>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. It's a virtual event, like all the events in 2020, but we've been going there since 2013. We're happy to be back this year and we're excited to have for the first time on theCUBE, our next guest, she's Kelly Herod the US SAP Offering Leader for Deloitte Consulting. Kelly, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Jeff, thanks so much for having me. >> Absolutely, so first time on, on theCUBE, you guys have a really interesting concept at Deloitte, you call it the Kinetic Enterprise. What is the Kinetic Enterprise all about? >> Yes. So if you think about the past, organizations built their technology infrastructures to be what we would call built to last, the future though is all about built to evolve. And that's exactly what the Kinetic Enterprise is. It's really how we're helping our clients create the right technology infrastructures that evolve with their business. And Kinetic Enterprise is focused on four key pillars. The first, that we're building a technology solution that's clean. That means we want to have reduced amount of custom code or things that we may have built that really rack up your technical debt. The second pillar is that it's intelligent. So we're leveraging all of the technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, to really automate and change the way in which an organization runs their business. The third pillar is that it's responsive, and that means it's on the cloud and this is where AWS comes in. And then the last pillar is that it's inclusive. So it uses all of the technologies and microservices available to really optimize and achieve a company's business value objectives. >> So that is a great summary, and I've got the list of the four pillars. It's just interesting you lead with clean. You know, there's a lot of conversation about digital transformation and move fast and be dynamic, you know, would be kind of an opposite to static. But clean, interesting choice of words. It runs with core... Core clean ERP with minimum technical debt. Why clean is such an important thing? I get kind of intelligent and responsive, but clean is an interesting attribute to pick. >> Absolutely, so if you take a step back and think... (Kelly hangs) when comes to ERPs, when ERPs came out, there was... (Kelly hangs) how you're going to run your entire organization on this one solution. What we've found is that as companies have put ERPs, they've gone through and created so much customization, that it's that which makes it very difficult to be able to keep up with technology changes or actually migrate to the next versions. So the concept here is if you're going to go in and put in brand new ERP, such as an SAP S/4HANA, this time around in order to achieve the promise of ERPs, let's make it clean. Let's stick to as much standard functionality as possible within the core, and then we innovate on the edges. And so that will allow us in the future to maintain that flexibility or dynamicism of a Kinetic Enterprise. >> Right. So I have to tease you Kelly 'cause SAP R/3 and ERP is not necessarily synonymous with digital transformation, speed, agility, and embracing change. So you've been involved in Deloitte's SAP practice for a long time. Why should people start to rethink about SAP in terms of being responsive, in terms of being able to change quickly and to your vocabulary, more kinetic? >> And you're right. You know, I've been doing SAP for 20 years. So I actually did start back in the R/3 days. And, you know, I would just say that things are changing, is evolving. You know, SAP themselves has been going through a transformation, a revolution. You look at the ERP landscape as a whole, all of the ERP players are moving to the cloud. The technology is the backbones are changing. Now the reality is, you know, going in and actually changing out your ERP, no matter what solution you're using, it's a big endeavor or undertaking. The goal here, and why we're partnering with SAP, partnering with AWS is really focused on how can we make this more efficient for our clients? More importantly, I like to think about it as how can we make this less of a one and done, and more of a let's keep transforming the technologies and the business as things are changing in the market, along the way. And using technologies to even change how we implement, allows us to do that. >> So, Kelly, another thing a lot of people probably don't think of is SAP and AWS, together in the same sentence. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that are much more intelligent about this, but for those that aren't as familiar, tell us a little bit about the relationship with SAP and AWS and then how you guys are leveraging that at Deloitte. >> Absolutely. So when you... There's a couple of things that I would bring up. One is SAP S/4HANA solutions, in particular, but any SAP environment that you're running on, one of the objectives most of our clients are focused on is how to move to the cloud, and that's where AWS comes in. You can absolutely run any of your SAP solutions on AWS. And what that brings you with is more flexibility, so that you can actually scale or contract your infrastructure that you're running SAP on based on your business needs. The second thing that we've been partnering with AWS to do is a little bit of what I just mentioned, which was a teaser around, how do you change the way you even go about implementing an SAP solution or start to migrate your business? So one of the things we asked ourselves was, could we radically change how you jumpstart an S/4 implementation? And what we decided to do is team up with AWS and leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, most importantly, standing up an environment on AWS. We actually created what we call Kinetic Finance Startup. Many of our clients are choosing to start with finance and specifically SAP central finance to begin their journey to the new S/4HANA environment. And what we've been able to do is create a touchless build solution, so over a weekend, we can actually connect to your existing ERP solution. Majority of those is starting with an ECC environment. We can extract the data, we can use harmonization rules to actually change and modify your data and optimize it for the future. And then we actually through completely touchless built-in automation, stand up a brand new AWS environment with S/4HANA on it and actually automate the configuration and testing of the basic financial transactions. So when you come in the next week and we start the conversation with the client, we're actually looking at a real life S/4HANA system on AWS with their mas... >> Oh, that's... >> So the whole concept is to change how we engage. >> Right. So again, I don't know that I were to think of finance as kind of a lead application, to start this journey. I mean, I can see on one hand, it is the system of record and it, you know, it has a lot of very important information that's got to eventually get into finance. On the other hand, it seems like there's less critical, maybe lower hanging fruit that's less risky. Is it because you can run it kind of in a parallel path for some period of time, but it strikes me that finance might not be the first place you go to look for some early wins. >> It's actually what you just said about the parallelism. So the reason we've seen that finance actually was one of the starting points is even if you look at the history of SAP's S/4HANA solution, way back before we got to that, it started with a concept called smart accounting or simple finance. And the theory here is, you could actually... If a company has, let's say multiple ERPs, as most do, you can actually grab the financial information, bring it into a new S/4 or central finance environment, and actually combine or merge the accounting information to get improved reporting, optimize a shared service organization. So it's actually a lower risk way to start the journey before going and touching the heart of the business or core operations, or manufacturing, for example, >> That's pretty interesting. So you run it in parallel for a while and then eventually does, is the plan that it takes over, from the old. So it is effectively kind of, I guess, a slightly delayed lift and shift, or maybe it's a reassemble and then a flip. I don't know how you would describe it because it's not really lift and shift. >> It's not really lift and shift actually, you have two options. You can either over time pull all of your business processes out of the underlying ERP solutions and bring them into the S/4HANA environment or multiple S/4HANA environments. Or some companies may choose to continue to... (Kelly hangs) Especially if you're in an industry where you do a lot of acquisitions or divestitures, you may not have an intention of ever combining all of your ERPs, but you may want to change each of them to S/4HANA underneath, and then have one environment in which you're pulling your data together to really consolidate your financial reporting. >> That's great. I want to follow up on something that you mentioned, which is the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And we talk a lot about, right? Those are hot buzzwords all over the place, but, you know, I'm pretty vehement in that, you know, general purpose AI and ML is kind of interesting, but where the real interesting stuff ends is where the rubber hits the road, is in applied. And it sounds like you've got a pretty interesting application where you're applying this technology to help make this move to cloud go a little bit smoother. >> Yes. One of the areas, you know, since we've been talking a bit about finance then I'll use it as an example. Is if you think about it, whenever we go in and we're typically working with... (Kelly hangs) especially in finance, you know, one of the topics is, how to optimize a chart of accounts? So over time we've done this hundreds of times, if we can look at different sectors, different industries, we can use benchmark chart of accounts. So instead of making this a paper-based exercise that individuals are doing, why not take that and actually use artificial intelligence machine learning to create data harmonization rules, so that technologies can actually do that same work. And so that's been one of the things we've been working on that I personally find very interesting just in my finance background. >> Right. And is this a relatively new thing, or have you guys been doing this for a while? >> Actually, it's something that over the last 12 months, we've been focused on building out in partnership with AWS. So it's fairly new. >> That's great. I want... I'd love to shift gears a little bit, and talk about COVID, and the impact of COVID on your business. Clearly in March, right? It was the light switch moment and everybody had to work from home and it was a quick rush to make sure that everybody was safe and we could support our remote workers, that said, can't help with the ba... All the bad stuff that's happening in hospitality and travel, and a whole lot of other industries. So that aside and that's bad stuff. In the tech industry, we were able to make the move, but now we know we're six, seven, eight months into this thing, and it's clear that, you know, we're going to have many elements of this going forward for a while. So I'm curious just from your business and your customer point of view, if you can share, you know, kind of the contrast of what happened in March and April to what you're seeing now and how this new reality, whatever this new reality is going to be, as we, you know, continue to evolve is impacting this digital transformation conversations? >> It is interesting. So if I pivot back to March, when this all occurred, you know, it truly did feel an instant going from in-person. And as consultants we travel and typically have a Monday through Thursday, or Monday through Friday type of travel schedule to an instant working from home overnight. And, you know, I'm really proud of our teams and how they seamlessly made that transition. Many, including myself, were actually leading clients through final cut overs in parallel to this happening. And we were able to really pivot and make those shifts, and I was reflecting with one of the executives I worked with, you know, she and I, you know, six months later, we're looking back at how we did that and how impressed we were with what the team pulled off. And since then, they've been able to do several other go lives, which is great. But I think that it was something we had to do quickly. I think many would have said it couldn't have been done that you would see the whole world move to a working from home environment, but we did. What it tells me is it gives me a lot of hope for a lot of the things that businesses can do in the future. In the past we used to constrain ourselves of, Oh, there's no way we could ever get XYZ done, or we can't make this type of change in the world, but we can. If I flash forward to now, I think we're very settled in kind of this new way of working, but I'm also hopeful for what the future is going to look like. I don't believe it will be a pivot all the way back to... Especially for consultants traveling on a regular basis of Monday through Friday. Instead, I think we're going to create models that give people and organizations the flexibility they need to really balance some of their personal responsibilities along with their work responsibilities. My hope and expectations is that also opens up options so that all organizations have access to more talent that they may not have had before. And I think that also means global talent. I think we're showing we can work as global teams, which means, you know, I could now have members from Japan joining, you know, my permanent leadership team in ways that I maybe never have thought of before. Those are just some examples of what I expect and hope for all of us that we'll see coming out of this. >> Hopefully and I know... Like you said, you've been a consultant for years and years and years, and you guys spend lots of time on airplanes, and hopefully you don't have to spend quite so much time on airplanes because you don't necessarily have to be there all the time. But you talked about an interesting thing and that's talent and opening up the opportunity to get more talent that maybe you wouldn't have ever considered. And along those same lines, right? Is the move in diversity and inclusion. And I just watched a show that you did a few months ago, called the... "A Chance for Change: Accelerating Business Recovery, Through Gender Diversity," on a Facebook interview, very cool panel, really enjoyed it. And I want to follow up on some of those things, 'cause you've made some really simple and poignant points. And one of the things that you said definitively, go back to the wide diverse talent and perspective equals winning in business, period. I love that. You know, we hear this all the time that, you know, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also good for business. And isn't it nice when those two things can actually line up. And you just talked about, you know, in more of a generic sense, the ability to open up your talent window when there's a worldwide talent shortage, both for geography, but also the work in diversity and inclusion and to continue to hold the momentum that continues to build in this area. I wonder if you could, you know, kind of share your thoughts on that, and your position and what's going on with Deloitte. >> Absolutely. You know, I do think this is one of those key pivotal moments for all of us, and I believe we have, coming out of this an option to really move the needle on our diversity and inclusion, and equality efforts. You know, one example I think about women, women in leadership positions. You know, being in consulting, you know, one of the challenges has always been that we do travel a lot, and it can be difficult to balance all the responsibilities, professional and personally. I think with a move to more flexible work arrangements, less travel, or travel for purpose is what I would highlight for the future. I think it opens the door to many more women being able to have careers in consulting, if that's what they, you know, had desired. I also think it allows them to have... You know, spend their entire careers in consulting and in ways we never saw before. And that means you'll see as significant movement and women in leadership positions. I also think this applies to underrepresented minorities. I hope that from all of this, instead of there may be companies that focus on recruiting from, you know, schools that are local to them or within their surrounding areas. I think this gives us an opportunity to really open that aperture up and look at talent from any school or university, or geography, and being able to get the right skill sets in the door and the right talent. Therefore you can actually see movement and diversity within teams, as well as at the leadership levels for URMs. >> Right. Right. And really managing to the right things too. I think that's the other thing that's coming out of this, and we've had a lot of conversations on work from home or work from anywhere. You guys are a little bit different than the consultant 'cause your team is there, usually local at the client site for some period of time. But for a lot of people, it's the first time they are not sitting across from a desk or, you know, within close proximity. Now you too, in your teams. And so, the shift changes that now you have to judge output, (Jeff chuckles) and not activity. And you would think that that would be a great and easy thing to execute, but we're hearing more and more that it's not necessarily. And you really highlighted, I think, three leadership traits that are always important, but more important now than ever before in that other interview. And I just want to call them out 'cause I thought it was worth calling out. You know, empathy has never been more important. Resilience, and my favorite one you said at the end, calm in the storm. I just wonder again, if you could share, you know, kind of, as you've gone through it, both, you know, as somebody at Deloitte within the greater Deloitte group, but then also in managing your own teams, to maintain that calm in the storm and to maintain, you know, empathetic leadership, because I think you've said it before, right? This is a personal challenge that we're all going through. We all have different things going on at home, whether it's the spouses working, the kids are doing homeschool. People are taking care of older parents, this and that. It's a real personal thing, and so these leadership characteristics, these softer leadership characteristics have never been more important >> That's so true. And, you know, when I think about the empathy part, right now what we're going through is also about how is each of us as leaders also sharing a bit more about how we're experiencing this? I think the sharing of stories is what also helps many on the teams adapt, adjust. The reality is when you're working on camera all day and, you know, in the past, imagine that you maybe were having a tough day or you weren't feeling that great, you weren't on camera all day with every one of your coworkers. You we're actually, you know, sitting in an office, you may have to go to the conference room to do some meetings, but you didn't look... (Kelly hangs) like someone was kind of staring at you all day long. Now, when we're working from home virtually and we're on Zoom or Skype or WebEx, et cetera, all day, it does feel like you're under the lights when you're on camera. And there's a lot of pressure and people are trying to figure out how to manage their own emotions while doing that. And, you know, my message would say as an empathetic leader, it's okay for you to also share when you might be having a tough go that day. Maybe one of your children has been kind of acting out and they didn't really want to do the virtual school. It's okay to share in that because everyone's going through it, and it makes us all more human. >> Right. >> And it makes us all more connected. >> Right. Well, I will share with you a pro tip, we've done a few of these interviews and it is okay to let people turn off the camera. And I think as a manager, I think it's actually an okay thing to say, okay, everyone, let's just turn off our cameras and get a break from that camera that's got that eye on you all the time, because it is just another, you know, kind of a factor that we have to deal with. Well, go ahead. >> And I was going to ask, what do you actually, you know, I don't know what one of your techniques is, but I know mine is some of the meetings, it's actually just go back to traditional telephone calls (Jeff chuckles) and actually even just being on your cell, put on your air, you know, your earbuds, or your headphones and even walk. >> Right. >> So I think the other thing we're all missing is actually that movement, the steps to go to the coffee maker and back, or to lunch and back, we don't have them anymore. So you've got to work extra hard, actually getting those extra steps in calories and just mental breaks at times. >> Yeah, well then there's a whole another tranche on walking during meetings. And I used have a boss that I would only do one-on-ones while we took a walk. He always says, I get in there... 'Cause then there's, you know, you're not necessarily looking at each other. And if there's some sensitive things or tough conversations, sometimes it's easier if you're not just looking across the table at one another with all the silence. So there's a lot to be said for that as well. Well, Kelly, I really enjoyed this conversation and getting to meet you for the first time. It sounds like you're doing a lot of cool and exciting things and, you know, exciting speed and innovation with SAP, that's noble work and I'm sure a lot of people are really happy to have you help them out there. So thank you very much for your time and to have a great AWS re:Invent. >> Thanks, Jeff. It was great to discuss this with you. >> Absolutely. All right. She's Kelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (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 cohost for this segment is Dave Vellante, John Furrier is also in the house. We're doing about three and a half days, wall-to-wall coverage. The surface area that we are covering here is rather broad and I use that term, my guest is laughing, Vikas Butaney, who is the Vice President of IoT, of course. Extending the network to the edge, to the devices, and beyond with Cisco. Thank you so much for joining us. >> It's great to be here. >> All right, the IoT thing. I've worked with Cisco my entire career, I've watched through the fog computing era for a couple of years. Edge of course, one of the hottest conversations, something that I bought up in many of the conversations, the across the portfolio but Liz Centoni was up on the main stage for the day one keynote talking a lot about IoT and IT and OT and your customers of the like. So let's start there, what's new, and how does IoT fit into the overall Cisco Story? >> Absolutely. So as Liz was on the main stage and David talked about the cross domain and multi-domain architecture; Now, IoT and our operational environment is one of the key domains within that environment. And what Liz announce yesterday are two pieces of news that we are releasing at Cisco Live. First of them is an IoT security architecture which ties together the capabilities with cyber vision and then integrates it within the rest of our IT security portfolio and the second part that I'm also excited to talk about is Edge Intelligence. It's about how we are helping our customers extract the data at the edge, then deploy and move it to wherever the applications are in the multicloud environment. >> You know, we definitely want to dig into those pieces, but IoT is such a diverse solution set so it's often helpful to talk about specific industries, any customer examples so what can you share with us there to help illuminate where Cisco's helping the customers love the security angles and edge? >> That's right. Just a level set, when we think about industrial IoT we're really talking about the heavier industries, plant environments for a manufacturing company. We're thinking about roadways for a public sector customer. We're thinking the grid for utility environments. We're thinking refineries and oil extraction upstream environments, right. So this is the kind of spectrum in which we are working in, where customers have real businesses, real assets where the operations is the heart of the enterprise that they are running. And the technology can really be a revolutionary change for them to help them connect and then extract the data and then make sense of the data to improve their business practice so industrial IoT, whether you're a roadway in Austria like Asfinag, you're a utility in Germany like NRG, or EDF in France as an example. Enel in turn in Italy, all of these industries and all of these customers are using industrial IoT technologies in running their businesses better today. >> Where are we in terms of that critical infrastructure being both connected and instrumented? Where are we on the adoption curve? >> Sure, look and many of these industries we have talked about SCADA systems, right, that have been here for thirty plus years for our customers and most of those is really a one-way flow of information, right. And typically customers stood up separate side load networks which weren't really connected to the rest of the enterprise so, Rockwell has a saying from the shop floor to the top floor, right like how the digital enterprise where all of these environments are coming together is where customers are. Critical infrastructure, as you said, in this day and age with security and other kind of threats, customers are a little hesitant about how they connect it all together. But Cisco is working with these customers and helping them think through the benefits they can get but also make sure, from a cyber security point of view, that you're helping protect assets, manage these environments because you can't just arbitrarily connect them because IT tool sets just are not ready to manage these environments. >> I love that all the examples you gave were European, of course, being here in Europe. I'm curious, there's some technologies where North America might take the lead or Asia might take the lead. Is IoT relatively distributed? Is Europe kind of on-par or with the rest of the world when it comes to general adoption? >> What we have found in Europe, because of many countries like Germany leading in the renewable energy effort, and the climate is a big focus here. Data privacy and concerns around data sharing are much more top-of-mind in Europe, so we find those kind of use cases getting adopted much much faster. In Germany, as an example, NRG which is one of our customers, and they were here with us last year at Cisco live and we launched a capability with them. They are trying to manage the real time flow of energy in their grid environment, such that make sure there are no outages, no brownouts in these environments. So utilities and customers like that across Europe are adopting technology faster. Manufacturing, as always, is a leading use case. There we see some of the automotives in US are leading a little bit more in getting environments connected to their environment but overall, IoT is a global market. We work, we have over 70,000 enterprise IoT customers today at Cisco so we are fortunate to be able to serve these customers on a global basis across the range of industries I talked about earlier. >> In a lot of respects too, I would say the US is behind, right, when you look at public policy from a federal standpoint, the US doesn't really have a digital strategy from an overall perspective whereas certainly India does and countries in Europe. You look at the railway systems in Europe. >> Vikas: Much more advanced, yeah. >> Beautiful and shiny and advanced. So I would say the US has a little bit of work to do here, in my perspective. >> That's right, in India Prime Minister Modi started the effort around One Hundred Smart Cities, right, and Cisco is working with many of those smart cities with our Cisco Kinetic for Cities to kind of create, connect all of the sensor networks. Video surveillance, safety, environmental sensors, managing the flow of that data and digitizing those environments, right, and in Europe we've been working in France, Germany, Italy, UK. I think we are seeing much more adoption in these specific industries but it's a global market and again, like I said, 70,000 customers, we get to see quite a bit of the landscape around the globe. >> What should we know about the architecture? Can you give us kind of a high-level summary? What are the basics? >> Sure, so in the comprehensive IoT security architecture we released this week, it really starts with, you have to be able to identify the devices, right. In IT environments, you know, to your laptop and to your PC, they have been managed by MDM technologies for years but in the industrial environment I might have a programmable logic controller that I deployed 15 years ago. It's not ready for modern capabilities so what you really have to start with is identifying all of these assets in the communication baselines that are happening there, that's step one. Step number two is really, now that I know that this is a PLC or that's a controller, I need to come up with a policy, a security policy which says this cell in a plant environment can only talk to the other cell but doesn't need to talk to a paint zone. So I'll give you an example in automotive, if I'm welding a car, I'm building a car, the welding robots need to be communicating with each other. There's no real reason that the welding robot needs to talk to the paint shop, as an example. So you can come up with a set of policies like that to keep these environments separate because if you don't, then if there is one infection, one malware, one security, then it just traverses your whole factory. And we know customers in Europe that their networks have gone down and they've impacted 150 to 200 million dollars of downtime impact. >> Well we had a real world use case 10 years ago or so with Stuxnet with Siemens PLC and boom it went all over the world, I mean it was amazing. >> Exactly right, so again back to identification then I create the policy, then I implement the policy within our switching or a firewall network but you're never done so you have to keep monitoring on a real time basis as the landscape changes. What's happening, how do I keep up with it? And that's where things like anomaly detection are super important, right, so those are the four steps off the architecture that I want to talk about. >> So it sounds like something like cyber security is both a threat and an opportunity of bringing together IT and OT. Bring us inside a little bit those dynamics, we know it's one of the bigger challenges in the IoT space. >> Yeah, I mean I think, look, both parties whether I'm an operational person or an IT person, both of us, both audiences have their own care-abouts. If I'm a plant manager, I'm measured on number of units I'm producing, the quality, the reliability of my products. If I'm in IT I really am measured on downtime of the network or the cyber security threat. There aren't really common measurable capabilities but cyber and security, it kind of brings both the parties together. So when we use our cyber vision product, we're able to provide to that plant manager visibility to what's happening, how are their PLC's performing, did anybody change my program, is my recipe for my given product I'm making secure and safe? So you have to appeal to the operational user with what they care about. IT really cares about to manage the threat surface, don't let that threat kind of propigate. Now at the board level because the board sees both sides of it, they're asking these teams to work together because they have a complimentary skill set. >> Well I think that's critical because, rhetorical question, who's bigger control freaks? Network engineers or operation technology engineers? They both, you know, keep that operation going and are very protective of their infrastructure. So it's got to come from top down and it is a board level discussion, right? >> Yeah that's right, we have customers where, you know, the board, the CEO has mandated to say listen, whether it's for the national threat actors or other corporate espionage, I need to protect the corporate intellectual property. Because it's not just a process, it's also about safety of employees and safety of their assets that comes into play, right. So when some of the customers we're working with, where the CEO has kind of dictated that the IT teams help the operational environments, but it is a two-way street, like, there has to be value for both parties to come together to solve these challenges. >> Okay so we talked a little bit about the threat, also when we're talking IoT, there's all that data involved. What's the opportunity there for customers with data, how's Cisco involved? >> Absolutely, look, I think one of the reasons customers are doing digitization projects is because they're trying to use the data to make better business decisions. It has to improve, yield, and meet their KPI's of their industry. So far what we have seen is that all of the data is really trapped in all of these distributed environments. Gartner tells you that 75% of the data will be produced at the IoT edge. But our customers to date have not had the tool set to be able to get access to the data, cleanse the data at the edge of the network, bring the right data that they can create insights with, and improve their businesses so it's been a heterogeneous environment, lots of protocols, lots of legacy, so that's kind of what our customers are struggling with today. >> Yeah, absolutely and most of that data is going to stay at the edge so I need to be able to process the edge. Heck I even went to a conference last year, talked about satellites that are collecting all of the data, I need to be able to have the storage, the processing, the compute there because I can't send all of the data back, as fast as it is. So it's a changing architecture as to where I collect data, where I process data. We think it is very much additive to traditional cloud and data center environments today, it's just yet another challenge that enterprises need to deal with. >> That's right, so the work that Cisco is doing in the IoT edge environment is we are enabling these customers to connect their remote terminal units, their machines, and their robots and providing them the tool set with four capabilities. First, extract the data. So we have a set of protocols like Modbus, like OPC UA where they can extract the data from their machine so that's step number one. Second is to transform the data, as you said, over an LTE circuit or over a connection, I'm not going to be able to send all of the data back so how do I transform the circuit, transform the data where I maybe take an average over the last five minutes or I kind of put some functions, and we are providing, as we are in the Devnet zone, we are providing developers the capability such that they can use visual studio, they can use Javascript to write logic that can run right at the edge of the network so now you have extracted the data, you have transformed the data. Governance is a key topic, who should have access to my data, especially here in Europe where we're concerned about privacy, we're concerned about data governance. We are enabling our customers to come up with the right logic by which if there's a machine data and you are the supplier, I'm only going to give you the data, the temperature, the vibration, the pressure that you need to support the machine, but I'm not going to give you the number of units I produce. I'm not going to give you the data about my intellectual property. And then you have to integrate to where the data is going, right. So what we're doing is we are working with the public cloud providers, we are working with software ISVs, and we are giving them the integration capability and the benefit of this for the customer is we have done pre-integration on the extraction part and we have done pre-integrations on the delivery part, which allows the projects to go faster and they can deliver their IoT efforts. >> So how do you envision the compute model at the edge, I mean, probably not going to throw a zillion cores so maybe lighter weight components, and I have some follow up on that as well. >> Sure, absolutely. Look, Moore's law is a friend of ours here, right, like with every cycle, every generation of CPU technology, you get more and more compute capabilities. So the IoT gateways that we provide to our customers today have four ARM cores in them. We are using a couple, two of those ARM cores for the networking function but those cores are available for our customers. We have designed an extra memory for them to be able to process these applications and we give them SSD and some storage at that so we can provide up to sixty gigs or one hundred gigs of storage so now that gateway, that communication device, a router, a switch that's at the edge of the network can kind of do a dual purpose. It can not only process and provide you security for the communications but is now an edge processing node so we call them IoT gateways and I can tell you, we are deploying these kind of products on buses. You know, in a mass transit bus, we all ride these buses, there are over six systems that are on that bus. A video surveillance system, I'm going to monitor the tire pressure, I want to monitor if the driver is going over the speed limit. We have now connected all of these systems and we are running logic at the edge such that the riders have a safer experience and then they can get real time visibility to where the bus is as well. >> Yeah and my follow up was on persisting, so you mentioned storage, you know, flash storage at the edge and then you also referred to earlier the challenges this data today is locked in silos or maybe it's not even persisted, it's analog data sometimes. So do you envision, if you think about successful digital companies, kind of born digital, data's at the core and traditionally big manufacturing firms, large infrastructure, the manufacturing plant is the center of the universe and data sort of sits around it. Do you envision a period where that data is somehow virtualized and we have access to it, we could really build digital businesses around that data, what are your thoughts? >> Absolutely. So we have been working with a customer, it's a steel manufacturer in Austria, the heartland of Europe as an example. And they make high quality steel, right, and when they're building the high quality steel, they have two hundred different machine types and like you're saying, the data is trapped in there. This customer is trying to digitize and trying to do that but they have been struggling for the last two years or so to be able to get the data because it's a variety of machines and they want to use our IoT services but they haven't been able to pipeline the data all the way to their cloud environments so that was one of our lighthouse customers and we worked with them like, you know, roll up your sleeves and kind of designed the system with them. And we worked to get that data such that now, they're not quite a born-digital company but they are a hard manufacturing company, they can get the best of the tool sets and analytics and all of the things that contemporary tech companies use and they can bridge them into this digital environment. >> Yeah and this is how the incumbents can compete with the sort of digital natives, right I mean it's an equilibrium that occurs. >> That's right, I mean look we love the digital companies but they're not really, they don't have physical assets there or out there working. They're working in a more physical or more of the real economy whether if you are an oil company and you're getting, extracting oil from a pumpjack, right, well you need to still have the capability to do that better. So that's what we're doing, whether you're a transportation, like the bus example I gave you, an oil and gas company whose trying to extract oil from the ground or you are a manufacturer or you're a utility, if we improve use of our digital technologies and operate, improve the efficiency of the business, a 0.1%, a 1%, that has got a much much bigger implication for us as a society and the world at large. But just making them better and more efficient. >> Huge productivity gains. >> Exactly right, that's right, right. >> Massive, yeah. >> So I think that technology and IoT technologies can benefit all of these industries and you know Cisco is kind of invested and kind of helping our 70,000 customers to get better with all of these capabilities. >> Awesome, congratulations. 70,000 customers, big number, rolling out IoT solutions. Look forward to keeping track of Cisco's IoT solutions. >> Super excited to be here, thanks again. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more wall-to-wall coverage here at Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live! We're in Barcelona, Dave Villante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. George Bentinck is here. He's a product manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki. >> Hi. >> Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> So, we were saying, Meraki's not just about wireless. It's all about cameras now. Tell us about your role. >> The Meraki camera is relatively new. It's one of the newer products. It came out just over two years ago and it's really embodying what we're about as a business unit at Cisco, which is about simplicity. It's about taking normally complex technology and sort of distilling it so customers can really use it. So what we did with the camera was we spoke to a lot of our customers, listened what they had to say, and they were fed up with the boxes. They don't want these servers, they don't want the recording solutions, they just want to get video. And so we built a camera which has everything inside it. All the video is stored in the camera using the latest solid state storage. And then we did all the analytics and the other sort of cool things people want to do with video in the camera as well. And yet to make it easy to use, it's all managed from the Meraki cloud. So that allows you to scale it from one camera to 100 cameras to 100,000 cameras and yet have nothing else other than the cameras and the management from the cloud. >> Well the way you describes it sounds so simple, but technically, it's a real challenge, what you've described. What were some of the technical challenges of you guys getting there? >> Well, there are sort of two components. There's the device piece and when we look at the device piece, we basically leverage the latest advances in the mobile phone industry. So if you look at the latest iPhones and Android phones, we've taken that high density, highly reliable storage and integrated it into the camera. And then we've also taken the really powerful silicone, so we have Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip in there and that performance allows us to do all the analytics in the camera. And so the second piece is the cloud, the scaling, and the management. And with video, it's lots of big data, which I'm guessing you guys are probably pretty familiar with. And trying to search that and know what's going on and managing its scale can be really painful. But we have a lot of experience with this. Meraki's cloud infrastructure manages millions of connected nodes with billions of connected devices and billions of pieces of associated metadata. This is just like video, so we can reuse a lot of the existing technology we've built in the cloud and now move it to this other field of video and make it much easier to find things. >> And when people talk about, y'know, the camera systems, IoT obviously comes into play and security's a big concern. Y'know, people are concerned about IP cameras off the shelf. Y'know, everybody knows the stories about the passwords where, y'know, they never changed out of the factory and they're the same passwords across the, and so, y'know, presumably, Cisco Meraki, trusted name, and there's a security component here as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics because, unfortunately, not many people ask about it. It's one of those, it's not an issue until it's an issue type of things and we put a lot of work in it. I mean, Cisco has security in its DNA. It's just like part of what we do. And so we did all of the things which I think every camera vendor and IoT vendor should be doing anyway. So that's things like encryption for everything and by default. So all the storage on the camera is encrypted. It's mandatory so you can't turn it off. And there's zero configuration, so when you turn it on, it won't record for a few minutes while it encrypts its storage volume and then you're good to go. We also manage all the certificates on the camera and we also have encrypted management for the camera with things like two-factor authentication and other authentication mechanisms on top of that as well. So it's sort of leaps and bounds ahead of where most of the decision makers are thinking in this space because they're physical security experts. They know about locks and doors and things like that. They're not digital security experts but the Cisco customer and our organization, we know this and so we have really taken that expertise and added it to the camera. >> Yeah, George, security goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the Cisco solutions. Is that the primary or only use case for the Meraki camera? Y'know, I could just see a lot of different uses for this kind of technology. >> It really is very varied and the primary purpose of it is a physical security camera. So being able to make sure that if there's an incident in your store, you have footage of maybe the shoplifting incident or whatever. But, because it's so easy to use, customers are using it for other things. And I think one of the things that's really exciting to me is when I look at the data. And if I look at the data, we know that about 1% of all the video we store is actually viewed by customers. 99% just sits there and does nothing. And so, as we look at how we can provide greater value to customers, it's about taking the advances in things such as machine learning for computer vision, sort of artificial intelligence, and allowing you to quantify things in that data. It allows you to, for example, determine how many people are there and where they go and things like that. And to maybe put it all into context, because one of my favorite examples is a Cisco case study in Australia, where they're using cameras at a connected farm as part of an IoT deployment, to understand sheep grazing behavior and so this camera watches the sheep all day. Now as a human, I don't want to watch the sheep all day, but the camera doesn't care. And so the farmer looks at eight images representing eight hours, which is a heat map of the animals' movement in the field, and they can know where they've been grazing, where they need to move them, where this might be overgrazed. And so the camera's not security at this point, it really is like a sensor for the enterprise. >> Yeah, it's interesting, actually I did a walk through the DevNet Zone and I saw a lot of areas where I think they're leveraging some of your technology. Everything from let's plug in some of the AI to be able to allow me to do some interesting visualizations. What we're doing, there's a magic mirror where you can ask it like an Alexa or Google, but it's Debbie, the robot here as to give you answers of how many people are in a different area here. A camera is no longer just a camera. It's now just an end node connected and there's so many technologies. How do you manage that as a product person where you have the direction, where you put the development? You can't support a million different customer use cases. You want to be able to scale that business. >> Absolutely, I think the North Star always has to be simplistic. If you can't go and deploy it, you can't use it. And so we see a lot of these cool science projects trapped in proof of concept. And they never go into production and the customers can't take advantage of it. So we want to provide incredibly simple, easy out-the-box technology, which allows people to use AI and machine learning, and then we're the experts in that, but we give you industry-standard APIs using REST or MQTT, to allow you to build business applications on it directly or integrate it into Cisco Kinetic, where you can do that using the MQTT interface. >> So, Stu, you reminded me so we're here in the DevNet Zone and right now there's a Meraki takeover. So what happens in the DevNet Zone is they'll pick a topic or a part of Cisco's business unit, right now, it's the Meraki, everyone's running around with Meraki takeover shirts, and everybody descends on the DevNet Zone. So a lot of really cool developer stuff going on here. George, I wanted to ask you about where the data flows. So the data lives at the edge, y'know, wherever you're taking the video. Does it stay there? Given that only 1% is watched, are you just leaving it there, not moving it back into the cloud? Are you sometimes moving it back into the cloud? What's the data flow look like? >> You can think of this interesting sort of mindset, which is let's have a camera where we don't ever want to show you video, we want to give you the answer because video is big, it's heavy. Let's give you the answer and if that answer means we give you video, we give you video. But if we can give you the answer through other forms of information, like a still image, or an aggregate of an image, or metadata from that, then we'll give you that instead. And that means customers can deploy this on cellular networks out in the middle of nowhere and with much fewer constraints than they had in the past. So it really depends but we try and make it as efficient as possible for the person deploying it so they don't have to have a 40G network connection to every camera to make the most of it. >> Yeah, so that would mean that most of it stays-- >> Most of it stays at the edge in the camera. >> Talk a little bit more about the analytics component. Is that sort of Meraki technology the came over with the acquisition? What has Cisco added to that? Maybe speak to that a little bit. >> So the camera is a relatively new product line within the last two and a half years and the Meraki acquisition was, I think we're only like five years or more now down that road, so this is definitely post-acquisition and part of the continued collaboration between various departments at Cisco. What it enables you to do is object detection, object classification, and object tracking. So it's I know there's a thing, I know what that thing is, and I know where that thing goes. And we do it for a high level object class today, which is people. Because if you look at most business problems, they can be broken down into understanding location, dwell times, and characteristics of people. And so if we give you the output of those algorithms as industry-standard APIs, you can build very customized business analytics or business logics. So let me give you a real world example. I have retail customers tell me that one of the common causes of fraud is an employee processing a refund when there's no customer. And so what if you could know there was no customer physically present in front of the electronic point of sale system where the refund is being processed? Well, the camera can tell you. And it's not a specialist analytics camera, it's a security camera you were going to buy anyway, which will also give this insight. And now you know if that refund has a customer at the other side of the till. >> Well, that's awesome. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What are some of the other ones that you foresee or your customers are pushing you towards? Paint a picture as to what you think this looks like in the future. >> It really is this camera as a sensor so one of the newer things we've added is the ability to have real-time updates of the lights' conditions from the camera, so you can get from the hardware-backed light sensor on the camera the lux levels. And what that means is now you have knowledge of people, where they are, where they go, knowledge of lights, and now you can start going okay, well maybe we adjust the lighting based on these parameters. And so we want to expose more and more data collection from this endpoint, which is the camera, to allow you to make either smarter business decisions or to move to the digital workplace and that's really what we're trying to do in the Meraki offices in San Francisco. >> And do you get to the point or does the client get to the point where they know not only that information you just described but who the person is? >> Yes and no. I think one of the things that I'm definitely advocating caution on is the face recognition technology has a lot of hype, has a lot of excitement, and I get asked about it regularly. And I do test state-of-the-art and a lot of this technology all the time. And I wear hats because I find them fun and entertaining but they're amazingly good at stopping most of these systems from working. And so you can actually get past some of the state-of-the-art face recognition systems with two simple things, a hat and a mobile phone. And you look at your phone as you walk along and they won't catch you. And when I speak to customers, they're expectation of the performance of this technology does not match the investment cost required. So I'm not saying it isn't useful to someone, it's just, for a lot of our customers, when they see what they would get in exchange for such a huge investment, it's not something they are interested in. >> Yeah, the ROI's just really not there today. >> Not today, but the technology's moving very fast so we'll see what the future brings. >> Yeah, great. Alright, George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was really, really interesting. Leave you the last word. Customer reactions to what you guys are showing at the event? Any kind of new information that you want to share? >> There are some that we'll talk about in the Whisper Suite, which I will leave unsaid, unfortunately. It's just knowing that you can use it so simply and that the analytics and the machine learning come as part of the product at no additional cost. Because this is pretty cutting-edge stuff. You see it in the newspapers, you see it in the headlines and to say I buy this one camera and I can be a coffee shop, a single owner, and I get the same technology as an international coffee organization is pretty compelling and that's what's getting people excited. >> Great and it combines the sensor at the edge and the cloud management so-- >> Best of both worlds. >> That's awesome, I love the solution. Thanks so much for sharing with us. >> Fantastic. >> 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 from Cisco Live! Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here, in Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live! Europe 2019, I'm John Furrier my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the IoT group at Cisco, formerly as part of the engineering team, Cube alumni, great to see you again, thanks for coming on! >> Great to be here, always good to see you guys. >> So you're in the center of a lot of news, IOT, edge of the network, redefining networking on stage, we heard that, talk about your role in the organization of Cisco and the products that you now have and what's goin' on here. >> So I run our IoT Business group. Similar to what we do with EN, data center, all of that, it has the engineering team, product management team, we build products, solutions, that includes hardware, software, silicon, take 'em out to market, really in IoT it's about you know, the technology conversation comes second. It's like, what can you deliver in terms of use case, and business outcomes that comes first. And it's more about what technology can enable that, so the conversations we have with customers are around, how can you really solve my kind of real problems. Everything from, I want to grow my top line, I want to get closer to my customers, because the closer I get to my customers, I know them better, so obviously, I can turn around and grow my top line. And I want to optimize everything from internal process to external process, because just improves my bottom line at the end of the day. >> So a lot of news happening here around your team, but first, talk about redefining networking in context to your part because, edge of the network has always been, what is, you know, edge of the network, now it's extending further, IoT is one of those things that people are looking at from a digitization standpoint, turning on more intelligence, with a factory floor or other areas, how is IoT changing and what is it today? >> So you gave an example of you know, digitizing something like a factory floor. Right, so let's talk about that. So what do customers on the factory floor want to do? They've already automated a number of this factory floors, but what they want to do is get more efficient. They want better EL, they want better quality. They want to bring security all the way down to the plant floor, 'cause the more and more you connect things, the more you've just expanded your threat surface out pretty significantly. So they want to bring security down to the plant floor because these are environments that are not brand new they had brown field equipment they had green field equipment. They want to be able to have control over what device gets on the network with things like device profiling. They want to be able to do things like, create zones so that they can do that with things like network segmentation so when and if an attack does happen, they can contain the attack as much as possible alright? Now, what you need in terms of a factory floor, automation, security, to be able to scale, to have that flexibility, that's no different than what you have in the enterprise already. I mean we've been working with our IT and enterprise customers for years, and you know, they, it's about automation and security, it's about simplicity. Why not extend that out, the talent that IT has, the capability that it has, it really is a connective tissue that you're extending your network from that carpeted space, or your clean space into outside of the office, or into the non-carpeted space so it's perfect in terms of saying, it's about extending the network into the non-traditional space that probably IT doesn't go into today. >> Well right and it's a new constituency, right? So, how are you sort of forging new relationships, new partnerships, what is, describe what that's like, with the operations technology folks. >> I mean at Cisco, we have great partnerships with the IT organization, right? I mean we've got more than 840,000 customers and our sales teams, our product teams do a good job in terms of listening to customers. We're talking more and more to the line of business, we're talking more and more to the operational teams. Because at the end of the day, I want to be candid. You know, going to a manufacturing floor, I've never run a plant floor, right? There are not very many people in the team who can say, I've been a plant manager before. They know their processes, they're concerned about 24/7 operation, hey I want to be in compliance with the fire marshal. Physical safety of my workers. We come in with that IP knowledge, that security knowledge that they need. It's a partnership, I mean people talk about IT and OT convergence, usually, convergence means that, mm, somebody's going to lose their job, this is more and IT and OT partnership. And most of these digitization efforts, usually come in for the CIO level or a chief digitization officer, we've got good relationships there already. The second part is, Cisco's been in this for quite some time our teams already have relationships at the plant level at the grid level, operator level, you know, in the oil and gas area, but we need to build more and more of that. Because building more and more of that is really understanding what business problems are they looking to solve? Then we can bring the technology to it. >> Liz, what's that in the enablement, you mentioned partnership, 'cause that's a good point, 'cause people think, oh, someone wins, someone loses, the partnership is you're enabling, you're bringing new capability into the physical world, you know, from wind farms to whatever. What does the enablement look like, what are some of the things that happen when you guys come into these environments that are being redefined and re-imagined or for the first time? >> Yeah I would say, you know, I'd use what our customer said this morning. And what he said was, IT has the skills that I need alright? They have the IP skills, they have the security skills. These are all the things that I need. I want my guys to focus on kind of business processes. Around things that they know best. And so, we're working with IT as part of what we're putting this extended enterprise, extending Intent-Based Networking to the IoT edge means, IT already knows our tools, our capabilities, we're now saying, we can extend that, let's go out, figure out what those use cases are together, this is why we're working with, not just the IT, we're working with our channel partners as well, who can enable these implementations on IoT implementations work well. Part of this is also a constant, you know, learning from each other. We learned from the operational teams is that, hey you can start a proof of concept really well, but you can't really take it to deployment unless you address things around the complexity, the scale and the security, that's where we can come in and help. >> And you can't just come in and throw your switches and routers over the fence and say, okay, here you go. You have to develop specific solutions for this world right? And can you talk about that a little bit? And tell us what you're doing here? >> Absolutely, so, if you look at the networking, industrial networking portfolio that we have, it's built on the same catalyst, ISR, wireless APs or firewall, but they're more customized for this non-carpeted space, right? You've got to take into consideration that these are not sitting in a controlled environment. So, we test them for temperature, for shock, for vibration, but it's also built on the same software, so we're talking about the same software platform, you get the same automation features, you get the same analytics features, it's managed by DNA center, so, even though we're customizing the hardware for this environment, the software platform that you get, is pretty much the same, so IT can come in and manage both those environments, but IT also needs an understanding of what's the operational team looking to solve for? >> Liz, I want to ask you about the psychology of the buyer in this market. Because OT, they're running stuff that's just turnin' on, put in the lightbulb, make it work, what I got to deploy something? So their kind of expectations might be different, can you share what the expectations are, for the kind of experience that they want to have with that? >> I use utility as a great example. And our customer from Ennogie, I think explained this really well. This is thing that we learned from our customers right? I haven't been in a sub station, I've been in a data center multiple times, but I haven't been in a sub station, so when they're talking about automating sub station, we work with customers, we've been doing this over the last 10 years, we've been working with that Ennogie team for the last two years, they taught us really, how they secure and manage in these environments. You're not going to find a CCIE in this environment. So when you want to send somebody out to like 60,000 sub stations, and you want to check on, hey do I still have VPN connectivity? They're not going to be able to troubleshoot it. What we did is based on the customer's ask, put a green light on their LED that shines green, all the technician does is look at it and says, it's okay. If not, they call back in terms of troubleshooting it. It was just a simple example of where, it's different in terms of how they secure and manage and the talent that they have is different than what's in the IT space, so you've got to make sure that your products also cover what the operational teams need, because you're not dealing with the CCIE or the IP expert. >> So it's the classic market fit, product market fit for what they're expecting. >> Correct. >> LEDs, you can't go wrong with a green light, I mean. (laughter) >> You know, everybody goes, that's such an easy thing, it's like well, it was not that perceptive to us. >> What's the biggest thing you've learned as you've moved from Cisco engineering out to the new frontier on the edge here, what are the learnings that you've seen, obviously growing mark early, it's only going to get large and more complicated, more automation, more AI, more things, what's your learnings, what have you seen so far that's a takeaway? >> So I'll say, I'm still in Cisco engineering. The reason we're in IoT is that, a secure and reliable network, that's the foundation of any IoT deployment alright? You can go out and buy the best sensor, buy the best application buy the best middleware, but if you don't have that foundation, that's secure and reliable, those IoT projects are not going to take off, so it's pretty simple, everyone's network is the enabler of their business outcome, and that's why we're in it. So this is really about extending that network out, but at the same time, understanding what are we looking to solve for, right? So in many cases, we work with third party partners, 'cause some of them know these domains much better than we do, but we know the IP, we are the IP and the security experts, and we bring that to the table better than anybody else. >> And over the top, DevNet showing here for the second year that we've covered it, here in DevNet zone, that when you have that secure network that's programmable, really cool things can develop on top of it, that's a great opportunity. >> Yeah, this is, I'm super excited that we now have an IoT DevNet. You know, as part of our entire Cisco DevNet. Half a million dev-opers you know, Susie Wee and team done a fabulous job. There's more and more dev-opers going to be starting to develop at the IoT edge, at the edge of the network, right? So when you look at that as, our platforms today with IRX on top of it, make this a software platform that dev-opers can actually build applications to, it's really about, you know, we're ready, ISVs and dev-opers unleashing those applications at the IoT edge. And with Susie making that, you know, available in terms of the tools, the resources, the sandbox that you can get, it's like, we expect to see more and more dev-opers building those applications at the edge. >> We got to talk about your announcements, right, so. >> Oh yeah, exciting set of announcements. >> What's the hard news? >> So we launched four things today as part of extending IBN, or Intent-Based Networking to the IoT edge, the first one is, we've got three new Cisco-validated designs. So think of a validated design as enabling our customers to actually accelerate their deployments, so our engineering teams try to mimic, as much as possible, a customer's environment. And they do this pre-integration, pre-testing of our products, third party products. And we actually put 'em out by industry. So we have three new ones out there for manufacturing, for utilities, and for remote and mobile assets, that's one. The second one is we're launching two new hardware platforms, a next-generation catalyst industrial ethernet switch, it's for modularity of interfaces, and it's got nine expansion packs. The idea is, make it as flexible as possible for a customer's deployment. Because these boxes might sit in an environment not just for three years like in a campus, they could sit there for five, for seven, for 10 years. So as you know, they, adding on, giving them that flexibility, they can be a base system and just change the expansion modules, we also launched our next-generation industrial router. It actually is the industry's probably first and only full IPV Six-capable industrial router. And it's got, again flexibility of interfaces, we have LTE, we have fiber, we have copper, you want dual LTE you can actually slap an expansion pack right on top of it. When 5G comes in, you just take the LTE module out, you put 5G, so it's 5G ready. >> Expansions on there. >> And it's based on IOSXC, it's managed by DNA Center, and it's edge-enabled, so they run IOX, you can build your applications, and load 'em on. So we can build 'em, third parties can build 'em. >> And the DevNet piece here as well. >> And the DevNet piece is the third one where we now have, you know, an IoT dev-oper center in the DevNet zone, so with all the tools that are available, it enables dev-opers and ISVs to actually build on top of IOX today. In fact, we actually have more than a couple of three examples that are already doing that. And the fourth thing is, we depend on a large ecosystem of channel partners, so we've launched an IoT specialization training program to enable them to actually help our customers' implementation go faster. >> Mhm. >> So those are the four things that we brought together. The key thing for us was, designing these for scale, flexibility, and security. >> And are these capabilities available today is that right? >> Absolutely, in fact, if you go in, we're shipping in two weeks! And you can see them at the innovation showcase, it's actually very cool. >> I was going to mention, you brought up the ecosystem, glad you brought that up, I was going to ask about how that's developing, I could only imagine new sets of names coming out of the industry in terms of building on these IOTs since this demand for IOT, it's an emerging market in terms of newness, with a lot of head room, so what's the ecosystem look like, is there a pattern, is it ISVs, VARs, does it take the shape of the classic ecosystem or is it a new set of characters or, what's the makeup of the ecosystem? >> Yeah, it's I would say it's, in many ways, if you've been in the IoT world for some time, you'll say, you know, it's not like there's a whole new set of characters. Yes, you have more cloud players in there, you probably have more SIs in there, but it's been like, the distributors are in there, the machine-builders, the OT platforms, these are folks who've been doing this for a long time. It's more around, how do you partner, and where do you monetize? We know where you know, the value we bring in, we rely on, we work very closely with those OT partners, machine-builders, SIs, the cloud partners, to go to market and deliver this. You're right, the market's going to evolve, because the whole new conversation is around data. What do I collect, what I compute at the edge? Where do I route it to, should I take it to my on-premise's data centers, should I take it to the cloud? Who gets control over that data, how do I make sure that I have control over the data as the customer, and I have control over who gets to see it. So I think this will be a evolving conversation. This is something we're enabling with one of our Kinetic platforms, which are not launched, it's already launched in terms of enabling customers to have control over the data and manage the data as well. >> And bringing all the portfolio of Cisco security analytics, management to the table, that puts anything in the world that has power and connectivity to be a device to connect into a system, this is the, I mean how obvious can it be? It's going to be huge! >> It's great that you think it's obvious, that's exactly what we're tryin' to tell our customers-- >> How to do it-- >> Well this is about extending this out. >> Yeah, how do we do it's the playbook right? So, each business has its own unique, there's no general purpose IoT is there? >> Correct. >> It's pretty much on a custom custom-- well thanks for coming on Liz, appreciate it. Want to ask you one final question. You know, I was really impressed with Karen had a great session, Karen Walker had a great session yesterday, impact with women, we interviewed you at Grave Hopper in 2015. Cisco's doing amazing work, can you take a minute to talk about some of the things that Cisco's doing around women in computing, women in STEM, just great momentum, great success story and great leadership. >> I would say look at our leadership at Chuck's level, and I think that's a great example in terms of, he brings people on depending on what they can, what they bring to the table, right? They just happen to be a lot of women out there, and the reality is, I work for a company that believes in inclusion, whether it's gender, race, different experiences, different thoughts, different perspectives because, that's where truly, in terms of, you can bring in the culture that drives that innovation. I've been sponsoring our Women in Science and Engineering for I can't remember, the last four or five years. It's a community that continues to grow. And, the reality is, we don't sit in there and talk about, you know, woe is me, and all the things that are happening, what we talk about is, hey what are the cool new technologies that are out there, how do I get my hands on 'em? And yeah, there are, we talk about some things where women are a little reticent and shy to do, so what we learn from other peoples' experiences, many time the guys are very interesting, so what do you sit down there and talk, and I said trust me it's not like, a whining and moaning session, it's more in terms of where we learn from each other. >> Peers talking and sharing ideas-- >> Absolutely. >> Of innovation and building things. >> Yep, and we've got, you know, we look around and we've got a great set of woman leaders throughout the company at every single level in every function. It's great to be there, we continue to sponsor our Grace Hopper, we have some of the biggest presence at Grace Hopper, we do so many other things like connected women within the company. It's just a, I would say, fabulous place to be. >> You guys do a lot of great things for society, great company, great leadership, thank you for doing all of that, it's phenomenal, we love covering it too, so, we'll be at the cloud now today in Silicon Valley, Women in Data Science at Stanford, and among other great things. >> It's definitely a passion of ours. >> Yeah. (talking over each other) >> Awesome, that's great to hear. >> Thanks for coming on, this is theCUBE, live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2018, back with more after this short break, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live! We're in Barcelona, Dave Villante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. George Bentinck is here. He's a product manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki. >> Hi. >> Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> So, we were saying, Meraki's not just about wireless. It's all about cameras now. Tell us about your role. >> The Meraki camera is relatively new. It's one of the newer products. It came out just over two years ago and it's really embodying what we're about as a business unit at Cisco, which is about simplicity. It's about taking normally complex technology and sort of distilling it so customers can really use it. So what we did with the camera was we spoke to a lot of our customers, listened what they had to say, and they were fed up with the boxes. They don't want these servers, they don't want the recording solutions, they just want to get video. And so we built a camera which has everything inside it. All the video is stored in the camera using the latest solid state storage. And then we did all the analytics and the other sort of cool things people want to do with video in the camera as well. And yet to make it easy to use, it's all managed from the Meraki cloud. So that allows you to scale it from one camera to 100 cameras to 100,000 cameras and yet have nothing else other than the cameras and the management from the cloud. >> Well the way you describes it sounds so simple, but technically, it's a real challenge, what you've described. What were some of the technical challenges of you guys getting there? >> Well, there are sort of two components. There's the device piece and when we look at the device piece, we basically leverage the latest advances in the mobile phone industry. So if you look at the latest iPhones and Android phones, we've taken that high density, highly reliable storage and integrated it into the camera. And then we've also taken the really powerful silicone, so we have Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip in there and that performance allows us to do all the analytics in the camera. And so the second piece is the cloud, the scaling, and the management. And with video, it's lots of big data, which I'm guessing you guys are probably pretty familiar with. And trying to search that and know what's going on and managing its scale can be really painful. But we have a lot of experience with this. Meraki's cloud infrastructure manages millions of connected nodes with billions of connected devices and billions of pieces of associated metadata. This is just like video, so we can reuse a lot of the existing technology we've built in the cloud and now move it to this other field of video and make it much easier to find things. >> And when people talk about, y'know, the camera systems, IoT obviously comes into play and security's a big concern. Y'know, people are concerned about IP cameras off the shelf. Y'know, everybody knows the stories about the passwords where, y'know, they never changed out of the factory and they're the same passwords across the, and so, y'know, presumably, Cisco Meraki, trusted name, and there's a security component here as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics because, unfortunately, not many people ask about it. It's one of those, it's not an issue until it's an issue type of things and we put a lot of work in it. I mean, Cisco has security in its DNA. It's just like part of what we do. And so we did all of the things which I think every camera vendor and IoT vendor should be doing anyway. So that's things like encryption for everything and by default. So all the storage on the camera is encrypted. It's mandatory so you can't turn it off. And there's zero configuration, so when you turn it on, it won't record for a few minutes while it encrypts its storage volume and then you're good to go. We also manage all the certificates on the camera and we also have encrypted management for the camera with things like two-factor authentication and other authentication mechanisms on top of that as well. So it's sort of leaps and bounds ahead of where most of the decision makers are thinking in this space because they're physical security experts. They know about locks and doors and things like that. They're not digital security experts but the Cisco customer and our organization, we know this and so we have really taken that expertise and added it to the camera. >> Yeah, George, security goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the Cisco solutions. Is that the primary or only use case for the Meraki camera? Y'know, I could just see a lot of different uses for this kind of technology. >> It really is very varied and the primary purpose of it is a physical security camera. So being able to make sure that if there's an incident in your store, you have footage of maybe the shoplifting incident or whatever. But, because it's so easy to use, customers are using it for other things. And I think one of the things that's really exciting to me is when I look at the data. And if I look at the data, we know that about 1% of all the video we store is actually viewed by customers. 99% just sits there and does nothing. And so, as we look at how we can provide greater value to customers, it's about taking the advances in things such as machine learning for computer vision, sort of artificial intelligence, and allowing you to quantify things in that data. It allows you to, for example, determine how many people are there and where they go and things like that. And to maybe put it all into context, because one of my favorite examples is a Cisco case study in Australia, where they're using cameras at a connected farm as part of an IoT deployment, to understand sheep grazing behavior and so this camera watches the sheep all day. Now as a human, I don't want to watch the sheep all day, but the camera doesn't care. And so the farmer looks at eight images representing eight hours, which is a heat map of the animals' movement in the field, and they can know where they've been grazing, where they need to move them, where this might be overgrazed. And so the camera's not security at this point, it really is like a sensor for the enterprise. >> Yeah, it's interesting, actually I did a walk through the DevNet Zone and I saw a lot of areas where I think they're leveraging some of your technology. Everything from let's plug in some of the AI to be able to allow me to do some interesting visualizations. What we're doing, there's a magic mirror where you can ask it like an Alexa or Google, but it's Debbie, the robot here as to give you answers of how many people are in a different area here. A camera is no longer just a camera. It's now just an end node connected and there's so many technologies. How do you manage that as a product person where you have the direction, where you put the development? You can't support a million different customer use cases. You want to be able to scale that business. >> Absolutely, I think the North Star always has to be simplistic. If you can't go and deploy it, you can't use it. And so we see a lot of these cool science projects trapped in proof of concept. And they never go into production and the customers can't take advantage of it. So we want to provide incredibly simple, easy out-the-box technology, which allows people to use AI and machine learning, and then we're the experts in that, but we give you industry-standard APIs using REST or MQTT, to allow you to build business applications on it directly or integrate it into Cisco Kinetic, where you can do that using the MQTT interface. >> So, Stu, you reminded me so we're here in the DevNet Zone and right now there's a Meraki takeover. So what happens in the DevNet Zone is they'll pick a topic or a part of Cisco's business unit, right now, it's the Meraki, everyone's running around with Meraki takeover shirts, and everybody descends on the DevNet Zone. So a lot of really cool developer stuff going on here. George, I wanted to ask you about where the data flows. So the data lives at the edge, y'know, wherever you're taking the video. Does it stay there? Given that only 1% is watched, are you just leaving it there, not moving it back into the cloud? Are you sometimes moving it back into the cloud? What's the data flow look like? >> You can think of this interesting sort of mindset, which is let's have a camera where we don't ever want to show you video, we want to give you the answer because video is big, it's heavy. Let's give you the answer and if that answer means we give you video, we give you video. But if we can give you the answer through other forms of information, like a still image, or an aggregate of an image, or metadata from that, then we'll give you that instead. And that means customers can deploy this on cellular networks out in the middle of nowhere and with much fewer constraints than they had in the past. So it really depends but we try and make it as efficient as possible for the person deploying it so they don't have to have a 40G network connection to every camera to make the most of it. >> Yeah, so that would mean that most of it stays-- >> Most of it stays at the edge in the camera. >> Talk a little bit more about the analytics component. Is that sort of Meraki technology the came over with the acquisition? What has Cisco added to that? Maybe speak to that a little bit. >> So the camera is a relatively new product line within the last two and a half years and the Meraki acquisition was, I think we're only like five years or more now down that road, so this is definitely post-acquisition and part of the continued collaboration between various departments at Cisco. What it enables you to do is object detection, object classification, and object tracking. So it's I know there's a thing, I know what that thing is, and I know where that thing goes. And we do it for a high level object class today, which is people. Because if you look at most business problems, they can be broken down into understanding location, dwell times, and characteristics of people. And so if we give you the output of those algorithms as industry-standard APIs, you can build very customized business analytics or business logics. So let me give you a real world example. I have retail customers tell me that one of the common causes of fraud is an employee processing a refund when there's no customer. And so what if you could know there was no customer physically present in front of the electronic point of sale system where the refund is being processed? Well, the camera can tell you. And it's not a specialist analytics camera, it's a security camera you were going to buy anyway, which will also give this insight. And now you know if that refund has a customer at the other side of the till. >> Well, that's awesome. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What are some of the other ones that you foresee or your customers are pushing you towards? Paint a picture as to what you think this looks like in the future. >> It really is this camera as a sensor so one of the newer things we've added is the ability to have real-time updates of the lights' conditions from the camera, so you can get from the hardware-backed light sensor on the camera the lux levels. And what that means is now you have knowledge of people, where they are, where they go, knowledge of lights, and now you can start going okay, well maybe we adjust the lighting based on these parameters. And so we want to expose more and more data collection from this endpoint, which is the camera, to allow you to make either smarter business decisions or to move to the digital workplace and that's really what we're trying to do in the Meraki offices in San Francisco. >> And do you get to the point or does the client get to the point where they know not only that information you just described but who the person is? >> Yes and no. I think one of the things that I'm definitely advocating caution on is the face recognition technology has a lot of hype, has a lot of excitement, and I get asked about it regularly. And I do test state-of-the-art and a lot of this technology all the time. And I wear hats because I find them fun and entertaining but they're amazingly good at stopping most of these systems from working. And so you can actually get past some of the state-of-the-art face recognition systems with two simple things, a hat and a mobile phone. And you look at your phone as you walk along and they won't catch you. And when I speak to customers, they're expectation of the performance of this technology does not match the investment cost required. So I'm not saying it isn't useful to someone, it's just, for a lot of our customers, when they see what they would get in exchange for such a huge investment, it's not something they are interested in. >> Yeah, the ROI's just really not there today. >> Not today, but the technology's moving very fast so we'll see what the future brings. >> Yeah, great. Alright, George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was really, really interesting. Leave you the last word. Customer reactions to what you guys are showing at the event? Any kind of new information that you want to share? >> There are some that we'll talk about in the Whisper Suite, which I will leave unsaid, unfortunately. It's just knowing that you can use it so simply and that the analytics and the machine learning come as part of the product at no additional cost. Because this is pretty cutting-edge stuff. You see it in the newspapers, you see it in the headlines and to say I buy this one camera and I can be a coffee shop, a single owner, and I get the same technology as an international coffee organization is pretty compelling and that's what's getting people excited. >> Great and it combines the sensor at the edge and the cloud management so-- >> Best of both worlds. >> That's awesome, I love the solution. Thanks so much for sharing with us. >> Fantastic. >> 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 from Cisco Live! Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE, covering the Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we're here in Barcelona. Welcome to theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! 2019. Cisco Live! Europe. I'm John Furrier with my hosts this week Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante breaking down all the action. Keynotes over. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, guys, Cisco Live! Introducing some new innovations, Stu and Dave, around reinventing networking. Couple key themes big announcements around ACI, anywhere application-centric, infrastructure, HyperFlex and the new CloudCenter Suite where they're doubling down on Cloud, redefining the network. Stu, we've been here last year. We've been watching Cisco. Policy-based, intent-based networking, Cisco's tying it all together with new branding, The Bridge to Tomorrow, your thoughts. >> Yeah John, I actually, I like some of the new branding The Bridge to Tomorrow, I've been critical of Cisco. Cisco always said, oh well networking's everywhere and it's really important, and it's like, well okay but where's the meat? Where's the detail behind this? They've done a number of acquisitions in the space. They're making sure that they understand where they are. And they had some failures along the way. I mean, call a spade a spade, John, they are going to be a leader in multi-cloud is where they want to be, but, they had some falters along in being a public cloud. The inter-cloud message that they had, they confused the service providers, they didn't understand how they played with they hyper-scale players and now they're understanding where they sit, S.D. Wayne critically important, where they live in the data center and it's interesting we talk about the, do we talk about the data center? Or do we care where the data is centered? And of course that is not in one place but it is many places. We know customers today live in a multi-cloud word, how I get to my data how I leverage my data is critically important and the networking and management is something that is critical across all those so right, as you said, ACI and HyperFlex, the CloudCenter suite I know is an area we're going to dig into a bunch this week Because Cisco has an opportunity to play across these environments, but, Cisco has been trying for a long time to be the manager of managers in these environments, I mean, I think back to things Dave Vellante and the Wikibon team and I have done for years talking about, how do you manage this heterogeneous world and it's just, instead of multi-vendor, we're now talking multi-cloud. >> And you know what, everything is coming together, Dave, we've been covering Cisco we're looking at the timing of the positioning it's seems to be coming together, and around the re-branding, which by the way, I agree with Stu, I like it. The bridge to tomorrow, it resinates with me maybe because I'm from the Bay Area but, the bridging two worlds, a bridging on premises and cloud together in a very seamless way and an elegant way architecturally, so the branding ties in with really much a rounding out of the portfolio so a lot of story lines to follow the new branding, Chuck Robbins getting his sea legs now as Cisco goes to the next level And clearly they see multi-cloud as their positioning because this has been Cisco's core positioning for many, many years this idea of enabling other people to do innovation whether its applications and work loads now they're connecting two worlds Your thoughts on the timing and their position vis-a-vis industry. >> Well Cisco talked this morning in the keynote about another bridge on one side of the network is users and devices and the other side of the network are application and data and we've talked for years about how the network is flattening and traffic is going east-west etc. But, inter-clouding, if you will, puts increased pressure on that and that is clearly Cisco's strategy to be the best at connecting whether its on prim and public clouds and between public clouds. Cisco's got to make the case that on our networks, you're going to be higher performance and more secure. And that's certainly what they are implying. They're also making a big transition from being a hardware company to a software company. When you listen to VMware, they talk about Cisco they talk about oh they make the best hardware, the best switches and Cisco's like no. They're talking software capabilities across the network, new architectures, reinventing, coming at it from the network, which is obviously their strong point and it just really sets up an interesting competitive dynamic between Cisco, certainly VMware who's trying to do to networking and storage what it did to servers, and know you've got IBM and Red Hat coming at it from applications, and the development perspective. We're here in the DevNet zone and I think that's the other piece of the announcements that we're hearing today is developers can actually program with things like IoT, and new use cases, so pretty exciting times. >> Stu, story lines around the data center you made a comment that was kind of a play on words on the key note, data is centered, so center dash ed, center-ed, so the data center concept is moving into data being center of the value proposition. This has been interesting because if you look at what DevNet has spawned and DevNet created under Susie Wee's leadership you saw the role of API's. So if data moves around the network and that's the core competency of Cisco moving packets from point A to point B Adding automation, adding intelligence, with intent based networking and cloud enabling on the other side, you got to have access to the data, the data's got to be traversing and interoperating with multiple environments. This is now a architectural standard. Is Cisco, from a product portfolio stand point whether it's security, analytics, cloud app management, IoT, networking, does it all come together? Your thoughts? >> Yeah, so, first of all, Cisco plays in a lot of these environments. We talked not just data center, but, when you talk about branch office something Cisco has been doing for a really long time, and how do I network between all of those remote applications and my central location, and my central location might not be the data center, it might be a or multiple public clouds out there. So Cisco's been attacking this back when optimization many years ago. SD-Wan really has taken that and much more you know, super important when we talk about this multi-cloud environment and how I get that connectivity so they're there and Cisco from the ground up has gone through a lot of rebuild. So, the CloudCenter suite that we talk about, Microservice's architecture built with Kubernetes into that API economy that we're talking about which is a lot about what we talk about here in the DevNet zone. So, absolutely, Cisco has, they're known as space, they have a lot of the skills, they have a very broad platform of products out there. David Goeckeler this morning, he's just reeling off all the different areas they play to and saying, we've got like 6,000 people in the opening keynote, and he's like, I came and looked at this room, and I've got like four x the amount of engineers working on your networking security issues that were here. It's like 24,000 people it's an army, there's very few companies outside of Google, Amazon and Microsoft, that can call on that engineering strength and that's just the internal piece what we love, we talked to Susie Wee and she's like, we've got 500,000 on our community platform helping to build, IT, OT, IoT, all the network, all the security pieces so, Cisco is not new to a lot of these but, is re-focused on a lot of what they are doing. >> So the big news obviously is the ACI anywhere in hyperfex anywhere and putting the data center, connecting those two worlds and you got the cloud as well so the role of hyper-convergence is certainly key in this announcements here today. ACI application center infrastructure just code words for policy based, intent-based networking, all the stuff that Cisco's used to doing. Then when you connect to the cloud, you got data center, on premises, cloud, and then hyper-convergence at the edge. This is the core, right, they got the edge, multiple environments, you got cloud, and you got the data center, legacy environment which is evolving, Those are all coming together, Stu. This is cross-domain challenge. Is Cisco prepared? David I'd love to get your comments on this as well, to be that cross-domain vendor? Because multi-cloud truly will require data to be moving around, policies to be automated and deployed across domains. This is a huge challenge. >> Yeah, I mean, John, it is challenging, and if you look at the hyper-convergence infrastructure space, where Cisco plays with HyperFlex goes up against VMware vSAN, Nutanix and the rest there, the people that sell that and build that, are necessarily the ones that really understand multi-cloud. We've seen that space maturing for the last couple of years. Obviously Cisco's got a right to be at the table there and they're moving in that direction, but, to the data center folks, and they are data center folks that have done networking and storage and all that, are they getting trained up and and helping to help bridge to that multi-cloud environment? I think there's still a lot of work to go and I talked to the channel, when I talked to the people who are out there going to market on that. >> Well that's the big challenge, is how do you move the base, how do you get them from point A to point B without, spending a billion dollars? You heard Gordon today stand up there and say, you got to change. Now, and he admitted, anytime somebody tells me I have to change, I kind of get defensive about it. But some of the things that I. Well obviously this end-to-end architecture, they're in a position, in theory anyway to do that, what choice do they have? A couple of things that struck me is they've got a new consumption model, SaaS-based consumption model, they also announced four validated designs for OT from IoT apps. It's good to see some actually meat on that bone. You got like utility sub-stations and mining operations and fleet management, I mean, it's stuff that you would'nt traditionally think about from coming from a data center company. So they're making some moves that I think are substantive and necessary. >> Well I took some notes down I wanted to get your comments on this guys, cause, to me, this is the core news here, is that Cisco is truly trying to put that end-to-end architecture around cross-domains, you seeing their core data center business continue to be robust, that's they're bread and butter. You got the Edge that's developing nicely with IoT and Enterprise Edge and other places around campus. Then you got multi-cloud, so you got the three-legged stool. Core data center, multi-cloud, and Edge. Does this address the industries demand for apps changing, work loads being distributed, and then, management across these multiple domains or multi-cloud, because you got to manage this stuff. So cost to ownership, these are now the table stakes, your thoughts on those three areas, Stu, core data center, multi-cloud, and Edge? >> Yeah, I mean we've been talking about for the last year, the move from hardware to software is not an easy one. There are things that you need to change for product that you need to change how their field handles it, the whole. The compensation and how they support their channel, is super challenging. At VMworld last year, we really highlighted how that inter-cloud networking, what a critical piece it was. I was so excited, that the original vision of what Nicira had pre-acquisition was starting to come out there, because VMware's coming after Cisco in that manner. Cisco, not like they're trying to create high providers, they are going to live in all those worlds, but, there definitely is some conflict there and something I always look at, Cisco's got a gigantic ecosystem. They have, hundreds of thousands of certified Cisco engineers and they've got a great ecosystem here. >> And a strong channel. >> And a strong channel. Right, that go to market, partners as well as the technology partners, and they're still strong. We're going to have on this week a lot of those players here, but, that change is something that is tough to go through, and, it's this journey that they're on. >> Well, this, Dave brought up to consumption, I want to dig into the consumption piece because how people consume the cloud obviously means that they got to stand up the cloud, multi-cloud. Cisco's clearly got Azure AWS and Google Cloud. Google seems to be a strategic partner as well as Amazon, Azure, but I think Google, kind of feels like this more strategic alliance there, I'm just speculating from my opinion, but, if I'm a Cisco customer, it's pretty easy now to go multi-cloud, I don't need to a lot of things differently. The question is, how do I manage it, what's the cost, and how do I consume it? This is going to be critical. Your thoughts? >> Well, so, Cisco's claiming they're going to extract that complexity, and whatever API's and software infrastructure, infrastructure's a service that your using, they're going to make that simple, simplify that and allow you to have a, single management console. So that, I said before, they're coming at it from a networking perspective, VMware is coming at it from the traditional hypervisor and trying to elbow its way into the networking against storage space and as I said, you got other companies like IBM and Red Hat now coming at it from the application space and Kubernetes is obviously an important role there. I think personally, I think that networking is a right place, a good place to come from. The problem for customers is still going to be complexity. Because the cloud providers are going to have their own, management framework obviously, vSphere is a big player here and now you got Cisco at all, and a bunch of start-ups saying hey, ours are even better. >> Well in the IBM, Red Hat accommodation. >> Right, so I don't foresee a day where your going to have one single painted glass, we've never had in this industry, it's always been nirvana, and so, then comes down to Cisco getting its fair share. I think Cisco's in a very good position to get its fair share for the reasons that Stu just mentioned. >> Stu, so I want to get your thoughts we're in the DevNet zone, that's where theCUBE is. It's our second year at Cisco Live! We'll be at the North America show again this year, it's on the schedule, but the role of the developer, the role of infrastructure as code now is in place, actually happening within Cisco's customer base. So if your a Cisco customer, you're looking at this saying, okay, I've been running the Cisco network, I've got all the portfolios, services, what is the role of the network engineer? Is there a renaissance coming? We've said this last year, I kind of see it happening here, the network is now the computer, the network is the data. This is a great opportunity for Cisco. Your thoughts on the culture of the Cisco customer base and that vibe of infrastructure as code? >> Yeah, so, John, I used to bristle a little bit, when you said, well, we're going to turn all the network engineers and they're going to become coders, and I said, well, I know a lot of network engineers and some of them love and thrive that, but, a lot of them, they're in the CLI, they're doing their thing. If you walk around this DevNet zone, a lot of the stuff that happening isn't networking. They are builders. This reminds me of going to AWS Reinvent, taking about people here, the tools, the skills you need to have to be a builder. And absolutely, networking is a part of it, that management, orchestration, security, all the things that touch into the network, but it's not, oh how do I manage my network switch better? Which was kind of the hardware focus view, and maybe code this, but, it really is, how am I building API's, how am I leveraging things, I've got IoT demos out there and it's networking is in there, but, it's not necessarily the thing, and, so therefore, you've got this wave of developers and builders and, John, we know that's the future, you need to be a builder, how can you create faster, things like server lists, or moving in that direction where I don't need, it's less about the coding, it's more about my application, my data and my building. >> You bring up a great point, Stu, and this is something that I always, I point to when I look at who's kind of BSing the market place in terms of speeds and feeds, and announcements. When you see people actually coding and being enabled to do some creative value, you start to see that's a good signal, and here in the DevNet zone, I saw four-five demos that were writing software apps, to take advantage of the hardware, to take advantage of the network, so know the network is enabling through APIs to extend the data. This is kind of changing the the concept of how packets will move around the networks, so this is truly a tell sign, that in my opinion, of the modern infrastructure. The question is, Dave, how fast will the customers migrate to being true devops or infrastructure as code customers, writing apps, building new things, to create that value? >> Well, I would say this, that of all the sort of traditional large scale call them, whatever, legacy, enterprise, data center companies, I think Cisco is the only one that I can really point to that has kind of got developers right. I mean IBM, Bluemix, StartStop, remember the EMC Code initiative, that was kind of a joke, and so, Oracle owns Java, and it still sort of struggles with developers, so, I think Cisco got it right, and I think the reason they got it right is cause they're focused. I mean that's what I do like about Cisco's strategy and the reason why, you, know, obviously you give them high chances, it's because they're really focused on that networking piece. They're not trying to be all things to all people, even though you forecasted they're kind of heading in that direction, but they're still starting from a position of strength. >> Well, you made a good point. The success and failure of developer programs is about creating an environment where it's compatible with how they're expectations are. Microservices, containers, these abstraction layers that they're used to dealing with create value. Developers will love that. The other thing I would say is is that as developers look at what they can do, the worlds changed. It used to be the network that used to dictate what can happen to applications, now applications need to program the network. I think this was a shift we saw with DevNet Create and DevNet two years ago, where they started moving from the command line interface to more software abstractions or applications interfaces where, say hey, lets just do more with the network, so applications now require program ability. This is the shift, it's upside down from what it was when the industry started, so this new bridge has to be application-centric and to me, that's what I get out of the cloud announcement around multi-cloud. You're starting to see to see the portfolio up and down their stack, from security, they got stealthwatch tetration, that's, SaaS, analytics, app dynamics, among other things data center, HyperFlex, UCS, Nexus, all lined up. CloudCenter, container platform, on multiple clouds, IoT, Kinetic, Vedge, cloud services router, this is now a portfolio. They got the products too. >> Absolutely, John. >> Okay guys, we're going to have a great day, three days of wall-to-wall coverage kicking off here in Barcelona, stay with us for more coverage here at Cisco live, it's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live, 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman is my co-host. Three days, we're in our third day. Our next guest, Lee Howard, Chief Technologist Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Oh, absolutely love any chance I get to hang out with you two, so. >> Love the technologist angle because I gotta ask you first questions. Cisco really kinda put the hard stake in the ground in their opening keynote. Old way, an architecture slide. Everyone's like "Oh yeah, a slide, yeah, firewall." New way, circle, cloud, a lot of services. They recognize the world's changed. Network's not going away, you guys are in the storage business, that's not going but it's changing. What's the key change that your customers and your Cisco, the customers, should know about going on right now that they should pay attention to? >> Yeah, I think from NetApp's perspective, the big focal area we have is turning the corner that we're no longer an infrastructure or a hardware provider. We're data management, we're software driven. And I think that story, if you've been watching us on Wall Street, has resonated very well, very positively received, but it's not just more architecture We're really rearranging ourselves, putting our money where our mouth is, and the focal point going forward is you know, how do we change from a mean time between failure as the measuring stick to mean time to resolution? How do we do it more intuitive, you know? The messaging here at Cisco Live has been absolutely around that, of how do we do policy-driven automation? How do we do so in an intuitive fashion? And then have the adaptability to where it's not a three or five year refresh cycle, but how are we continually developing and delivering insights and helping improve environments on a daily basis? >> One of the things that's pretty consistent we're seeing is obviously, as the market understands what you guys are doing you guys have been doing this for a while. We've been following NetApp. You were doing cloud very early on with AWS. Certainly, you're very customer-driven as well. But you're seeing some change happen because of the scale aspect with the cloud, change is constant. So really having managing the change with the tech is critical. And that's more software science. Can you just share your vision on that? Because to have evolutionary change from a scale standpoint, meaning not the same as it was yesterday, more data growing, what is the core tenets of the architecture? What should customers be thinking about? Because if change is the constant, the tech can't be a one size fits all, what's going on? What makes this model work for you guys? >> We have more key constituents out there than what we did five years ago. And so, in that comes more concerns, more factors on how we need to do our development cycles going forward. And so instead of this, you know, every three years there's a refresh and that's our big update push, we're on a six month cadence. And if you look from, you know, ONTAP moving from 8.x to 9.1 we're seeing, at times, 40% improvement. That customer has purchased nothing, that environment has changed zero. But we're continuing to develop a better product on a software-based developmental scale rather than, you know, having to wait for the hardware to get swapped out. And I think that's where we're seeing a lot of success. >> One follow up question, so before, I know Stu's got a question, I'll get in there, but how has that changed your relationship to the customers? What has changed, 'cause we know the old way, what's the new engagement model with the customers? >> There were absolutely growing pains because, you know, there was perceptions out there whenever George first took us down this road that you guys are old guard, you know, you're a filer company and that's it. And it took a while to gain the credibility to be able to enter into these newer conversations and really be up-leveled, higher up in the org chart to be able to say, you know, this no longer just an execution partner. We're a strategic partner to really be able to go to market with and build that out. And it's that data pipeline from edge to core to cloud with an application pipeline on top of it. I view it like a utility grid within a city. You know, if you walk into any room in that city, you flip on a light switch, you expect for that light to turn on and illuminate the room like the top of my head is in this environment right now. But, you know, it's understanding that you have to have that data availability regardless of who your constituency is out there. And from, you know, our sensor endpoint, be that a person, be it a device, to where that is consumed, that entire continuum, we're the only people out there that are going to be able to deliver that in as efficient way and as seamlessly as we do. >> Yeah, Lee, and I love the vision that you talk about there. We're talking about multi-cloud, IoT, it's not the network appliance that I knew of 20 years ago. Help connect the dots for us. Because when I look at the Cisco NetApp partnership, the biggest piece of that is FlexPod, and many people will be like, "oh Flexpod has been around for eight years, "I take filers, I take networking, I take servers, "I wrap 'em all up together, put together a solution." It's simple, but, you know, maybe not, you know, it's not multi-cloud, it doesn't fit into some of these new paradigms. Where's the modern applications? Where is the multi-cloud? How does the software message and, you know, this convergent infrastructure solution fit together? >> We've got kind of three real key constituents that you have to be able to deliver a solution to nowadays. You've got the traditional IT curators and stewards, you've got the software devs, and you have operations. And if you can go through and find ways for them to collaborate and speak the same language, it comes down to a dialect. And if you can be that Rosetta Stone, to be the translation layer between those, that's how businesses can start planning and taking you going forward. So, yeah, we're gonna have those traditional pieces of the stack that are gonna be in there. Those are necessities. But it's layering in the, you know, app dynamics from Cisco and giving folks a way to say, here is what our growth plan needs to be to start migrating to the cloud. You have our partnerships that we've set up with AWS, Amazon, Google Cloud. You have Cisco's partnerships that they've set up there to where, you know, they're choosing to run NFS on us. You know, we're getting pulled into deals on that. >> Yeah, no, I love that. One of the patterns we've been seeing from customers is step one is you have to modernize the platform and that has to have a lot of the same pieces of what I'm doing if I'm in public cloud. And then I can modernize the applications on top of it. >> And the refactoring of those applications as you're evaluating that, is I don't wanna just bolt on a capability. I want to extend my existing presence out into this new realm. And I think that's been the delineating factor whatever you're looking at, it's not a heavy lift from adding proficiencies. You're just changing the location where you're executing your applications. >> Lee, I wanna get your thoughts on the tech, now you mentioned before that you guys are changing your relationships, certainly you have a technology advantage, there's some good tech there, hardware and software, even though you're emphasizing more software, but there's also now business impact. You're now becoming a business partner. And there's, I won't say business technology, but there's the outcomes are driving everything if it's the system holistically with cloud. So, in the successful models today, open source has proven through generations that co-development has become a very big part of today's collaboration where you don't have to have the other guy to lose to win. >> Yes. >> And, so collaboration and co-creation is a big part of why DevNet's successful. >> Absolutely. >> A big why cloud is successful, open source is successful, you guys are kind of alliance program that requires integration. You have that kind of a posture there. What's the secret sauce for you guys going forward? How do you see the trajectory of the alliances, the partners? 'Cause at the end of the day, integration becomes critical. >> Absolutely. >> The cloud, what's your vision on this direction? >> So we had to take a step back and really get to know who we were at the time. And there was a mentality of make the world NetApp. And we wanted to be disruptive as much as possible, and you can't have the monarchies of IT anymore. It has to be a democracy. You have to have a coalition of folks that are bringing best of breed to bear and especially in the open source model out there, you're getting new titles, new ways of being able to innovate that are being posted daily and curated daily. So if we can be that common broker between these, it's no longer a layer one through four conversation. It's not layer one through seven. It's that layer eight, speaking the dialect of the end user, and if you can articulate those eight layers and be able to do so in a way saying that, you know, we're great at what we do, we also need you to be great as well and put that best foot forward and be that willing partner. You find that if you can be at the central junction point of that, that, you know, the rest of the business, the rest of the org starts going and then that message really starts resonating. >> So the next question I wanna ask you is obviously enabling technology is kind of what you're getting at, let's have that enablement where people can do development whatever that is, solution and/or code or whatever it could be. What should people know about NetApp? What's the one thing or few things that makes NetApp an enabling capability for this new world order that's happening around this new development environment? >> Well, I think it's the focus that's out there that, you know, we're not trying to push a box or a skew. We are a portfolio company with a lot of different ways to be able to consume, and the focus has always been on the end user. How do you want to interface with your data on a day-to-day basis? And then collecting the feedback loops. I think that's something a lot of companies out there want to pontificate and force solutions out there. Ours are how can we co-opt together? You know, we're taking a lesson. >> So the data is the key? >> The data is the key. And if you can rally around that and pool the right resources together, I think you end up with a solution that everybody's able to get ahead with. >> Lee, one of the areas where that's critically important is IoT. >> Yes. >> Most customers we talked to, they're early in the discussions, some of them are rolling out, a lot of listening, a lot of figuring out, lot of diversity in what people are doing. Where are the customers at and how is NetApp engaging? >> Well, you're finding that you're not, you know, ten years ago, you would go very deep into one specific vertical and that's how solutions were set up. That's completely fell on its side to where we're seeing machine learning IoT as a data pipeline that's going horizontal and going across all customers out there, and those that it's either you are above the line and you're taking advantage of this or you're gonna be fledgling in two to three years. And so, where we're really wanting to go with this is articulating from that end point, you can get into ONTAP, and you're able to carry this and go regardless of where you need to execute those applications. And we've got co-opt with Jasper, we have co-opt with Kinetic from Cisco to help securely onboard that data at the edge, at the fog, depending on what the use case is. And then being able to normalize it and be able to move it, sort it, curate it, and move, because data, right now, I mean, that's the new oil. And so if you can combine that and turn it into information which is adding understanding to that data, you've got a recipe to really start delivering as I said in the keynote out there, it's changing the I in IT from information to innovation. It's innovation technology. >> What's the data-driven story? Obviously, data-driven has been around, it's been one of those things that's kind of in, like, digital transformation. It's been kicked around as a, you know, management practice and also a technical architecture concept. You talked about data-driven in your talk here at Cisco Live. What did you talk about in your session? >> Yeah, the big focal point out there was that there are new IT imperatives that require us to change the way that we approach defining problems. And if you can change the way that you define a problem, it's gonna set you on the road to come up with a more intuitive solution. And so going through, we've got use cases of hospitals that are out there where readmission rates are being dropped. Sepsis mortality rates are being dropped. Because we're no longer having a bifunctional area or bidepartmental silo in environments. We're trying to go through and shatter silos out there so that we have a good standard platform for information sharing. You know, consumer or patient, regardless of where you're at, that value chain of how they're able to get data from source to innovation has been the primary focal point of what we've been driving towards. >> Lee, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate your insight. Very candid, very direct and articulate on that app. I gotta ask you the question around the show, for the people that couldn't make Orlando this year, what's the big story coming out of Cisco Live? You know, if you step back and look down at the show, what's the big story? >> I mean, we're coming off of five back-to-back quarters of double-digit growth according to IDC, and so, you know, there's a trajectory, but we're wanting to get to that next gear and ramp up. So you've heard some of the other of my party come on here and speak of managed private cloud, talk about, you know, the industry focus and I think what you're gonna see out of us is continuing to be that data authority, but doing so in an easy to consume fashion so that, you know, the layperson out there is gonna be able to garner the same insights the way that, you know, any large industry player would be able to as well. It's the democratization of data. >> Democratization of data. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist in theCUBE breaking it down for you. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, more coverage, stay with us as we are going into the end of day three coming up. Stay with us. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. (techy music playing) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE here in Mountain View in the heart of California, the Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier, my cohost Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Riaz Raihan, who's the global VP and general manager of Cisco, IOT, CUBE alumni, back... Last on at Cisco Live in Barcelona. We got Cisco Live coming up, but we're here at DevNet Create developer... Develop our ecosystem for Cisco and external cloud native developers, great to see you. >> Thank you, John, pleasure to be back. >> What's a Cisco guy like you doing at a hoody show like this, IOT... >> You know, IOT is so topical and there's so much interest around it, so just happy to be here with the developers and just get to meet a few people out here and just be part of this whole event. >> So, IOT, we last time, and all joking aside is really hot because you have now, you know, the cloud is a foundation, on-premise data, hybrid cloud going on, but the Edge of the network's certainly very relevant. So, you've got a lot of new things happening. So, the question for you is what industries are early adopting... What industries do you see that are adopting IOT in the programmable way? I'm not so much as censored networks, they're out there, but as they bring them into, the IOT into the technology, IT world, which industries are the most adoptive for you guys? >> I talk about, you know, a handful of industries that are really leading the charge, right. Number one I'd say is manufacturing. We see a lot of activity out there primarily because for the first time manufacturers have an opportunity to really converge their data and put it on an IP network, which is exciting. The other big one is energy, both oil and gas as well as utility. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And then we're seeing huge amount of interest in transportation, both in actually the roadways as well as well as the fleet that run on the roadways. In addition to those I'd say retail and general public sector and cities are big adopters of IOT. >> So, on the IOT side with, say... Let's take transportation, so as we know, we know that Uber happened with Uber. They had a death, now the censor, they sort of argued latency matters, right, so you've got to have a network, support it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Is smart cities truly happening in a way that's, in your opinion, moving the ball down the field. Where is the smart cities with IOT respect to cities I mean, is it still early, are they moving the ball down the field, your thoughts? >> You know, I'm asked this question pretty often and I can tell you that moving a city towards a smart city is actually a massive endeavor. What we find is the cities that are doing this successfully, they kind of start small with a few use cases. Let's say parking, maybe lighting, and then they've got to expand out the number of use cases but also geographic spread of where they'll deploy, and specifically, you know, when they work with us one of the big advances we're making is something called the FOG Appliance. Building this easy-to-install appliance that can be used at intersections and at various points to enable cities to go smart. >> So, Lauren, you and I were talking the other day about this, is that, you know, in the cloud, you bring cloud together with the developers. >> Lauren: Yep. >> It's interesting because they have to actually figure out that software going to be powering the Edge-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And you know, Kubernetes is in one example, and then when you start looking at what Kubernetes is doing to the network layer you say, "Okay, I've got to write software." >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But most of the Edge applications, oil and gas, they're like facilities guys. These guys are hardware people. They're deploying cameras, they're not-- >> Well, there has to be their software that actually runs on that as well to enable things for people, places, and things at the Edge and I think you all have to look at the Edge when you are talking about IOT, especially. >> Software, that's the key, what do you say to all those guys that have to relearn software? (laughing) Come to DevNet Create, I mean, this is a real issue. >> Yeah, you know, if you look at software in general, right, software's playing a bigger and bigger role in these applications, not to diminish the role of hardware or networking or any of the other elements, but what software's certainly playing a bigger role, like let me give you an example. Let's talk about the FOG Appliance. You know, one of the things we've been working on quite diligently is building out a single software framework that can sit on a number of different hardware devices depending on what the use case is, and the use case is defined by the customer, it's defined by the industry. It's also defined by the price point, so what we're seeing more and more, John, is having a single software framework but being able to deploy across different platforms, if you will, and therefore building different appliances to solve different problems. >> Lauren: Great. >> Yeah, and one of the things that I think is huge, and I want to get your thoughts on this, I think we should do a deep dive on it, and that is is that video is becoming much more of a bigger app. We use video a lot, as seen on theCUBE. Thank you for watching, but there's a lot of data in the video apps. It's not just do the video to communicate a message. >> Riaz: Yep. >> There's a digital artifact-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> That's beyond what it's for. It's now digitized-- >> Riaz: Yeah. >> So, that's now data, your thoughts? >> You know, when we were talking before you mentioned video is a data asset, completely agree. What we're finding is video is now transitioning from just being something that we thought about for safety and security to becoming more of an intelligent asset. Video's also now getting integrated more with the business process. So, let me give you an example. We're working with the manufacturer of nylon, and this is a process industry that works 24/7, and they're using video to actually monitor the output as it comes out of the machines. Because when the temperature rises above a certain limit, and this is obviously a manufacturing defect, it tends to blob up the nylon, which then reduces the value of the nylon from something that's high grade and high margin to low grade and low margin. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And video's helping solve the problem. So, the video creates an alert that's part now of the manufacturing process and manufacturing control, allowing management to intervene quickly to kind of at least cut their losses. So, that's an example of how video's now becoming very much a part of the business process. Not just safety and security but well beyond that. >> Well beyond surveillance. >> Riaz: Yeah. >> Lauren: Yeah. >> This is more than just normal use cases. So, new value activities are going on with video. >> Absolutely, the other big one is traffic, and I'm talking about road traffic. Whether you look at tunnels or you look at parkways and so on, we're now seeing video being used to monitor the flow patterns of cars-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> On highways and on parkways-- >> Lauren: Yeah. >> And then not just using that to predict traffic jams, but in some cases predict accidents. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Because once you take these data labels and data assets through video and compute them, it's a stream of information that can be analyzed mathematically using an algorithm, and then fortunately we are able to now use that-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> To prevent accidents potentially, right? >> Lauren: Yeah. >> So, that's the kind of thing we see video in. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And this is just the cusp. You'll see a lot more of use cases where video and IOT get very integrated and again, very happy that Cisco's leading the charge on that. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, Lauren, I want to ask you a question because I know you and I have been talking about this, and that is is that the developer role around this is not obvious... I mean, it's obvious, "Oh, got to write software." >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But now you've got to create ecosystems. So, let's just say businesses want to integrate video, they have a buy/build decision to make. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Do they build it from scratch or they integrate it in. So, if you take Riaz's next level of conversation is video is a service, it's a microservice. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> If it's a data asset, if you believe that it's a microservice. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> So, it's not trivial now, you've got to figure out how to codify it. What do you guys think about that? You guys are the experts in the software, what's your thoughts? >> So, you know, I can jump in. I think this is an important trend. You know, especially if you look at three industries that I personally work with: manufacturing, you look at energy, and then you look at retail. These are three industries that I think are leading the charge on how they're using video, you know, in this context, and how the video's actually provided I think is less important. What's more important, as you said, is the microservice that has video as a component, and then consuming that and integrating it with a whole value stream within that industry. The other important element, I believe, is the use of video in conjunction with other types of sensors. So, let me give you an example. We're working with a large telco and you know, they have these cell towers placed all across the country and they actually video, they have video to monitor the cell towers and that's great, but the problem is it gives them a lot of false positives. So, they solved the problem by using human form recognition, still-- >> Like what's a false positive, give me an example. >> A false positive is, you know, a leaf, branch blowing. >> John: Oh, okay. >> And that gives you a positive reading, right. Now, they've kind of used, they've used some technology and they've reduced that down, but they still have too many false positives. So, they decided to combine the video feed with some of the sensors that they have. For example, when someone tries to pull a copper plate from the cell phone tower there's a sensor that tracks that. So, now combining the video input and the sensor input they get, you know, much fewer false positives. >> John: Yeah. >> And are able to take action much more expeditiously. >> The co-occurring incidents are a huge, huge opportunity for the IP. So, the thing I want to ask you, because I think this is much more business oriented, so want to get your thoughts on it... Okay, video's a data asset, people say it. I believe that, now I want to operationalize that in my company. Talk about a new process improvement, that's hard to do because they've never done it before. How are you guys engaging customers and what are some best practices to get them to operationalize a new, not just new technology or service, but actually integrate it into a preexisting or changing value chain? >> One of the things we do, John, is we'll engage with customers to do what we call a value management analysis. So, we actually sit down with them, work out, you know, what their existing process looks like, what an improved process might look like, and importantly, what kind of cost they can take out of the process, out of the system, or what kind of new value they can drive for their customers. So, it's either an increase in revenue, it's a decrease in cost, or an improvement in process efficiencies. Once we've done that it really allows us to then pair up that new process with our technology, and then actually track how much of the value they've received. We've found this approach kind of grounds everything in a very strong ROI, so instead of guessing as to what the output will be and does it actually move the needle on a value basis. We're actually able to document that up front and then actually track the results against what we thought would be. The other advantage of this process is it allows us to improve incrementally. So, the first version of a video enabled business process might give us a certain amount of value, but as we improve on that you could see incremental values and other processes being added on. Very similar to starting small and then adding on incrementally-- >> John: Yeah. >> Kind of a designed way. >> But you got to be open minded. Just let me throw a wrench into the equation here, which is okay, new data source... >> Riaz: Yeah. >> You mentioned the co-occurring identity on the cell tower, for example. There could be, like, multiple data inputs that are new. How does a customer figure that out? >> Different customers are different, and again, as I mentioned-- >> John: Or in generally speaking, because you've got to be prepared for the unknown. >> Yeah, some industries I think are more open to this because they have seen... They have felt this problem before. Going back to manufacturing as an example, monitoring, visually monitoring the output of a manufacturing process is a very labor intensive, you know, proposition. Manufacturers have struggled doing that for a long time. >> John: Yeah. >> Now having used video and getting just a very high level of efficiency-- >> John: Yeah. >> And combining different types of inputs is something they're very open to. >> John: Yeah. >> So, we see them very open to it. Other industries, I think, are coming along, but it all goes back to how important a problem are you solving and what's the payoff of solving the problem? >> John: Yeah. >> The bigger the problem, the more the willingness. >> Great conversation-- >> Lauren: Yeah. >> We had the devops guy on early. Damian, who's with Rundeck and he's saying, you know, bringing down silos and tickets is killing operations. >> Lauren: Yep. >> It's an old paradigm. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> You guys are going down a new road, and we talked about this at Cisco Live in Barcelona. You got tail wind for you guys as this, but you got a clean sheet of paper but you got some preexisting stuff, but it's not like baggage. It's just opportunity, in my opinion. So, I got to ask you how is the business going, what are you guys doing? What are some of the recent successes you've had? Share some insight into the-- >> Yeah, and I think just to add to that, I think what are the revenue opportunities that you see that, you know, you're providing these services to these customers. They must see new revenue opportunities as well. Wondering what those are. >> Absolutely. So, I'll kind of cover both, both sides of my business. I'll start with Jasper, Cisco Jasper. Our Cisco Jasper business is doing fabulously well. We added almost 10,000 devices last month alone, or last quarter, and we are on track to keep adding devices at a very fast pace, so very excited about that. We've just crossed 75 million. So, 75 million devices on Jasper. The last time we spoke, John, the number was 60 million. In addition, we've also seen many more enterprises adopting Jasper. >> John: Yeah. >> The last time we spoke it was 14,000, now it's over 16,400. (laughing) So, that number keeps growing. >> You'll see next month it'll be 20,000. (laughing) >> So, that number just keeps growing-- >> John: Yes. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And that allows us to broaden our reach-- >> John: Yeah. >> Get into different use cases and drive incremental value for our customers. On the Kinetic side, as I mentioned we're seeing a lot of traction in the verticals that I laid out earlier, but specifically what we're finding now is customers are getting serious-- >> Take a minute to explain Kinetic for a second. >> Riaz: Sure. >> Just one minute and then get into it. >> Sure, so Kinetic our data fabric. It's our platform that allows us to extract data from all kinds of IT devices that are sitting on a corporate or a private network. It allows us to process that data at the Edge and then it allows us to transport the data to wherever the customer wants it to be. So, it's really our IOT platform, our data fabric at the core. The Kinetic business is doing great. We've had lots of update, there's actually a booth out here where they're demoing Kinetic. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> I see a lot of people coming in and trying to understand it and we see people deploying Kinetic in more and more unique ways. We're working, for example, with a German manufacturer, a very prestigious German manufacturer that's now launching a pretty large project with Kinetic where they're using Kinetic to monitor the health of not just all their new machines, but also all the Braunfeld machines that they have installed over the past decade, right. So, we're very excited about that and very excited about the future. >> Well, great job, congratulations. Always great to talk with you. I think it's one of the exciting bright spots within Cisco with the IOT, certainly the DevNet developer program has been a huge success and that's only going to help you guys, and obviously the DevNet, create. You want some more software developers, you know, working on Kinetic and also Meraki and all these cool tools. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> More live coverage here, DevNet Creates, theCUBE in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back after this short break. (techy music playing)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's The Cube. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and The Cube's ecosystem partner. >> Hey welcome back, everyone. This is The Cube live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE co-host of The Cube with my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Riaz Raihan, who's the global VP and general manager of Cisco IoT, Internet of Things Division. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, John. >> Great to see you. New to Cisco, IoT, I was commenting on the keynote to Stu today, I mean Cisco got it right ten years ago in their initial vision. And it's now happening in real time in front of our eyes. We see cars, we see connected people, we see connected everything. Everything's connected with an IP address or some connection point with power. That is IoT world, it's massive. You're in charge. Are you having fun yet? >> Absolutely. I mean, I joined in May last year, and I can tell you it's been an eventful eight and a half months. Cisco has a huge commitment to its IoT. They've made a massive investment, of people, of funds, and of intent. I mean, this is one of the top strategies for the company. Right from our CEO Chuck Robbins down, everyone's really committed to IoT. We've made a few important changes. We're making it real. And as you said, IoT today is ubiquitous. So it's very important for Cisco, as a leader in this field, to demonstrate that leadership, and I'm honored to be leading the charge. >> So define what's happening at Cisco. If you could put a stake in the ground right now, as someone who's coming in fresh, and, again, you've inherited a good position. As we say in the NASCAR business, whole position. What are you doing? How do you look at it and how would you explain Cisco's view of IoT, because everyone seems to have a different view of how they're attacking IoT. What's the strategy for Cisco? How are you going after it? >> You're right. I mean, IoT means different things to different people. But the one common thing is that it's very context-based. Right? IoT within the context of manufacturing, as an example, is different from within a context of roadways and transportation. So we've done a couple of things to get that context right. First of all, we've defined how we're going to go after the market. So we've got two platforms. We've got Jasper, which was acquired by Cisco, which is IoT for everything to do with cellular networks. So if you're on a public cellular network, Jasper is the platform you'll use. And then we've got Kinetic, which is our platform for IT and OT networks. So first we defined our strategy around product. Next, we've defined which industries we'll go after. And there's five key verticals that we've decided are crucial for Cisco. Number one is cities. We have full position in that. Number two is manufacturing. Number three is energy, which includes both oil and gas as well as utilities. Number four is transportation. That includes roadways as well as fleet. And number five is retail. So that's really our go-to market strategy. We are kind of focusing on specific use cases and specific industries. >> And you view the network, we were talking before we went on camera, there's certainly cloud, which is not competitive to you guys, or are they? But how do you, is the network more important than the edge, is the edge where the action is? Cause a device on the network technically is a device, it's a thing. The internet of things, people are things. Machines are things. >> Absolutely. >> John: So where is the edge, scent or does it matter? Your philosophy on this. >> So, you know, IoT, the "T" stands for "things." And everything is connected to something, right? And that's where the data's coming from. So whether it's a machine, whether it's a moving vehicle, whether it's a vending machine, or a side center, they're all things. Cisco has owned the network for a long time, right? And a lot of these things that we talk about are the last point of a network, and they're connected to some network in some capacity. So we approach IoT from the bottom up. We have, I believe, a great position to approach IoT from. We understand the network, we understand what's on the network, we've got visibility to the techs on the network, we have secured the network, and it gives us a great perspective on how to approach IoT. To your other point around cloud, we are not competitive at all with the cloud business. As a matter of fact, we are complementary. We work with all the big guys out there. We have figured out how best to work with them, because at the end of the day, their mission is to drive as much data to the cloud as possible. Our mission is to help extract data from difficult to extract places. So it's actually a pretty good marriage. >> And what's the best way to work with them? You said you've figured out the best way to work with the clouds, what is that best way? >> So you mentioned the edge. I think the edge is where we had to define clear rules of engagement. Our theory on the edge is that we will bring data, as I said, from difficult to extract places, and compute it at the edge, right? And then we'll actually transport it to wherever the customer wants it to go. And, as you heard in the keynotes today, we live in a multi-cloud world. Very few customers are with one cloud. They either have, you know, two more more of the big puppet cloud guys, or they have their own private clouds, or they have a combination thereof. So in that sense, we'll do all the edge compute, and then when the data has to be transferred or moved to the cloud, that's when we'll kind of help figure out what the customer wants to do, and then move it to where the customer wants it to be. >> So Riaz, your background's software, and I want you to give us a little bit of insight as to where we are with IoT today. Specifically, think about go to market and sales cycle. Some of the things I've heard is there's a lot of customers interested, but it's really early. And there's a lot of consultative activity there, it's not to the point where, you know, oh okay, you're this industry, this is the solution, let's shrink-wrap it and go sell it. So it takes a little bit longer. Where are we, how are we along that maturity cycle, and how does that fit into Cisco's selling model and partners? >> You're absolutely right, Stu. IoT is still very nascent. Customers are still trying to figure out not just how to do things, but what to do. And I think Cisco has a leadership role, because of our legacy and because of our brand, and frankly because of our top leadership. While I come from the software world, I recognize that Cisco has had great leadership in the networking area, great leadership in security, and great leadership in software. We are transitioning into becoming a software company, we've had great strength in software, our CEO has often said that 80% plus of our engineers are software engineers. With that said, what we are doing for customers is we are helping define what we call "industry solutions." Let me give you an example. If you're talking to a manufacturing customer, who's trying to connect a number of their machines, both green field and brown field, to sensors, these are actual devices that we partner with and that we install for customers, and then extract data from those sensors onto an edge compute device, there's software involved, but equally there's networking hardware involved in making this happen. And then there's of course virtualization and connection to the cloud, as we just talked about. So to make all that, to make that value chain come to life, we are doing two things. Number one, we are defining what that data flow looks like, and number two, we are defining for the customer what the end-to-end solution looks like, because we think that's critical. And in all the verticals that I've mentioned, we've actually gone down to the level of use case. So if you look at manufacturing, to stick with that example, we have got a use case for equipment health monitoring, we've got a use case for energy monitoring, we've got a use case for track and trace, and each use case has a combination of software, networking, hardware, security, and services. So Cisco's taking a leadership position in defining that, by industry. >> So, you mentioned Kinetic was an acquisition? No, no, Jasper was. >> Riaz: Jasper was, yes. >> Okay, Kinetic was for IT OT, information technology and operational technology. We've reported, and we've observed, the culture clash between OT and IT. OT guys, they're like IT, get out of my face, I don't want an IT connection anywhere near my hardened system. Usually around industrial IoT. How is Cisco bringing those worlds together? 'Cause it feels like dev ops again, is it a collision, is it smooth? Your view? Does it matter? How are you seeing that? >> It's evolving. Going back to Jasper, which Cisco acquired a couple of years ago. And by the way, a very successful acquisition, the device growth has grown from about 20 million devices to 60 billion plus today, in just over eighteen months, and continues to grow rapidly. Jasper, most of Jasper's go-to-market motion was focused at the business user. What you would call OT. Jasper, one of the big verticals in Jasper is the connected car. All of the big, they do a lot of different verticals, they empower a lot of different industries, and anything to do with cellular IOT is served by Jasper. >> And that's mostly sensors. >> Riaz: That's mostly sensors. >> So you're saying, the OT's kind of covered with the Jasper side. >> Riaz: Yeah, yeah. >> So you win at both sides. >> Yeah, we have a lot of OT coverage with Jasper. And there's a lot of great skills that Jasper brought into Cisco. It's not just the technology and the massive user base, there's a lot of great skills as well. Now, coming to Kinetic, this one's interesting, because when we've worked with, going back to manufacturing as an example, we have to work with the OT guys. This is a good thing for Cisco, 'cause it gives us a completely new set of buyers in the corporate world to interact with, and by definition we're actually bringing IT into a lot of these OT conversations. Now, some of them - >> Well they've got the data, too. You've got to bring it back home, right? >> Yeah, but there's also minor other things like security to deal with, right? So we've got to kind of bridge that gap, and OT and IT are kind of playing a big role in defining that. >> You mentioned the key word that I'm surprised it took us so long to get to. Security. Talk about the ever-expanding attack radius. In the keynote this morning they talked about all the new agents are in there, IoT's huge risk out there. What's Cisco's role there, what's the ecosystem partner? How does Cisco maintain a leadership position in this place? >> So let me start by saying something that could be quite sobering. IoT devices are some of the most hackable devices on the planet, right? Research study after research study bears this out. That said, Cisco's point of view is very simple. Security is something we start with, it is not an afterthought. So to that end, we have integrated security into our strategy, but more importantly into our products. Let me give you two examples. Jasper is one of the most secure IoT platforms on the planet, if not the most secure. Jasper is delivered through our service provider network, that we call JPO, so Jasper Partner Operators. In the US it happens to be AT&T, globally we've got about fifty partners to do this. And we work with them to make that rock solid and robust. We also offer additional security offerings on top of what comes with Jasper. Now, coming to the OT IT side, that's a big challenge as well. If you guys had gone to the Walder Solutions, which you probably did, you would have seen that we have a specific offering called IoT Tech Defense. We take this very seriously. We've baked this into our architecture right when are designing the starter solutions, and then we also stress test our solutions as those solutions grow. >> I can see the OT being very secure, end-to-end, enclosed, I should say first licensed spectrum with cellular, and then an end-to-end endpoint. Cool, I can lock that down. Here's the problem. A wifi device as a light bulb, it's got a computer in it, it's got multi-threaded processes, I mean computers are this big. That's going to require a policy on the network. It's an IP device. This is where the threat factor is. This is an area you guys can help. So this is more on the IT side, because that wifi light bulb in my house, which has processes, could be hacked, and actually spawn a lot of malware from there. So how do you take that dumb device, that wants to be a little bit smart, that's too smart right now with all this processing power? >> Too smart and - >> I mean it's a dumb device, all it needs to do is just flash lights, it's got to be on and off. You know what I'm saying? So when is that going to be throttled back? Can you guys help with the network layer? >> You know, we recognize the volatibility of some of these devices, and as David Goeckeler mentioned in his keynote today, security for us is a massive business, but it's also something we think about constantly. Like, going back to your example, what we can bring is the IT security depth that we have. Whether it's wifi, a wired connection, or a combination thereof. I think we've got the network chops and the security chops to secure those devices, and we're doing that. The important thing is we're doing that, baking it into our project strategy. >> I just want to get philosophical for a second with you, because it's a great conversation and IoT's certainly important. Let's kind of zoom out, kind of go in the clouds a little bit, no pun intended, and look down at the industry. Architecturally there's a debate, and we've said that the data center's going to get shrunk down so small that the edge device is going to be a data center some day. How do you see that? Because that changes the data equation, we all know the cost of moving data around the network. So ultimately you have to have a lot of compute at the edge. Your thoughts? How does that play out architecturally, how should customers grok that and think about it? Is it too early? >> So I've seen a shift happening in this as recently as the last twelve months. The emphasis on edge, I know it's very topical, it's been in the business press for a long time, but I think if you look at the ground reality, it is true. A lot of the data consumed by customers today is consumed very close to the point of generation. A classic industry that does this repeatedly is manufacturing. One of the studies indicated that almost 72% of the data generated on the shop floor in an IoT context is consumed in the shop floor. So a lot, a lot of this is going to the cloud. There's other industries, but a lot of data is going to the cloud. But the reality is the edge is getting more and more important. Compute, as you said, is going to the edge. This is trend we'll see, that will continue to happen. It's not going to lessen, it's probably going to deepen. And from Cisco's perspective, I think we're well-positioned to take advantage of this, and to serve our customers as this trend evolves. >> Awesome. Well, so much. Thanks so much for spending the time with The Cube. We really appreciate it. It's illuminating for the folks watching. What's your mission as you head up the division? What's your marching orders to the troops? Honestly, you've got to look at it and reign things in, double down where it's working, and evolve with this wave that's coming, that's here. You've got decentralized apps down, out in the road. You've got immutable block chain entries potentially. Crazy stuff happening. How do you look at this? How do you motivate the team? What's your marching orders? What are your top goals? >> So we've got three key objectives, right? Number one, we want to get to a billion connected devices. And Jasper is really helping drive that charge. We're at 60+ million, growing to a hundred million in this calendar year. We want to get to a billion, because once you get to that level of scale, you become the de facto standard in many ways. So that's number one. Number two, on the Kinetic side, we want it to be ubiquitous. We want to have Kinetic in all of those industries that I've mentioned, and then some. We want to own the use case. And number three, we want to make sure that we're leading with IoT and helping drive great growth for the company, 'cause that's Cisco's number one imperative. >> Awesome. Riaz, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Great conversation about IoT. Great thought leadership at the helm at IoT. A confusing but massively growing opportunity. It's a connected world, this is what we live in today, it's pervasive and software's going to be running it, and it's going to be secure. And of course The Cube's breaking it down for you here, we are secured in Barcelona with The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)