>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The CUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, Netapp, and the CUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. This is the CUBE live in Orlando for Cisco Live 2018, exclusive coverage, I'm John Furrier, cohost of the CUBE. Stu Miniman all week for three days and we have Dave Alante flying in as well, cohost for our kickoff of day two of our three days of coverage, great Dave, good to see you Stu. Good morning, so I think the big news obviously day one in the books. Cisco Live pumping on all cylinders. The parties, we saw great concert last night at the Cohesity party celebrating their 250 million in funding, but the real big news here is Cisco's moving up the stack and the business performance. Dave, you had a chance to scour the landscape last night and yesterday, what did you find out? What's going on with Cisco's business? >> Well the business wise, I mean, this company is actually doing quite well. It's a large company, 50 billion dollars, they're growing at four percent. You don't usually see growth, we've seen how many quarters in a row as IBM, you know, revenues declined. Cisco's reversed that trend and is growing. The other thing about Cisco is it brought about 60 billion dollars from overseas on the tax holiday, which is just amazing. The company is trying to shift its model, more toward a cloud-like model. Stu, you've made the point many times Cisco, like Dell, doesn't have a cloud. So they've got to create a cloud-like model, they've got to go multi-cloud, they've got to be an arms dealer for the cloud. So as a company that's 50 billion dollars, a 200 billion dollar plus market value, which is down from where they were in the halcyon days but still it's a 4X revenue multiple and they throw off over $10 billion dollars in free cash flow a year, so this company's very, very strong and John, we were talking last night about the angle and security and basically a programmable network infrastructure. To me, the big trend is it's all about the data. As the data explodes, the network gets a lot of pressure. >> You know, Stu, I want to get your thoughts on this because we talked on security last night. Talk about companies that have to pivot. Cisco is not pivoting in any capacity. They are dealing with networks that are running the internet, right? So Chuck Robbins just said, "Look it, "we have done a lot of great things" but they're dealing with so much security threats. It's encrypted traffic, they are dealing with a ton of activity so the relevance of Cisco is on an all time high. The opportunity is to take that relevance and build on top of it, and so, we're looking for some signals, Stu. What do you when you squint through the noise and look at Cisco's relevance, obviously you see they run networks. You're moving up the stack with Kubernetes and containers and DevNet's been a great indicator there's a rise of the new normal, but they gotta actually put it together, they got a community. Where is the change happening, Stu, in your opinion? >> Yes, so John, first of all I look at, we've been tracking Cisco's moves in open source for many years. Dave Wright, Lou Tucker, folks we've had on the CUBE. They're very involved in open stack, they're deeply involved, Kubernetes, Ishdio, Diane Greene on stage. So there was that seed of growth and change, but it didn't really push far enough. Where the critique I've had for Cisco and many of the other big legacy companies, is they haven't really embraced cloud as fast as they could. It's good to see where Cisco is and where they're trying to bring their ecosystem. The exciting stuff has been right here, in the DevNet zone. How many events do we go to and companies we talk to? "Oh we need to be relevant to all "these developers out there," well, Susie and her team here, they've got a platform, they've got 500 thousand developers on it. John, you and I interviewed one little startup's netnology. A buddy of mine, actually, Jason Ellerman, worked for this other company called Network to Code. They've got this whole little incubator section here in the DevNet zone. These are hardcore networking people helping to bridge that gap between the network and the developer world. It's open APIs, it's all the things we've been talking about and that really does set the stage for Cisco to help, not only itself, but it's very large channel and partner ecosystem move further into this new, cloud native world. >> I want to get your thoughts real quick. I know we've got to get in day two but, if you look at Cisco, they've done a lot of things early. The human network, they've had telepresence. So they've hit megatrends, but they misfired on timing. The timing-- >> IOT is another >> IOT, they misfired on timing. But again, they had the network to fall back on, which is a core asset and core competency. But if you look at the timing of what they're doing right now, as Pat Gelsinger would say, "You get on the right wave" and what DevNet, to me, proves, Stu, is your point, is that Cisco's on the Cloud Native wave and they have a clear visibility for their network engineers, not to feel like they're not relevant and they have to retrain to learn how to code. What's important and we talked about it yesterday, is that network engineers are instrumental powering. And they're the tier one people. Now, with Cloud Native, there's a path where they can extend their career, not pivot, or reset, it's just becoming more powerful. So if you can be a network engineer, and then code with Cloud Native, you've got the best of both worlds, the power base extends. It's not like "I need to be retrained, my job's going away." No, no, your job is expanding. This is what DevNet has tapped into with DevNet Create, your reaction. >> Well when cloud exploded, everybody wanted infrastructure as code, and to your point, Stu, you remember when IBM launched Bluemix, like "We need developers." You know, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, these companies don't have a strong developer community, even Oracle kinda lost its way with developers. Here comes Cisco allowing Cisco engineers to do infrastructure as code, it's a huge leverage, it's an amazing-- >> Yeah Oracle should take a playbook out of what Cisco's doing, Stu, your thoughts. >> Yeah, absolutely, there's a lot of training. One of the strengths, actually, if you look at this community, it's about training, we talked about it in our open yesterday, John, when you walk in, there's this giant bookstore, people are excited, it's their career and they've been hearing for the last five years, up, you know. Automations gonna kill your job. That the machines are gonna kill your job. They're jumping in and most of them, at least, are understanding that they need to adjust what they're doing, learn, move forward, and embrace some of these options. >> Well, and it's not just, as we were talking earlier, John, it's not just learning python as a generalist, it's applying it specifically to Cisco infrastructure and actually getting stuff done, moving from command line interfaces to a much more facile development environment. Driving value through developer productivity and increasing value up a stack. >> Yeah as Diane Greene said yesterday in the keynote from Google Cloud is mind blowing experiences. I think Cisco is in a great position, they got a lot of core things going on, it's a position of strength. Can they execute, can they secure that network security, can they have that extensibility and the programmability in the network I think is core. I think DevNet's an indicator. Everything else will fall into place, in my opinion, so, day two Dave, thanks for joining us. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> We'll have Dave Alante in the CUBE throughout the day, he's also gonna go out and get some stories. Wrapping it up here on the intro, day two begins. This is the CUBE, thanks for watching. Be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)