>> From around the globe it's theCube. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. >> We're here with Vikas Ratna, who's the director of product management for ECS at Cisco and James Leach is the director of business development for UCS at Cisco as well. We're going to talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Vikas let's start with you and talk a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving, they're supporting new data intensive and other workloads, especially as high-performance workload requirements, what's Cisco's point of view on all this? And specifically, I'm interested in your thoughts on fabrics, I mean, it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators, What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >> Sure, Dave. First of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric, accelerators, the drives, the processing power, the core density all have been evolving at just an amazing pace and the pace will only pick up further, but ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications leverage those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values, very, very exciting times, Dave, but talking about the impact on the customers, well these innovations have helped them pretty positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with a point product based approach of delivering these platform innovations to the applications. What has happened is these innovations today are being packaged as point products to meet the needs of a specific application. And as you know, the different applications have their different needs. Some applications need more tributes, others need more memory, yet others need, you know, more cores. Some need different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is pretty common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know, several different form factors, one you, to you, purpose-built servers or the variety of, you know, blade form factor. You know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you, when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system, a cool music device for listening to the music, a phone device for making a call, camera for taking the photos. Right? And we were all excited about it. It's when the smartphones arrived that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient, and easy to consume it through one device and, you know, and that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers who are benefiting from these innovations to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to do it today. >> And I like, look, it's always been about the applications, but to your point, the applications are now moving at a much faster pace. The customer experience is, expectation, is way escalated. And when you combine all these, I love your analogy there Vikas, because when you combine all these capabilities, it allows us to develop new applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's the, I always say, the next 10 years, they ain't going to be like the last. And James, public cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and customer operating models. You know, it's funny, when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone, we were swooning about oh, low cost, standard off-the-shelf servers, you know, and storage devices, but it quickly became obvious that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyperscalers, how are they filtering into on-prem infrastructure and maybe, you know, maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address? >> Absolutely. So, you know, I'd say first of all, quite frankly, you know, public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment, they've gotten used to, or, you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application-focused view, a services-focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application. They want to move outward, right? So, this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know, we're taking a different approach. We've decided that, you know, we're not going to chase this, you know, single pane of glass view of the world, which, you know, frankly our customers don't want. They don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get with the public cloud, but they want it across all of their cloud options. They want it across private cloud, across hybrid cloud options, as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services. They want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation orchestration, but they also need Kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services. They may need Terraform, workload optimization. All of these services have to be available from within the operating model, a consistent operating model, right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud, anywhere, where the application lives doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a consistent model, that we think about it from the application out, and frankly, I'd say, you know, this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right? This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X Series and intersight as that, you know, operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen. >> This is a Cube first, first time's a technology vendor has ever said that it's not about a single pane of glass because I've been hearing for decades we're going to deliver a single pane of glass. It's going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational. And it's just not reality. So can we stay on the X Series for a minute, James, maybe in this context, but in the launch that we saw today, it was like a fire hose of announcements. So, how does the X Series fit into the strategy with intersight, and hybrid cloud in this operating model that you're talking about? >> Right. So, I think it goes hand-in-hand, right? The two pieces go together very well. So we have, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely, you know, something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems Vikas was talking about before, we need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models or different sets of benefits, when you want infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications. And then, you know, the operating model is very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure. So that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about it is the data center is not centered, right? It's no longer centered. Applications live everywhere. Infrastructure lives everywhere. And, you know, we need to have that consistent operating model, but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage, right? So we want all the SaaS benefits of a CICD model of, you know, the intersight can bring, we want all of that, you know, proactive recommendation engine with the power of AI behind it, we want the connected support experience. We want all of that, but we want to do it across a single infrastructure. And we think that that's how they tie together. That's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem, but both together. That's why we're here. That's why we're super excited. >> So Vikas, I make you laugh a little bit. When I was an analyst at IDC, I was a bit deep into infrastructure, And then when I left, I was doing, I was working with application development heads. And like you said, infrastructure, it was just a roadblock, but it was so the tongue-in-cheek is when Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business. And it wasn't until I dug in that I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure deployment and management. And change the model. It was like, okay, I got that wrong. But, so let's talk about the, the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there. X Series, how does it fit into this converged infrastructure business that you've built and grown with partners? You've got storage partners like NetApp and Pure. You got ISV partners in the ecosystem. We see Cohesity, it's been a while since we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live, hopefully next year, but tell us what's happening in that regard. >> No, absolutely. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year, Dave. Absolutely. You brought up a very good point. UCS is about the ecosystem that it brings together. It's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure, from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can all go off and running pretty quick. That converse infrastructure has been one of the cornerstones of our strategy, as you pointed out, in the last decade. And I'm very glad to share that conversed infrastructure continues to be a very popular architecture for several enterprise applications even today. In fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications, where performance, resiliency, latency, are the critical requirements. They are almost de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualize and business critical databases and so forth. With X Series, with our partnerships, with our restorative partners, those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition, it's a hybrid cloud world. So we are now bringing in the benefits of conversed infrastructure to the world of hybrid cloud. We'll be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CA infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with the store as partners to tell you with the same benefits to the new age applications as well. >> Yeah and that's what customers want, they want that cloud operating model. Right? Go ahead, please. >> I was just going to say, you know, that the CA model will continue to thrive. It will transition out, it will expand the use cases now for the newer use cases that we were beginning to see, Dave, absolutely. >> Great. Thank you for that. And James, like I said earlier today, we heard this huge announcement, a lot of parts to it. And we heard, you know, KD talk about this initiative is, it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean, I like that because it shows some vision and that you've got, you know, a roadmap, that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just the, you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >> Sure. You know, that's a great question. number one. Number two, I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for customers in general, for our customers, customers in general, because if you look at what's in the market, right? These rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2009 when we brought UCS to market, these are what we're seeing over and over and over again, that's not really going to work anymore, frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually put in the market. We've rethought this from the ground up because frankly, you know, future-proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future-proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even, you're not even today-proofed. So we've rethought the entire chassis, the entire architecture, from the ground up. Okay. If you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like, you know management inside the chassis. That's a great example. Daisy chaining them together. Like, who needs that? Who wants that? Like, that kind of complexity is, first of all, it's ridiculous. Second of all, if you want to manage across clouds you have to do it from the cloud, right? It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact, you know, your entire domain, your world, which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here. Right? So, we had to, you know, solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you know, talk about, you know, the mid plane is a great example. Well, you know, the mid plane in a chassis is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple. Just get rid of it. Like we just, we took it out, right? It's now no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it, no forklift upgrades. So as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling, or maybe we need to take advantage of some new high performance, low latency fabrics. We can do that with almost no problem at all, right? So we don't have any forklift upgrades. Park your forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade granularly. You can move along as technologies come into existence that maybe don't even exist today. They may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of but I like to think of these technologies. You know, they're really important to our customers. These are, you know, we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves, right? And this is the way that we've designed this, from the ground up, to be easy consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability, flexibility, and future-proofing. >> I like that phrase, true hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years. But to me, this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You could support the mission critical applications. You can develop on the system and you can support a variety of workloads. You're not locked into, you know, one narrow stovepipe. And that does have legs. Vikas and James, thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >> Thank you, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching. This is Dave Volante for theCube, the leader in digital event coverage. (uplifting music)

>> Presenter: From around the globe. It's theCUBE present a future cloud one event a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >> We're here with Vikas Ratina, who's the director of product management for ECS at Cisco and James Leach is the director of business development for UCS at Cisco as well. We're going to talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen. Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Vikas let's start with you and talk about a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving they're supporting new data intensive and other workloads especially as high-performance workload requirements. What's Cisco's point of view on all this and we're specifically interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean, it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >> Sure, Deb, first of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric, the accelerators, the drives, the processing power, the core density, all have been evolving at just an amazing pace and the pace will only pick up further. But ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications levels those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values, very very exciting timestamp, but talking about the impact on the customers. Well these innovations have helped them pretty positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with a point product based approach of delivering these platform innovations to the applications. What has happened is, these innovations today are being packaged as one point products, to meet the needs of a specific application. And as you know the different applications have different needs. Some applications need more tributes, others need more memory, yet others need, you know more course, some need different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is pretty common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know several different form factors one you to you, a purpose-built servers the variety of, you know, ablate form factor. You know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system. A cool music device for listening to the music. A phone device for making a call, camera for taking the photos that we were all excited about it. It's when smartphones arrived, that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient and easy to consume way through one device. And you know that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers who are benefiting from these innovations, to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to do today. >> And I liked I mean it's always been about the applications but to your point, the applications are not moving at a much faster pace. The customer experience is his expectation is way escalated and when you combine all these, I love your analogy there Vikas because when you combine all these capabilities it allows us to develop new applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's, I always say that the next 10 years they ain't going to be like the last. And James' public cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone was swooning about oh low cost, standard off the shelf servers you know, and storage devices but it quickly became obvious that that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyper scalers? How are they filtering into on-prem infrastructure and maybe, you know maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. >> Absolutely. So, you know I'd say first of all, quite frankly, you know public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment they've gotten used to or you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application focused view a services focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application. They want to move outward, right? So the, this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know we're taking a different approach. We've decided that, you know we're not going to chase this, you know, single pane of glass view of the world, which, you know, frankly our customers don't want. They don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get with the public cloud, but they want it across all of their cloud options. They want it across private cloud, across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services, they want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation orchestration but they also need Kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services. They may need Terraform, workload optimization. All of these services have to be available from within the operating model, a consistent operating model, right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud, anywhere, where the application lives doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a consistent model that as we think about it from the application out and frankly I'd say, you know, this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right? This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X series. and intersite as that you know operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen. >> There's theCUBE's first times a technology vendor has ever said, that it's not about a single pane of glass cause I've been hearing for decades we're going to deliver a single pane of glass. It's going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and it's just not reality. So can we stay on the X series for a minute, James. >> Sure. >> And maybe in this context but in the launch that we saw today it was like a fire hose of announcement. So how does the X series fit into the strategy with intersite, in hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? >> Right, so I think it goes hand in hand, right? The two pieces go together very well. So we have, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely, you know, something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems Vikas was talking about before. We need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models or different sets of benefits, we need one infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications and then, you know, the operating model was very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure. So that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about it as the data center is not centered, right? It's no longer centered. Applications live everywhere, infrastructure lives everywhere. And, you know we need to have that consistent operating model but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage, right? So we want all the SaaS benefits of a CICD model of you know, the intersite can bring we want all of that, you know, proactive recommendation engine with the power of AI behind it. We want the connected support experience. We want all of that but we want to do it across a single infrastructure. And we think that that's how they tie together. That's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem, but both together, that's why we're here that's why we're super excited. >> So Vikas I, I make you laugh a little bit. When I was an analyst at IDC, I was a bit deep in infrastructure and then when I left, I was doing, I was working with application development heads and like you said, a infrastructure it was just a roadblock. But with, so the target cheek is when Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business and it wasn't until I dug in then I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure deployment and management and it changed the model. I was like, okay, I got that wrong. But so let's talk about the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there. X series, how does it fit into this converged infrastructure business that you've built and grown with partners. You've got storage partners like NetApp and pure. You got ISV partners in the ecosystem. We see Cohesity has been a while since we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live hopefully next year but tell us what's happening in that regard. >> Now, absolutely. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year. Absolutely. You brought up a very good point. UCS is about the ecosystem that it brings together. It's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can all go off and running pretty quick. The converged infrastructure has been one of the cornerstones of our strategy as you pointed out in the last decade. And I'm very glad to share that converged infrastructure continues to be very popular architecture for several enterprise applications even today. In fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications, where performance, resiliency, latency are the critical you know requirements. They are almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualize and business critical databases and so forth. With x-series, with our partnerships, with our storage partners, those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition, it's a hybrid cloud world. So we are now bringing in the benefits of converged infrastructure to the world of hybrid cloud. We'll be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CI infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with our storage partners to deliver the same benefits to the new AEs applications as well. >> Yeah and that's customers want, they want that cloud operating model, right? Go ahead, please. >> I was just going to say the x series model will continue to thrive. It will transition our, it will expand the use cases now for the newer use cases that we were beginning to, you know say to if it absolutely right. >> Great. Thank you for that. And James, I said earlier today, we heard this this huge announcement, a lot of parts to it. And we heard, you know, KD talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean, I like that because it shows some vision and you've got, you know a roadmap that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just the you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >> Sure. You know, that's a great question, number one. Number two, I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for customers in general for our customers customers in general because if you look at what's in the market, right? These rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2009 when we brought UCS to market, these are what we're seeing over and over and over again that's not really going to work anymore, frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually putting in the market. We rethought this from the ground up because frankly you know, future-proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future-proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even today proofed. So we've rethought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay, if you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like, you know management inside the chassis. That's a great example. Daisy chaining them together, like who needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is first of all, it's ridiculous. Second of all, if you want to manage across clouds you have to do it from the cloud, right? It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact, you know your entire domain, your world which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here, right? So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you know, talk about, you know, the mid-plane is a great example. We, you know, the mid and a chassis is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple, just get rid of it. Like we just, we took it out, right? It's no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling or maybe we need to take advantage of some new high-performance low-latency fabrics, we can do that with almost no problem at all, right? So we don't have any forklift upgrades, parker forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade gradually. You can move along as technologies come in to existence that maybe don't even exist today. They may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of but I like to think of these technologies they're really important to our customers. These are, you know we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We don't want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves, right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So do we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability, flexibility and future-proofing. >> I like, I like that phrase true hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years. And but to me, this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You could support the mission, critical applications. You could develop on the system and you can support a variety of workloads. You're not locked into, you know, one narrow stovepipe and that does have legs. Vikas and James thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE the leader in digital event coverage. (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)

(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 Washington DC it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public-Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to AWS public sector here in Washington DC, the Cube's live coverage, two-day coverage, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting alongside John Ferrier, and we are welcoming back to the Cube, 13 time Cube alum, Sanjay Poonen in the COO of VM-Ware. Thank you so much for coming back on the show >> VIP status, by the way. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> That's definitely VIP status. >> Yes we have a red carpet rolled out >> Delighted to be here. I've lost track of the number of times, but when you're having fun it's good. >> Exactly, so tell us a little bit about what is VM-ware's role here in the public sector, what are you doing here at this conference? >> VM-ware and AWS announced a partnership in October 2016, and it really was the coming together of the best in the public cloud, with the best in the private cloud for what we describe as the hybrid cloud opportunity. And the past two and a half years, coming up on three years pretty soon, has been incredibly exciting. We started off with some of the key industries that we felt, for us, the public sector is among our top three industries. But financial services, telco, public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, all the key industries, technology, we're looking for ways by which they could take their applications into the cloud without having to re-factor and re-platform those applications. That's a big deal because it's wasted of work, if you can lift and shift and then innovate. And that's the value we brought to the public sector and some of our earliest customers, were customers in the public sector like MIT, schools, most of the regulated industries. In the on premise world, we're very strong in almost every, civilian, military, the legislative advance, the judicial advance, the federal agency, all of them use us. Millions and millions of work loads. The question really is how is they think about modernization can they get the best manifesto of the public cloud while leveraging their VM footprint >> So some would say that modernization may not include the original VM-ware vision because a lot of the governments are tryna replace and equated old systems like coldblow, mainframes, whatever, but you guys have been around dominated the operating side of IT for a while so you're kind of seeing the first wave of virtualization, the first wave of modernization but there's some cloud native people they might see that as like "Whoa, is that old school?" So what is particular perspective on that innovation dynamic? Because a lot of the public sector investors are awakening now going "Oh my god, I can move fast with Cloud" So Cloud is bringing on a new set of disruptors in IT, you guys have already been there on the first wave of disruption, so how do balance that kind of presence, >> Yeah >> But also disruption, you might be viewed that way, I'm not sure. >> Yeah, I would say, actually, that the first wave of our free reign modernization started with this device before Cloud. Okay, in 2007 when the iPhone came out there was a significant move by big parts of the public sector to move away from blackberry, which is kind of what they use for the decade prior to that. And when we brought AirWatch, we began to see some of the earliest industries that were adopting the public sector. Many of the agencies started to look at us now, so we actually began our journey into this modernization discussion in the workplace transformation, part of the discussion before we got to Cloud. So we were prepared for some of what that looked like, for example, census 2020 that entire for all the workers something is being done with mobile devices now as opposed to paper or surveys that were done maybe 10, 20 years ago, and all powered and secured by Workspace ONE. Now, when it got to Cloud we were prepared for that because, you know, we knew a little bit of what that meant and mobile and Cloud were some of the two top discussion items that people were talking about as modernization at first under the banner of digital transformation. We had to begin to showcase to a customer that moving an application, now we're talking clients server three tier architectures as opposed to a cobalt mainframe that's really where we have but the bulk of the 886 architecture that's from virtualized VM-ware if you could take them now to the cloud and then use some of the services that these guys are building whether it's data based, whether it's artificially intelligence, machine learning, if you waste all your time in re-platforming and re-marketing an application it's that much less time you have to do some of those innovative things. And the lift and shift process once we had this sort of highway into the Cloud, so to speak, which is what VM-ware Cloud and AWS does, it became so apparent, so we are that process, we had to then work what we can talk about Fred RAM certification all of these things that I'm (inaudible) >> In AirWatch was really a critical acquisition, turns out a boom for you guys with public sector. >> Oh yeah. >> You guys had the iPhone was a driver not so much the blocking and tackling of virtualizing data centers and IT, which you had a presence in, but it was the mobility piece. >> Well since 1998, 99, since the company was founded, the public sector business of VM-ware has been very important, I mean I would say, like I said it's the top three and so, we have tremendous amount of relationships some of our biggest deals. Eight figures plus deals where done with some of the biggest and many of our partners here. >> So it's a large business. >> Large business. >> Did you break that in the numbers? >> We did but we have always said it so a top three, we have always talked about in our earnings calls, some big, large customer examples like US Army, and then , which is also a sort of representative of this community here. Safe, local education. All the universities are using us. So the footprint of VW-ware premise was well documented, well understood, lots of spent going on there. What we didn't have an access to, we had some virtual desktops, VDIs. This mobile aperture gave us a whole new banner of spending. But then the Cloud aperture is kind of taking this to a whole new level. And quite frankly if you look at the commercial sector, the overall IT spent in the world is about one trillion we track and about 150 to 200 billion of that, 15 to 20 % is being spent on the Cloud. And the public sector, governs sector is starting to track that, they are probably a little bit lagging in certain areas to commercial. But that 15 to 20 % is only going to get 30 or 40 % in the next five years. VM-ware has been one the top infrastructure companies, we are looking at our move, a bigger part of the wall of share that we gain as people move their investment to the Cloud. >> When you are thinking about the different clients and customers that you're working with, the Sled groups and then the corporate customers, what-how different are they and how, what's on the public sector's mind versus your corporate clients? And how do you manage the relationships differently? >> Yeah, we have sort of segment them at VM-ware and many companies have done the same thing into three pockets. One is who we describe as the federal public sector customers that are civilian, military and we mirror that in almost every country so Theresa here, for example, runs AWS and we have a similar type of work structure to hear in each of the key regions. The second big segment is healthcare, many of the healthcare organizations are regulated there's similar characteristics and the third is SLED, state local education. And those three pockets are very similar patterns in the way in which they buy, their CIOs are similar and they also have often very similar security requirements. So the highest maybe something like a FED and FedRAMP and we some specialized needs that they have for certain certifications on the device or certifications on the Cloud and we have to comply with all of those. But then as you get to the ones that are in the state local maybe they don't as many and higher certifications but what it's helped is to basically work with partners with a very similar across this, and the proposition on the initial transformation is really modernization of either the data center and their applications or modernization of the device. And VM-ware is very uniquely provisioned to help on both those fronts. >> And security is really top of mind >> Absolutely >> I mean we've heard on the main stage and we know how big a threat these cyber threats face. These Cyber threats pose. >> Absolutely, and if you think about aspects of security. Security has multiple aspects of where you can think of them as control points. The network, the end-point, the cloud, identity and lots of event management that is collected. These are the five biggest markets of security. In each of those areas VM-ware is starting to play more. For example, network, you know, five, six years ago people didn't think of VM-ware in that area but with NSX our leading software define networking area, we have become the lead on that segment and about half of our use cases are security related for a use case called micro-segmentation. So the government can basically segment out a set of their apps and through software, think of these as on-off switches almost like light switches only allow certain apps to access certain parts of the data center. That's very easily done through NSX. Workspace ONE, the endpoint can now be extremely secure and provide all the levels of security that Blackware provided in their proprietary devices but now on any device. So we've been systematically looking at each of these areas I would estimate about 15 to 20 % of VM-ware revenue is security related use cases and public sector this is a very, very key place where we get grilled on and we have to satisfy their level of requirements for security. >> Sanjay, what are you doing here? I know you said you are speaking at a panel, Fireside chat, what's your agenda of the week? What's the story? What some of the key talking points for VM-ware? >> VM-ware is one of the top sponsors here, I don't know whatever is global or platinum or whatever the highest level is, you will see our name's there. And largely what we did when we announced this partnership was, you know, Andy and I were classmates at school. We wanted to build a very close partnership at their big events, so you will see us at all the major summits. VM-ware is a top sponsor, and you'll see them also at >> Doubling down on the relationships. >> Yep, we're doubling down. And they're doing the same at VM-world, so we said "Listen" and I think I talked about this in one of your previous shows. If you can mingle, VM-ware has collectively about 100,000 people that come to all the VM-ware events across the world and maybe about half a million to people who watch those events online. Amazon has probably twice that number. But if we can mingle each other audiences because they are coming off into both shows and we, the best showing up at AWS summits and we'll give them lots of access to VM-world. >> Ups* >> (laughs) There we go. >> Operations >> Hey, that's got a ring to it. I like it >> That's exactly the vision. So we, first of all, VM-ware is a big presence and the acquisition we've done, also, like Cloud helped also has a big presence, so that's one. Number two, we try as often as possible to have either a key note or some kind of Provence, I've had a good friendship with Theresa. She invited me to speak, I think there's an event with their top five hundred customers, sort of a key note inside that. And I do that a little later this afternoon. And it's also a tremendous opportunity, I think they have 13 or 15,000 attendees here to meet some of our top customers, so those are the three things that I'm doing over the course of the next day and a half. >> You got the CIA deal 2013, what that has done, in gestation period since then, a lot of other folks in the DC circuit here, public sector, government, agencies, they are all going "Hmm, Amazon has got the right formula" so Theresa put the formula together, people are adopting it, you guys do the strategic deal with AWS with your AA gown on, as a student of the game if you will in tech, Sanjay, which you are, knowing what you know now at VM-ware what's your perspective on this? Because you got a big tail wind with Cloud, you get clarity in what you guys do, in what AWS does, you also have multi Cloud with other Clouds, I mean you got NSX with a nice product, you got multi Cloud built-in hybrid, I mean, pretty good at spot for VM-ware for public sector. What's your perspective on this? >> Yeah, two parts to your question. First off, tremendous respect for Andy. I was describing before I go out on the show with both of you, when we were in school, I wouldn't have put him, in 1987 when we graduated, as the person who would of been the pied piper of this public Cloud revolution. But kudos to him, Theresa a fantastic executive and I think that, you know, 2013 CIA deal put them on an incredible place to be, a front runner in this and many other deals they've done similarly. VM-ware, we saw over the last, you know, 3, 4, 5 years is a significant rise of Amazon in our accounts. Customers were asking us "Why can't we get the best of both worlds? Why does it have to be on premise runs and VM-ware and public lines and I've got to portent and refactor and re platform my applications?" So our customers drove a us together and what we've sort to do in our relationship with Amazon is we meet on a quarterly basis, we review feature and function, product road map, we're aggressive, with our sales teams are trying to pursue opportunities together. And that's really helped us, you know, that's part of the reason I'm here, so, the more that we can do together to satisfy customers, customers like seeing big partners come together, even if, it feels a little bit like Berlin wall moment, right? You remember 1987? You had the US and Soviet Union and people were surprised by that. I that that the general consensus was complete surprise in 2016 when we announced the project with Amazon. But with every move we made like for instance, recently we announced the FedRAM status, one of our biggest 8 figure deals we had announced in our queue for was with a major customer that's in this segment, actually. Our public sector SLED and the more that we can do this, I think there's a lot of future ahead of us. >> Berlin is interesting, you know, tearing down that wall that was a moment that came down and the government, the theme that we are hearing over and over again is red tape. Lag with data it hurts application work loads so fast data, make it available, cut the read tape out of procurement, I mean, basically, 1980s, 1990s, procurement rules don't apply to how people consume and deploy technology today. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Tear down that red tape. >> I think you got that right. I think the governments mandate to go Cloud first in the, you know, last several administrations was absolutely key and certain elementary work loads like websites, I mean why, so if it's a public website that's holding public information, I mean, of course, you've got to worry about security but the data public anyway. Okay, so, what's going to get hacked? I mean, why don't you move all websites that are web content, so some of those early work loads are moved over very easy. I would call it so, the 1-O-1 of posting. Why would you want to have server just to host a website? But once that's done the more mission critical applications, Windows work loads, Oracle's sequel service databases, Virtual desktops, now you are starting to see and I think eventually some of the more mission critical apps like SAP or Oracle apps, I think you see them also now with a lot of customers in both public sectors and commercial- >> Military DOD tactical edges, >> Absolutely. >> The military lives are on the line, it's not a video game, lag actually will kill people. So you want to have that application peaked. >> Exactly. >> With the right architect >> One of the things that are so inspiring about being here at the public sector summit is that we are seeing all these used cases, of using the Cloud for good to solve pressing environmental challenges, health challenges, social challenges, what are you seeing, what is VM-ware working on that is, that is particularly inspiring to you? >> I am glad you asked that Rebecca. I would say that's one the things and Amazon shares a similar value where we think that, you know, technology companies have to think beyond themselves and be a force for good. I think that one of the first times at any major conference, last year we had the Nobel Peace Prize winner who's changed the world, Malala, come and speak and I think everyone who comes to major tech conferences, and we had one of the biggest conferences, was, I mean, we had grown big men, 6 foot tall crying at the end of that. And we had a number of customers that we loved to be able to talk about there stories, Make A wish is an example of an organization that, you know, if someone's with a terminal disease and they want to have some wish that they could wish for, all the infrastructure runs in VM-ware and we can help them serve that audience better, we have a number of charitable organization, Red Cross was on (unintelligible), so we, a big part of pad mind the attire of companies, kind of charter in our EPICC values has been people of integrity, people of work with the customers and the community. Our values EPICC stands for execution, passion, integrity customer and community. And that last C I think is very important, cause, you know, we live in a world and the more important thing is not necessarily how much money you make but what a force you can be for changing people's life. That lasts forever. You can't take your money into the grave but the more you can have on people, impact on people's lives, I mean, John, I am delighted to see your daughter. >> Yeah. >> I mean that generation continues >> Well, it's community right? >> And you're passing on those values onto the next generation or helping people that's the bigger story of life and that gets us equally excited as innovation. >> Communities can now be instrumented via digital technologies, so your faster time to find truth, people who have communities were very active, the data is there, it's all in the data and so you can see the impact >> You know, I think that's absolutely key. So John, I would agree with you and I think you as, you know, you talk to companies that's an important question to ask them. Because we are all in this together. There is no whether it's competitors or what's not, we can all serve the greater community, here for good and make this world a better place, you know there is a lot of what we do that helps the world run better, that's good, infrastructure helps us run better, but helping the world be a better place, it takes both individual and collective will. >> Well one of the talent gaps is not just computer programming and tech people it's architects for the new society that needs help and these key policy questions like governance and responsibilities, you're seeing YouTube and Facebook and our neck of the woods responsible for all this impact and they don't really kind of, there's no oversight. (laughs) >> Well, listen I'm not going to get into the public debate about, you know, privacy and governance and so on. I would say that one thing that, you know, we're also really excited to kind of give back to the community in terms of education. One of the things that is very powerful to VM-ware is our user groups. We call them V-mugs, VM-ware user groups and there's collectively about 150, 200000 of them and it's amazing when you spend time with them, they are really, really, they are members of the community really because they're customers and partners and they dedicate their time to educating others and the more that we can use online forums, I love the way in which you're using your online platform with the AI and other techniques. I think artificial intelligence becomes the ground equalizer, give access to everybody. >> Access to the voice is access to the data but right now as you pointed out we need a society that's going to have shared values and I think that's like where the good is coming from and it's easy to get on the bad tech band wagon which everyone is on right now but there are examples of tech for good, you mentioned- >> But when you say shared values, is that you, I mean is that possible? >> Well, I think there is, there is an awakening going on now from Silicon Valley where I live and here in DC which it's, it's in my face here because people as tech savvy here as they are in say Silicon Valley, no offense, but those people aren't as tech savvy here as they are in Silicon Valley, they don't go deep on the impact of tech but they see the results of bad tech. So I don't see a lot of a vandalizing going on outside of certain areas around tech for good. So I think there's a lot of great examples, human trafficking, you're seeing tech for hiring, new generations onboard training, skills gap, so efficiencies in healthcare, there is so many areas that tech could be used for good and if people were educated on focusing on that and not the bad, I mean bad's got to eradicated, certainly, I'm not for bad things but maybe there's a lot more good, the good pile is much bigger than the bad pile in tech, so, when I say shared values is recognition of that which is let's get on the same page, there's bad and there's good, have that debate and then apply the tech. >> Yeah, interesting. It's a galvanizing force. >> Well, it's just like any invention whether it's the printing press or the use of fire, I mean, there is good use of it and there's bad use of it. And we got to to find ways by which technology while this debate is going on as to as some of these social media platforms, my fundamental belief is that technology is going to transform society, the reason I came to the United States as an immigrant was to study computer science and I felt like the United States had, you know, when I came to this college I hade never heard of called Dartmouth College in Haven New Hampshire, was very fortunate to have a scholarship to go there but that's because I wanted to study computer science and I felt like computer science could change a lot of the way at which, you know, at that time, I was just trying to program and learn how to, you know, create algorithms but if you look at what transformed every aspect whether it's the mobile device which is really a computer in your pocket or Cloud computing which is kind of bringing the super computer into the Cloud. >> (inaudible) >> I think it's tremendous what we can do and we have to constantly find ways by which artificial intelligence and these forces of, you know, the next part of general mobile, Cloud computing can be used for greater good. >> Did you go to scholarship on full bode with basketball? (all laugh) >> Man, we got the Warriors with two ball games. >> So you are a big Warriors and for the folks that don't know Sanjay, we always used to talk about every time Warriors looking good to stay alive but not looking good >> So sad to see. I mean it's sort of, the last game I was watching last night, it was, it was sad, it was, of course, it was a win but also a loss to see KD go down that way was just absolutely tearful, yeah, but, you know, we have one more game. >> It's going to be hard >> It's going to be hard to, you know, kind of beat the crowd and the crowd is really loud at Oracle and get one more game and then, yeah, I think it'll get to game 7, we'll what happens but it's just great to their heart. >> I'm from Boston so I'm kind of over Golden state but I am sure everyone is over Boston and our red socks and our throw-ins and our pads >> Duck tour has only been 15 months? >> I know exactly! Exactly! We're still- >> There will be a Celtic warriors game >> That would have been so good >> That would have been so good like the Lakers (inaudible) >> It was more recent than that. It was the pads victory, so yeah >> Okay >> Yeah, anyway. Just saying, just saying. Sanjay, thank you so much for coming back on The cube, we look forward to your 14th visit on the show. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, John. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Ferrier, stay tuned for more AWS public sector summit here in Washington DC. (Upbeat Music)

(upbeat jazz music) >> Woman: From our studio's, in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a CUBE conversation. >> John: Hello and welcome to this CUBE conversation here, exclusive coverage of Google Next 2019. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Big Google Cisco news, we're here with KD who's the vice president of the data center for compute for Cisco and Kip Compton, senior vice president of Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. Guys, welcome to this exclusive CUBE conversation. Thanks for spending the time. >> KD: Great to be here. >> So Google Next, obviously, showing the way that enterprises are now quickly moving to the cloud. Not just moving to the cloud, the cloud is part of the plan for the enterprise. Google Cloud clearly coming out with a whole new set of systems, set of software, set of relationships. Google Anthos is the big story, the platform. You guys have had a relationship previously announced with Google, your role in joint an engineering integrations. Talk about the relationship with Cisco and Google. What's the news? What's the big deal here? >> Kip: Yeah, no we're really excited. I mean as you mentioned, we've been working with Google Cloud since 2017 on hybrid and Multicloud Kubernetes technologies. We're really excited about what we're able to announce today, with Google Cloud, around Google Cloud's new Anthos system. And we're gonna be doing a lot of different integrations that really bring a lot of what we've learned through our joint work with them over the last few years, and we think that the degree of integration across our Data Center Portfolio and also our Networking and Security Portfolios, ultimately give customers one of the most secure and flexible Multicloud and hybrid architectures. >> One of the things we're seeing in the market place, I want to get your reactions to this Kip because I think this speaks to what's going on here at Google Next and the industry, is that the company's that actually get on the Cloud wave truly, not just say they're doing Cloud, but ride the wave of the enterprise Cloud, which is here. Multicloud is big conversation. Hybrids and implementation of that. Cloud is big part of it, the data center certainly isn't going away. Seeing a whole new huge wave. You guys have been big behind this at Cisco. You saw what the results are with Microsoft. Their stock has gone from where it was really low to really high because they were committed to the Cloud. How committed is Cisco to this Cloud Wave, what specifically are you guys bringing to the table for Enterprises? >> Oh we're very committed. We see it as the seminal IT transformation of our time, and clearly on of the most important topics in our discussions with CIO's across our customer base. And what we're seeing is, really not as much enterprises moving to the Cloud as much as enterprises extending or expanding into the Cloud. And their on-prem infrastructures, including our data centers as you mentioned, certainly aren't going away, and their really looking to incorporate Cloud into a complete system that enables them to run their business and their looking for agility and speed to deliver new experiences to their employees and to their customers. So we're really excited about that and we think sorta this Multicloud approaches is absolutely critical and its one of the things that Google Cloud and Cisco are aligned on. >> I'd like to get this couple talk tracks. One is the application area of Multicloud and Hybrid but first lets unpack the news of what's going on with Cisco and Google. Obviously Anthos is the new system, essentially its just the Cloud platform but that's what they're calling it, Googles anthem. How is Cisco integrating into this? Cause you guys had great integration points before Containers was a big bet that you guys had made. >> Kip: That's right. >> You certainly have, under the covers we learned at Cisco Live in Barcelona around what's going on with HyperFlex and ACI program ability, DevNet developer program going on. So good stuff going on at Cisco. What does this connect in with Google because ya got containers, you guys have been very full throttle on Kubernetes. Containers, Kubernetes, where does this all fit? How should your customers understand the relationship of how Cisco fits with Google Cloud? What's the integration? >> So let me start with, and backing it with the higher level, right? Philosophically we've been talking about Multicloud for a long time. And Google has a very different and unique view of how Cloud should be architected. They've gone 'round the open source Kubernetes Path. They've embraced Multicloud much more so then we would've expected. That's the underpinning of the relationship. Now you bring to that our deep expertise with serving Enterprise IT and our knowledge of what Enterprise IT really needs to productize some of these innovations that are born elsewhere. You get those two ingredients together and you have a powerful solution that democratizes some of the innovations that's born in the Cloud or born elsewhere. So what we've done here with Anthos, with Google HyperFlex, oh with Cisco's HyperFlex, with our Security Portfolio, our Networking Portfolio is created a mechanism for Enterprise ID to serve their constituent developers who are wanting to embrace Containers, readily packaged and easily consumable solution that they can deploy really easily. >> One of the things we're hearing is that this, the difference between moving to the Cloud versus expanding to and with the Cloud, and two kind of areas pop up. Operational's, operations, and developers. >> Kip: Yep. >> People that operate IT mention IT Democratizing IT, certainly with automation scale Cloud's a great win there. But you gotta operate it at that level at the same time serve developers, so it seems that we're hearing from customers its complicated, you got open source, you got developers who are pushing code everyday, and then you gotta run it over and over networks which have security challenges that you need to be managing everyday. Its a hardcore op's problem meets frictionalist development. >> Yeah so lets talk about both of these pieces. What do developers want? They want the latest framework. They want to embrace some of the new, the latest and greatest libraries out there. They want to get on the cutting edge of the stuff. Its great to experiment with open source, its really really hard to productize it. That's what we're bringing to the table here. With Anthos delivering a manage service with Cisco's deep expertise and taking complex technologies, packaging it, creating validated architectures that can work in an enterprise, it takes that complexity out of it. Secondly when you have a enterprise ID operator, lets talk about the complexities there, right? You've gotta tame this wild wild west of open source. You can't have drops every day. You can't have things changing every, you need a certain level of predictability. You need the infrastructure to slot in to a management framework that exists in the dollar center. It needs to slot into a sparing mechanism, to a workflow that exists. On top of that, you've got security and networking on multiple levels right? You've got physical networking, you've got container networking, you've got software define networking, you've got application level networking. Each layer has complexity around policy and intent that needs to marry across those layers. Well, you could try to stitch it together with products from different vendors but its gonna be a hot stinking mess pretty soon. Driving consistency dry across those layers from a vendor who can work in the data center, who can work across the layers of networking, who can work with security, we've got that product set. Between ACI Stealthwatch Cloud providing the security and networking pieces, our container networking expertise, HyperFlex as a hyper converge infrastructure appliance that can be delivered to IT, stood up, its scale out, its easy to deploy. Provides the underpinning for running Anthos and then, now you've got a smooth simple solution that IT can take to its developer and say Hey you know what? You wanna do containers? I've got a solution for you. >> And I think one of the things that's great about that is, you know just as enterprise's are extending into the Cloud so is Cisco. So a lot of the capabilities that KD was just talking about are things that we can deliver for our customers in our data centers but then also in the Cloud. With things like ACI Anywhere. Bringing that ACI Policy framework that they have on-prem into the Cloud, and across multiple Clouds that they get that consistency. The same with Stealthwatch Cloud. We can give them a common security model across their on-prem workloads and multiple public Cloud workload areas. So, we think its a great compliment to what Google's doing with Anthos and that's one of the reasons that we're partners. >> Kip I want to get your thoughts on this, because one of the things we've seen over the past years is that Public Cloud was a great green field, people, you know born in the Cloud no problem. (Kip laughs) And Enterprise would want to put workloads in the Cloud and kind of eliminate some of the compute pieces and some benefits that they could put in the cloud have been great. But the data center never went away, and they're a large enterprise. It's never going away. >> Kip: Yep. >> As we're seeing. But its changing. How should your customers be thinking about the evolution of the data center? Because certainly computes become commodity, okay need some Cloud from compute. Google's got some stuff there, but the network still needs to move packets around. You still got to store stuff, you still need security. They may not be a perimeter, but you still have the nuts and bolts of networking, software, these roles need to be taking place, how should these customers be thinking about Cloud, compute, integration on data primus? >> That is a great point and what we've seen is actually Cloud makes the network even more important, right? So when you have workloads and staff services in the Cloud that you rely on for your business suddenly the reliability and the performance and latency of your networks more important in many ways than it was before, and so that's something any of our customers have seen, its driving a lot of interest and offerings like SD-WAN from Cisco. But to your point on the data center side, we're seeing people modernize their data centers, and their looking to take a lot of the simplicity and agility that they see in a Public Cloud and bring it home, if you will, into the data center. Cause there are lots of reasons why data centers aren't going away. And I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing HyperFlex take off so much is it really simplifies multiple different layers and actually multiple different types of technology, storage, compute, and networking together into a sort of a very simple solution that gives them that agility, and that's why its the center piece of many of our partnerships with the Public Cloud players including Anthos. Because it really provides a Cloud like workload hosting capability on-prem. >> So the news here is that you guys are expanding your relationship with Google. What does it mean? Can you guys summarize the impact to your customers and the industry? >> Well I think that, I mean the impact for our customers is that you've two leaders working together, and in fact they're two leaders who believe in open technology and in a Multicloud approach. And we believe that both of those are fundamentally more aligned with our customers and the market than other approaches and so we're really excited about that and what it means for our customers in the future. You know and we are expanding the relationship, I mean there's not only what we're doing with Google Cloud's Anthos but also associated advances we've made about expanding our collaboration actually in the collaboration area with our Webex capabilities as well as Google Swed. So we're really excited about all of this and what we can enable together for our customers. >> You guys have a great opportunity, I always say latency is important and with low latency, moving stuff around and that's your wheelhouse. KD, talk about the relationship expanding with Google, what specifically is going on? Lets get down and dirty, is it tighter integration? Is it policy? Is it extending HyperFlex into Google? Google coming in? What's actually happening in the relationship that's expanding? >> So let me describe it in three ways. And we've talked a little bit about this already. The first is, how do we drive Cloud like simplicity on-prem? So what we've taken is HyperFlex, which is a scale out appliance, dead simple, easy to manage. We've integrated that with Anthos. Which means that now you've got not only a hyper conversion appliance that you can run workloads on, you can deliver to your developers Kubernetes eco system and tool set that is best in class, comes from Google, its managed from the Cloud and its not only the Kubernetes piece of it you can deliver the silver smash pieces of it, lot of the other pieces that come as part of that Anthos relationship. Then we've taken that and said well to be Enterprise grade, you've gotta makes sure the networking is Enterprise grade at every single layer, whether that is at the physical layer, container layers, fortune machine layer, at the software define networking layer, or in the service layer. We've been working with the teams on both sides, we've been working together to develop that solution and bring back the market for our customers. The third piece of this is to integrate security, right? So Stealthwatch Cloud was mentioned, we're working with the other pieces of our portfolio to integrate security across these offerings to make sure those flows are as secure as can be possible and if we detect anomalies, we flag them. The second big theme is driving this from the Cloud, right? So between Anthos, which is driving the Kubernetes and RAM from the Cloud our SD-WAN technology, Cisco's SD-WAN technology driven from the Cloud being able to terminate those VPN's at the end location. Whether that be a data center, whether that be an edge location and being able to do that seamlessly driven from the Cloud. Innerside, which takes the management of that infrastructure, drives it from the Cloud. Again a Cisco innovation, first in the industry. All of these marry together with driving this infrastructure from the Cloud, and what did it do for our eventual customers? Well it gave them, now a data center environment that has no boundaries. You've got an on-prem data center that's expanding into the Cloud. You can build an application in one place, deploy it in another, have it communicate with another application in the Cloud and suddenly you've kinda demolished those boundaries between data center and the Cloud, between the data center and the edge, and it all becomes a continuum and no other company other than Cisco can do something like that. >> So if I hear you saying, what you're saying is you're bringing the software and security capabilities of Cisco in the data center and around campus et cetera, and SD-WAN to Google Cloud. So the customer experience would be Cisco customer can deploy Google Cloud and Google Cloud runs best on Cisco. That's kinda, is that kind of the guiding principles here to this deal? Is that you're integrating in a deep meaningful way where its plug and play? Google Cloud meets Cisco infrastructure? >> Well we certainly think that with the work that we've done and the integrations that we're doing, that Cisco infrastructure including software capabilities like Stealthwatch Cloud will absolutely be the best way for any customer who wants to adopt Google Cloud's Anthos, to consume it, and to have really the best experience in terms of some of the integration simplicity that KD talked about but also frankly security's very important and being able to bring that consistent security model across Google Cloud, the workloads running there, as well as on-prem through things like Stealthwatch Cloud we think will be very compelling for our customers, and somewhat unique in the marketplace. >> You know one of the things that interesting, TK the new CEO of Google, and I had this question to Diane Green she had enterprise try ops of VM wear, Google's been hiring a lot of strong enterprise people lately and you can see the transformation and we've interviewed a lot of them, I have personally. They're good people, they're smart, and they know what they're doing. But Google still gets dinged for not having those enterprise chops because you just can't have a trajectory of those economy of scales over night, you can't just buy your way into the enterprise. You got to earn it, there's a certain track record, it seems like Google's getting a lot with you guys here. They're bringing Cloud to the table for sure for your customer base but you're bringing, Cisco complete customer footprint to Google Cloud. That seems to be a great opportunity for Google. >> Well I mean I think its a great opportunity for both of us. I mean because we're also bringing a fantastic open Multicloud hybrid solution to our customer base. So I think there's a great opportunity for our customers and we really focus on at the end of the day our customers and what do we do to make them more successful and we think that what we're doing with Google will contribute to that. >> KD talk about, real quickly summarize what's the benefits to the customers? Customers watching the announcements, seeing all the hype and all the buzz on this Google Next, this relationship with Cisco and Google, what's the bottom line for the customer? They're dealing with complexity. What are you guys solving, what the big take away for your customers? >> So its three things. First of all, we've taken the complexity out of the equation, right? We've taken all the complexity around networking, around security, around bridging to multiple Clouds, packaged it in a scale out appliance delivered in an enterprise consistent way. And for them, that's what they want. They want that simplicity of deployment of these next gen technologies, and the second thing is as IT serves their customers, the developers in house, they're able to serve those customers much better with these latest generation technologies and frameworks, whether its Containers, Kubernetes, HDL, some of these pieces that are part of the Anthos solution. They're able to develop that, deliver it back to their internal stakeholders and do it in a way that they control, they feel comfortable with, they feel their secure, and the networking works and they can stand behind it without having to choose or have doubts on whether they should embrace this or not. At the end of the day, customers want to do the right things to develop fast. To be nimble, to act, and to do the latest and greatest and we're taking all those hurtles out of the equations. >> Its about developers. >> It is. >> Running software on secure environments for the enterprise. Guys that's awesome news. Google Next obviously gonna be great conversations. While I have you here I wanna get to a couple talk tracks that are I important around the theme's recovering around Google Next and certainly challenges and opportunities for enterprises that is the application area, Multicloud, and Hybrid Cloud. So lets start with application. You guys are enabling this application revolution, that's the sound bites we hear at your events and certainly that's been something that you guys been publicly talking about. What does that mean for the marketplace? Because certain everyone's developing applications now, (Kip laughs) you got mobile apps, you got block chain apps, we got all kinds of new apps coming out all the time. Software's not going away its a renaissance, its happening. (Kip laughs) How is the application revolution taking shape? How is and what's Cisco's roll in it? >> Sure, I mean our role is to enable that. And that really comes from the fact that we understand that the only reason anyone builds any kind of infrastructure is ultimately to deliver applications and the experiences that applications enable. And so that's why, you know, we pioneered ACI is Application Centric Infrastructure. We pioneered that and start focusing on the implications of applications in the infrastructure any years ago. You know, we think about that and the experience that we can deliver at each layer in the infrastructure and KD talked a little bit about how important it is to integrate those layers but then we also bring tools like AppDynamics. Which really gives our customers the ability to measure the performance of their applications, understand the experience that they're delivering with customers and then actually understand how each piece of the infrastructure is contributing to and affecting that performance and that's a great example of something that customers really wanna be able to do across on-prem and multiple Clouds. They really need to understand that entire thing and so I think something like App D exemplifies our focus on the application. >> Its interesting storage and compute used to be the bottle necks in developers having to stand that up. Cloud solved that problem. >> Kip: That's right. >> Stu Miniman and I always talk about on theCUBE networking's the bottle neck. Now with ACI, you guys are solving that problem, you're making it much more robust and programmable. >> It is. >> This is a key part for application developers because all that policy work can be now automated away. Is that kinda part of that enablement? >> It sure is. I mean if you look at what's happening to applications, they're becoming more consumerized, they're becoming more connected. Whether its micro services, its not just one monolithic application anymore, its all of these applications talking to each other. And they need to become more secure. You need to know what happens, who can talk to whom. Which part of the application can be accessed from where. To deliver that, when my customer tell me listen you deliver the data center, you deliver security, you deliver networking, you deliver multicloud, you've got AppDynamics. Who else can bring this together? And that's what we do. Whether its ACI that specifies policy and does that programmable, delivers that programmable framework for networking, whether its our technologies like titration, like AppDynamics as Kip mentioned. All of these integrate together to deliver the end experience that customers want which is if my application's slow, tell me where, what's happening and help me deliver this application that is not a monolith anymore its all of these bits and pieces that talk to each other. Some of these bits and pieces will reside in the Cloud, a lot of them will be on-prem, some of them will be on the edge. But it all needs to work together-- >> And developers don't care about that they just care about do I get the resources do I need, And you guys kinda take care of all the heavy lifting underneath the covers. >> Yeah and we do that in a modern programmable way. Which is the big change. We do it in intent based way. Which means we let the developers describe the intent and we control that via policy. At multiple levels. >> And that's good for the enterprises, they want to invest more in developing, building applications. Okay track number two, talk track number two Multicloud. its interesting, during the hype cycle of Hybrid Cloud which was a while, I think now people realize Hybrid Cloud is an implementation thing and so its beyond hype now getting into reality. Multicloud never had a hype cycle because people generally woke up one day and said yeah I got multiple Clouds. I'm using this over here, so it wasn't like a, there was no real socialization around the concept of Multicloud they got it right away. They can see it, >> Yep. >> They know what they're paying for. So Multicloud has been a big part of your strategy at Cisco and certainly plays well into what's happening at Google Next. What's going on with Multicloud? Why's the relation with Google important? And where do you guys see Multicloud going from a Cisco perspective? >> Sure enough, I think you're right. The latest data we saw, or have, is 94 percent of enterprises are using or expect to use multiple Clouds and I think those surveys have probably more than six points of potential error so I think for all intensive purposes its 100 percent. (John and KD laughing) I've not met a customer who's unique Cloud, if that's a thing. And so you're right, its an incredibly authentic trend compared with some of these things that seem to be hype. I think what's happening though is the definition of what a Multicloud solution is is shifting. So I think we start out as you said, with a realization, oh wait a second we're all Multicloud this really is a thing and there's a set of problems to solve. I think you're seeing players get more and more sophisticated in how they solve those problems. And what we're seeing is its solving those problems is not about homogenizing all the Clouds and making them all the same because one of the reasons people are using multiple Clouds is to get to the unique capabilities that's in each Cloud. So I think early on there were some approaches where they said okay well we're gonna put down like a layer across all these Clouds and try to make them all look the same. That doesn't really achieve the point. The point is Google has unique capabilities in Google Cloud, certainly the tenser flow capabilities are one that people point to. AWS has unique capabilities as well and so does Dajour. And so customers wanna access all of that innovation. So that kind of answers your question of why is this relationship important to us, its for us to meet our customers needs, we need to have great relationships, partnerships, and integrations with the Clouds that are important to our customers. >> Which is all the Clouds. >> And we know that Google Cloud is important. >> Well not just Google Cloud, which I think in this relationship's got my attention because you're creating a deep relationship with them on a development side. Providing your expertise on the network and other area's you're experts at but you also have to work with other Clouds because, >> That's right we do. >> You're connecting Clouds, that's the-- >> And in fact we do. I mean we have, solutions for Hybrid with AWS and Dejour already launched in the marketplace. So we work with all of them, and what our roll, we see really is to make this simpler for our customers. So there are things like networking and security, application performance management with things like AppDynamics as well as some aspects of management that our customers consistently tell us can you just make this the same? Like these are not the area's of differentiation or unique capabilities. These are area's of friction and complexity and if you can give me a networking framework, whether its SD-WAN or ACI Anywhere that helps me connect those Clouds and manage policy in a consistent way or you can give me application performance the same over these things or security the same over these things, that's gonna make my life easier its gonna be lower friction and I'm expecting it, since your Cisco, you'll be able to integrate with my own Prime environment. >> Yeah, so then we went from hard to simple and easy, is a good business model. >> Kip: Absolutely. >> You guys have done that in the past and you certainly have the, from routing, everything up to switches and storage. KD, but talk about the complexity, because this is where it sounds complex on paper but when you actually unpack the technologies involved, you know in different Cloud suppliers, different technologies and tools. Throw in open sources into the mix is even more complex. So Multicloud, although sounds like a simple reality, the complexities pretty significant. Can you just share your thoughts on that? >> It is, and that's what we excel. We excel, I think complexity and distilling it down and making it simple. One other thing that we've done is, because each Cloud is unique and brings some unique capabilities, we've worked with those vendors along those dimension's that they're really really passionate about and strong end. So for example, with Google we've worked on the container front. They are, maybe one of the pioneers in that space, they've certainly delivered a lot of technologies into that domain. We've worked with them on the Kubeflow front on the AI front, in fact we are one of the biggest contributors to the open source projects on Kubeflow. And we've taken those technologies and then created a simple way for enterprise IT to consume them. So what we've done with Anthos, with Google, takes those technologies, takes our networking constructs, whether its ACI Anywhere, whether its other networking pieces on different parts of it, whether its SD-WAN and so forth. And it creates that environment which makes an enterprise IT feel comfortable with embracing these technologies. >> You said you're contributing to Kubeflow. A lot of people don't look at Cisco and would instantly come to the reaction that you guys are heavily contributing into open source. Can you just share, you know, the level of commitment you guys are making to open source? Just get that out there, and why? Why are you doing it? >> Yeah. For us, some of these technologies are really in need for incubation and nurturing, right? So Kubeflow is early, its really promising technology. People, in fact there's a lot of buzz about AI-- >> In your contributing to Kubeflow, significantly? >> Yes, yeah. >> Cisco? >> We're number three contributor actually. Behind Google. >> Okay so you're up there? You're up at the top of the list? >> Yeah one of the top three. >> Top of the list. >> And why? Is this getting more collaborative? More Multicloud fabric-- >> Well I mean, again it comes back to our customers. We think Kubeflow is a really interesting framework for AI and ML and we've seen our customers that workload type is becoming more and more important to them. So we're supporting that because its something we think will help our customers. In fact, Kubeflow figures into how we think about Hybrid and Multicloud with Google and the Anthos system in terms of giving customers the ability to run those workloads in Google Cloud with TPU's or on-prem with some of the incredible appliances that we've delivered in the data centers using GPU's to accelerate these workings. >> And it also certainly is compatible with the whole Multicloud mission as well-- >> Exactly, yeah. >> That's right. >> So you'll see us, we're committed to open source but that commitment comes through the lens of what we think our customers need and want. So it really again it comes back to the customer for us, and so you'll see us very active in open source areas. Sometimes, I think to your point, we should be louder about that. Talk more about that but we're really there to help our customers. DevNet, DevNet Create that Susie Wee's been working on has been a great success. I mean we've witnessed it first hand, seeing it at the Cisco Live packed house. >> In Barcelona. >> You've got developers developing on the network its a really big shift. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's a positive shift. >> Well its a huge shift, I think its natural as you see Cisco shifting more and more towards software you see much much more developer engagement and we're thrilled with the way DevNet has grown. >> Yeah, and networking guys in your target audience gravitates easily to software it seems to be a nice fit. So good stuff there. Third talk track, Hybrid. You guys have deep bench of tech and people on network security, networking security, data center, and all the things involved in the years and years of enterprise evolution. Whether its infrastructure and all the way through the facilities, lot of expertise. Now Hybrid comes onto the scene. Went through the little hype cycle, people now get it, you gotta operate across Clouds on-prem to the Cloud and now multiple Clouds so what's the current state of Cisco-Google relationship with Hybrid? How is that fitting in, Google Next and beyond? >> So let me tease that in the context of some history, right? So if we go back, say 10 years, virtualization was the bad word of the day. Things were getting virtualized. We created the best data center infrastructure for virtualization in our UCS platforms. Completely programmable infrastructure's code, a very programmable environment that can back a lot of density of virtual machines, right? Roll forward three or four years, storage and compute were getting unwieldily. There was complexity there to be solved. We created the category of converge infrastructure, became the leader of that category whether we work with DMC and other players. Roll forward another four or five years we got into the hyper conversion infrastructure space with the most performant ACI appliance on the market anywhere. And most performant, most consistent, deeply engineered across all the stacks. Can took that complexity, took our learnings and DNA networking and married it together to create something unique for the industry. Now you think, do other domains come together? Now its the Cloud and on-prem. And if that comes together we see similar kinds of complexity. Complexity in security, complexity in networking, complexity in policy and enforcement across layers. Complexity, frankly in management, and how do you make that management much more simple and consumerized? We're taking that complexity and distilling it down into developing a very simple appliance. So what we're trying to deliver to the customer is a simple appliance that they can stand and procure and set up much in the way that they're used to but now the appliance is scale out. Its much more Cloud like. Its managed from the Cloud. So its got that consumer modern feel to it. Now you can deliver on this a container environment, a container development environment, for your developer stakeholders. You can deliver security that's plumed through and across multiple layers, networking that's plumed through and across multiple layers, at the end of the day we've taken those boundaries between Cloud and data center and blown them away. >> And you've merged operational constructs of the old data center operations to Cloud like operations, >> Yeah. >> Everything's just a service, you got Microservices coming, so you didn't really lose anything, you'd mentioned democratizing IT earlier, you guys are bringing the HyperFlex to ACI to the table so you now can let customers run, is that right? Am I getting it right? >> That's right. Its all about how do you take new interesting technologies that are developed somewhere, that may have complexity because its open source and exchanging all the time or it may have complexity because it was not been for a different environment, not for the on-prem environment. How do you take that innovation and democratize it so that everybody, all of the 100's of thousands and millions of enterprise customers can use it and feel comfortable using it and feel comfortable actually embracing it in a way that gives them the security, gives them the networking that's needed and gives them a way that they can serve their internal stakeholders very easily. >> Guys thanks for taking the time for this awesome conversation. One final question, gettin you both to weigh in on, here at Google Next 2019, we're in 2019. Cloud's going a whole other level here. What's the most important story that customers should pay attention to with respect to expanding into the Cloud, taking advantage of the growing developer ecosystem as open source continues to go to the next level. What's the most important thing happening around Google Next and the industry with respect to Cloud and for the enterprise? >> Well I think certainly here at Google Next the Google Cloud's Anthos announcement is going to be of tremendous interest to enterprises cause as you said they are extending into the Cloud and this is another great option for enterprises who are looking to do that. >> Yeah and as I look at it suddenly IT has a set of new options. They used to be able to pick networking and compute and storage, now they can pick Kubeflow for AI or they can pick Kubernetes for container development, Anthos for an on-prem version. They're shopping list has suddenly gone up. We're trying to keep that simple and organized for them so that they can pick the best ingredients they can and build the best infrastructure they can, they can do it. >> Guys thanks so much. Kip Compton senior vice president Cloud Platform and Solutions Group and KD vice president of the Data Center compute group for Cisco. Its been exclusive CUBE conversation around the Google-Cisco big news at Google Next 2019 and I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat jazz 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 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)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. (bouncy upbeat music) >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. This is theCube. I am your host, Stu Miniman. Happy to be joined for this special segment. Calling it the independent wrap analysis multi-hybrid focus with Blue Cow. Blue Cow is here. First-time guests on the program and Blue Cow has brought a few of the friends. Friends of mine, people that I got to know through this phenomenal VMware community also guest host on the program here. Been a pleasure working with all three of you. John Troyer from Tech Reckoning Justin Warren from Pivot 9 and Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming here. Now, we're independent when we come to this and I don't think any of us are shy as to kind of sharing our opinions. I think all of us have had "I can't believe what you said on Twitter" at least once. In fact, I remember when John Troyer was working for VMware I did get a call every once in awhile. I've said, if I didn't get a call at least once a year from him saying, "Hey Stu, can you moderate that a little," I'm probably not doing my job. Let's get into it. The first thing I'd say is it's 2017. We blinked and like we're getting towards the end of it. Of course, there's the big party. There's still a whole bunch of sessions going for another day. Reactions on the show, high-level things. Keith, let's start down with you. >> First off, the energy of the show this year was, I have to say it was, I have to say it was up a notch. There was a lot of uncertainty around the acquisition and even Pat's future, whether or not he would be here for the VMworld this year, as the head of VMware he announced, I think it was kind of like with a little bit of pride, that he said "This is my 5th year as CEO of Vmware" and he bought the energy Monday and I think that energy has transferred throughout all of the VMware staff and throughout the show for the past few days. >> Just in that question, of course, and how many selfies has Blue Cow done at the show? >> Not as many as usual, unfortunately, because we've been very, very busy with briefings and meetings, so we haven't had as much selfie time as we've had, but we still make time to take a few photos around the show. And, yeah, I agree with Keith. The energy this year, and I think it had started with the example that Pat set at the first keynote. Which, it's just been lifted this year and I've been saying for, I've been hearing it from a lot of different people and I've been having it in conversations as well that this year, VMware stopped apologizing for existing and it's embraced itself, and I'm sure that having the stock price hit a nice high of a 107, I'm sure that helped with Pat and his idea of, "That makes you happy. Makes it a lot easier for you to keep your job." >> That's great, there was a comment actually The first time most of us remember. The week of Vmworld? The stock actually was going up. John, you know, you've got lots of experience with this community; your take. >> Certainly more energy than last year. I mean, let's look at the micro and the macro. There's always tactical stuff going on. Last year, Vster 6.5 had not been released. Dell acquisition and nobody was sure what was going on exactly. This year, the big VMware cloud on AWS announcement, I think, is an acknowledgement of maybe, that we can talk about. That, wait a minute. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty plumbing infrastructure layer, you still need to partner with somebody like VMware. I think the industry and the analysts, and the market, that's one of the things they like and then look at the macro trends on the economy. If you look at the Expo floor this year? Huge, lots of money being spent, lots of vendors here. There's something macro going on as well with the people here. >> Let's talk about two things I look at. Did VMware meet expectations? Was it what you expect? And, what are we going to be looking back at when we come here? John, I'll start with you, you hit on the big topic from my standpoint, looking at VMware and AWS. What will VMware look like in the future? Are they going to be a SAS provider? How does that transition from an infrastructure software company to a different fit for how they do cloud today versus the whole Vcloud era and everything before it? That was era not error even though, you know... >> Hey, they had a lot to do, of messaging and a lot of product-in announcements and a lot of introductions this week. I don't know, let's give them a B for that because there were a lot of them and they had a lot to do in a short space especially, like, through the lens of say the keynotes which is the lens a lot of people have. I think AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS is the big story. I don't know, I predict that in a year or two VMware will probably be the biggest VMware hoster service provider, right? I think a lot of workloads are going to shift into the AWS service through VMware and that will happen to excess capacity. It'll happens through a lot of different things. But, that's my prediction. >> I'm sorry, you say VMware will-- >> VMware will be the largest VMware hoster within a year or two. >> I feel like I'm watching the NFL Network. Bold predictions, here we have it. VMware has got 4500 partners, John. I've have Ajay Patella on a couple of times talking about his tiers of partners and everything like that. But let's let some of the guys weigh in. >> I'll extend on that, I kind of agree. I think that there's a lot of customers who will basically do a lift and shift and use cloud and I think having to choose between which of their children is the most beautiful and which one they love more has been has been really tearing them apart and I think that now they don't have to make that choice. I think they're going to be a lot easier for, particularly CIOs, to just say, "Yep, I'm doing some cloud." The announcement on Tuesday sort of felt a little flat for me because they were talking about Google container services which is running on Pivotal. Pivotal's sort of an unappreciated part of the whole portfolio, I think. There's a lot of companies some really interesting software development work there. But, as we mentioned, the development community? That's not this community. This is much more about infrastructure people. That kind of whole announcement and what they were talking about on Day 2? Just kind of went, it felt a little bit off for me. >> Yeah, I want to echo, I think a couple of statements that you've made. One, that VMware's seemed to embrace... Monday, they seem to embrace being VMware. You know what? We may pick on the concept of VMware VSphere being cloud. That VMware is very proud of calling their SDDC strategy which is an important strategy. It adds a lot of value to, not just legacy IT but current things that people are doing in their data center and they embraced being what they do well on Monday, and then we had cloud pizza on Tuesday which kind of broke that but I think I loved the message for VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, this concept, this reference architecture, this validated design that I can run in my data center. I know that at a Rax pace, at a CNF such as... take your Switch, take your choice between Switch and CenturyLink, etc. I'm going to get that consistent openstack what should have been openstack filling across cloud providers, but John, I agree with you. AWS is AWS at the end of the day and it's a easy checkbox to say VMware Cloud on AWS? Really easy to do and it's easy to consume. I don't have to go and choose between Cloud providers. >> One of the things of this show is that there never enough hours in the day, even Vegas. I actually have to admit I got to bed at a reasonable hour every night. We still have one more night for me here so we'll see on that. Hallway conversations, parties, some of the really cool stuff on on the show floor we talked about a little. I'll start off with kind of, from a customer standpoint, Some customers I talked to; a number of them seemed to be, "I want to move faster. "I'm interested in trying new things "and price isn't necessarily number one on my list. "It's further down the list." Which reminds me: It's not quite there yet but I go to Amazon Reinvent and this will be the fifth year and we are doing the Cube at that show. That's the thing that really excites me. There's cool new things we're trying. I echo and agree with a lot of what you all said about Day 2. Most of the customers here aren't ready for PKS. Sure Pivotal has lots of customers that are using Vmware, but the average attendee's not there. Kind of a wild card, customer insights, cool parties, things there. John, do you want to start down on your end? >> Sure, my channel check and the most surprising thing that I saw this week were talking to SC's from VMware and saying that their customers were coming to them and asking "Help? I now have Kubernetes in the house. "What do I do with it?" That surprised me. I have been a Kubernetes and Container advocate but a skeptic as far as adoption and at least anecdotally the folks that I talk to, it sounds like actually it's now trickling its way and kind of to the mainstream to where the VMware accounts are going to be able to have to deal with it. Now I will say on the flip side, Stu, if you look out at the show floor there are no developer tools, dev ops tools, cloud tools, maybe some cloud tools. That side of, that AWS side of the house, the people that are there, those companies that are there who are not here. If you were a customer, if you were an IT person looking to, this year, finally, educate yourself on how to do that that wasn't here at this show. >> For me, it's been about migration. This is about we have a whole bunch of stuff running on VMware, it's already there and that was one of the reasons VMware was popular in the first place, was that you could take stuff you already doing and you can virtualize it and then you could increase the capacity utilization that you have and you could get some more efficiencies out of that and then people started to layer additional services on top of that and to do interesting an new things on that. It allowed them to do that because it kind of freed up some time. I think we're going to say that again as things start to move to the cloud people start to do them in different ways. the workloads will migrate. It's not just going to happen tomorrow and some of the things that we're seeing, one of the things that impressed me about the show was a company called Densify who had been around previously. They were called Server and they did a rebrand and repossession and nailed it and it's a very, very simple tool that actually sells about the business. It's not about a technology, they don't actually talk about how the thing works or what's going on underneath it. But it allows you to understand the effect of what's happening if you move from VMware here over to that cloud, this cloud or the other cloud and it shows you the pricing. I looked at that and just went I can walk into a CFO and I can sell them on the idea just showing them this. That kind of experience, I think, we're going to start seeing a lot more of that as people moved to the cloud. >> So Monday gave me a new catch phrase for VMworld. VMware moves at the speed of the CIO and, you know what? With hallway conversations I still talk to, John, I don't remember like one-third of the attendees of VMworld are all first-time attendees, I talked to a lot of first-time attendees and it's amazing because VMware has an enormous sales team and they are very aggressive getting to accounts and talking about the overall message. I had people coming up to me and saying "Man you know what, I just found out about this "vRealize Log Insight and it's amazing!" and I'm thinking, Wow, that doesn't get much much more traditional IT than log management with vRealize and you know VMware has preached that for the past 5 or 6 years at the show I think it just shows the Delta in the community from those looking to do the developer, dev ops and cloud-native integration. Us, as analysts, pushing VMware saying, "Hey, what's your digital transformation story? "It's something other than cloud pizza," to all the way, to the keeping the lights on with SAP and Oracle apps that will not change and haven't changed and probably won't change for the next 10 to 15 years. >> Yeah and actually it brings up an interesting point; I had a conversation with Pumela this morning and we were talking about how it used to be, come to the show and it's the virtualization show. Now, It's a pretty broad ecosystem and in some ways it's, I wouldn't say fragmented but I'm grasping for a better word because you walk through the show floor and Dentrify, interesting. We had one of their co-founders on as to that kind of cloud management, and how all those pieces, these big hairy issues that people are solving. We've got people working at analytics and data. You've got all the cloud pieces, security all over the place, networking, we've always had storage at the show. But I'd been a little jaded coming to VMworld. It's now my 8th year and I've kind of re-energized this year. I know that some people have stopped coming. There's a new influx coming in. Let's fast-forward to VMworld 2018. What are you hoping to see from this ecosystem? Any final things you'd want to say? "Hey, this is what we can do better?" Or, "This thing, Do it absolutely again especially!" We've got one more year in Vegas then I think we'll probably go back to San Francisco. You've all been to many of these. Where do we start? >> I'll take two. One, is I like'd to see more basketball players and rappers. We had a lot of them on. >> Did you hang with KD? >> I did not. I was busy. He called my people and I don't know if you want tee that one up, what that one is. >> You could mention that absolutely. >> Sure. I mean Rubrik was here winner of the Best of Show of VMworld. Also spent a lot of marketing dollars on Kevin Durant who was also an investor and also Henson Nischlak >> Did they make cards? I'm on a trading card. How hilarious is that? >> Keith: Trading cards were cool, I have one. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> They came to play and and they bought it this year. Marketing dollar spent, I actually have a second predication which is that next year or the year after we'll be talking about, it seemed like VMware and Red Hat are throwing down against each other so I think next year we might be talking about the Dell technologies Red Hat wars in the cloud. >> Open source comes up but hadn't been discussed much except we did some Red Hat interviews here. Red Hat? Absolutely. Hybrid cloud environment, Microsoft, VMware, and Red Hat all players there. John's been thinking about this wrap for a while I know. >> Well I'm going to switch completely differently and into the future what I like to see just to shake it up a little bit. I don't think we should talking about AWS things around containers. I think there will be some of that conversation but what I want to see is that VMware starts hosting a function service. I want to see functions on VMware because I reckon that's where the industry is going to move to in the long time. >> Stu: Serverless, you're saying? >> Yeah, Serverless. >> Like I mentioned on Day two? >> I want to see a functions as a service on VMware on AWS. >> Oh, that will happen. >> There you go product management. That's what you can go build. >> You can tie it into Lambda right now, right? You'll have your... >> yeah but if you're tie it into Lambda that just plays right into AWS's hands. >> Give Chris Wolfe a call and Kit Colbert will make that happen. >> You know what? Full disclosure. I was part of judging for best of VMworld and Rubrik won Best of VMworld. I don't want to see more data protection. I don't want to see more secondary storage. I think one of the driving elements that part of that discussion, pulling back the onion a little bit was about redefining something in the data center that had been forgotten, that API level access Rubrik pushes API level access to the data center. This is something that I've asked from VMware forever which is to basically be the API to my data center. You may not ever, I may never get function as a service. I may never get PaaS, I may never get all these cool things from a developer perspective that I want from VMware but at the very minimum, you're the software defining data center. I want to have APIs into the data center and that data center is not just my physical Data Center but this whole VCF thing that's pushed whether it's in my data center, in Rackspace, or some other VCAMP partner or in AWS. My interface, If infrastructure is going to continue to be VMware's customer then you should enable me from an API perspective to manage my software-defining data center, believe it or not. >> Unfortunately, I love to chat with these gentlemen for hours at a time if I can. We're limited with the queue. We only give you a taste of what's happening at these shows if I've mentioned before, you need to come to these kind of events to talk to these quality people. We also mentioned a few of the sponsors on the show. Sponsorship helps us bring, not only the Cube to the event, but helps me bring high quality, independent analysis from gentlemen like this. Please check out all of our sponsors. Check out all of our content on theCUBE.net. These, all three of them, creating a lot of content. Go to their Twitter handle, @ctoadvisor, @jpwarren, and @jtroyer, I'm @stu. Thank you so much for joining us for our coverage of VMworld 2017. Reach out to all of us. Really, we'll get back to you. 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