>> 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)

>>Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to the Cube's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube Dave Volante Ecosystem Minimum here all week in Barcelona, kicking off 2020 With the keynote analysis, Cisco just unveiled their looks like their plan for the year and what looks like a future direction of Cisco again. We were here past two years covering Cisco Live. We'll be at the US show this year as well. David Stew Keynote analysis. Let's get into it right away. Mostly you start to still see the messaging Positioning unfolding in front of us is clearly not there yet. A lot of people have their check boxes that rotation David get kicked it off. I mean, when we kicked it off David gentler key executive, really leading the charge here. But this is about Cisco setting the table. Let's get into it. What do you guys think? I thought it was a good keynote. I thought was a little bit lacking in the story, telling what was the thread was no common thread. Heard a lot of little cloud. I heard a lot of sis card, a lot of speeds and feeds. Everyone kind of has their turn, and all the top people were on there. What's your thoughts? >>Well, who is? Cisco was my first thought. Is your kid coming out of college? You hear that keynote, which I agree was good keynote. But I still wouldn't be sure exactly what Cisco does on. And so I think that you're right, that messaging needs to be tightened up. There needs to be a threat. At the same time, we saw some innovation. They sort of double down on the December announcements and talked about that. I really liked the collaboration that that's been a sleepy market zoom change that woke everybody up. And so we saw some interesting features. Their stuff on app d. They made a lot of claims, which I don't know if they're true or not. It seemed like VM Ware could do some of that stuff and new relic and some of the others dynatrace. But Cisco is coming at it from a networking area of strength, and, um so I guess my bottom line is, I still wanna understand what that threat is, and they talked about multi cloud. I really do think that Cisco is in the best position to connect those clouds to on Prem and Hybrid. They've got the data from the network, and they're in the best position to leverage that for value for their customers. Kind of came through, but I think it's my inference, not their claim. I was >>a little surprised. A This third year we've done this show, and usually there's, you know, the new tag line, and they were reusing the bridge to possible and feels still where things are coming together. Francisco, as you and John were saying, some of the products moving together. So it's awesome chatter on Twitter said, Oh, great Inter site and Empty, actually going to integrate and work well together on that integration messages, one that Cisco's highlighting Cisco's always had a really broad ecosystem. They put up the video about like, you know, if you know the Internet and everything you've done, we've been there, and we're going to drive that for the next generation in the collaboration space. It's not the same WebEx that you've known forever heck, you know, we're gonna have Microsoft with teams and WebEx trying to squint through that a little bit and say, Okay, well, Cisco's got a bunch of devices. Is that all it is? Is, you know, being saying great. You know, I've got Cisco Devices and therefore, if I'm you know, teams customer for Microsoft, I can plug into that. It seems like there's a lot of inter networking pieces underneath the covers there because Microsoft driving hard in that space. Zoom as you said Dave, for the quick, easy experience that that came out of Cisco. So a lot of things moving in the collaboration space. But in the hardcore data, says center space workload Optimizer is something that they were focused on. Talk about the new router Jonathan Davidson, who we'll have on the Cube tomorrow, talking about that space. So Cisco's got a very broad portfolio, and John, I think you nailed it. I did not come out of it. A consistent You know who Cisco is. The message for how we're going to partner with in the future. >>The day bring up a good point college kid looks at This is a good way to kind of zoom out of the technical world. Remember, David Gettler is a technical person. He ran engineering. He sees his big marketing word is multi domain. Come on, Multi domain is not a marketing word. It's just it's a technical feature, but >>this is a >>technical show and a lot of their audience here at the show. We are techies, and so it's clear to me that Cisco's brick by brick building the sass ification, the cloud ification of Cisco and this is something. I think they're not yet ready to pull the switch on Dave as to use a sailing analogy as they attack into the marketplace. They got to do a full turn on the boat. I think this is just the progression. I think it's natural to see Cisco spending millions of billions of dollars as we heard cloud defying and creating this subscription business model. The other notable things is you start to see some tell signs from the keynote, a few little things and I picked up out of this that shows that they're kind of going in the right direction. Still a lot more work to do, and the story needs to be up leveled a bit. I totally agree, rather than just speeds and feeds the classic enterprise. But Wendy hit it clearly. Business model is the new killer app, and I think all the things that we've discussed over the past 10 years to past five, in particular with Cloud Native is the business outcomes is what the APS are focused on. And so they're headlining the event with APP application dynamics, which makes sense. But it's not clear enough that the business model is the key to everything, and you're gonna connect businesses what Cisco does. I mean, what a Cisco Date. They connect business that's been their their mission. From day one, they >>got to take that message, bring it >>up with the applications, are driving business model changes and results. And I think that's the thread they're trying to get through and trying to thread the needle. They're they're just not ready. >>See, from an umbrella messaging standpoint, I think that would have been a lot more effective. But some of the things that I liked in the keynote, you know, Wendy Mars did talk about the importance of privacy, how Europe is leading in diversity. So so that is really important. And they also talked about how last decade was all about enabling APS. And this decade is going to be all about enabling APs and to your point, about enabling business. John. They talked a lot about bringing I t an OT together lists, and Tony really made a big point of that. When we walked into The DEV. Net zone, there was all these network engineers looking at an I O T presentation, these air I t guys trying to learn about the edge in OT. And so I think that's a really important message to the collaboration front. You know, some neat, neat features I just wanted to mention. But my understanding is that Microsoft Teams is all about taking its the old Skype business, which has, like, fallen off a cliff because everybody hates Skype and migrating at the team so they can compete more effectively with WebEx and the rest of them. So again, a lot of different parts of Cisco, but I think there was some definite innovation there, and then when I talked about they're December announcements the optics, the silicon one and the software bringing that together, you know, that is going to power service providers for the next 5 10 years, >>we'll do. I want to get your thoughts here because one of the things that we're observing and they've got hit with teams is that they're kind of groping a little bit on areas. Everyone's gonna get their time on stage. I get that. You know, the comment I made yesterday in our pre game day zero analysis was that there needs to be a Tesla of this industry and to completely change the game. So I think Cisco, if they take the business, we're connecting businesses and looking for a business model. Change is we're gonna look for the engine of the of the car of the application of the company and then what it ISS. So Cisco as a company, is the car, the engines were there, the weaknesses. So if you look at Cisco, all they do is talk about the engine and the features of the Pistons and all the technical speeds and feeds. That's great, but at the end of the day it's a new environment on the business front and I think they got to get that kind of conversion and bring that together Because, of course, they have to check the boxes on. Look, we've got a new engine. We've got new clouds modification. This is where it's at, but it's the destination that you're driving to, which is a business model Outcomes. So, you know, under the hood, are they there? So it seems to be they're still trying to get the engine fixed, and then they could roll out >>one of the things when we always look at all of these keynotes is Are they effectively letting customers tell their story? And does that resonate with what they're talking about? For the piece I saw, I only saw two customers. There was a video with Michael Bay, Great special effects. And actually, you know, I thought it kind of resonated because it's like, Okay, you know, I've got 10 locations shooting around the world and you know, there's terror, bits of information. He's like, I don't even know what a terabyte. It sounds like a dinosaur. And of course, all the networking like Ha ha. You know, you do cool exploding stuff, but you don't know what a terabyte is. And then they had Airbus and Dave, you talked about. Listen, Tony got up on stage and look at it and ot they don't play well together and that's we've done research, looking at the challenge of really delivering on I ot it is that schism between I T and OT and I would have loved to hear a little bit more because she said, Oh well, our tools just enable ot to work on anything. It's not that easy. Just >>well, I throw >>those two worlds >>together, key their security, and we're talking about securing critical infrastructure and really, that's a whole new opportunity in realm. I mean, it kind of came through, but But that's the linchpin is really securing that critical infrastructure, whether it's power plants, it roads, all kinds of logistics and a >>lot of one on Dave. I mean, this is the whole point about Cisco's challenges. One from a story standpoint is complex from a technology integration standpoint complex because you got application awareness, which is going down to the network. And then they showed a lot of that, and I thought that was a key highlight that didn't actually come through, but they did present it. They got the clarification story And then they got network automation all those things, as well as five g around the corner. Silicon One is a lot coming >>together. Nailed that, I mean, no doubt, >>a lot coming together. And I think the key is Is that Scott? Harold nailed it. I think we get clearer and the team are right on the money. On terms of the engine is intent based networking. Multi domain. Is that to me means multi cloud and hybrid. Nail that, and you can get those kinds of innovations. And I think Scott Harrell said it. Simplification is key security and inclusive of the cloud that one word to use, he said. We're talking about something that's inclusive of cloud. He really slam Cloud, he said. You know, it's a fancy place. It's Nirvana. But don't forget the intent of having the on premise basically. So I thought that was a nice thread, the three layers of insight security business in I T. But to me it's simple. I think Cisco needs to think differently around how they position themselves, because if they're going to throw WebEx out there and throw out all these analytics and data, they're a data company. They're a data first company, and they have to be a video first company of its five G. And they got to be a virtual first company because the new future workplace is about having those kinds of workloads running those kinds of app set, you know, feed the modern enterprise. And to me, my premise is, if you can automate it, it's not a feature for the modern modern enterprise has. Automation will be critical of everything, and you can't have bloated software running virtual first environment. >>But to your point, Cisco's advantage is that the data is running through the network, so they have visibility on that data. So they are in a very good position to leverage that data for automation and to connect businesses. Networks of data video is killer feature for that. I mean, they really are the only company right now in the business that can do that. >>Yeah, actually, I like the analogy. They said you should think of the network as a sensor. This is what's going to be able to drive your insight and outcomes. It's not just the plumbing anymore, but you know, that's one of the earliest areas where we drove analytics and data out of everything that's going on and set them up for that machine learning and AI world that people are driving toe extract data >>and to your point on cloud. I mean, look it. They know that you sort of reference that the cloud is slowly eating away at their opportunity because I T practitioners will tell you what the more we do in the cloud, the less we're gonna have to spend on our own network year. >>Yeah, but here's the thing that's coming out. And during the SD win section, I was making some comments >>on >>YouTube channel. SD Win is really, to me, a bellwether of how this goes because latency matters. If you're in the Cisco ecosystem, it's late in the late latency. And if the win is the new land, which is my premise than the interactions with security between the routes becomes critical, right? So you have to have that kind of insight. So we look at something like Web experiences on the collaboration side is that product truly defined for that environment? And I think you mentioned Zoom earlier as kind of waking everyone up is they've built a product around latency and around the environment around land, not the land. So WebEx and desktop is not the state of the art. So unless you got an NVIDIA graphics card designed into it and gaming rig, it's gotta be mobile. It's gonna be over a land link for virtual. And I think if the software to bloated, it's not gonna work. And I think that's gonna be an area that Cisco is going to look at and say, Does these products fit this new use case? >>Okay, so let's say three days of coverage, right? We did. Day Zero is actually four days of coverage for us. We got a lot of good guests coming on. A lot of Cisco execs. What >>are you guys looking for? This. Let's go look at the week we had a lot of guests coming on. Dave's do. What are you guys looking for? In terms of analysis? What are you looking to tease out of the show? >>Well, like any of these shows, I'm really trying to look at the substance, trying to understand the announcements that they're making, how real they are and how they map into the customer's view of what it is that they need. I say the collaboration thing is interesting to me. I was really concerned about Cisco. I thought they were just sort of sitting on their laurels. I think they're WebEx install Base is gonna really look hard at these features. If they're in fact, they're available. I want to understand from practitioners and particularly service providers, You know what they think of all this new stuff that's coming out cause it's expensive. But that's a big, big cap ex investment for these guys. And I want understanding the core Cisco business, their their data center business, their networks. They're hyper converged where they stand competitively. And the last thing is the partner ecosystem. You know, we've talked about how they have to walk a fine line between, you know, servicing guys like IBM and Netapp and then also competing with their former great partner in EMC now Dell, EMC, and how they're gonna go forward in the next 10 years. >>Yeah, you touched on the partner ecosystem and service riders. Edge is the next big opportunity for Cisco, and how will they leverage what they're doing to support all of those partners? going forward. Big thing I'm looking for this week as well as a Z you said Dave. Maturation of a lot of the pieces that they add. Where's the substance behind the announcements that they've made? How much of them are table stakes that we see some of the other environs? Collaboration Space John. As you said, Oh, here's these things on the desktop I could do all these things on my phone was so trying to understand what is differentiated >>awesome for me I'm looking for actually, we're in the Dev Net Zone Cube. I'm looking for the developer equations that came up clear, kind of last with Susie Wee. But she put the new world of developers that's going to change the whole CC certification area and on the ecosystem. And for the developers, it's a C I O T. D and a center Inter site an umbrella. Outside of that, I'm gonna be looking for how Cisco is looking at cloud ification of networking network as a service way into Cloud versus internal SD win simplification of the edge security and networking common policy to name a few know talk a WiFi. I mean, WiFi is the preferred connectivity point inside the enterprise. And how does that relate to the whole edge thing? Application awareness. I really jazzed up by app D and I think where they're going with that is really gonna be the front end of that network policy. And that application awareness is critical on finally network automation from See I CD pipeline into analytics and how that relates to Fixed Wireless the five G, which is going to be I o. T. In the subscription based model. So yeah, to me, that's the That's the big picture. I want to dig into those areas >>that you are the things if I May 1 is this gestalt of, um, I'm gonna buy best of breed or am I going to buy from, you know, one throat to choke? And I think Cisco is obviously trying to be the ladder, and I think the last for me. Security, security, security. And how is Cisco going to help practitioners implement the best security possible? >>Yeah. And John John mentioned in the DEV. Net zone. It is that modernization of the workforce, one of the last things in the keynote they want, accelerate the 1st 500 certified definite engineers out there. So what Sisi Iea's had been doing for many decades, many of them in the future are going to be part of that dev net with security being one of the key areas that we focus >>on. And, of course, we're the top story that so far out of the keynote to me, the top story so far is that Cisco is not gonna yield to the big cloud guys, They're brick by brick moving the needle on their rebooting of their products to be cloud enabled for hybrid. And then ultimately, in multi cloud. And I still think the big switches coming. They haven't pull that lever. They haven't yet made a big move, I think a lot more to come. So we're gonna be digging in to the guys. Thanks for the analysis. Keynote analysis here. Day one of Cisco live in Barcelona kicking off in setting the agenda for 2020. It's the cube coverage. I'm John for Stu Minima Dave Volante. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah