(techno music) >> Live from Mountain View California, it's the Cube covering DEVNET CREATE 2019, brought to you by CISCO. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin with John Furrier covering, day two covering I should say, CISCO DEVNET CREATE 2019, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. We're please to welcome Prashanth Shenoy, the VP of Product Marketing, Enterprise Networks and DEVNET at CISCO. Prashanth it's great to have you join John and me this afternoon. >> Great to be here. >> So, this event is growing year after year. John and I have been talking about this very strong sense of collaboration and community with the attendees that are here in person. One of the big things yesterday that Susie was talking about was this, What's coming in Wi-Fi? Talk to us about this next-gen Wi-Fi and how it's going to be so impactful to everyone. >> Yeah it's, it's a phenomenal technology inflection point this year, I feel. We can't believe it, but you know, when was the first Wi-Fi that got started? >> 2001. >> Pretty close, 1999. So this is the 20th Anniversary of Wi-Fi. It's come to be life, right? so it's now in its fourteenth. >> I'm off by two years. >> Right, so yeah, I know. (laughter) But, 802.11A was the first Wi-Fi technology, and the speeds were ... promised speeds were 54-megabits, okay? Ah, but the real speeds were, like, 6-mega or something, right? And now, this is the sixth generation of Wi-Fi, so we've come a long way and we take it for granted in our daily life. >> Absolutely, we do. >> I don't think I can think a day without having Wi-Fi. >> Everyone talks about Wi-Fi. The kids, What's the Wi-Fi password? (laughter) I change it all the time, kids, this ... parents, pro tip. Change the password. >> Yes. You got to listen. They'll call you, your kids will call you back. It's an important tip. >> Full-on security, yeah. >> But distance is been an issue, distance, and >> Yeah. >> Radio Frequency has certain >> Yeah propagation technique so, >> Yeah. >> Are you close to the router? That room doesn't have, this doesn't have it. So there's always been distance. And throughput. >> latency, throughput, capacity. >> Most people say who's streaming Netflix, Wi-Fi is down, so again people know this they experience it everyday. >> Exactly. >> What's the big hubbub about Wi-Fi 6? What's different? I got a little preview from Todd so I'll let you explain it but >> Yeah. >> What is the notable bullet points of why it's different? >> Yeah. >> And, Why it's a game changer? >> So it's, as with every technology, three things that it always brings up, better experiences, better capacity, increase capacity, and better battery savings, which I think is very important for users but more importantly useful for IOT applications, which is ... I'm very very excited on what its going to unleash when it comes to IOT. It's been in the fringe side of IOT, like oil and gas mining utilities is what we think when we think of IOT. And now we're going to think IOT in corporate space like this, right? Each one these devices are IOT devices now, like your HVAC systems, your lighting system, air conditioning systems, physical surveillance cameras. Everything with the Wi-Fi is IOT. And because of this increased capacity, an increase density, high density environment where this capacity becomes really critical, imagine 20 devices simultaneously using Wi-Fi to communicate high Bandwidth intensive application. That's when Wi-Fi 6 becomes really critical and powerful and that opens up a huge - >> So more coverage area. >> Yeah. >> With the Antenna. It's MIMO Antenna. >> Yeah. >> And Bandwidth, right? >> Capacity and Bandwidth, like compare to .11A, and even .11AX, right it's up to 4X better capacity, 4X better battery savings and the promised throughput of like six gigabits, right, so, But the key part here is simultaneously talking to multiple devices at the same time. And that is very very crucial because of technologies ... I don't want to geek out here, like OFDMA and all this etc. >> Well let's all ... architectural because one thing Susie brought up was, architectural shifts are going to be the big game, One of the game changes you brought up and you know Wi-Fi ... and I have seen it grow from the beginning, I remember when they first came out was a revelation and you know the battery power was an issue but it always was viewed as a peripheral to the network. >> Yeah. >> You bolt on Wi-Fi and just basically extend your land - >> Yeah. >> To use network parlance and now you're seeing people working on making it much more Core 1 Network. >> Absolutely. And Meraki kind of shows the benefit of having wireless and wired - >> Yeah. work together as one. >> Yeah, absolutely >> This seems to be the thesis behind Wi-Fi six. One core thing. >> Yeah. >> Not a bolt-on extension. >> No, absolutely. I think there's a saying which is the reality, behind every wireless there are tons of wires, right. So, 'cause everything that's connected to the wire infrastructure, and with the Wi-Fi 6 now having increased capacity and increased density, it's causing a cascading effect into the rest of the network infrastructure so it becomes highly, highly crucial when you architect your network infrastructure not just to think about wireless but what happens to the access switch, to the core, to the distribution, to the aggregation. And that has a compounding effect, like multi gig speeds in the access to 10 gig to 40 gig in the core going all the way to 100 gig, right, so, the whole performance and reliability to have that immersive experience that Wi-Fi six needs to bring in, needs to be there. >> so for developers and entrepreneurs out there who always look for the white space, CISCO is a big Multi-Billion dollar company. You guys got big market share, whenever there's big moves like this it causes a new change in the order, the pecking order - >> Yeah >> of companies, it changes the landscape. This is going to be a game changer because it's going to create the new opportunities to create new things. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What are some of the things that you see out there you could share for people watching who are you know hacking around creating things who say, I want to create something big. What's the enablement? What are some of the things that you see happening that are going to be emerging out of this? >> Yeah, a lot of Fringe technologies that are fringe right now are going to be mainstream, like imagine 2006, When iPhone came in, right so and we were just having the discussion, like, that came in at the heels of major shift in connectivity, that's when 3G came in, right, at that point and multi-megabit capacity, and you saw new applications come in. Now Uber, Lyft, all these kind of applications were possible because of the connectivity. And now, Wi-Fi 6 along with 5G will unleash the next wave of applications. So, first thing is immersive applications, things that are VR, AR, it's used for gaming right now, and kids use this, you're going to see that come in hospitals, where surgeons can do remote surgeries, they can have high-density imagery of your brain, for example, as you're operating, being sent to a remote expert and on the fly, make decisions, right? Like, that is going to be pretty normal and standard, in fact, quite a few of our customers are testing this out, right? VR learning, for students, like, if I were to go ... Like, imagine if you are at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, August 1963, right, listening to MLK "I Have A Dream" speech, and you're in the crowd, immersed in the VR, like, which student wouldn't have more recollection and really connect with that, right? >> I'm sorry, wait - >> You're going to see more and more of these, so it's a better way of learning, and really getting that learning sticking in your brain, you're going to see more of that happening. And the same goes with retail experience, you're shopping, it's going to completely change the way, because of all these immersive experiences. And then, because of the higher density, you're going to see entertainment venues like stadiums where everybody now wants to share their experience to the outside world, and livestream it, right? And I was talking to Carnival Cruise Line, who's one of our customers, and they call themselves City On The Sea, which means, a cruise ship is nothing but it has entertainment, casinos, hotels - >> Lots of food. (laughs) >> Lots of food, swimming pools Concerts happening, and when people took vacation they just wanted to disconnect from everything in the world, right? Now, it's completely reversed. They want to connect full-on, and share their experience in the land, right? And they want to stream it live, 4K. And, these cruise ships are transforming themselves to provide this always-on, fully-on immersive digital experience, and they're creating things like a mobile app to order pizza no matter where you are on the ship. Within five minutes they're going to find the exact location of where you are on the ship and deliver pizza to you, right? These kind of experiences will happen! >> And you know, the perfect storm in all this too, is that the Cloud earnings are coming out, we saw Microsoft's earnings yesterday, Amazon Web Series' earning >> Yeah. do proud of Amazon today, the Cloud stocks are up, the Clouds are growing at a massive scale, they're a power source for these application developers. >> Yeah. >> As well as the on-premise business. So you have, you now have the perfect developer environment - >> A hundred percent. >> To create these new wacky ideas that will be standard. I mean, what was once ... what we take as standard as you mentioned, was a wacky idea in 2006. >> Yeah. >> Location services, checking into a hotel with my phone and having - >> Yeah. >> Cars being delivered to me, what? Who does that? >> And this, this becomes a reality, and Cloud really increased the pace of innovation, right? Now it's kind of cheaper, you don't need to get your own server, you can kind of swipe your credit card, get a bunch of VM, start building applications, and now you have the required bandwidth capacity and density in your infrastructure, and you have the right devices right now to bring that experiences to you, right? So, now it's this trifecta of things, awesome devices, the network ready to deliver those experiences, and Cloud being able to scale out to build those experiences. >> Prashanth, I know you've got a big announcement coming up on the 29th, it's a virtual event, I think Cisco.com, they can probably find out with the URL where the event is, without revealing all the secret sauce, I know you guys had Wi-Fi 6 inside Cisco, >> Yeah. >> testing it out, I heard people in the hallway here, >> Yeah. >> Talking about it, um, and they're pretty animated in their commentary. Can you share the vibe and what's it like when the engineers look at the data, when they say, we just deployed the Wi-Fi 6, what was the reactions, um - >> Yeah. >> Were they blown away, was it mediocre, was it - >> Yeah. >> What were some of the things that they were saying, what was the feedback? >> We were piloting that, and the best way to look at it is, if you go to the wireless dev center on DevNet, you're going to see that we compared a 4K video running with Wi-Fi 6 and without Wi-Fi 6. I think the results speak for themselves. Like, the kind of experience that you're going to see, it's going to be beautiful, and when employees look at those things, and I talked about a few experiences, last week we had a thing called Cisco Beat which is internal employees that we rally around and talk about technology, but more importantly, what it means to us as human beings in a personal way, and what it means to our customers, and they were blown away with some of the applications that are going to be mainstream in all of the industries that I talked about, right? Like Healthcare, hospitality, education, entertainment venues, et cetera. >> What's the low-hanging fruit use cases? What's the things that are going to be right obvious, right out of the gate for companies to implement, in terms of deploying Wi-Fi 6 and seeing immediate benefits? >> Immediate benefits is high-density environment, period. Like student lecture halls, convention centers, areas like this, where everybody wants, like, understand what's going on, but be digitally and visually connected, right? It's not only about email checking anymore, That happens automatically. But if you're here and you want to watch Susie's keynote livestream right now, with high density, and 20 other people want to watch with you, on their devices, it's possible, without a hitch. So that seamless, always-on experience becomes a reality that people can easily test out in small environments, right? Not in their entire environment, where there are high-density of people, accessing multi-media applications or high-bandwidth applications, so I feel that's a low-hanging fruit. And then it's going to go more and more towards IOT applications where sensors are getting connected, like some of our customers are brewers, have hundreds and thousands of sensors in their farms, in brewing machines, and they want all of their data to come and look at that simultaneously for quality control, right? Beer, no matter where it's made, should taste consistent, right? So you can see that coming to life, because now all of these can be connected, and because of better density and better capacity and better battery savings for these IOT devices that Wi-Fi 6 provides, you make these applications possible. So you're going to see very vertical-specific applications coming more and more with Wi-Fi 6. >> Vertical-specific, because you mentioned a number of different customer examples, you know, ranging from retailer, to - >> Yeah. >> Carnival Cruise Line, it's now this connected city - >> Yeah. >> Are there any verticals you see where, when you're talking with customers they're not quite there yet? >> Yeah, that's an interesting thing, it's ... for a change, you always have these early adopters but there is a lot of laggers who are just watching, waiting on the sidelines saying, mm, that's not for me. With Wi-Fi 6, there's been a lot of industry excitement, I would say, like manufacturing full-on, right, just coming on board. Retail, higher education, are always in the early-adopter phase, because for them, and there has been studies shown to say this directly impacts their brand - >> Yes. >> like customer experience defines brand. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And Wi-Fi, equals customer experience these days, right? So, you're going to see all of these industries really, I think I haven't seen much in maybe financial services, if you will, I think that's the only thing that I can remember, transportation, big on, like, machine to machine communication, autonomous driving is possible now because of 5G and Wi-Fi 6, right? So, and you are seeing more and more of this industry - >> This is right in your wheelhouse, and you guys have been pushing the edge for a long time, SD Wind, campus networking This is not new to Cisco. >> Yeah. >> But now with Wi-Fi 6, it literally lights that up. >> Yeah. Yup. >> Pun intended. >> I mean, you can now enable those environments to be completely robust, fully addressable, data-driven - >> Yeah. I think data that you mentioned becomes very, very crucial in this, because, especially now when you have so many more users, so many more devices, so many more applications getting on the network, people are really trying to figure out, what do I do with this? How do I get visibility into ... am I delivering the right experience? Am I providing the right security, et cetera, right? So, data becomes extremely crucial, and you'll see emergence of ML and AI technology because it's going to be humanly impossible to look at all of the data and make sense. So you've got to do machines, do their job, figure out patterns, air on dwell time, foot traffic, predictive ways of saying things may break, the experience may change, and predicting that even before they happen, and giving the right insight to the IT in the line of business, so Wi-Fi 6 is going to open up a whole new slew of ML and AI-driven operations and management capability too, so that's pretty exciting. >> When are they going to pull up a GPU on the Wi-Fi 6 devices? >> (laughs) Oh, it's happening. >> It's ready? >> It is going to happen, because you can run Edge computing applications right on Wi-Fi 6 devices, so you're going to see all of that, so, application hosting capabilities with GPU powered applications are going to be there. >> Just a network connection, right? >> Yeah. So you are going to see that, and frankly even I don't know what some of the Edge computing applications with Wi-Fi 6 will be, but we are seeing more and more of these coming ... DevNet buying tech, yeah. >> Well we did some research, we keep on a part of our SiliconANGLES team, where we prove that it's easier and more cost-effective, rather than moving data around, you move compute to the Edge - >> Edge. >> And then you use the backhaul, 'cause it costs money to send data around the network. It's costly. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and the autonomous cars was one great example, right? Like, it's a life-and-death situation when you are letting the car drive itself, right? So, you can't send all the data to the Cloud and say, analyze it for me. There are instantaneous decisions to be made, in milli-micro- nanoseconds, that need to be done on the Edge. So I think autonomous cars are a great example of Edge computing that needs to happen right on the Edge. The learning can then start happening in the Cloud, right? As in when these things get more and more smarter, you send all this data, you correlate all the intelligence there, you send it back to the machines. So you're going to see these kind of Edge computing applications. >> So you're excited by Wi-Fi 6? >> Nah. >> (laughter) >> Wi-Fi 6, so that's an even number, is that to be odd numbers, or lucky, I mean, the naming convention? >> No! >> Is there a - >> We want to be better than 5G. (laughter) So 5G is fifth generation of cellular, >> Okay. >> Wi-Fi 6 is sixth generation of Wi-Fi, right? I mean it's - >> So you're going to trump the 5G with the 6, >> Yeah. >> Kind of get ahead of it. >> Because it is truly the sixth generation of Wi-Fi. >> Okay, that's what it is. >> If we were to go back in time we would call 802.11ac, Wi-Fi 5. Right? It's kind of not that easy to say, but yeah, so Wi-Fi 5 happened like three or four years back, and now it's Wi-Fi sixth gen, so. >> We'll have to do a deep dive in the studio sometime, >> Oh, absolutely. >> on getting into all the spectrum issues, you know, the channels - >> Yeah. >> And the antennas and chains and all that good stuff. >> Yeah. There's a lot to geek out on that. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's going to be fun. >> So you talked about, kind of before we wrap up here, you talked about, you know, everything really kind of being related to, or how this can help companies with brand, and brand is everything to any type of company - >> Yeah. >> We talk at every event we go to about how it's all about customer experience. >> Yeah. >> So my last question for you is, how is Wi-Fi 6 and some of these new technologies that clearly you're excited about, how do you think that's going to change the experience for your internal customers, and from being able to get things out faster, to your external Cisco customers? >> Yeah, when you say internal, our own employees - >> Yes. >> Our R and D? >> Yes, exactly. >> Absolutely. So I think, and one of the examples was shown right here, right, so, and I'm connecting the two answers that you had, like, there's a lot of technology details behind what we do, right, we spend tons of money doing R and D, but we wanted to expose that to our own customers, to our channel partners, and to our developers, right? So, this is something that Wi-Fi 6 brings a lot to our customers. So, all the goodness, the intelligence that we have hidden in our network, now gets exposed, through these APIs, to our developers, and to our own customers. So the internal customers of ours, which are engineers, Cisco IT, are tremendously excited to see what that unveils to us, right? And DevNet provides that platform where you can expose this through APIs, whether it's for security, whether it's for application experience, whether it's for better operations, and have new co-creation of applications that we haven't envisioned, new ways of ecosystem partners coming up and building new applications that we haven't envisioned. So, for our own R and D teams, it's pretty exciting. Because - >> Big catalyst. >> Yeah, just, exactly. You're just providing the platform, it's the catalyst for innovations, and that's what the internet was when we created that, right? We didn't know the internet of 20 years back is going to be the internet of today, and we didn't envision that, but here we are. >> Well the ETI's going to open up your market, because you're going to create an enablement to pass that forward, the opportunities to other developers to come up with the ideas. >> Yeah, absolutely. And that's the whole idea, is to provide them a platform to come up with innovations and ideas, and help share these ideas to other folks, right, because when the minds meld, it gets better and better. >> Build some good apps, make ... get it distributed on Wi-Fi 6, make some money, build a business, create a great app - >> Runs on your feet. It's step by step. >> It's a big inflection point. >> That's a pretty good motto. >> It's an inflection point. >> It is. It is truly, I believe, an inflection point. Mainly because, frankly, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G coming together, truly, because me and you as a user really don't care whether I'm on Wi-Fi or cellular, and we shouldn't, right, all I expect is no matter what I do, where I go, and I use my device, I should get the same consistent seamless experience. >> It works. >> Well I don't have the unlimited plan, so I'd love to have it - >> You would with that. on the Wi-Fi. (laughter) >> So you've got this virtual event next week on the 29th - >> Yeah. >> Is that going to tee up anything, any exciting things we're going to hear at Cisco Live a few weeks later? >> Oh yeah. Big time. Big time. (laughs) >> Any teasers you can give us? >> Without getting fired? Yeah, it's going to be tough. (laughter) No, yeah, I think things that we talked today are what we're going to explain more, and we're going to give more flavor on what Cisco's actually is actually doing from our products perspective, solutions, partnership perspective, to bring it to life, right? So, that's really exciting, so I highly encourage the folks that are watching this to register for this on Cisco.com Go Wired For Wireless event, so it's fun, because we've got a lot of industry experts, customers because that's where rubber meets the road - >> Absolutely. >> And that's where the top good applications, how far along they are, what are they testing, what are they trying out, and then we can geek out on all the technology, right? But it always starts with why, and why does it matter. So ... and that's why I'm excited, yeah. >> It sounds exciting. My cheeks are hurting from smiling. Prashanth, thank you so much ... right? ... for sharing your enthusiasm, your energy and expertise, it's been fun. We look forward to, uh, the virtual event next week, and hearing more about what's going on at Cisco Live. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks John. >> Well, our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube live from day two of our coverage, of Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching. (techno music)