outcome. And the reason why we have multiple CVDs, is we have one CVD per use case. So the more use cases we have together, the more the CVD's precise, and you just have to follow the CVD design principles. Of course, the later swarms, and maybe Patrick can say a word, but we've been of course doing things regarding analytics and AI, because this is a big demand right now, so maybe Patrick, you want to say a word on this. >> Yeah, you guys were first with the AI and bringing AI and storage together with your partnership with Nvidia, so maybe double down on that. >> The FlashBlade was our move into building a storage platform for AI and model analytics, and we've seen tremendous success with that in lots of different verticals. And so with Cisco we launched FlashStack for AI, which brings together FlashBlade networking, and Cisco's fantastic compute platform with capability for considerable scale of Nvidia GPUs. So an in-a-box capability to really deliver fast time to market solutions for the growing world of analytics and modern AI, people want quick insight into the vast amounts of data we have, and so FlashStack for AI is really important for us being able to deliver as part of the Cisco ecosystem, and provide customers with a platform for success. >> What's happening with modernization, generally, but specifically in Europe, obviously Cisco, long history in Europe, Pure, you've got a presence here, good presence, but obviously much newer. Larger proportion, far larger proportion is in North America, so it's a real opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing in terms of modernization of infrastructure, and apps in the European community? >> Modernization I think is particularly important, and it's more and more seen under the guise of digital transformation, because investing in infrastructure just doesn't get the credit that sometimes it deserves. But the big push there is really all around simpler infrastructure, easier management, and the push for automation. Organizations don't want to have large infrastructure support teams who are either installing or managing in a heavy touch way, their environments, and so the push towards automation, not just at the infrastructure layer, but all the way up the stack, is really key. And you know, we were talking earlier, behind us we have the DevNet sessions here, all about how customers of Cisco and by correlation Pure, can really optimize the management to their environment, use technology like Intersight, like Ansible and others, to really minimize the overhead of managing technology, deliver services faster to customers and be more agile, in this always-on world that we live in, there's no time to really add a human to the cycle of managing infrastructure. >> I think we've been very proud over the years because this notion of converged infrastructure, which was, the promise was to simplify and modernize the data centers, before it was like, "Everything needs to get connected to anything," and coming was this notion of a pod, everything converged, "We've done the job for you, mister customer, "just think about adding some pod." This has been the promise for the last 10 years, and we've been very proud, almost to have created this market, but it wouldn't have been possible without the partnership with the storage players, and with Pure, we've been one step further in terms of simplifying things for customers. >> I love the extension you're talking about, because absolutely converged infrastructure was supposed to deliver on that simplicity, and it was, let's think of the entire rack as a unit of how we manage it, but with today's applications, with the speed of change happening in the environment, we've gone beyond human speed, and so therefore if we don't have the automation that you were talking about, we can't keep up with what the business needs to be able to do there. >> Yeah, that's what it's all about, it's the rapid rate of change. Whether it's business services, whether it's supporting developers in the developer environment, more and more our customers are becoming software development organizations, their developers are a key resource, and making them as efficient as possible is really important, so being able to quickly spin up development environments, new environments for developers, using snapshot technology, giving them the latest sets of data to test their applications on, is really central to enabling and empowering the developer. >> You know, you talk about Cisco's play and kind of creation of the converged infrastructure, Mark, and I think that's fair, by the way. Others may claim it, but I think the mantle goes to you. But there were two friction points, or headwinds, that we pointed out early in the day, the first was organizational, the servers team, the storage team, the network team didn't speak together, then the practitioner told us one day, "Look, you want to solve that problem, "put it in and watch what happens." 'Cause if you try to figure out the organization you'll never get there, and that sort of took care of itself. The other was the channel. The channel likes things separate, they can add value, they have this sort of box selling mentality, so I wonder if you could update us on what the mindset is in the channel, and how that's evolved. >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think the channel actually really likes the simplicity of a converged infrastructure to sell, it's a very simple message, and it really empowers the channel to take, to your point about organization, they have the full stack, all in one sellable item, and so they don't have to fight for the different components, it's one consistent unit that they sell as a whole, and so I think it simplifies the channel, and actually, we find that customers are actively seeking out, it's shown by our growth with FlashStack that customers are actually seeking out the channel partners who are selling FlashStack. >> Yeah, and do you think the channel realizes, "Wow, we really do have to go up the stack, "add more value, do things like partner with"? >> Well for most of the partners, they were heavily specialized on storage or compute or network, so for most of them, supporting the converged infrastructure was to be able to put a foot into another market, which was an expansion for them, which was part number one. Part number two, maybe the things that we've been missing, because since the beginning we had APIs around all those platforms. I don't believe in the early days, I'm talking about five years from now, that they got, that they could really really build something upon the converged infrastructure. Now, if you go through the DevNet area here at Cisco Live, you will see that I think this is the time now for them to understand, and really build new services on top of it, so I believe the value for the channel is pretty obvious now, more than ever. >> Well yeah, it's a great point, you don't usually hear converged infrastructure and infrastructure as code in the same conversation, but the maturation of the platforms underneath are bringing things together. >> They really are, in the same way that IT organizations are freeing up more time to focus up the stack on automation and added value, the same is true of the partners. It's interesting the corollary between the two. >> So I have a question on your act two, so what got us here the last 10 years, both firms were disruptors. Cisco came in and disrupted the compute space, it was misunderstood, "Cisco getting into servers, "that'll never work!" "Well, really not getting into servers, "we're changing the game." "Ah, okay," 10 years later. Pure, all-flash, really created some havoc in the industry, injected a ton of flash into the data center, practically drove a truck through the legacy business. Okay, so very successful. What's act two for you guys, what do you envision, disruptors, are you more incrementalists, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. >> I start, Patrick. Probably for us, phase two is what you heard yesterday morning, I think Liz Anthony did a great speech regarding Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, sorry for the name, this is a bit long, but what it means is now we truly connect the infrastructure to the application performance, and the fact that we can place and discuss about converged infrastructure but in the context of what truly matters for customers, which is application, this is the first time ever you're going to see such amount of R&D put into bringing the two worlds together. So this is just the beginning, but I think this was probably for me yesterday one of the most important announcement ever. And by the way, Pure is coming with this announcement, so if you as a customer buy Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, you'll get everything you need to know about Pure and if you have to move things around the storage area, you know the tool will be doing it for you. So we are really the two of us in this announcement, so Patrick, if you want to? >> No, I mean as Eric mentioned, Intersight's important for Cisco, it's important for us, we're very proud to be early integrators as a third party into Intersight to allow that simple management, but you know, as you talk about the future, we were viewed as disruptors when we first came to market with flash array, and we consider still ourselves to be disruptors and innovators, and the amount of our revenue that we invest in innovation, in what is a really focused product portfolio, I think is showing benefits, and you've seen the announcements over the last six months or so with FlashArray//C, bringing all the benefits of flash to tier two applications, and just the interest that that has generated is huge. In the world of networking with NVMe, we have a fabric in RoCEv2, just increasing the performance for business applications that will have fantastic implications for things like SAP, time and performance-critical databases, and then what we announced with direct memory with adding SCM as a read cache onto flash array as well. Really giving customers investment protection for what they bought from us already, because they can, as you well know, Evergreen gives customers an asset that continues to appreciate in value, which is completely the opposite. >> And you're both sort of embracing that service consumption model, I mean Cisco's becoming a very large proportion of your business, you guys have announced some actual straight cloud plays, you've built an aray inside of AWS, which is pretty innovative, so. >> Yes, and as well as the cloud play with Cloud Block Store in AWS, there's Pure as a service, which takes that cloud-like consumption model and allows a customer to run it in their own data center without owning the assets, and that's really interesting, because customers have got used to the cloud-like consumption model, and paying as an OpEx rather than CapEx, and so bringing that into their own facility, and only paying for the data you have written, really does change the game in terms of how they consume and think about their storage environments. >> Patrick, we'd just love to get your viewpoint, you've been talking to a lot of customers this week, you said you've been checking out the DevNet zone, for people that didn't make it to the show here, what have they been missing, what would their peers be telling them in the hallway conversations? >> There's a huge amount as we've been talking about, there's a huge amount on automation, and actually we see it as we go into customers, the number of people we're now talking to who are developers but not developers developing business applications but developers developing code for managing infrastructure is key, and you see it all around the DevNet zone. And then, the focus on containers, I've been talking about it for a long time, and containers is so important for enterprises going forward. We have a great play in that space, and I think as we roll forward, the next three to five years, containers is just going to be the important technology that will be prevalent across enterprises large and small. >> Dave: Yeah, we agree. >> Eric and Patrick, thank you so much for giving us the update, congratulations on all the progress and definitely look forward to keeping an eye on your progress. >> Thanks very much. >> All right, Dave Vellante and I will be back with much more here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Man: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2020 (upbeat music) brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBEs live coverage of Cisco live 2020 here in Barcelona. It's our second full day of coverage. We're actually doing about three and a little bit more days of coverage I'm Stu Miniman my co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante, John Furrier is also in the house. A lot of interesting announcements at Cisco. We've been watching for the three years we've been at Cisco Live. Really Cisco getting much deeper into the software space. Of course we're here in the DevNet Zone where we're watching the changing workforce go even more towards developers. Hardware and software, living together nicely and to help us dig into that topic, we'll welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Todd Brannon, who is the Senior Director of Computing with Cisco. Todd, thanks so much for joining us. >> It's a pleasure to be here -- >> Dave: Good to see you man. >> Pleasure All right, so let's tee up what I was just talking about there. You know, there are certain companies that think about Cisco in the boxes and ports, we know the future is more software is eating the world developers of course are the new kingmakers. >> That's right. And Cisco has been moving on that journey, so bring us inside a little bit the announcements that you've been working on and where your team's seeing where customers are going. >> It's all about the application. So the AppDynamics team, they did some surveys. They found that the average consumers, 7,000 people worldwide, they surveyed them, average consumers using 34 apps a day or 34 digital experiences and so if you think about applications and infrastructure, we've always talked about applications infrastructure, right People don't buy a server to use as a coat warmer. It's always going to be running some sort of workload. But I think in the past, there wasn't as visceral connection between what the operations and infrastructure teams were running. If it was CRM or ERP, it wasn't as visceral connections you have today when it say the hotels interface to their customers in terms of booking or getting that early checkout, right? So the application experience has become much more personal, much more visceral and really incredibly critical to the business. And so that puts enormous pressure on the infrastructure teams that are a big part of making sure that application experience is a good one, right? Response time or is the app even available? So for us it's how do we start to begin to bring that infrastructure operations team into the fight with the teams that are thinking about applications, which oftentimes when using different tool sets or sort of some operational silos though. So this announcement is all about trying to break down some of those silos all in service of that application experience. >> Right, and of course AppDynamics was a large bet by Cisco. We've seen them in a lot of a Cloud environment, very much tied to the application. One of the announcements this week is taking Cisco Intersight which first time I ran across it was in things like UCS in other Cisco gear there. Help us understand how those are going together now and how should we be thinking about Intersight today in 2020? >> We should definitely be thinking about it differently cause you're right. Here to fore, Intersight has been focused on our computing infrastructure, HyperFlex UCS and, you know, when we started with UCS, we took management out of devices, we moved it into the network fabric and then three years ago with Intersight, we moved our management control plane into the Cloud. So think of Muraki but for computing and but it was always around Cisco and our infrastructure. Now we're taking two really big steps. One is we're integrating a product that we've had called our Workload Optimizer into Intersight. And that Workload Optimizer software has always been inherently a heterogeneous approach. So databases, Cloud management platforms, all the Hypervisors, Operating System, storage partnerships. We've been able to do telemetry and interdependency mapping with that in a heterogeneous way for some time. So now it breaks Intersight out of being more of a Cisco focus to really the reality which is a heterogeneous Data Center environment. Second thing is that, now we've done a data integration with AppD, and so the beauty of that is AppD best-in-class and understanding the interdependencies, those complex web of interdependencies at the application tier. Our Workload Optimizer best in class to understanding infrastructure interdependencies. And now we correlate those and you get a top to bottom view. Again, they kind of get you to where you can see what's an application, how's it performing from a business context with AppD but been able to connect it all the way down into your Cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Make that correlation and ensure that your infrastructure is doing the right things for the app. >> So the application portfolio has evolved dramatically over (laughs) the last 20 years, right? >> Yep. It used to be, you know, and it still is the crown jewels of the organization, but you'd have a mission critical App that's insurance company would have a claims app and then it'd be a zillion other applications around it, but the claims and the sales apps were really the key and whatever happened in the other apps, okay, fine. Now you have developers, you have Shadow IT came in and just do saying everybody's a software company and you had this explosion of apps that are all sucking resources from the network. So the traffic has changed (laughs) and that just brings massive complexity. So wonder if you could talk about how that trend has affected network traffic. >> You hit it, it's the interdependency. So, you know, it's been estimated that the typical enterprise application until very recently needed to talk to four to eight other enterprise applications to function properly. We're seeing that number jumped to 20 in a very near future. And it's because applications to your point are becoming much more modular, right? The development environment in the Cloud where all the innovation is occurring is inherently distributed Microservices, Serverless or functions-based in many cases. So all of the things that conspire together to create that experience, like an insurance claim on your phone, all of those interdependent components, it's become much more distributed, much more complex. And the key thing is underneath each of those components is going to sometimes be different infrastructure managed by different teams with different tooling. And so it's become almost impossible for it teams to correlate all that and manage it. Especially as it becomes, you know, higher velocity. >> Right, it got to. Yeah, Todd, I would like you to put a point on that, cause you've talked about applications are becoming much more distributed. I want to hear what you're hearing from customers. Cause sometimes it's like, "Well, I think of this application as either one thing", or this collection of things that I put one place or another. We're starting to see some customers that well, I start tears things apart and therefore it becomes developed hybrid in nature and people often complain it is, "It's hybrid, it's moldy", it's all this other things. Well, it's a real difference between "I had something in my Data Center and a piece of it is in a Public Cloud", versus, "Oh, Hey, I'm just going to throw a thing in whatever Public Cloud I want to use today or tomorrow". >> I think that's an incredibly important distinction. So multi-Cloud is the notion of, "Hey, I want to be able to consume innovation from different Cloud providers. But a hybrid application is really this idea of Public Cloud or Microservice connecting back to monolith on-prem side and I think it's still very, very rare that people are building applications that tie together multiple Public Cloud services to your point but it's very much more common for people to be saying, "Hey, I've gone out and built something innovative, a new customer experience out in the Public Cloud, but now I have to connect it". Data gravity is real, right? And GDPR here in Europe, right? So there are very real reasons why applications and data are staying on-prem, but they need to connect it out to this Cloud innovation. And that's what this announcement was all about. How do we give people a tool set? Because if you think about it, you're going to have infrastructure powering these pieces in the Cloud, and on-prem, how do you monitor that? How do you ensure that you're not over provisioning or under provisioning? It's a very complex problem. >> Well, it's critical because the Cloud brings scale. You know it used to be, "Okay, we're going to deploy a website. Hey the websites, it's important, it's slow, let's figure it out." Now you have these dozens and hundreds of applications coming in, many if not, most of which are customer facing. So if there's a problem, it's really escalated and the Cloud helps scale that problem, you know, massively. So Todd, help us understand sort of ... in the keynote yesterday there was a sort of the circular diagram of the visualization, the insight and the action. So give us a little sort of insight as to how this works. >> Coupled together. >> What's the secret sauce underneath it? >> So the secret sauce is correlating data, right? So telemetry data is something that we've always collected in the context of either infrastructure or applications. So with AppDynamics, we have a platform that based in the industry, it going out and figuring out all the independencies between an application and all of those services that are there. And then we have all of the similar things on the infrastructure side. And so what we've done here is correlate those data sets. So we're using the API as a feed data between AppDynamics and Cisco Intersight, which is the infrastructure side of the equation. And we create a data Lake now that we can then be able to apply analytics to. And so we can start to think about the Data Center as a demand supply equation and how do I want to match up my applications with the business context intact from AppD to what I'm doing with my infrastructure and provisioning that, so it's really a story of collecting all the telemetry, integrating it, stitching it together, and then applying the analytics to help our operators because it's gone beyond human scale, keeping track of the needs of all these VMs and especially when you get to containers. So it's first about stitching together the data, then applying the analytics for insight and then taking action. So it's automation informed by insight. But first you have to have visibility of everything. So that's the loop. >> It's interesting you talk about demand supply. Again, it used to be you'd manage demand, IT demand with an IT Project Management System and now you've got this infrastructure that is, you know, being sucking apps or sucking resources out of it and you can't just manage it manually. You've got to have the data which you've got and you've got to have some level of automation to be able to remediate things. So how does that fit in to the product and sort of the roadmap? >> So our optimizer product has, you know, you're going to give your credentials for all of the different tooling in your Data Center and you're going to bring it all together for the analytics and then be able to take action in a similar fashion from a central position. So what you see in Intersight Optimizer, it's really powerful as a recommendation engine. So it's going to tell you straight up, "Hey, you've got an ... you have an application and it's going to look at historical data". So over the past, whatever, 30 days, this VM over on AWS, 95% of the time has been running at less than 70% utilization of its assigned resources, so guess what? You should go from instance size three to Instance Size two, and we can even tell the operator, "Here's how much money that's going to save you every month" Do you want to do this, yes or no?" Bum. >> Boom Off you go and you kind of stand up the new instance. Similarly on the on-prem site, this VM has been consuming, you know, more than 95% of its allocated memory. You know, 80% of the time over the past month you should give it some more memory. And because we have optimized our controlling vCenter or you know, the micro, we can go off and make that change. So it's really the analytics to decide what is the right action to take. Then giving the operator the go button to go instantiate it and that's, that's incredibly powerful. >> And it's the same experience for my on-prem workloads, my Amazon, my Azure, and my Alibaba, whatever workloads I'm going to run in the future? >> Correct, and that's essential because of the hybrid dynamic. You know, the innovation is going to go on out in the Cloud, but you got to tie it the backend. So we have to be able to manage both of these at the same time. >> So people might be asking that aren't as you know, into this world as, "Well, why can't I just ... isn't Amazon going to do that for me? Isn't Azure going to do that for me? Or you know, the IBM Cloud, whatever, right? Can you explain, sort of help people understand the differences in the way in which each of these environments, including on-prem handles this type of of activity? >> I think what we're seeing is a maturation of the on-prem side of the equation. So the Cloud-like operating model consuming resources, That model ... Clouds and operating model, it's not a place, right? Everyone's been throwing that around for a few years, but it's very true. And so now on-prem, you know, OpenStack was hard, right? For folks, you know, we know that it just was difficult for people to get to the Private Cloud Nirvana that they wanted to. So with things like Intersight, we're basically starting to deliver, you know, enterprise-ready hardened systems. We're not calling it a Private Cloud, but effectively that's what it is especially when we talk tomorrow about HXAP and what we're doing on the container side, that's ultimately what we're delivering is a Cloud-like experience for the operator. So we're, you know, as a company we're focused on ... we've been focused for 10 years on "How do we create a better operating model in the Data Center". But now we're competing on experience just like our customers are with their App. So we have a mobile app for Intersight, right? And we're focused now on the experience for the operator and bringing that Cloud-like experience on-prem. That's really the ... >> Todd, I'd like you to dig into the organizational impact here a little bit. First of all, from your partners selling these solutions into the customer as well as from a customer standpoint. Because I kind of hear individualized a little bit. Well, you know, AppD is very much an application-centric focus as opposed to Intersight is more of the infrastructure piece of it and those worlds haven't necessarily communicated or you know, there's some gaps. >> They have been the victims of silos on a technology basis and then that does manifest in the organization, right? And we used to see this when we started with Blades back in the early aughts, right? Is it the network? Is the networking team that assign off on this Blade chassis? Well, they can't manage the switching, we're not going to let the server guys manage that, right? So we've kind of seen technology kind of reveal very dysfunctional (laughs) organizational constructs and I think we're trying to help the same dynamic here, but between the folks that are concerned about the application how it relates to the business and looking at the application performance and the teams that manage infrastructure, they haven't had common tooling. And this provides common data sets, a single source of truth so that when something goes wrong, everyone's aware of the same set of conditions. They can see, they can correlate it. We're correlating these two data sets from the app side and the infrastructure side. And it helps the teams work together because you're right, I mean, you've got app teams that look at the world as a you can think of it as a horizontal application topology. But underneath every one of those points on the graph, there's an infrastructure component, maybe different teams. So, and they're looking at the world as stacks. So you've got the infrastructure folks looking up the app folks looking down and unless you've got these worlds correlated, that's what the war-rooms and the finger pointing, it must be the network, who knows. You know, so we're really trying to help teams come together cause ultimately in a business, they're all working for somebody that cares about the whole edge ladder. >> So for from a selling motion, is it that person that they report up to that will drive that? >> It's both. or you find -- >> Well, what we're doing is, you know, we have our infrastructure operations teams, the folks that we work with there now we can bring them a tool set that says, "Here's how we can help you be directly relevant to the business in real time. Here's how to hug your application team and make them happy. He is right, so it's a story of relevance and in a real time way". and then for the application team, it's a story of, "Hey, here's a tool set that ensures the thing that you care about most, which is your precious baby, your application is going to get all the care and feeding it needs from the infrastructure on-prem and the Cloud. And so our AppD team is talking to those application-centric monitoring and operations teams and our, you know, all the folks that work in our Data Center Organization are talking to the infrastructure buyers, but we're now selling them a common tool set. You know, one team kind of coming bottom up the other common top down. >> And it's heterogeneous, I don't need, I don't have to have Cisco gear >> Correct to make this work. And it's a SaaS model -- >> It is SaaS, yes pretty sure. And it's a 2020 availability, right? >> Yes. The calender 2020? >> First half. Yeah. First half. Great. >> Yep All right, Todd, want to give you the final word as we look through 2020 what should be customers be looking for in this space? >> I think they should be thinking about how can they impact the top line and the bottom line, so as an IT organization And on the top line, it's going to be these new application experiences. That's where the companies are innovating, right? To drive revenue, new experiences. And then on the bottom line is, "How do we get rid of over provisioning? How do we operate in a more efficient way?" And to do that, you need analytics, right? I haven't said AIOps, but I'll throw it out in the close, right? But you need analytics to really understand "How do I optimize the environment, reduced my cost of computing and help out with a bottom line." So that's, that's the rest of the year. >> Todd Brannon, really appreciate the conversation. Thanks so much for all the updates. Look forward to talking to you again soon. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> All right, for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with much more wall to wall coverage here from Cisco live 2020 in Barcelona. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat 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.

>> Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our coverage of Cisco Live day three is in full effect. I am Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and we have a couple of guests joining us. We've got Mike Bundy, head of Cisco Strategic Alliances from, guess where? The jacket should give it away, Pure Storage. And Tom Koppelman, the VP of Architecture Sales America for Cisco, hi guys! >> Hi. >> Hi. >> How ya doing? >> Thanks for bringing more brightness to our set. >> Yeah I forgot my sunglasses. >> I know, we're in the buzzy, bright DevNet Zone. We've been here all week. Great event, massive event, my goodness. 28,000 folks or so, Mike let's start with you. Give us a status of the Pure-Cisco relationship, the evolution of that, where you guys are now. What is exciting? >> Sure, so the relationship, it's unbelievable in terms of the amount of synergies and energy we have together. In fact, Tom at Cisco was really involved in the early genesis of this relationship, prior to me joining the company. And, in the last couple years, we've probably doubled in terms of our go-to-market and sell to customers together. So, tremendous growth. Partnership brings a value to us because of the strong heritage that we have from a DevNet tie-in, in terms of all the automation that we have on the platform, so. It's just a tremendous, tremendous, great partnership. >> And Tom, Cisco has a massive partner ecosystem, a lot of choice. What is it about Pure Storage that is providing advantages to Cisco? Where it's helping customers really kind of bridge this gap between hyper-converged, multi-cloud hybrid, all that jazz? >> Right, so Pure was a first mover in terms of flash storage, right. We saw demand from our customers wanting that technology to improve their data center environments. And when we partnered up early, we were able to kind of capture that momentum, right. And, when I think about our go-to-market with Pure, which is really where I kind of focus, there's very little friction in that relationship, right. There's not competitive overlap. There's not things like that. It's technology that the customers want, that they ask for, and a good field go-to-market in leadership on both sides that are willing to invest and get engaged and move the relationship forward. >> So what else are you guys doing besides just the go-to-market partnership because I got a hold of this timeline of Cisco Validated Designs that Pure and Cisco have put out over the last five years, four years. >> Right. >> And there's like 13 milestones on there. So that's roughly three a year. Of course, it started with Pure's IPO. So that's when Cisco said, all right, these guys are real. Start working with them. And in the early days, of course, you started with FlashStack. That was the flagship product. And then VDI, everybody does VDI, analysts are like, yeah, yeah, everybody does VDI. But then it started really accelerating the cadence. So it's more than just go-to-market. What's beneath that go-to-market? >> Yeah, good question. >> You want to? >> You hit the highlights of the CVD's and whatnot. >> I would say that Pure, this is our number one partnership that we have from an alliance perspective. The investment is far exceeding other partnerships we have. So, the amount of product integration that we're doing is tremendous, as you see there. We've focused on ACI and multi data centers the last couple years. We've focusing on AI and machine learning, most recently. And beyond that, we just signed an agreement and have released resell of Cisco SAN switches in the marketplace. It's the resell agreement we've ever done as a company and it just further shows the commitment in resources that we're willing to put into making sure the partnership is successful and continues to grow and evolve. >> And on top of that the investment in Cisco Intersight, in integrating with Cisco Intersight, the management platform, which is very important to us, it just shows commitment of the partnership. >> Let's talk more about that. So, how does that work? What problems is that solving for customers? >> Well, Cisco Intersight is our cloud based management offering for compute and Pure has integrated their storage platform as part of that solution. So allowing customers, whether it's a converged solution, just raw compute, a hyper-converged solution, but allowing them to manage those pools and deliver that via a cloud solution. >> So Pure plugs into the Cisco API. Now you're part of that stack, essentially. So it's transparent to the customer. And, Cisco's management plane takes care of all that. >> That's exactly right, correct, yes. >> Its' a big deal for us because it was the first integration with Intersight from any storage partner that Cisco has, right. So first to market. We want to embrace hyper-convergence, which is a big important priority for Cisco, and also bridging that gap. So as we compete against single vendor stacks, we have the right solution that customers are looking for. And ultimately, that's why it's so important for us. >> Yeah, Pure is big on firsts. First to flash, you just mentioned another first, you were the first with NVMe, before that you were with the evergreen. I mean, you like being first. >> First orange sport coat. >> That's definitely first there. (laughing) >> Let's talk about customer value though. Obviously, that's what it's all about. As we look at, not just the tremendous amount of choice that customer have when it comes to technology partners, but also the amount of data that's being generated, that's growing astronomically. Yet, organizations are getting so little value out of that because they can't extract the insights. What are you guys doing together leveraging the superpowers of AI and machine learning to help customers in any industry search a really, not just monetize that data, but really accelerate their businesses. Tom you're smiling so let's start with you. >> Yeah, so we came out with an AI server, right, our ML 480, and we've integrated that. Pure has invested, we've both invested and done an integration between FlashBlade, and I'll let Mike talk a little about FlashBlade and the value proposition of FlashBlade, but integrated that with our AI server. And our AI server is an Nvidia powered server, so it essentially gives you scale of processing and capabilities to allow you capitalize on all that data so the customers can get the information they need out of that. If you want to take a second on FlashBlade. >> And you know, AI is the buzz. It's the hot two letter acronym in the industry these days. $13 billion infrastructure opportunity, et cetera, et cetera. So, what Pure is really focused on is, data is the new oil of commodities for customers and clients. What we've built is a platform called FlashBlade, an architecture called the Data Hub, that allows you to not have to copy data and move it around and create silos in data warehouses. So, you can much easier execute a data strategy with the Data Hub architecture, using FlashBlade. When you look at machine learning in terms of how you build a data pipeline so that you can then get to quicker results from a business application standpoint with AI. That's what we've built together with Cisco. We're uber, uber, super excited a number of customers already in the last couple months. >> So I'm going to push a little on that, AI server, AI storage, people don't associate storage and server guys with AI. But if I hear you correctly, there's a $13 billion opportunity for workloads. To manage workloads running on your servers and your storage. >> Correct. >> And so you're optimizing them for AI workloads. >> Absolutely, exactly right. >> So you're not necessarily inventing AI. You're providing infrastructure so that people can leverage AI, is that right? >> Yes. >> Yeah, and the same way that we've built APIs together to work with Intersight, we do that in a way that allows our customers to leverage Cafe, other applications that can help build that data pipeline. We build the platform from the infrastructure level, it makes the management easy and we partner with all of the applications at the top end, but also the middleware and that software prepackage layer that connects via APIs to us. So, it's easy, it's agile, it's manageable, it's a cloud-like experience for the customers, right. >> Easy, agile, all awesome but security. Absolutely critical today. What are you guys doing, Tom I'll start with you, how are you guys working together infuse and integrate security into the technology so that from a customer's perspective, those risks dial down. >> So, Cisco is integrating security across all of our product portfolio, right. And, that includes our data center portfolio, all the way through our campus, our WAN, all those portfolios. We continue to look for opportunities to integrate, whether it's dual-factor authentication or things like secure data center where the highly scalable, multi-instance firewall in front of a data center, things like that. So we're definitely looking for areas and angles and opportunities for us to, not only integrate it from a product standpoint, but also ensure that we are talking that story with our customers so that they know they can leverage Cisco for the full architecture from a security standpoint. >> And the same thing on the storage of the data from an encryption perspective, and as the data gets moved or is mobile, that level of security and policy follows it wherever the data is moved. >> So, what should we expect, what's next in the time? What's 14 going to look like? You don't have top give us specifics but are we going to see blockchain CVDs? What should observers think about the partnership going forward? What could we look forward to? >> Yeah, I mean, the adoption of Container capability is tremendous in our customers environment. Cisco has a cloud Container platform available today. We're integrating that into FlashStack in the very near future. Embracing the cloud. Disaster recovery and data protection it's very hot for customers. Improving that experience so that you have faster restoration times, you're able to look at multi-tier strategy that's very easy to manage from a storage perspective, leveraging S3 with Amazon, Azure, et cetera. So, that's a couple things that are on the short term building block together. >> Yeah, I was going to comment on certainly multi cloud and Containers, those would be two of the big ones that I'd hit on, right. And, in the event of multi cloud leveraging, converged and hyper-converged together to better solve a customer's problems. >> So I was going to ask you. So hyper-converged now becomes a bridge to the cloud if, in fact, that's where customers want to go. >> Yes, it can be. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, it can be, yes. >> Absolutely. >> Well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, sharing with us the momentum that the Pure-Cisco relationship has and what excites you for the future. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-hosts. Stu Miniman, John Furrier has been here all week. Day three coverage of Cisco Live!, Barcelona. Cisco Live EMEA, and R. We learned the other day, add R for Russia. Kaustubh Das is back. KD is the vice president of product management for data center at Cisco and he's joined by Kevin Egan who is the director of the computer systems group for data center. Also from Cisco, gents, good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> KD, Data center was a real focus of the announcements this week. The data center is exploding to a lot of different places. What's going on in the group? >> It's been a terrific weekend, you're right. Data center was a core of a lot of the announcements this week, and as we kicked off the key note with this concept that the data center is no longer centered. It's really, the data moves to the edges, the data center is moving to the edges. We had a lot of announcements around Hyperflex, Hyperflex anywhere, this product that we've been innovating on like monsters. Within a very short time, gone from a brand-new product on the market to a magic quarter liter with Gartner, and really kind of doing a lot of industry firsts with that. That's been a big focus. We had a lot of announcements with our technology partners, because we not only innovate within Cisco, but we work with Pure and NetApp and Citrix and Intel Optane and Nvidia to bring products to the market that get the richness of their innovation and our innovation together. The other big focus has been all about programmability. As the world becomes much more programmable, focus devops automation, it's been around Intersight and programmability and taking that to the next level. >> Interesting. So of course we always talk about shipping five megabytes of code as opposed to shipping petabytes through a straw into the god box. But so Kevin, programmability's a key theme here, of course we're in the devnet zone. We had Susie Wee on yesterday and she was just talking about the evolution of Cisco infrastructure and how early on you guys made the decision. Let's make all this stuff programmable. And that was sort of a game changer, your thoughts. >> Yeah, no it's been amazing. The growth of just Cisco devnet right? We've got half a million developers now developing against our SDKs, our devops, our opportunities all across our Cisco platforms. We've got thousands of Cisco resources doing work on that, producing those libraries, producing that, those sample sets of code and contributing to the communities. And today our customers are using it in a way that they've never really done. Previously it was a sort of a fix because vendor tools weren't getting it done. And now they're using these automation tools to really do every day tasks out to the mass, to reduce the complexity for their teams and reduce the burden. And then of course to have that repeatability and that security and that compliance aspect and it's been amazing the explosion. >> Yeah. The simplicity reminds me back you know the earliest days of UCS, you know UCS was built for that wave of virtualization and as KD has talked with us this week already about some of the partnerships that you've built. The wave of converged infrastructure, UCS really dominated in that marketplace, but here now we talk about AI with some of your partners, you talk about programmability, it's like that's not the Cisco UCS that I remember launching. So maybe give us the updates specifically that was announced this week. Where the platform has gone in more recent days. >> So I can start maybe, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> UCS came up with this concept of everything needs to be programmable, everything needs to be an API. And maybe we were a little ahead of our time, we conceived of this in 2007, got the product out in 09 and really from the very genesis of the program, of the UCS program, it's been a programmable platform, it's been everything's an API. The UI makes calls to the API, our SDKs make calls to the APIs. So that's been the core platform and in some ways it feels like the industry is coming to where we thought it would come to a little bit earlier. So they, this whole concept of infrastructure's code, softly defined what do we want to call it, this was core and germane to the product itself. What we've done lately is, it's taken that policy that we're encapsulated and taken out all of the silver into the fabric for scalability, we've taken that now into the cloud. And what that does is it leads to that velocity of innovation becoming even higher, the ability to create new and unique use cases becomes higher, the ability to conceive it becomes higher. And all of that coupled with where IT is going, which is becoming much more devops, much more around automation. I think those forces are coupling together to create some really unique use cases. >> You said, you gestured take it into the cloud, which is interesting, pointing. What does that mean? Taking it into the cloud? >> So let's speed back a little bit. So what we start off with was listen, a silver's a box, we need to abstract the silver, the personality of the silver out of that box into policy, put it in the fabric. And that allows us to really scale that and give the box different personalities depending upon the workload. What we've done is, we've launched a product called Intersight. Intersight takes that policy and makes it a SAS service, management of the service we want to call it. So now as data moves everywhere, as data centers move everywhere, as our applications no longer become monolithic but become these combinations of little applications communicating across data centers, it allows us to have a centralized dashboard for our infrastructure that we can access, because it's in the cloud, from anywhere. And because it's in the cloud it can kind of get, get that innovation wheel turning much faster. It's just been game changing, and obviously there's other things that can happen once you do that. You can have proactive guidance coming down from the cloud, you can have golden images come down from the cloud, you can do workload specific settings. So there's a lot of new areas that it opens up once you, >> Analytics, right? >> Analytics. >> Machine intelligence. >> So we've got the takeover happening in the devnet zone right now, so focus on the data center, everybody's got t shirts and I think it says Hyperflex on them, big announcement this week about Hyperflex anywhere. Kevin you know I think that when people heard HCI, they often picture a box, or it's a group of boxes it's in a rack, it's all that and everything, and the thing is as an analyst I was poking at it, it's like "well we virtualized a lot of the stuff "and we put it in a new form factor." That's great to modernize the platform but how do we make it cloud native, how does it fit into a hybrid and multi cloud world, and it feels like we're reaching that point now. So help us connect the dots as to how, what HCI was fits into this hybrid and multi cloud world today. >> Absolutely. I mean, HCI when it came out was an alternative to SAN, I mean it was an alternative and it was touting simplicity, touting you know grow with your applications. But really now, with the multi cloud instances that our customers are looking at, they have to have a way to deploy those, a way to connect to those remotely, manage those, monitor those, actually connect that back to the core so that you can take advantage of the analytics that are running at the core and make real time recommendations, make real time adjustments for services and those type of, you know that connectivity is really what we mean by Hyperflex anywhere. It's the evolution of how you deploy, how you manage, and then of course that day two, day five, day one hundred where you're actually making that experience simple for the customers. >> Help us understand exactly, is this, do I just have the backup image in a public cloud, do I actually have similar software stacks, what's the expanse? >> Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think it's three different vectors that we're doing. So we want as we modernize, and as our customers modernize, they're looking for a much more cloud-like limber, elastic platform. That's the first vector, that's what HCI has done, that's what we've done. And we've actually done it on steroids because we've taken that code-designed hardware and software much like the public cloud guys are doing, but we control that and we can give that to our enterprise customers and our enterprise grade resilient infrastructure. The first thing is that, the second piece of it is what our customers and really our developers and the customers are wanting to do, is to create in one place and deploy in another. So create on the private cloud, deploy in the public cloud, or create in the public cloud, deploy in the private cloud, or actually have an application that bridges the two. So having a homogenous development environment whether it's, and a lot of this is around the container frameworks, whether it's on the public cloud, private cloud. That's key, and what we've done with Hyperflex, and the integrations we've got with our container platform, with open shift, with cloud center, which was again a big announcement this week. That's that second vector, is being able to port applications, develop one place, deploy any place. And the third piece is what we've been talking about all through this segment, which is the ability to now have the cloud drive your infrastructure. Everything's connected, everything's analyzed in the cloud, there's telemetry, there's proactive guidance, there's a common dashboard there's centralized monitoring, there's the ability to deploy, like we did in the key note demonstrating in the key note, multiple different sides spread out across the world, from a cental location. I think that's game changing. >> I'd like to get your take on differentiation. Obviously you guys are biased. Cisco's different, it's better. But I want to hear why. So relative to other infrastructure players, are you, in your words, however you want to describe it more cloud like more programmable, where's the differentiation? >> Go ahead and I'll later on. >> Yeah sure. So basically we started with a foundation of UCS and that foundation, virtualize compute bare metal compute, and of course now hyper-converge, and the reason that it allows us to do things, allows us to Hyperflex anywhere, allows us to have that cloud-based model is because we built that infrastructure around the API from day one. When we started this, that programmatic infrastructure, we were talking to customers, it was stateless it was desired state config, they didn't know what we were talking about. I mean, they had no idea when this came out. But that's the foundation that really allows us to drive the API integrations to our app layers, which is what KD was talking about, and then of course from there to our multi cloud integrations and that's really the foundation that laid, that we laid early on. And that's why all of our UCS platform really enables this cloud integration. >> Yeah, I mean the way I look at it is nobody else has a fully API driven infrastructure. Everything's an API for us, we don't expose APIs after the fact, it is built around, it's an API first infrastructure. And everything is built around them. Whether it's our STKs, our integrations with you know Pop and then Ansible, and those kind of tool sets, our integration with other tool sets that people use. It's all driven through that. The second thing that is different is, we have an emulator, so we can allow our customers to really time travel through the whole process of deployment. I mean, our customers can deploy the infrastructure before the infrastructure hits the loading dock because they can download the UCS emulator. They can actually configure, deploy, build the whole policy on our management platform, test it out, do the what ifs on the emulator. When the equipment shows up, we're ready to go, we are in business, nobody else can do that. And the final thing which is, aside from all of the cloud connected pieces I've talked about, the breadth of Cisco's portfolio spanning from all of our networking assets, our SD WAN assets, our security assets, our collaboration assets, our cloud assets, that breadth gets us to implement use cases for our customers that are just, it's just impossible for anybody else to do. >> We've heard lots of proof points here in the devnote zone specifically from programmability and the automation. I've talked to some service providers here at the show, we've also heard about the journey that enterprise customers are going through to kind of understand that space and learn places here like this. Kevin, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of customers here, maybe if you have examples as to you know the exemplars of who're doing this well, and what people can learn from customers like that. >> Yeah, I mean it's amazing right. In just devnet alone we've got sessions on UCS with Python, STKs, UCS with Powertool, how to integrate with Ansible, these are just becoming common terms, common household terms for our customers. As you go up to enterprise customers, service provider customers, they're using these tools in a day to day manner to do the automation on top of, to really deploy and manage their apps, right, and the way that, I mean, it's exciting, we have customers from all segments of all industry, and they really they use these programmatic, KD's simple example of platform emulator, you don't realize how powerful that is, where you can set that same exact state machine that's in your UCS, you can put it on your laptop, set up all your policies, and then when that gear hits the dock, you are up in hours. Literally we have very large e-commerce sites, they do this, thousands of servers hit it, and in a matter of hours, they've applied those policies and they're up and running. Python, we've got Python, Ruby, Powertool, software developer kits, we've got devops that sit on those, and Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and these are just the automation so if you want to do it yourself, we've got the world class API, nobody else gives you that programmatic API. That's how we built our foundation. If you want Cisco to call those APIs, we have Intersight and we'll make those calls for you. If you just want to do some simple scripting, Powertool. You can automate certain processes, it doesn't have to be the whole end to end. You know you can use all these, it's basically choice to really, what your applications are demanding and what your customers are demanding. >> That's a strong story, one of breadth and depth. We're out of time, but KD I wonder if you could sort of put a bow on Cisco Live! Europe this year, big takeaways from your point of view. >> Listen, we've been innovating like monsters and it's such a terrific week for us to come here, to really touch and feel and listen to our customers and see the delight on their faces as we show them what we've been doing. And this part of the show, day three the devnet takeover, this is where it gets really really real, because now we get to go down to the depths of looking at those APIs, looking at those use cases, getting people to play around with them. So it's just been terrific, I love it. >> I love it too, we're the interview monsters this week. So guys thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cicso Live! In Barcelona. Be right back. (upbeat electronic outro)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Dave Vellante as well, Stu Miniman, who's been doing interviews with us all week, our next guest is Roland Acra, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Data Center Group. He's in charge of that core business of data center now, at the center of cloud and the edge. Roland, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So a lot of announcements, a lot of the big guns are out there for Cisco, you got the data center, you got the networking group, and you got IoT, and then cloud center suite was part of the big announcement, your team had a big piece of the keynote yesterday and continues to make waves. Give us a quick update on the news, the key points, what was the announcements? >> Yeah, the two big announcements for my group were ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex Anywhere, and we captured them under a common moniker of There's Nothing Centered About the Data Center Anymore, because both of these speak to things going outside the data center. ACI Anywhere is the integration of ACI, our software-defined networking solution, into two of the most prominent public cloud providers out there, Amazon and Azure, and for HyperFlex Anywhere, the exciting news is the expansion of HyperFlex, which is our hyper-converged solution, also outside the data center, to the edge of the enterprise, specifically branch offices and remote locations. >> And the other thing that came out of our conversation here on theCUBE and also on the keynote, is that the center of the value is the data center, as you guys pointed out with the slides, big circle in the middle, ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, but the network and the data and the security foundation has been a critical part of this new growth. >> Yes. >> Take a minute to explain the journey of ACI, how it started, where are we? It's been a progression for you guys, certainly inside the enterprise, but now it's extended. What's the journey, take us through that. >> When ACI came into the market five years ago now, we have a five year anniversary, ACI brought a software-defined networking solution into the market. It brought an automated network fabric capability, which said you can no longer screw yourself up by having incoherence between one part of the network and another, it's all managed coherently as one thing, and it brought, to your point about security, what's called segmentation of applications. Today, applications have data, they have databases, they have different sensitive pieces, and it's important to be able to tell the network not only get the traffic from one place to the other, but also selectively get the traffic that I tell you to get there, and not the one, and don't get the traffic that has no business getting there, and that's known as segmentation, which is a security concern, particularly when you have sensitive data like consumer data or things that have regulatory things around them. ACI has brought that to the market. That was the value proposition of ACI. We worked on then expanding ACI in the direction of scale. Customers have two or more data centers for disaster recovery, for resiliency, we made that possible. We got to bigger and bigger footprints. Then we took ACI to the edge of the enterprise. What if somebody wanted to put some computing capability in a store, or in a logistics center. ACI then was expanded with that. Step N minus one, was we took ACI to bare metal clouds. Customers now want to deploy also things in co-locations or bare metal clouds. We decoupled ACI software from the Cisco switches, which is the ACI hardware, and ACI became completely virtualized, and still able to be doing everything it does in hardware on premise, in software instead, in somebody's else's capability. And yesterday we announced the full combination of this, which is what if you don't want the ACI soft switching or hard switching, can you use the native switching of a public cloud, like Azure or AWS, and you tell the other APIs, please let those packets go from A to B because they're part of the whitelisted paths,, and don't let packets from C to D go because they're part of the blacklisted paths. And that was the full integration with these clouds-- >> Can you abstract that complexity? >> Completely, completely. One orchestrator, which is the multi-site orchestrator, the same one people have used on premise, that they've developed their policies around, so that we have invested a lot of sweat equity in that controller, it's where also they put their compliance, verification, and audit and assurance, and they use that thing even when something goes to Azure or it goes to AWS. >> So you mentioned the progression. So it's now your full progression, from core to the cloud, including edge-- >> Going through edge. >> What has been some of the results? You mentioned that segmentation's one of 'em, I get that. How has ACI been used, what are some highlights that show the value, because people start looking at ACI, saying, hmm, I like this, I like scale, I have a scale challenge with the new cloud world and edge, and complexity's abstracted away with software, okay, check, so far, so good. Where has been the success of ACI and how do you see that unfolding specifically in the cloud? >> Yeah, the biggest value our customers have gotten, cloud or no cloud, has been with ACI, they've been able to shorten the speed of change, shorten the time for change, therefore increase the speed of change of their network, because now the network needs to operate at the speed of the applications. Applications reconfigure themselves sometimes on hourly or daily basis, and it used to be that changing something in the network, you sent a ticket to somebody who took weeks to reconfigure things. Now that software-defined capability means the network reconfigures and people can change generations of compute on the fly, and the network is in lockstep with that. The agility and speed has been great. The other value has been the value of automation, which is people can run a bigger and bigger and bigger network with a small number of people. You don't have to scale your people the more switches you have. Again, because programming and automation comes to the rescue with that. >> Well I'll tell you, people who are watching right now can look behind Roland and see that it's a packed house. We're in the dev net zone, which has been the massively growing organization within Cisco. Community's been growing very fast, people are developing on top of the networks, and these are network folks, and as well there's new talent coming in. So skill gap is shortening, so you're getting a different makeup for a Cisco user, your customers are changing and changing, growing, existing base plus new people. Talk about that dynamic about how that impacts this intent-based networking, this notion of policy software is defined. >> Yes, you it's you know what many people have been calling infrastructure as code, which is you go from scripting to actually coding and composing very sophisticated automation capabilities and change management capabilities, for an automatable system, which is what ACI is. It's made for people drawing on the strengths that they were doing in the application domain or in the server domain, and bringing that into the network. And that's a new and exciting thing, it brought the network within the purview of coders, people who know how to do Python and know how to do Go language and things which are modern and exciting for the younger generation. It's made also for bringing the analytical capabilities, you know, a lot of what those young coders are used to is a lot of logs, a lot of visibility, a lot of analytics running on, because they've done that on web servers, they've done that on applications that run in the cloud, and we now offer the network, which is very rich in data. If you think about, we see every packet, we see every flow, we see every pattern of how the traffic is changing, and that becomes a data set that is subject to programming because then from there you can extract anomaly detection, you can extract security signatures of malware, you can extract prediction of where the traffic is going to be going in six months. There's a lot of exciting potential from the telemetry and the visibility that we bring into that framework. >> And as you point out, devs love that. I mean Cisco, we've talked about this, is one of the few large established companies that has, in our view, figured out developers, right? There's a lot of examples of those companies that haven't and continue to struggle, we've just witnessed here the dev crowd. I want to ask you about ACI and how it's different from, for example, VMware NSX. What's the differentiation there? >> The biggest differentiation is ACI is one system through which you manage the entire network, the overlay which is the virtual view of the network that the applications care about, as well as the underlay, which is the actual real delivery system that makes the packets get from A to B with quality of service and so forth. So that's first thing. It actually does a lot more, it has much more scope than NSX does. The other thing that's very unique about ACI is we have integrated it with every hypervisor on the planet and every container management framework on the planet, and ever bare metal system on the planet, which means that any workload, something sitting on a mainframe, something sitting on a Sun Oracle server, something on OpenStack on OpenShift, on VMware or on Hyper-V, and now on the EC2 APIs of AWS or on Azure, all of those are integrated with ACI. We're not wedded to one hypervisor, and our cloud implementation that we announced yesterday is a true integrated cloud capability, it's not a bring your own license and go put it on bare metal at AWS, which has been VMware's cloud strategy is to team up with AWS and let customers bring their software licenses into AWS bare metal. That's not EC2. And of course that's not Azure and that's not the other clouds we're going to be doing. So the openness to being multi-cloud on premise, which means every hypervisor and every container framework, and bare metal, with one system. We're extending that into the cloud to give customers choice and openness, that's really a very fundamental philosophy in networks. >> So much wider scope. That's kind of always been Cisco's philosophy in partnership. When you think about HyperFlex going back 10 years when you guys sort of created that with partners and then multiple partners now, maybe talk about that journey a little bit. >> HyperFlex? >> Yes. >> Yeah, 'cause hyperconvergence is another very exciting and fast growing trend in our industry. And really, HyperFlex started off with the hyperconverged infrastructure, started of being the notion of putting a mini-cloud in a box on-premise for application developers to rapidly deploy their applications, as if it was in the cloud. So speed and simplicity were really at a premium, and that's really what defines hyperconvergence. And we've done a tremendous amount of work at Cisco to make speed and simplicity there, because we've integrated network compute storage and a cloud management system called Intersight to give that whole capability to customers. We then hardened it. We took it from being able to do VDI kind of workloads and rather benign workloads, to mission-critical workloads. So databases are now running on HyperFlex. ERP systems are running on HyperFlex, the real crown jewels of the enterprise are now running on HyperFlex. Then we made it multi-cloud. We opened it to all hypervisors and to all container frameworks. We announced OpenShift yesterday, we have already done Hyper-V, we had done OpenStack and DSX, so again, same spirit of openness. And yesterday's announcement was, what if I want to take hyperconvergence outside of the data center in hundreds or thousands of remote locations? Think a retailer. In a retail environment, some of the most interesting data is born outside the data center, it's born in a store. The data is center that follows the customer who's interested in a plasma TV, and that data has a perishable lifetime. You act on it on location and on time or you lose the value. So sending it over, taking two hours to do a machine learning job on it and come back, the customer's already back home watching a movie. And so the window of opportunity for the data is often right there and then, and that's why our customers are taking their computing environment off into where the data is, to act on it fast and on location. >> It sounds easy but I want to just get your thoughts on this, because this is a critical data challenge. If data's stored in classic old ways, data warehouses and fenced off area, it's kind of in the internet, you're not going to have the latency to get that data in real time. Talking about real time data that's addressable for part of the application value. So this is a new notion that's emerged with dev ops and infrastructure as code. >> That's right. >> That's hard. How do you guys see that progressing, how should customers prepare to have that data centered properly for app addressability, discovery, whatever the uses of the data contextually is, time series data or whatever data it is, this is a critical thing. >> It's a critical thing, and there's no one answer, because depending on what the data is, sometimes you only see the value when you concentrate it and consolidate it, because the patterns emerge from rolling out a thousand stores worth of data and seeing that people who buy this toothbrush tend to buy that toothpaste. There may be that value where you want to concentrate the data, but there are also many things where acting on the data in the moment and on location quickly without referring to the other thousand stores extracts 90% of the value of that data. So that's why you want to do forward deploy computing on that data. >> So this highlights network programmability, this means the applications driving the queries or the network for that data, if it's available... So there's two things, network programmability from the app, and availability of the data. >> Yeah, and the ability for the entire infrastructure, network, compute, and storage, and hyperconvergence is the automation of all three to be able to deliver its value equally in remote locations or in a cloud, as it would have in a data center, because that's where, the application's going to want to go where the value is, and if the infrastructure can't follow it there, then you get a degraded ability to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Right, real time decisions happen at the edge, but then as you describe, you got to bring data back, certain data, back to the cloud, do the modeling there and then push the models back down. So you're going to have-- >> And you're going to have decision making distributed. >> And you've got to have low latency to be able to enable that. >> Yeah, and the same goes for other considerations. For example, why is it important to do, allow people to put data both on their premises and in the cloud? For disaster recovery, for data replication, for resiliency. Sometimes for governance reasons. GTPR in Europe says the data of European citizens that's personally identifying has to stay in Europe. Somebody may not have a data center in Europe. Could they take advantage of a co-location ability or somebody else's cloud? >> This is the theme we're seeing at this show this year, and certainly at the center of the news is, complexity is increasing 'cause it's just evolution, more devices are connected, diverse environments, scale for cloud and connectivity, but software driving that. So I got to ask you the question. Go back to the old days, you know, the 1990s, multi-vendor was a big word. Now multi-cloud feels the same way. This is the openness thing. How would you describe multi-cloud strategy for Cisco in context of this notion of being open? >> It is really the new dimension of openness, right? We've been open in the past to multiple forms of physical networks. Customers to use wireless or fiber or copper or what have you, we need to give them an IP network that operate equally well over all media. That was one dimension of openness. Another dimension of openness was, does a product from vendor A work with a product from vendor B? My router, your router, my switch, your firewall, those are other dimensions. Hardware and software coupling. Can I buy the hardware from Peter and the software from Mary, will it work well? The new dimension of openness is, can a customer avail themselves of any form of cloud, either because they like the tooling and how well their developers are more efficient on a given cloud, or because the pricing of the other guy, or the third guy has a point of presence in Tokyo, which this one doesn't. All of those are business choices that if we make our technology, let them take advantage of them with no technical restriction, they will, because now they can shop on the merit of what they want to do, and not on, oh well, sorry, if you want to go to Azure, I can't help you, but if you're willing to settle for your own premise or for Amazon, then I have a story for you. So that's-- >> Roland, you're leading the team on the core crown jewels for Cisco, as you guys, the rising tide's floating all boats here within the company. What's your plan for the year, what's your goals, you'll be out there pounding the pavement with customers, what's your objective, what do you hope to accomplish this year in 2019? >> Well 2019 is the year of many things for us, it's a very exciting year. It's the year of, on the physical infrastructure side, we're taking our switches to 400 gigabit per second. We have our new silicon capability, our new optics, so we're going to be able to scale for the cloud providers who are heading the next frontier of speed and density and scale. So performance will always, always be there, and when we're done with 400, we're already going to be asking about 800. So that's an exciting new generation of switches. ACI Anywhere getting deployed now and adopted across multiple clouds, is another exciting thing. HyperFlex Anywhere, we're really looking forward to the potential in financial services, in logistics, in retail, where's there's a lot of deployed data at the edge. And then, security is a never finished journey, right? Everything with give our customers in the way of security, because there, there's an active actor who's trying to make you fail, right? It's not that you're only fighting physics to get to 400 gigabit, then you win. There we have a guy who's trying to foil your schemes and trying to foil their schemes. Security is a great-- >> Constant attacks are on the network. You guys have seen this movie before, so you know how critical, Roland thanks so much for spending the time, congratulations on ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, intent-based networking at the core. It's theCUBE bringing you all the data, we have an intent here to bring you the best content from Cisco Live in Barcelona. I'm John, Dave Vellante, stay with us for live coverage, day two of three days of coverage here in the dev net zone, packed with developers learning new skills. We'll back with more after this short break.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to The Cube. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from New York, It's the CUBE! Covering theCUBE, New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the live CUBE coverage here in New York City for CUBE NYC, #CubeNYC. This coverage of all things data, all things cloud, all things machine learning here in the big data realm. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. We've got two great guests from Cisco. We got DD who is the Vice President of Data Center Marketing at Cisco, and Han Yang who is the Senior Product Manager at Cisco. Guys, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on again. >> Good to see ya. >> Thanks for having us. >> So obviously one of the things that has come up this year at the Big Data Show, used to be called Hadoop World, Strata Data, now it's called, the latest name. And obviously CUBE NYC, we changed from Big Data NYC to CUBE NYC, because there's a lot more going on. I heard hallway conversations around blockchain, cryptocurrency, Kubernetes has been said on theCUBE already at least a dozen times here today, multicloud. So you're seeing the analytical world try to be, in a way, brought into the dynamics around IT infrastructure operations, both cloud and on premises. So interesting dynamics this year, almost a dev ops kind of culture to analytics. This is a new kind of sign from this community. Your thoughts? >> Absolutely, I think data and analytics is one of those things that's pervasive. Every industry, it doesn't matter. Even at Cisco, I know we're going to talk a little more about the new AI and ML workload, but for the last few years, we've been using AI and ML techniques to improve networking, to improve security, to improve collaboration. So it's everywhere. >> You mean internally, in your own IT? >> Internally, yeah. Not just in IT, in the way we're designing our network equipment. We're storing data that's flowing through the data center, flowing in and out of clouds, and using that data to make better predictions for better networking application performance, security, what have you. >> The first topic I want to talk to you guys about is around the data center. Obviously, you do data center marketing, that's where all the action is. The cloud, obviously, has been all the buzz, people going to the cloud, but Andy Jassy's announcement at VMworld really is a validation that we're seeing, for the first time, hybrid multicloud validated. Amazon announced RDS on VMware on-premises. >> That's right. This is the first time Amazon's ever done anything of this magnitude on-premises. So this is a signal from the customers voting with their wallet that on-premises is a dynamic. The data center is where the data is, that's where the main footprint of IT is. This is important. What's the impact of that dynamic, of data center, where the data is with the option of a cloud. How does that impact data, machine learning, and the things that you guys see as relevant? >> I'll start and Han, feel free to chime in here. So I think those boundaries between this is a data center, and this a cloud, and this is campus, and this is the edge, I think those boundaries are going away. Like you said, data center is where the data is. And it's the ability of our customers to be able to capture that data, process it, curate it, and use it for insight to take decision locally. A drone is a data center that flies, and boat is a data center that floats, right? >> And a cloud is a data center that no one sees. >> That's right. So those boundaries are going away. We at Cisco see this as a continuum. It's the edge cloud continuum. The edge is exploding, right? There's just more and more devices, and those devices are cranking out more data than ever before. Like I said, it's the ability of our customers to harness the data to make more meaningful decisions. So Cisco's take on this is the new architectural approach. It starts with the network, because the network is the one piece that connects everything- every device, every edge, every individual, every cloud. There's a lot of data within the network which we're using to make better decisions. >> I've been pretty close with Cisco over the years, since '95 timeframe. I've had hundreds of meetings, some technical, some kind of business. But I've heard that term edge the network many times over the years. This is not a new concept at Cisco. Edge of the network actually means something in Cisco parlance. The edge of the network >> Yeah. >> that the packets are moving around. So again, this is not a new idea at Cisco. It's just materialized itself in a new way. >> It's not, but what's happening is the edge is just now generating so much data, and if you can use that data, convert it into insight and make decisions, that's the exciting thing. And that's why this whole thing about machine learning and artificial intelligence, it's the data that's being generated by these cameras, these sensors. So that's what is really, really interesting. >> Go ahead, please. >> One of our own studies pointed out that by 2021, there will be 847 zettabytes of information out there, but only 1.3 zettabytes will actually ever make it back to the data center. That just means an opportunity for analytics at the edge to make sense of that information before it ever makes it home. >> What were those numbers again? >> I think it was like 847 zettabytes of information. >> And how much makes it back? >> About 1.3. >> Yeah, there you go. So- >> So a huge compression- >> That confirms your research, Dave. >> We've been saying for a while now that most of the data is going to stay at the edge. There's no reason to move it back. The economics don't support it, the latency doesn't make sense. >> The network cost alone is going to kill you. >> That's right. >> I think you really want to collect it, you want to clean it, and you want to correlate it before ever sending it back. Otherwise, sending that information, of useless information, that status is wonderful. Well that's not very valuable. And 99.9 percent, "things are going well." >> Temperature hasn't changed. (laughs) >> If it really goes wrong, that's when you want to alert or send more information. How did it go bad? Why did it go bad? Those are the more insightful things that you want to send back. >> This is not just for IoT. I mean, cat pictures moving between campuses cost money too, so why not just keep them local, right? But the basic concepts of networking. This is what I want to get in my point, too. You guys have some new announcements around UCS and some of the hardware and the gear and the software. What are some of the new announcements that you're announcing here in New York, and what does it mean for customers? Because they want to know not only speeds and feeds. It's a software-driven world. How does the software relate? How does the gear work? What's the management look like? Where's the control plane? Where's the management plane? Give us all the data. >> I think the biggest issues starts from this. Data scientists, their task is to export different data sources, find out the value. But at the same time, IT is somewhat lagging behind. Because as the data scientists go from data source A to data source B, it could be 3 petabytes of difference. IT is like, 3 petabytes? That's only from Monday through Wednesday? That's a huge infrastructure requirement change. So Cisco's way to help the customer is to make sure that we're able to come out with blueprints. Blueprints enabling the IT team to scale, so that the data scientists can work beyond their own laptop. As they work through the petabytes of data that's come in from all these different sources, they're able to collaborate well together and make sense of that information. Only by scaling with IT helping the data scientists to work the scale, that's the only way they can succeed. So that's why we announced a new server. It's called a C480ML. Happens to have 8 GPUs from Nvidia inside helping customers that want to do that deep learning kind of capabilities. >> What are some of the use cases on these as products? It's got some new data capabilities. What are some of the impacts? >> Some of the things that Han just mentioned. For me, I think the biggest differentiation in our solution is things that we put around the box. So the management layer, right? I mean, this is not going to be one server and one data center. It's going to be multiple of them. You're never going to have one data center. You're going to have multiple data centers. And we've got a really cool management tool called Intersight, and this is supported in Intersight, day one. And Intersight also uses machine learning techniques to look at data from multiple data centers. And that's really where the innovation is. Honestly, I think every vendor is bend sheet metal around the latest chipset, and we've done the same. But the real differentiation is how we manage it, how we use the data for more meaningful insight. I think that's where some of our magic is. >> Can you add some code to that, in terms of infrastructure for AI and ML, how is it different than traditional infrastructures? So is the management different? The sheet metal is not different, you're saying. But what are some of those nuances that we should understand. >> I think especially for deep learning, multiple scientists around the world have pointed that if you're able to use GPUs, they're able to run the deep learning frameworks faster by roughly two waters magnitude. So that's part of the reason why, from an infrastructure perspective, we want to bring in that GPUs. But for the IT teams, we didn't want them to just add yet another infrastructure silo just to support AI or ML. Therefore, we wanted to make sure it fits in with a UCS-managed unified architecture, enabling the IT team to scale but without adding more infrastructures and silos just for that new workload. But having that unified architecture, it helps the IT to be more efficient and, at the same time, is better support of the data scientists. >> The other thing I would add is, again, the things around the box. Look, this industry is still pretty nascent. There is lots of start-ups, there is lots of different solutions, and when we build a server like this, we don't just build a server and toss it over the fence to the customer and say "figure it out." No, we've done validated design guides. With Google, with some of the leading vendors in the space to make sure that everything works as we say it would. And so it's all of those integrations, those partnerships, all the way through our systems integrators, to really understand a customer's AI and ML environment and can fine tune it for the environment. >> So is that really where a lot of the innovation comes from? Doing that hard work to say, "yes, it's going to be a solution that's going to work in this environment. Here's what you have to do to ensure best practice," etc.? Is that right? >> So I think some of our blueprints or validated designs is basically enabling the IT team to scale. Scale their stores, scale their CPU, scale their GPU, and scale their network. But do it in a way so that we work with partners like Hortonworks or Cloudera. So that they're able to take advantage of the data lake. And adding in the GPU so they're able to do the deep learning with Tensorflow, with Pytorch, or whatever curated deep learning framework the data scientists need to be able to get value out of those multiple data sources. These are the kind of solutions that we're putting together, making sure our customers are able to get to that business outcome sooner and faster, not just a-- >> Right, so there's innovation at all altitudes. There's the hardware, there's the integrations, there's the management. So it's innovation. >> So not to go too much into the weeds, but I'm curious. As you introduce these alternate processing units, what is the relationship between traditional CPUs and these GPUs? Are you managing them differently, kind of communicating somehow, or are they sort of fenced off architecturally. I wonder if you could describe that. >> We actually want it to be integrated, because by having it separated and fenced off, well that's an IT infrastructure silo. You're not going to have the same security policy or the storage mechanisms. We want it to be unified so it's easier on IT teams to support the data scientists. So therefore, the latest software is able to manage both CPUs and GPUs, as well as having a new file system. Those are the solutions that we're putting forth, so that ARC-IT folks can scale, our data scientists can succeed. >> So IT's managing a logical block. >> That's right. And even for things like inventory management, or going back and adding patches in the event of some security event, it's so much better to have one integrated system rather than silos of management, which we see in the industry. >> So the hard news is basically UCS for AI and ML workloads? >> That's right. This is our first server custom built ground up to support these deep learning, machine learning workloads. We partnered with Nvidia, with Google. We announced earlier this week, and the phone is ringing constantly. >> I don't want to say godbot. I just said it. (laughs) This is basically the power tool for deep learning. >> Absolutely. >> That's how you guys see it. Well, great. Thanks for coming out. Appreciate it, good to see you guys at Cisco. Again, deep learning dedicated technology around the box, not just the box itself. Ecosystem, Nvidia, good call. Those guys really get the hot GPUs out there. Saw those guys last night, great success they're having. They're a key partner with you guys. >> Absolutely. >> Who else is partnering, real quick before we end the segment? >> We've been partnering with software sci, we partner with folks like Anaconda, with their Anaconda Enterprise, which data scientists love to use as their Python data science framework. We're working with Google, with their Kubeflow, which is open source project integrating Tensorflow on top of Kubernetes. And of course we've been working with folks like Caldera as well as Hortonworks to access the data lake from a big data perspective. >> Yeah, I know you guys didn't get a lot of credit. Google Cloud, we were certainly amplifying it. You guys were co-developing the Google Cloud servers with Google. I know they were announcing it, and you guys had Chuck on stage there with Diane Greene, so it was pretty positive. Good integration with Google can make a >> Absolutely. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE, thanks, we appreciate the commentary. Cisco here on theCUBE. We're in New York City for theCUBE NYC. This is where the world of data is converging in with IT infrastructure, developers, operators, all running analytics for future business. We'll be back with more coverage, after this short break. (upbeat digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's the Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Kicking off 2018 here in Europe is Cisco's annual event. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of the Cube, with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon. Our next guest is Todd Brannon, who's the marketing director at Cisco, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> You guys announced HyperFlex before the show. >> We did. >> And a lot of cloud happening here in the keynote. Seeing IOT, well security number one obviously. Security, that's always going to be number one, but the other themes are obviously IOT and multi-cloud. >> Todd: Multi-cloud. >> Huge conversations, both developing rapidly in kind of it's own way. >> Well that's crucial for us 'cause we talk about HyperFlex 3.0, a lot of cool features that we're building into that, but the scope for us is much, much broader because of the multi-cloud piece. That's reality for our customers. They've told us very, very clearly, I'm going to use multiple public clouds, but I'm also going to have to get my on-prem side of it. So we tell 'em, absolutely, good multi-cloud starts at home with platforms like, with HyperFlex, and that's exactly the way we've brought it together. So we talk about a kind of a very modest aspiration with this is we want to help customers power any application, on any cloud, on any scale. >> Well take a minute before we get started, help us with some questions. What is HyperFlex 3.0 for the folks watching? What is it? >> So we introduced HyperFlex as our hyper converged platform built on UCS. We acquired a company called Springpath. They brought in a purpose-built, log-structured file system for the cluster and we combined these things together to create HyperFlex. So it's really unique in the sense that, well let me back up, I'd say a lot people ignore how crucial a file system and a network are to a clustered system. It kind of goes without saying, but a lot of the focus has been on, okay what's the individual node in that stack look like, but we look at it much more at the cluster level. And so, our uniqueness is that we've engineered all of this thing together. So we brought that out in 2016, last year really we focused on performance, 40 gig, all-flash, open up the network pipes and then this year is really about our multi-cloud integration and then additional features that we're bringing in to support more workloads, Hyper-V support, containers. So 3.0 is really just filling in a lot of features that we need to really make this a ideal platform for multi-cloud. >> Todd, we've tracked UCS since the early days. UCS really created and led the whole converged infrastructure ten. >> When we heard about CI though, it's really about simplification. It's infrastructure, it's that next step. Hyper converged, a lot of the things you were talking about there, it's about cloud and the underlying platform, and while CI can be used for that, seems like a different discussion. Can you give us a little bit compare/contrast as to what you see? >> Absolutely. Well, I mean, the conversion infrastructures, you know, we started that way back in the day with Vblock and VCE, and then FlexPod, VersaStack, FlashStack, there's lots of different storage partnerships that we have we can bring customers. And private cloud has been a big workload for those infrastructure components. You know, it's really just a storage question of how you want to address that component, but it all revolves around the operating model. So our mission is, look, we've got a huge install basic customers are used to acquiring and deploying pre-engineered chunks of infrastructure like a Vxblock or a FlexPod, what have you, we need to continue to serve them, while they also evaluate where hyper convergence might fit in the equation as well, and how do we offer those both up with a common set of policy and management, with UCS management, with Intersight. So we think that these are going to coexist for quite some time and customers are going to have to decide how they want to use those different types of infrastructure, but ultimately, it's just about the workload. >> Cisco and it's storage partners have billions of reasons why they're going to keep selling CI's for a while. >> Certainly, yep. >> Help connect the dots though. You talked about that operating model in the keynote this morning, big focus on multi-cloud, >> Todd: Certainly. >> And things like, we talked to AppD at AWS re:Invent, how does the public cloud mesh with these other solutions. >> So, one of the things that we're announcing here at the show is the cloud, our Cisco container platform. That's an example of how we're going to work with Google to create an integrated stack, focused initially around Kubernetes, and we have HyperFlex as an infrastructure component under that, and that's, for people that are really accelerating their application development or maybe they're modernizing older workloads with containers, we're going to provide that element. But the true multi-cloud functionality is what we do with things like CloudCenter. So that was our CliQr acquisition, allows us to profile workloads, take 'em out to the cloud, multiple public clouds. So for us, when we talk about HyperFlex as a platform for multi-cloud it's those integrations with CloudCenter, but then also AppD, which is hugely important because like we were talking about earlier, you've got applications now that are distributed across on-prem and multiple public clouds potentially. So maybe you got a front end out in the public cloud, customer data or business logic on-prem, how do you keep track of the performance of that collection of functions and systems that are running independently and you have to do that with something like AppD. So we have a lot of the software components to help customers really get their multi-cloud going. >> So bringing it back to HyperFlex, my understanding, not just virtual environment anymore, you're also doing containers and that tied into that multi-cloud piece. >> So, a couple important things with this 3.0 release. We're bringing for Hyper-V, for customers who want to do different hypervisors, and then we developed a persistent storage plug-in into the file system for those stateful workloads that are going to be in containers. So again, with Kubernetes, as developers want to go out and do pod requests, basically self-service volumes on the HyperFlex storage environment, that's huge. And so we've opened it up to two more classes of workloads right there. >> I mean, what aren't you doing? Got these centralized apps. Is there going to be a Cisco coin in the future? (laughs) >> I think -- >> There's a rumor going around. >> So yeah, I can't speak to our cryptocurrency strategy. That's out of my domain. >> Probably coming, these centralized apps, again, on the horizon, another future thing you guys are positioned for. In all seriousness though, I want to put a plug in for Stu's Wikibon team. They came out with a true private cloud report recently last year, really kind of the only ones looking at it this way, but it really is interesting. I want to get your comment to this because we go to 100 of events a year, last year was over 100, I think, 30, and what we've observed is the same thing that's happening here. DevNet's got a lot of attraction. You've got DevNet Create, more of an open-source, cloud native focus. >> Todd: Sure. >> You're seeing the enterprises getting their act done at home, inside the premise. >> Todd: That's right. >> So it's not so much they're moving to cloud. Yeah, some stuff's going in the cloud, but they're kind of cleaning up the house first, going cloud ops on premise. >> That's right. >> And then, as a preparation to all the spend and all the intention is really on the private cloud, what they call true private cloud. Do you see the same thing? >> Absolutely. >> And is that a stepping stone to the cloud? >> Absolutely, and that's exactly, that's informed everything we've done here in this latest, this past year really, of development around HyperFlex is our IT customers telling us, look I've got the developer as my new constituent. As much as I need to maintain shrink wrapped apps or legacy workloads for the core business, the developer is really my customer now and I have to provide infrastructure on-prem that behaves like the cloud in terms of infrastructure as code and being able to do things like we're doing with this Kubernetes environment, where the developers can withdraw the resources they need, turn 'em back in and the IT team can get out of the way. That's hugely important. >> I think we're observing on our opening this morning when we were commenting on the keynote and some of the trends here is that Cisco is moving up the stack pretty rapidly over the years, this year more than ever, you can start to see a clear line of sight that it's not just network plumbing, although that's pretty critical. But with Kubernetes and the growth, you mentioned Google, it's pretty interesting, a renaissance is going on in the software world, certainly with open-source, you have app developers, which are like just classic building software apps, then you got engineering, software engineering. So I use that that term software engineering as a throwback to the age when I graduated with my CS degree, that was what you called yourself when you got a job. You were a software engineer. You have network engineers, so you're seeing a line of under the hood engineering with software and networks and whatnot. And then, above Kubernetes you're seeing, just hey I just want a program, just give me some functions. >> Absolutely, and it's the IT generalist that are emerging as the heroes here that have to understand, okay, how do I build that on-prem platform, how do I have the capability to get my developers out to the public cloud, as in when they need to and it makes sense, or potentially bring things back. And you're right, and then on the development side they don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of that. So to the degree we can enable our IT customer to provide that service, but also simplify that for them is essential. >> Talk about your posture to those two different personas because you guys just provide the network in the old days and app developers programmed on them. They get some storage or perusing some storage. Now you got to lean in towards the network engineers, which are now software engineers under the hood, and then you got to lean in to the app developers and enable them to be successful. How are you attacking those, not attacking, how are you servicing and leaning into those groups. >> We brought the storage and computing experts into the fold with UCS, nine years ago, but now when you look at our acquisition of AppD, that's where we really start to take care of the application owner, be it the developer or the business owner for the application and allowing them to kind of see across on-prem, out in the public cloud, how do I ensure that I'm going to stay out of trouble, and if something goes wrong I know exactly where in that constellation of services the problem resides. So AppD is critical in that sense because -- >> So they fill a big hole. >> Absolutely, because that's how we can, all this comes together to power our workload, power business service. Applications are the heart of new business. >> Todd, what about from a training perspective? Cisco Live's always been a show where people get their certifications, they build their careers on this stuff. It's changing so fast. How are you keeping, the training tracks, and giving that career help to all the people that do this for a living. >> We're adding the pillars for all the things we're talking about, the multi-cloud software portfolio, new infrastructure components, like HyperFlex. Those are all being built into our training regimen and also our training partners, so they can take that out and scale it for us. >> All right, so you went and just connected the dots on what I was finishing up for network engineers, software engineers, under the hood, app developers, AppD, you guys have a good solid footing there, good approach. Multi-cloud, is that the Kubernetes? Is that the secret sauce to multi-cloud in your opinion? And/or how do you guys look at multi-cloud and how do you talk to your customers about it? >> Well we talk about, the data is pretty clear, customers want to be able to use multiple public clouds and they want to be able to evaluate them. So I think the center of our strategy, we have our multi-cloud portfolio, how we organize all these things. The cloud consume pillar of that is really comprised of AppD, which we talked about, but also CloudCenter. And so CloudCenter is a tool that allows our customers basically profile an application and then go understand what's it going to cost me and what are the different attributes of these public cloud services, and which one matches up the best. So I'd say that's the center of the strategy. Obviously, particularly around containers, but more workloads in the future, Kubernetes becomes a much bigger -- >> So orchestration is pretty key. >> Yeah, orchestration's essential and it's not just in a pure software context, but how do we hook down into infrastructure. So we've already built this programmable infrastructure, so how do we expose those knobs and dials to orchestration engines so that we're not just virtualizing, but we're actually optimizing the infrastructure they need. >> That's the beautiful thing about service and function-based software. Okay, so now I've heard about this dCloud. What is dCloud? >> So dCloud's basically a demo environment that our engineering team can use and our partners can use to demo software. So, for example, we launched our cloud management platform for UCS and HyperFlex last fall, we call it Intersight. So software like that, you know software becomes central to our strategy, dCloud becomes the way that we show that. >> Customers can come in and play on that and partners? >> Partners and our sales teams can take customers through it. >> But not customers. >> I don't believe there's an end user entrance to that yet. >> So it's like a sandbox for the cloud. >> But I could be wrong. I'm not a dCloub expert. >> So for the folks watching, what's different this year at Cisco Live in Europe from other shows? Is there anything that stands out to you around this year? >> Definitely the multi-cloud theme and we're hearing that from customers. They don't, there's always been the question of what type of infrastructure should I provision for different workloads, but it's really moved that past that to here's the workload spectrum I need to support. What are the tools you're going to give me for that on-prem? How can you help me get to the cloud? And I think the other thing, more narrowly speaking, hyper convergence is really turning the corner in terms of adoption. So when we first, we weren't the first ones to arrive at the hyper convergence party in the industry by any means, but we brought the keg. So when we showed up the party kind of got started. We think we brought the complete answer and now we're seeing as more and more workloads can go onto a HCI platform, the adoption's starting to, and we're seeing large organizations bring it on, both in the core and out at the edge. So those are a couple big changes -- >> Todd, any bold predictions? Will Cisco be number three in HCI by the end of 2018? >> Todd: Yes, 'cause we already are. >> Okay. (laughs) >> We already are. So, today it's a three horse race right now. So it's Dell, Nutanix, Cisco in the latest IDC numbers. So I think by the end, I'd like to see number two within a type of a timeframe. I'll give you number two within six quarters, how about that? >> And Stu wants to know what are you going to do with all that cash that you bring over from, to the US? (laughs) >> John: What are you going to buy? >> Your patriotion, yeah. >> I heard Chuck talking about investing in employees so I hope to get some of that, or no. No guys, I think Chuck's already kind of laid it out. We got our investors, we've got potential things we can do, bringing in new technology, so he's really laid that out. >> Todd, final question for you at the end of the segment. >> Sure. >> As the personnel change, excitedly, the infrastructure of the cloud and the evolution of the renaissance that's coming with software, DevNet, DevNet Create, doing some great stuff as an indicator of what's coming, >> Sure. >> How is the roll of the network, your target customer, who's been loyal Cisco net MVP all these years and you got storage guys, interdisciplinary has been a big thing, what skill sets do you see evolving for that Cisco hero out there? What the trend that you can talk to? >> It's the ability to automate. It's the ability to take advantage of some of the technologies we're bringing in terms of assurance. It's how do you bring all of that insight that resides in the network, in the telemetry and that data, how do you bring that out and use it in a way that can help the business. I think for our core audience, for those folks you talk about, it's how do I become much more adept at bringing these pieces together in an automated way, but then how do take advantage of some of the things that are available to me now in terms of bringing the power of analytics, AI, into an IT context and take advantage of those things for all the different things you can imagine, security, assurance, et cetera. >> So the big thing then, just to summarize, if I hear you correctly, the difference this year is that you got AppD, and you got end to end DevOps. >> I think it's our multi-cloud story has really jelled over the past year, and now we're bring it in to the context of on-prem infrastructure in addition to the public cloud side of it, so I think that's the, that's big news from data center side. >> Todd Brannon who's the marketing director at Cisco here inside the Cube. We are in Barcelona, live coverage, two days, wall to wall. I'm John Furrier for Stu Miniman. More live coverage at the Cube after this short break. (synthesizer beat)