our mission is to help every company in the world find its relevance and really every person in the world certainly every person in our industry find their relevance people are searching for how to become relevant in this very hyper connected changing time first today one at all right they need to maintain investments extend investments that they have in traditional systems but they want to take advantage of these new really cool technologies like micro services like sort of data hub you know data aggregation and they don't want somebody knocking on their door and saying hey I'll sell you anything as long as you want to buy this I think the key thing is everyone's got to realize that whether you're in a private cloud hybrid cloud or public cloud configuration storage is that rock solid foundation you don't have a good foundation the building will fall right over and it's great you've got cloud with its flexibility its ability to transform the ability to modernize move data around but if what's underneath doesn't work the whole thing topples over and storage is equivalent you [Music]

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage, here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is a wrap-up of the show. This is day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. And, I got to say, I'm surprised at how it's evolved, and the clarity of what's happening is coming into focus. We had a great kickoff, I thought, on day one. I thought we laid it out and kind of predicted and connected the dots on what was going to happen. But some kind of new white spaces were filled in. I want to get your thoughts on it. One, DevNet's success with the number of developers. Clearly a number success. But what's really interesting, after watching all the activity here at DevNet, talking to people in the hallways, is that DevNet is changing the face of Cisco. Because Cisco has an energy and an openness now, that's bringing the momentum and success and proven success of open store software to the networking layer, engaging and energizing the core base of the Cisco constituent, which is the customers, the network engineer, and allowing a path to cloud-native, a path to multi-cloud, and a path to innovation. I mean this is the story, in my opinion, at this event. There are some announcements, certainly, that tie into it, but the notion of what DevNet and DevNet Create are proving, besides being good execution by Susie Wee and the team, is that this is a tell sign that the programmable network is at a seminal moment where, like the iPhone was in 2007, that changed telephony, and created apps, the network is now programmable. New things are going to happen. This is, to me, the biggest story here at DevNet. >> Yeah, and John, in case somebody just listened to our wrap and hadn't heard the three days of coverage here, that number is 500,000. It was up, Chuck Robbins announced it on stage on day one here on Monday. 500,000 developers registered. By the way, Susie said we'd actually, we kept having to scrub the list and bring it down, so we had 300,000, it went down a little bit. She's like, "Are we still growing?" Now the momentum continues, so they're growing. But, you're right John, we've done two of these Cisco Lives. You and I did the Barcelona show and we did this show. And what's been crystallizing, what I learn and, in processing here that actually excites me, is I'm a networking guy, and so many waves that these technologies, remember it was like, "Oh ethernet fabrics are going to change everything", "SDN will totally revolutionize everything." I kind of looked and things and I was like, "You know, we're fixing networking problems, and how do I tie that to the business. Oh, I need to be more agile and I need to move faster." The punchline to what does it matter, this intent-based networking, which it's kind of a wonky term, but really we're building new applications, where the network is how we do that. It's built for microservices, it's this modern environment. And I have to have this DevNet ecosystem to enable it. Because it can't just be I manage my switch and I'm going and okay, I download software and I do some things over here. This is the career path for all of the people that, you know, the 25 years of CCIEs that we had, we've had this huge line next to us here, of everybody's getting their badges and they've got their area where they've got a little bit of special treatment of those CCIEs; there's an army of them and that's been Cisco's strength and can they take that army and get them ready for the new guerrilla warfare that is this modern application building and John, you know, how many times do people say, you know networking, they're just a bunch of plumbers, sitting down in there, wiring closet, they'll be left behind. >> Yeah, and this is the false narrative and that's absolutely the case. There definitely was a lull there. If you look at Cisco and what's going on in the networking world, we've talked. This is our ninth year with theCUBE, so you and I have pontificated and riffed many times about "the network's a bottleneck", and it's always the network, everything comes down to the network, which is why the network guys have always been the most powerful in companies. But here's what's happening here, the gestation period of SDN is an interesting dynamic. So here's what I think no one's yet reported. I think this is the real story. The SDN has been incubating and gestating now for what, four years, give or take, roughly? So SDN's embedded in at the network layer, the network's getting smarter. Then you've got the cloud scale happening, and you've got security issues in cyber, you've got cloud scale in the public cloud accelerating, the valuation of things, this costs this per minute. So, creating the economic kind of disruption. Then you have the Kubernetes on the scene, taking docker containers, making it a global container, it's not just docker, all containers generically as a key vehicle for wrapping around legacy. And it was Kubernetes, and now with Service Mesh on the horizon, there is a clear, visible path to the value creation. Combine that with the continuing explosion of open-source. Open-source has proven that the way to run things in the open is exactly how DevNet's doing it. So, all these things are elements that have just come together at a perfect time, and Cisco is taking advantage of it. And we were critical of Cisco at Barcelona by saying, they'd be crazy not to double down on this. I would quadruple down on it, it's proven. Not, "we own the network, you got to go through us", Blockchain, I sat in the blockchain session today. The central authority model in communities is flattening, this is the new normal. I think Cisco has lightning in a bottle here. Let's see what they do with it, Stu. I don't know what your reaction to that is, but they have an opportunity to make the network programmable, energize their base, it's just really exciting, I got to say. If I worked at Cisco, I would be all over the DevNet, the DevNet Create, get in the cloud scale, and ride that wave. >> Look, John, Cisco has been dominant in networking so long, that there's been so many waves hitting against it, said we were going to overtake Cisco. Open networking is one of those big waves. I've been to many conferences, I know a lot of the companies we've interviewed on theCUBE, many of the companies that are going to go take a chunk out of the monolith that was Cisco. Well, Cisco, you know, they're not deaf, they're listening-- >> They're disrupting themselves. >> They are disrupting themselves, and especially, you know, the line I heard for years was, you know, Cisco was the standard, it's like, oh, well, you know, they're dominating at the standards bodies and trying to push their way through. Well, they've got the customers. And they've got an ecosystem, and while they've invested in open source over the years, and we've talked to many of them, this DevNet activity has really pushed along, and is impressive. Doesn't mean that there aren't some pockets where other people are more advanced with the technology, you know, you can always have the debates as to who is more open than the others, which, you know, you and I have gone down many times, but it is impressive to see how Cisco is changing, what's here, the excitement has been palpable. And it's not just, you know, it's an infrastructure show, it's a networking show, when you and I interviewed Rowan Trollope at the Barcelona show, it's Cisco of the future is a software company, and they are making progress. If you give a little bit of a nudge as to, you know, what they didn't have, it's like, there weren't a ton of announcements, but the ones that they were, they were talking about the progress they've made, the DNA center-- >> Look, if you want to look for critiquing, I mean, you can look anywhere in anyone's life and find faults. There's plenty of things that Cisco's not advanced on, but time is on their side. They don't have to have big-doubt Istio version running on switches, that's coming down the road. They can work with Kubernetes, we saw some great demos in here. So I think time is a good friend for them right now, but they're doing all the right things, so again, it's an opportunity. The other thing I've noticed with the DevNet and the DevNet Create and all of our CUBE coverage, Stu, you know, I've been looking at theCUBE data, the SiliconANGLE, Wikibon data, and a new kind of persona personality is emerging, in, at least in our audience, that kind of is a tell sign to innovation. One, developers are kind of forming two lines of developers. Developers-- well, there's three. Classic developers, who just geek out and program. But two new personas. Business-oriented developers, who are being pulled to the front lines, who are dealing with issues like Capex, Opex, digital transformation. And we're seeing that, people who don't want to get an MBA, but they want to learn business. The other new category that I see developing here at DevNet is the entrepreneurial developer. This is the developer that has all the same attributes that someone starting a company would have. They're resourceful, they're looking at connecting the dots outside the box, they're using their creativity to identify using software to solve problems in the network. So, this is kind of interesting, because those are the ones that are going to jump on the grenades, take the chances, and they're inside the company. So this is going to be a wealth creation opportunity for the networking, because the networking is, right now, been waiting for the network to be scalable and programmable, we've been saying it for how many years. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, boy, John, you know, we lived through, I've said it many times on theCUBE. The decade of making networking work properly in a virtualized environment was kind of painful. When we look at containerization, what's happening to the cloud data space, I think networking understands the networking ecosystem, and especially Cisco, knows what they went through before, and they are attacking the space, and going at it hard to try and make sure that they, you know, get on this next wave, win some mine share, and you know, don't lose these customers. Because, John, something we've said many times is, right now, is probably the ripest time for customers to say, "You know, I've trusted and used this company for a really long time, but it's okay for me to try new things." And therefore, Cisco with its massive-- >> They got to try new things. >> Could be disrupted, if they don't try really hard. >> The customers have to try new things, Stu, that's definitely the case. Okay, let's get into some of the landscape issues. We saw a lot of startups come on, growing startups, so the question is will they be the M&A in the future of Cisco? But we had IBM on, we had NetApp on, Avi Networks, a lot of companies. We also saw Cohesity score a huge round of funding, 250 million dollars. We haven't seen a lot of venture-backed activity, here at the show, we've seen a lot of VC announcements, but you know, the big round for Cohesity crystallizes the competitive landscape. Your thoughts, you got the big players like IBM doing great with storage, Cloudify, NetApp with FlexPod, doing very well with the cloud. I mean, is the tide rising, where everyone's floating, and this is a lot of the competitive? And if so, is the scale attainable for the startups, or will they have to bought by the big players? Your thoughts. >> Well, John, to go back, we were just talking about DevNet, I actually feel like Cisco's pulling some of their ecosystem along. The storage-networking interactions isn't the most exciting thing in the world, and I spent ten years living in these environments. I mean, you know, storage-networking doesn't exactly get most people excited, but it is one of the fundamental things, it needs to make your environment work. Every time you did a bank transaction, or you know, bought a plane ticket, probably that was your storage and the networking underlied that, making that work. >> So what's your point, the ecosystem is going to grow, or? >> The ecosystem is following Cisco's lead, and getting involved in developer and cloud-native activity. So we're not just talking about boxes anymore. That wave towards software. NetApp, really nice story, as to how they fit into the multi-cloud environment. You know, they kind of rode down on the box trend, and as they really focused back on their core, which has always been software, they're making some strong moves there. You mentioned two of the vendors we had on, Cohesity and Avi Networks, both of them, part of their funding is from Cisco. So, you know, Cisco investing in some of the hot areas, you know, Cohesity, data protection-- >> Don't forget LiveAction was bought last Friday, their aperture in the market goes up, so we're seeing the partner network, really interesting dynamic. We're growing, we're going to see more people come in, what's your vision on this? >> No, the ecosystem's very dynamic. So, really good show floor here, you can feel the energy when you walk through this place and you go see what's happening. Big ecosystem, it showed. By the way, we didn't say it on the intro, but the number I heard was 26,000, which, this is a good size show. Bigger than a VN World, smaller than an AWS reinvent. But you know, really, much more, it's not-- >> It was my first time, it was my first show, at Cisco Live in North America. I got to say, I wasn't expecting the show floor to be that good. I mean, I was like, okay, Cisco, we have the vendors out there, partners, you know, a lot of people, you know, typical enterprise show. I was blown away, blown away by the energy of the future of creating value. I mean, the stories, it wasn't just people mailing it in. These real, compelling use cases of cloud scale. Not just selling boxes, Stu. >> Yeah, and John, you know, talk about community. You know, you and I both have a lot of networking DNA in our backgrounds. I love this community, it's people that, they love to collaborate, they love to share, they love to dig in. Lots of bloggers, there was a big podcasting going on. We brought some of those people on the program, and I loved, some of them are working for cool new startups. They're doing coding, they're doing developer activity. A section of this felt a lot like a KubeCon, or even, you know, some of the AWS and Google kind of mojo that we see at the cloud show. Which, I enjoyed Barcelona, but that was my critique, they're not as in that multi-cloud world. They were talking about it, but they're kind of stuck in this transition. It's not like they're fully there. Cisco still sells a lot of kit, and everybody makes money too. But we know this transition's going to take a long time. >> Chuck Robbins said at the keynote, that there'd be no cloud without networking. Networking and cloud people have a symbiotic relationship because networking people are inherently smart. You may argue, someone sitting at a desk, you know, doing networks, some of them have different personas inside that, but most of them are pretty smart, right. Networking people aren't dumbasses, generally speaking. The cloud people are innovating on the app side with the scale piece, also smart people, so when you get networking people with cloud, I just see a nice fit there, and I think, Kubernetes, and the Istio, and the service mesh, I think that's where it connects, because if you're a networking guy, using Ansible, using Python, you're going to naturally gravitate towards Kubernetes. It's the same concept. So, I'm watching that very closely, I think you and I have been talking about this at Linux Foundation, that's going to be the tell sign. If the network engineers can adopt the Kubernetes concept, and take the service mesh to the next level, that, to me, is going to be a tell sign. >> Yeah, and John, you know, we go to a lot of shows, we've got some really smart people who came on the program, we're a bit of intellectual snobs sometimes, and when we come on this program-- >> Speak for yourself, Stu. (laughs) >> No, I mean we love to talk to smart people. As I always say, John, if I'm the smartest person in the room, I'm in the wrong room. And I'm really excited, most of the time we're on theCUBE, we bring some really smart and interesting people on. >> Alright, let's wrap this up. Obviously the big story is DevNet. I think the community approach is great. Christine Heckart came on, she's the new senior executive, just started at Cisco. When we were at Barcelona, we saw her there. She saw DevNet, kind of a fresh eyes in Cisco, what impressed me about my observing her, on theCUBE and then watching her walk around was, she's fresh eyes. She's been in the industry, her eyes were lighting up. She sees DevNet, she understands. She came on and talked about network effects. Stu, our business is community-driven, theCUBE is very community-oriented with the content, we have network effects in our business. And I think she hit on something that I think is the next conversation point, is, the network effects is a technical and business dynamic and I think she's got her hands on a very successful narrative around where the value will go, and then when the engineering and the business come together to create value. I think DevNet has done the right thing with the open-source model, being welcoming, not elite. And I think that is worth noting. >> Yeah, and a lot of hard work went into reaching where we are with DevNet today. I love, we dug in with Susie, with Mandy. One of the interviews I did, John Apostolopoulos. You know, he's one of the ones in the labs inside of Cisco. So, it took, he walked me through, John, you know, the basically five years that led to this new DNA solution that we had. We of course had some great VIPs on the program, like Lynn Lucas, the CMO of Cohesity, Lee Howard, and of course, Zoginsash himself, Eric Herzog, who, both of those gentlemen, when you walked around this show, they are everywhere. They're plastered on the screen before the keynote, they're walking around and talking to them, so we love, as part of our community, to get to talk to those as well as, you know, all different aspects in our about 30 interviews we did this week. >> Well, we're looking forward to more coverage, Stu, I want to thank you for great coverage, thank the guys here, we're going to be going and covering Cisco like a blanket, we're going to hit all their events, Cisco Lives in Barcelona and the US. We'll continue, got a great thing going on here with the DevNet and the DevNet Create events, look for those. Check out thecube.net for theCUBE schedule. But I also want to put a shout-out for the sponsors, if it wasn't for sponsors, we wouldn't be able to bring the great crew here. Want to thank NetApp as the headline sponsor. NetApp's FlexPod, great stuff, check it out, those guys got a new mojo going on with cloud, and on premise really creating a software model. And also, Cisco, IBM, LiveAction, and Avi Networks. Thanks so much for that community support, that sends a signal that you're investing in the codevelopment of content, it's great stuff. >> And John, yeah, actually, Cohesity and Presidio helping round that up, John. One of the highlights of the show had to be the Ludacris party. >> Yep, Cohesity's new funding, great concert. >> 250 million dollars, it's a ludicrous round. >> (laughs) Stu Miniman with his own meme. Thanks for watching, we are here at Cisco Live, that's a wrap-up for the show here on day three, I'm John here with Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(techno music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partner. >> Okay, welcome back everyone it's theCUBE live here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018 I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost Stu Miniman. So our third day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, the big story here is the transformation, the power of the network, it's becoming computable, it's a great, great story. Our next guest is Guru Chahal, who is the Vice President of Product, AVI Networks. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you, John. Thanks for having me John and Stuart. It's a pleasure being here again. >> So we just talking before the camera came on about STO cause Stu wants to go there right away, but we've got to hold off on that, but service meshes is certainly going to be a great thing with Kubernetes and containers but the story here is the changing nature and power of the network. Suzzy, who you came on with DevNet, was talking about the success of DevNet has been a combination of great timing, of open-source, hitting the network but making the network programmable, opening up new innovations. This is a really big thing, I want to get your reaction to this because Europe tied into this trend big time. What does that mean for people that are watching this? They're trying to grok the new way. What is this intent-based network? What's this programmable network? Is it the iPhone, kind of moment where for networks, where new apps are coming that we've never seen before? Or is it something different? What's your take? >> That's such a great example John, so just a fundamental transformation that iPhone had on how we think about telephony in general, we're at that sort of moment in the network. And the reason for that, frankly, is how we deploy applications, how we design applications, and where we deploy applications has fundamentally changed. You know 20 years ago, you had one choice to deploy an application and it was that server, right over there, in your data center. And today you can do it as a container, or bare-metal server, a virtual machine, on-prem or one of hundreds of data centers, public cloud data centers all over the world. And then architecturally, everything is moving from these monoliths to microservices, or much more tiny and more manageable components, and what that does to the network is fundamentally different from what's been going on in the network for the past couple of decades. It elevates the position of the network from just connectivity, to something that is fundamental to how these services talk to each other unlike 100 things that live inside a box and talk to each other, now you have 100 things on the network talking to each other. So think about what that does to you from a availability strategy perspective, from a security strategy perspective, from a surface area of security, from a monitoring perspective, I mean the reason why you see, I mean walk the show floor here, so much innovation in the network and the reason for that is instead of an enterprise running 1000 applications, within the next few years each enterprise is going to be running 100,000 applications and their budget is not going up 100 times so you need innovation, you need automation and that's where the intent-based movement comes in. >> So new opportunities are going to be created, new wealth creation, more innovation. What are you guys doing? Take a minute to explain why you guys are here with your company? What are you contributing, what's your role in the ecosystem, what's your product differentiations? What's the story? >> Yeah, great, so we play in the application services space. If you think about the network traditionally people have thought about it as connectivity, which is layer two, layer three, and then network services are the services that the network offers to an application, that's load balancing, it's application security, SSL offload, it's web application firewall and so on. So services that are tied to the application that's basically what our company is about. So we have a fabric-based platform, software only, the fabric can be instantiated on bare-metal appliances, or containers, or virtual machines, all centrally managed, and it's intent-based which means it's policy-driven. So you go to a single place you say, "please I need load balancing capabilities "for this application, I need SSL "and I need to turn on my web application firewall." And no matter where the application is, in Azure, in AWS or on-prem, or a mainframe, the fabric is able to instantiate that service automatically infront without the operator having to worry about where is it, what do I need to do, do I have enough capacity, none of that. >> Guru, in Chuck Robbins' keynote on Monday you talked about kind of the old way, this kind of bespoke, it was silos, it was like, well, oh, you know we have the wiring guys over here doing the physical layer two, layer three, four through seven is over there. Today it's software, up and down the stack, you know, changes a lot, maybe talk a little bit about that dynamic as to how applications, you know intent-based networking really is having, the application doesn't just use, but it's heavily involved with the network. >> So here's the single biggest thing that's driving this change, applications used to be secondary for IT in some sense, certainly infrastructure teams, and infrastructure was primal. And I had my ADCs and load balancers here and my routers and my switches and so on, and this is my infrastructure, now let's figure out how to fit the application on my infrastructure. And that world is gone. That's the old way. You can't hug your load balancers anymore that's (laughs) if you do that today, those days are, if not gone, they're almost nearing an end. And increasingly the infrastructure is going to live for applications. The center world is my need as a business to role out an application quickly, to understand how people are interacting with that application, to make changes to it in real time, and all of infrastructure is now wrapping itself around that notion. So intent-based networking, in our case, intent-based application services is all about how can I, in an automated way, quickly deploy load balancing, application security for applications, no matter where they are, how can I monitor the applications in real time. That's really what the movement is about. >> Well, that's a great point. I'd like to just add and get your thoughts on this, and react to another concept, to add to that is that you've got all that happening, okay, that's because of the cloud and great new tech but then you factor in that the programming models are changing too, so the perfect storm is everything that you've said, but now the expectation of the developer-- >> API. >> With open source-- >> Everything is in API. >> Has to be programmable and it's like the classic, let infrastructure take care of it's business but no one's got to do all this manual work. This is a huge dynamic and I think the DevNet story this year at Cisco Live really puts an exclamation point on the fact that this has got traction. We kind of know, we see open-source but from the networking world it's a whole new, essentially greenfield opportunity. You agree with that? >> Totally, I mean you know there's in most of our largest customers, and by the way we didn't talk about our solar business side, but just to give you a quick flavor for what our customer base looks like we primarily sell to Global 2000, three of the top five banks in the US are our customers, two of the top five banks in ME are our customers, 20% of the Fortune 50 are our customers, we've replaced traditional load balancing solutions and so on. And the primary reason, the number one reason is automation. And by automation, everybody talks about automation, but by automation what our customers mean is infrastructure as API. Simple things. I want to capture all the packets going to that application and I want to do that with a single REST API, I want to talk to an IP endpoint and say here's the REST API, give me all the traffic. Can you do that in your network today? Our customers can. >> What's the alternative, if they don't use APIs? >> Oh yeah, so you've got two choices, one you walk into your data center, turn on the SPAN port take all that traffic, take it to some sort of a monitoring fabric blah, blah, blah, three days later if you're lucky you get traffic. Second approach, call AWS tell them to turn on the SPAN port, and good luck with that. (laughs) So, you know increasingly you frankly don't have much of a choice, you need infrastructure to be-- >> Scale is also a tsunami of data coming in so one time is a massive problem, that's never going to happen, so people are going to give up-- >> Number of events, number of alerts, you know it's speed. Talk about the top three trends that are going on in our customer base, speed, speed, and speed. >> Okay, you've got some great clients. Why are they going with you, and how does someone engage with you guys? What do they do? Do they just call you up and say bring in some software, do I get a box, is it software, how do I configure it, how do they onboard? How do you guys engage with your customers? >> Right, so why do they buy us? Three quick reasons, one amazing automation fabric-approach central management. Two, amazing analytics to your point about great events, we want to help our customers address this deluge of events and things that are happening in the data center and provide great insight, so that's all built in to the product. And three, much more cost effective. I mean these traditional solutions, believe it or not, that have been around for 20 years, they're not just traditional, as in legacy, they're also extremely expensive. Our competitors sell load balancers at 84% gross margins. You know how many of my customers run their businesses at 84% gross margins? Zero. So how can you afford that, right? So those are three big reasons why they buy. How they get engaged with us is they typically have a public cloud project, they'll say alright, like Adobe, "they'll say alright, we need to go to Azure, "move the applications right away." Well that's easy for the CIO to say, in practice, that's a beast, right. So they need to get in there, they need to figure out how am I going to meet application SLAs on Azure, how am I going to do application availability, or security, or monitor these, and they could do a Google search or something and get that connected with us. Two, we're a Cisco partner, Cisco resells us, and Cisco is everywhere. So when people approach their trusted vendor, like Cisco, and say, "Cisco, "I've got this public cloud issue, "a network monitorization issue "and load balancing is a consistent thorn "in my neck, like, what do we do?" And Cisco goes, "oh we've got a great partner, "we resell their technology, I'd love "to help you understand more, and then "they pull us in, and we close." >> Yeah, that's a great point Guru, one of the things we've been talking to a lot of customers, is how do I manage and deal with my network when I don't own a lot of the pieces of the network. And that's the story we've been hearing. Cisco talking about multi-cloud. Up on stage, Chuck Robbins brought Diane Greene out and talked a lot about Kubernetes and STO, we know AVI Networks, I've seen your team at theCUBE con show, John was just at the Copenhagen show, I unfortunately missed that one, I'll be back at the Seattle show. Talk about what your team is doing with Kubernetes and STO, and how does Cisco fit in to that discussion? >> Yes, we love that space it's actually, I think at this point, after public cloud after Azure and AWS in particular, and GCP as well. So after public cloud, is the fastest growing part of our business today and what we've been shipping for over two years now, is an enterprise-class service mesh targeted at, not just Kubernetes, but Kubernetes, OpenShift, Mesos or Consisto, and the beautiful thing is our fabric is just a fabric it can, the same fabric in one corner of the data center could be serving a traditional bare-metal application and another corner of our data center is serving a containerized, a Kubernetes application and what we do there is, we provide both North-South load balancing capabilities, as well as, the East-West load balancing capabilities for that entire cluster. And to give you a sense for scale, our largest customers, we've got large banks and technology companies running us in production with Kubernetes, at the other, at the highest end we've got customers running eight to ten clusters of somewhere between 50 to 100 nodes each. So we're talking about 500 to 1,000 nodes running in both public cloud and on-prem of Kubernetes where we are providing the distributed load balancing capabilities. >> Well that's great. So if you've been doing service mesh for two years, that's pre STO? How does that relate to the STO project? >> Yes, it is, and in sometimes it's still pre STO right, cause I love STO, on slides (laughs) but the era of STO is 2019 and maybe 2020. So it's going to take some time we love it because here's what happens today, this is the problem for solution providers like us, what happens is, we're forced to integrate with Kubernetes, the Kubernetes master service. At some point customers are like, "alright, so you're integrated with Kubernetes, "and this person is integrated, "and this other piece of software integrated." What STO does is it very cleanly separates the network policy from Kubernetes to STO. So we have to integrate only with STO and we are doing that integration right now. So from our perspective these are northbound orchestration systems and policies systems, once STO solidifies, and I expect sometime next year, maybe the middle of next year, maybe late next year, and we're ready for production and then you can continue to use us within the system. >> Yeah Guru, I'm going to have to say you're the hipster service mesh company then, right? You were doing it before it was cool. (Guru, Stu and John laugh) >> Yes and then perhaps we can move-- >> Alright so I got-- >> on to something else >> We love the STO is a total geek conversation but this is super important, I want to get you thoughts on this, I do agree it's definitely got some work to do but there's, it's the number one open-source project within the CNCF, so clearly there's a ton of interest. And a lot of the alpha geeks are going there they see great, great value there. Containers, check. Containers are great. Kubernetes, check, on a good path. STO is interesting cause its service meshes is a concept that kind of ties networking with apps and you guys are in the middle of this. What does that mean for the network engineer out there or for the company, why should they pay attention to this service mesh concept or STO and the role of mircoservices? Clearly microservices makes sense if you're APIing everything you want to have more services developing. but what's going on under the hood? Why is STO getting so much traction in your opinion? >> It's a very simple reason John. So this was my world as a network engineer. I had a few of these applications I would look at them, they're like my little puppy, and I would configure my entire network to support these applications. The world of microservices, and really this new world that we live in, I don't have one of these, I have 100 of these per application, so I have 100,000 of these floating around. I can't do it without using policy. Policy is at the root of all this, intent-based networking, declarative policies, STO, declarative policies, our platform, declarative policies. So the entire world of networking is moving away from, let me go to one of my 50 switches and configure the CLI, to let me define a set of ten policies that we will then apply to 100,000 applications, cause frankly, there's only ten different things I want to do. I don't want to configure a 100,000 endpoints. I just want to do ten things, that's something I can do as a human and that's really what's at the root of this. So it's really intent-based networking sort of at different layers. >> So there's been conversation, we've been obviously talking about this on theCUBE since day one here about, we believe the network engineer, the Cisco customer, if you will, or people getting all of these certifications, they're going to be so much more powerful because there's been a conversation in other press and media around the death of the network engineer (Guru laughs) We should, look they're the mainframe guy-- >> Which iteration of that are we on? 'Cause I hear that every five years. >> They better learn how to code so they don't lose their job. When actually, the network is getting more and more powerful, so what you're talking about, we think connects and validates that the network engineer, the one doing Cyber Ops, data center, service provider, industrial IOT, CCNA, CCIEs, these guys are going to be a fish to water when they hear words like policy, dynamic provisioning these are-- >> Automation, APIs. >> These are concepts they're used to. What's your thoughts on that because this is a kind of a new emerging connect point that DevNet's kind of pointed with DevNet Create and DevNet proper, what are you're thoughts? >> Yeah, listen I have tremendous empathy for our customer base, I used to be a customer on the other side a couple of decades ago, and there's this sort of fashion in Silicon Valley to come up with new innovations and then say, "oh, all those people, they're going to be left behind "and my technology is going to be awesome." I don't subscribe to that, the hunger I see in networking teams to continually add value is unparalleled today. The hunger I see for automation, for learning REST API, STKs, Python, Ansible, interacting with DevNet is unparalleled. And in some sense if that wasn't there, why would you have intent-based networking, why would a vendor like Cisco, a vendor like AVI emerge? Why would we build these amazing things if there wasn't a hunger for this? So, I think the network is going to be extremely important and most of the networking teams today will make that transition. I'm not going to discount the fact that there will be some who will want to hug their load balancers for the next 10 years, and I have bad news for them, there was a time when you could ride it out for five or 10 years before the next tech showed up. Those days are gone, man. The new tech shows up today and then you're like, "no, not going to happen for about 12 or 18 months." And then boom! Everything just changes. >> So what's your advice to that, of those networking engineers out there, those folks do, and that are going to be the power players in this new configuration? What should they do? >> Engage. >> Engage, be the person in the organization that brings in a new technology, never in my entire career, two decades now, have I seen individuals in networking teams at banks, at technology companies, at retailers, at grocery store companies, at radiology centers, you know, go out there and ask questions is there a better load balancer, is there a better switching solution, is there a better X, Y, Z, is there a better way to monitor my apps, and then pull in that, play around with that, call the vendor. You know, traditionally it never used to happen. So I'm excited about it. >> Yeah, and it's awesome it's great. It's a great opportunity to be, the timing is perfect. Alright, final question, actually two questions. What's up for next for you guys at AVI Networks on the road map, what's coming next? And then you're take on the show, what's the vibe, what's it like for the folks who didn't make it to Orlando, what'd they miss? >> So our vision is double down on multi-cloud, it's so real, all our customers, all, almost a 100%, are both on-prem and in AWS or Azure and we're continuing to invest in making that easier through the introduction of several sort of initiatives on the platform including SAS, including increased investments in security. So that's on our vision side. Invest in our partnership with Cisco, as I said Cisco is a reseller and now an investor in our last round of funding, so we're pretty excited about that. And they're excited about being close to a company that frankly, is seeing the kind of traction we're seeing. So that's what we're doing over the next three to five years. Show floor, I've got to say 80% of it sounds like, give me your data and I will provide you insights. And that's trivializing that a little bit but I think it goes back to the point, John, you made earlier, where things are moving so fast, so much is changing that there's just an increased excitement around technologies which help you automate, which help you provide better insight, which help you just manage this. >> And then final question, one more, it just popped into my head, got to get out there. Programmability, obviously we believe it is happening, APIs are happening, microservices are right around the corner, you guys are first-generation service mesh and production. What are some of those new apps we're going to see? If the network programmable is first-generation, like an iPhone was for telephony, what kinds of network apps, app-networking apps, are we going to see in the new paradigm that DevNet's pioneering? >> So, actually two kind of apps I'm already seeing in my customer base right now. The first one is self-service and provisioning apps. So as soon as the network becomes programmable the first thing networking teams do, this is a little bit counter intuitive, remember the old world where networking teams were like, "my network, don't touch it." The first thing they're doing now is, they're saying "oh, it's programmable? "Let me build a sandbox for you quickly. "You do it, don't call me. "Don't call me. "Just do your thing, if you hit " the bounds of the sandbox, then "call me and we'll talk about it." So, self-service automation provisioning is the first kind of applications I'm seeing emerging. And the second one is monitoring. You know the age-old problem, I don't know what's going on. So people are building these amazing solutions, I mean our, I thought people would be logging into our CLI or UI and getting insights. No, they're taking my data, right now I counted about 15 upstream solutions from Tetration, to Splunk, to other SIMs, Datadog, AppDynamics, New Relic, they're exporting this wherever they can. And so those are the two classes. Self-service automation and monitoring. >> And this all is underpinning value for safe security monitoring and scripts is right around the corner. Anyway thanks for coming. Okay, AVI Networks' VP of Product here inside theCUBE day three, it's theCUBE coverage here. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman at Cisco Live in Orlando. Stay with us, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's Ecosystem partner. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're getting to the end of three days of live, wall-to-wall coverage here at Cisco Live 2018, and you're watching theCUBE. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest David Tucker, who's the SVP of business development, with SingleWire, thanks so much for joining us. >> I'm glad to be here, Stu. >> All right, so David, you've worked for Cisco, you're now a partner with them. Give us a little bit about your background and tell us, for those who don't know, what SingleWire's mission is. >> Okay, my background is almost 40 years in the voice space, and then I joined SingleWire about two... Two and a half years ago, after leaving Cisco for 18 years. So, Singlewire is a ISV that partnered with Cisco right after 9/11 when the Department of Interior came to Cisco and said, "We have to evacuate "all of our buildings in less than "10 minutes, give us a solution." Our product, InformaCast, was born after that event. So, what we do is we work with Cisco's UC collaboration portfolio, and when a customer needs to get critical communications out to employees, such as a weather alert, such as a safety announcement, in a hurry and they need to reach all their employees no matter where they may be, that's where we come in. >> Yeah, so David, it's an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, you know, when I go to my kids and I say, you know, "You have this device"-- >> Right. >> It's for the internet, the apps, and you know, text and everything... They don't actually use voice on it all that much. >> Right. >> On the other hand, you know, I go to some of the cloud shows and things like that, you know, voice is the new interface. I've got an Alexa and I got a Google Home and I talk to Siri and Cortana and everything like that, so people are programming again for voice. Give us your perspective on, you know, just voice in general and then I definitely want to get into, you know, your company's mission and how some of that stuff works. >> Well, couple thoughts... First off, when you need to communicate to people and get their attention there's nothing better than audio with voice, live audio. You know, if there's an emergency in a building, for example, if you hear it in your ear through, you know, a speaker, through a phone, through your cell phone, it gets your attention. If it's a text or an image I may look at it later and it's too late. From a user interface perspective, when you walk into a building or you now need to communicate that there's an event going on, what better way other than to speak it? "I need help." "Man down." "There's an armed gunman in the building." "There's a chemical spill in the factory." Using voice is a great way to communicate and to trigger events is a natural way of doing it. So, voice is still very powerful in terms of, you know, that human to human interaction. >> Yeah, absolutely, so tell us a little bit about how do these mass notifications work? You know, I've been, I travel a bunch, you know, for these environments and I've been places where all of a sudden everybody's phones start making those weird sounds because you know, flood alerts are going on. You know, "Thunderstorm, stay in place." You know, sometimes when there are either manmade or nature made events, you know, how does this work? Is this tied to the phone network, is it, you know, how does this fit in? >> Well, think of us as kind of a Swiss Army knife piece of software where a customer may have all kinds of ways to trigger an event, and it could be as simple as a panic button under a desk or a panic button on a Cisco phone, it could be tied to the weather service, such as a tornado bearing down on your building, and then we have to then communicate out to reach all the employees through their mobile interface, through digital sign-ins, through overhead speakers, through their Cisco phone be able to reach everybody. So, it's kind of that any-to-any kind of model because you never know where people are going to be, and so that's really what SingleWire really does. Very common in schools, K through 12, obviously. A lot of universities, but there's now a workflow component of this as well. "I need to be able to tell the "employees that my network is down." "There's a chemical spill in the factory. "How do I tell the right people not "to drive through that chemical spill?" So, that's what we really do, we're that Swiss Army knife of really making sure people know, whatever event it may be, as quickly as possible, and seconds is what it really comes down to. >> All right, and David, I heard you say this can be like a featurous part of a Cisco phone, so I assume that the software that goes in... Can you speak a little bit about, you know, how much is just... You have pre-made packages for verticals and how much is it... You know, we're here in the DevNet zone or you know, people coding and you know, putting together their own packages or you know, building you as part of a custom application. >> Well, we're one of the very first Cisco Ecosystem partners going back into 2001. Our system is API forward, so we've been working with Cisco APIs into the phone and into Call Manager since that timeframe, because we need to be able to talk to the speaker, be able to put something on the display of the phone. We need to be able to talk to Call Manager to know where people are, who's on what phone, what building, what floor they're on, and then we also have APIs on our side. So, we're also like a Ecosystem partner of Cisco but talking to another ecosystem of speaker vendors and of digital sign vendors. We're working now with the intent-based networking solutions, so when they're having problems in the network and they need to be able to communicate to certain people that there's a network issue, you know, who do you tell? So, you know, plug into that ecosystem, as well. So, that's our livelihood is DevNet. >> That's fascinating, yeah, it's great. No longer the pagers going off, right? >> That's right. >> Now that they hear that little voice on the weekend when they're not even on call anymore. (laughing) >> That's right, that's right. We're going to find you, yeah. (laughing) >> It sounds like you've got a really interesting, diverse customer set. I wonder if you have any interesting customer examples or things that would help us, you know, really put a face on these solutions. >> Our common, our core applications deal around safety, safety in the workplace, safety in a government building, safety in a school, but our customers have taken our product and used it for all different kinds of things. We have a school system, for example, that connected us to their restrooms because they wanted to be able to save water, and after hours we'd turn off the water supply so the toilets aren't running all the time. >> Right. >> We have an ice cream company that connected us to their ammonia sensors because they use ammonia to clean the tanks to make sure there's no Wisteria in there. So, that basically is an application where now, you know, that sensor goes off, we tell the people on the forklifts not to drive through this particular area. So, we have another hospital in California, Laguna Hospital, it's a hospital that focuses on patients with dementia, and they put RFID tags on the patient, and when they get up and they wander the hallways they may get lost and they get confused. We can detect that that patient is now in this particular wing. We now play back over the closest speaker the voice of their loved one telling them to go back to their room, which they tend to respond to. So, those are some interesting use cases how we tied Cisco technology to ours. >> Yeah, that's fascinating, David, have you been to a few of these Cisco Lives in the past? >> In my career quite a few, yes. >> Yeah, it had been a couple of years since I'd been here. There's great energy here, especially being, you know, here in the DevNet zone. What do you see that's different today in networking in general and at Cisco Live specifically? >> It continues to be a evolution to more open connectivity. In the early days it was all about Cisco and it was very much, "Sell my box." Now it's selling solutions and the resellers and the partners here that are selling those solutions look to multi-vendor type environments, and Cisco's openness to that has really changed over the years, and I was involved in the very beginning days of the Ecosystem and the collab group, and it was really about starting that ball going. But you know, this is a totally different environment now and it's really amazing to feel the energy of people willing to work together and create something unique. So, that's the big change I see. >> Yeah, absolutely, I think back to... You know, the line you'd hear is like, "Well, Cisco is the standard," so that's kind of the way people do things, but that community and openness, it's making progress. Not saying that everything that Cisco does is 100% open, but it is... We were talking to Susie Wee earlier and some of the other people in DevNet is... Remember when Cisco had, like, one API-- >> Oh, yeah. >> For a product, now you know, there are a lot of solutions and they're building and they're collaborating with the community. >> Right, right. >> All right, Dave, I want to just give you a final word as to, you know, things you're seeing out there, what's exciting you the most and any final takeaways from the show? >> Well, I think networking continues to evolve. I think UC and collaboration is really still in the forefront of how it can affect how businesses operate, and you know, with the extension of video in meetings, you know, I see that's going to continue to be very exciting for both Cisco and for customers. You know, what we do is really on the forefront of people's minds now with safety and we're just on the tip of the iceberg of customer opportunities, so you know, if somebody's out there, he knows a Cisco customer, give us a call. >> All right, well David Tucker, thank you so much. SingleWire, absolutely, security of the network has been top of mind, security of people, absolutely, critically, and great to see some of those things also spreading into lots of other ecosystems and building interesting solutions. So, be back with lots more coverage here at Cisco Live 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this theCube's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. We've got three days of programming we've been doing. We're heading towards the end, but still going strong. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, John Apostolopousos, who's the vice president and CTO of Enterprise Networking and lab director of the Innovation's Lab with Cisco. It all rolls right off the tongue, right John. >> Yes, yes. >> But welcome to the program, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for joining me, it's a pleasure being here. >> Alright so you and I were rapping, we both have some background in networking in innovation labs. So, you know, it's one of the things I love to talk about, who doesn't love to talk about innovation. Tell us a little bit about your background and what are the innovation labs inside of Cisco? >> Okay, so I've been working in various areas of R and D and innovation for many years. And I joined Cisco about five years ago, both to be CTO and also to create a group, a lab, a group of people to help identify and try to solve problems of a strategic importance to Cisco's future. And by doing these, we believe that we can have a significant effect on our customers and bring great value to them and differentiation for Cisco. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. >> It's kind of a, you know what, one of the things I poked at, I worked in a CTO office at one of the big vendors for a few years, and it's like we need the place where people can play and learn and try and fail, it's okay. There's always a push from this, well it needs to lead to product that leads to revenue. How does that work inside of Cisco? >> So it actually works quite well because there's strong push from the top from Chuck Robbins, Dave Decker, from my boss, Scott Harrel, my junior colleagues, Robby Chandra and so forth, to identify these key problems, invest, try to solve them and so forth. Because they know if we can succeed, it's going to be huge revenues. >> Okay, yeah. John, the level we get a CTO on, there's no shortage of cool and interesting things to look at. What are some of the main areas that you and your team look at? >> Sure, so one of the things which actually I with Robby Chandra and other very talented colleagues across Cisco started about five years ago now, was looking at what are some of the key use cases that customers need to have addressed three to five years down the road? And what architectures do they need to solve it? And we started that work four or five years ago, that leads to what we call the digital network architecture DNA that we are hearing all about today. So that work actually started in December 2013, it would really ramp up in 2014 and 2015. And it takes so long because it takes a long time to figure out what are the real problems customers need to address and then how can you build the ASICs and the operating system and the software on top and the platforms and DNA center and now DNA center platform that's needed. And we have a whole bunch of additional things in the pipe. >> Yeah, so bring us back, because you know in technology three to five years, that's a really long time. >> That's a long time. >> So what were some of the original kind of customer needs that you saw and what was on target and what's changed in that time period? >> Sure, so some of the things the customer needs, is they need to be able to role out new services really fast, okay. Today it takes and it historically takes a long time to role out a new service. Let's say we want to have a tele-present system or let's say you want to bring a new IOT device on the network, and you want to segment it relative to all the other devices so there can't be any security threats. And you want to apply all the best practices for networking and security. Typically that's been really, really hard. It's been really hard because you have to figure out for the new application what network and security requirements do you need. Then how should that, how should the network be architected, how should each device in the network be programmed for QOS or anything else. And then go out and do it. Device by device typically. And then be able to look to say hey, is that actually working the way that I intended? Or is there a problem, if so, where's the problem. How can I fix it? How can I change it? Historically that process has taken a long time. Now what we've done is by taking a more wholeistic view, and with things like DNA center, we have a full understanding of what's happening end to end. So we can role out a new service, we can identify both the network policies that are required, the security policies, figure out what's needed in each element in the network, go out and employ it. Then look to see what's happening, verify if it's doing what's needed, and if not, make recommended fixes and so forth. So this is one of the major fundamental shifts that is occurring and it's something we're very excited about and our customers are also really excited, which is, because it brings them great value. It increases their speed. It increases their security, lowers their costs. It's pretty exciting stuff. >> Yeah, John, if I wind the clock back 10 or 15 years ago, intelligence in the network, using data and analytics in the network, we were talking about it back then. >> We were, we were. >> So tell me why it's different now. Why, you know, I know all the people that work on this, we're quite excited for the things that we can actually accomplish today. Not like we were just talking about it, we were building real solutions, but what's different today? >> It's different at every single level. For example, 10 years ago we did not really have ASICs to be programmable. Today with a lot of the ASICs we have with UADP, unified access data platform ASIC. As new protocols become important, we can go and change more for to support it. Our new Cat9ks actually we have x86's built in, so you have an x86, which you can have a containerized environment there, so third parties can take their applications in a container, deploy it and run it across switches. That was never possible before. So these are some of the major advances that happened that just makes it so much easier to deploy these. >> Yeah, well one of the things that we've been really interested to dig into is some of the new applications that aren't just running on the network but the network is involved in how we build those environments. So when I think about you know just the theme of the show, it's you know, imagine what we can do, and here in the dev net zone, it's customers talking about helping to build those applications. Talk a little bit about that. How does that tie in to some of these mega trends like machine learning, AI, you know, choose your favorite buzz word of choice there. >> Yeah, so what happens is now when you role out a new application, one of the key things you want is visibility and know how it's working. In the past you've had visibility at the server. You may have visibility in the client. You haven't had visibility end to end, and you often haven't had it real time. But now you can actually have end to end visibility and you can be able to automatically self optimize the network to be able to do what needs to be done. For example, here we have thousands of people just on this floor here, and you want to optimize which APs they're talking to and what paths they're taking through their networks. So that whatever they're doing, could it be a Face Time or anything else could be done with very high end to end quality. And all that you want to happen automatically. >> Yeah, the place I've actually been a little critical of Cisco is when we first started talking about IOT, it was like well everything needs a networking part of it. I'm like well a lot of these devices aren't going to have connectivity or have limited connectivity. Transport isn't, you know, the piece of it, but when I take that, when I look at solutions like NFV that are coming out, all of these coming together, this great new term we're talking about, edge computing. So what are you seeing, what's happening today, what are you looking at from a research standpoint? And, you know, where does the edge start? >> Yes, so the edge is a really fun topic. And it's something Cisco cares a lot about because it's often for many applications you have to run them at the edge, especially for IoT. For instance today, you mentioned IoT, you mentioned machine learning. Each of those applications, it's typically a lot of the process ended, the analytics for IoT, the machine learning AI for other sort of applications, that's usually done in the Cloud. However, many times you can't do it in the Cloud or you don't want to do it in the Cloud, because it's too expensive or you just can't get things to the Cloud. >> Yeah, if I'm driving an autonomous vehicle, I can't wait for it to do the round trip before I hit you know whatever that was. >> Yes, and that's a great point. Because what happens is there's a latency issue. There's also scalability. Scalability in the amount of data that's coming for a single IoT device or in a place like this you may have thousands of IoT devices. So it's huge scalability issues. Also reliability. You want your systems, your IOo applications, everything to work. And usually you're counted on being connected to Cloud, but in case you're not connected, in case something breaks down, a storm, a backhoe takes out your internet connection, you still want it to work. So for reliability, you also want to do things at the edge. Also for privacy. You see for privacy, what happens is you want to limit the information that you send to the Cloud. And if it's possible not to send anything, or just to summarize and send only a very small part of information. That could lead to major gains in privacy. So doing processing at the edge, especially with machine learning, AI, can lead to improvements in scalability, lower latency, improved reliability, lower costs, and improvements in privacy. So lots of gains by doing things at the edge of the network. >> Okay, and were does Cisco play in some of these edge solutions? >> Yes, first of all, Cisco has been building computer at the edge with ISRs for many years, okay. I view this as one of the hidden gems that Cisco has. Also we've been working on, what we call, fog commuting for many years. Actually I joined Cisco five years ago, but even before that, my colleagues realized that hey, for some IoT applications, you can't do it in the Cloud. You actually have to do it in the edge. And so they coined the term fog, which basically means taking a part of the Cloud, bringing it to the edge of the network, and a cloud on the ground is called fog, hence the term. And then we've been developing it ever since. And so this is what led to us including for example x86s and containerized frame works on switches and so forth so it makes it much easier for developers to deploy things at the edge of the network. >> Yeah, we just have to make sure enterprises don't choke on it because then it would just be smog. (laughter) >> Luckily we're working really hard on that, and also to make it very secure. Because that's another key component. High scalability, privacy, reliability, low costs, and security. >> Okay, so. >> And no smog. >> No smog. What are some of the things, you know, give us a little inside into the innovation labs, what are some of the things as you look out that maybe we're not yet talking about on the show floor here? >> Sure, for example, some of the major things upcoming is 802.11ax, it's the next generation of wifi. So it gives significant improvements in wifi performance. We've been working on that for a number of years. When I say we, it's myself and other colleagues throughout Cisco. And often colleagues and universities and standards organizations and other companies, wherever it makes sense, because we're trying to push the industry forward. So 802.11ax is a major effort we're working on. Also 5G cellular, you may have heard a lot about it because it's getting a huge amount of attention. And we're also trying to connect these two. Because, for example, in indoor environments like this, wifi is going to be, wifi is the best solution. On the other hand, as you take your mobile device and you go outside, you have 5G, or you will have 5G. As a concrete example, you're familiar with network segmentation, okay, this is incredibly powerful. It's very good for security, for giving the applications the bandwidth allegiance they need and so forth, so very, very powerful. DNA provides that capability within the campus branch, across wired and wireless. And that's what we're shipping today. What happens is with 5G as defined by 3GPP standards, when they come out, you're going to have something very similar, it'll be called network slices, instead of network segmentation. But exact same concept. And it'll be provided on service provider networks. And now what you can do is you can use DNA center to set up the policies in the network segment to go across the enterprise campus and also on the service provider network. So when you go outside with your mobile devices, wherever you are, you'll still have your network segment with your security, you QOS and so forth that they need for applications. >> John I'm just sitting here smiling because I worked in telecom back in the nineties. And there were the trucking companies that was like my phone was a walkie talkie, and then it was also a cell phone, which was pretty cool back in the nineties. When we talk about data, that's been the ultimate promise. It should be ubiquitous, 5G, working with the wireless has been an interesting thing to kind of dig into. So how long until, you know, that becomes reality? >> Well in the enterprise, indoors, campus branch, so forth, end up going to data center. We're working with our data center team very closely to build network segments across both. That's, in some cases it's already available today, in other cases it'll be coming in six months and so forth. With 5G, it depends on the deployment of 5G. And so that's 2020, 2021. But we're already working to make that possible. >> Alright, John, I want to give you the final word. I've worked on some of those projects when it's kind of years in the making, and something comes out the door and then that's what you have with the DNA solution. You know, tell us a little bit about the celebration, the pride, the excitement, that the team is seeing. >> Yeah, it's a lot, right now, it's a great time because as you mentioned, we started some of this work four years ago. We brought some of it out, SDA and DNA center, last summer. Assurance in January. IoT, DNA IoT recently. We just brought out the world's best AP with a 4800. So it's all these sequence of things that finally came out that we've been working on for years, so it's really an awesome feeling. And there's a lot more in the pipe. And so it's going to be a fun, fun future ahead. And our customers are going to get a lot of value. >> John Apostolopousos, really a pleasure. Thank you for joining. You're now a part of theCube alumni here where we always love talking about innovation, driving that pipeline to help customers through all of these new technologies. Stay with us, we got a couple more interviews left. Three days, wall to wall coverage here in Orlando, Florida. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always thank you for watching theCube. (techno sounds)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we're here live in the Cisco DevNet Zone, at Cisco Live 2018. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. This is Go Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman there, here with Suzie Wee who is the CTO and Vice President of Cisco. This is her baby DevNet, the fastest growing developer program in Cisco history, only four years old. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey John good to see you, hey Stu. >> I made that stat, it was only four years old. So DevNet, obviously just for color commentary, really successful developer program, only in it's fourth year or so for Cisco. But it's really changing the face of Cisco. It's showing that a new collaboration, a new co-development, a new developer framework is being built on top of networks and it's on a collision course with Cloud Native. Kay, this is a great path for network engineers. It really changed the show vibe so congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. Yeah, and why do you say collision course? There's like a whole new paradigm, right? And it's pretty amazing, it's pretty amazing. >> Well some of the things that we've been seeing here, obviously CCIE's or 25 years of excellence and stats was out here >> Yes, Yes. >> The key note from the CEO, Chuck Robbins, talks about an old way and new way. Developers are clearly in the driver's seat here and network engineers, Cisco partners, customers technical folks and engineers. They're at the keys to the kingdom and you introduced a concept called Network Dev Ops. >> Yes. >> Okay, a few years ago when we first had you on theCUBE. Where is that now? Where is Network Dev Ops now? What's the vibe internally? Is there a full acceptance to it? Is there embracing it? >> It's amazing and ya know it's like, when we were pushing it we were just saying, "Hey, the network is changing, the network "is gonna be programmable, the network "is going to have API's", and you go back four years and then you're just like, "What was the buzz?" The buzz was SDN, y'know the buzz was SDN. SDN was open flow, it was separation of control plain from data plain. But, it was still kind of research. And what we knew is like, it wouldn't become real until the people who are building and operating the World's networks were ready to adopt it. And so, at first of course, it was like, there were the people who were like, "Okay this network thing, this programmability "is gonna come to the network, but what can we do there?" And since then, people have jumped in, they've like really gotten in. And like here at this Cisco Live, what we're seeing is that people are ready to code. And so the concept of, I'm a networker, now there's software built into my entire network programming portfolio. How do I build the skills? I'm a developer, and the networkers are getting comfortable with understanding that they need to code, they need to understand these skills. But one thing that we did, was we actually separated out, like, the definition of developer. >> Yep. >> Y'know. >> You guys done a good job of really defining a path for the network engineer, who can extend their skill set and solve network problems, be creative, and also do great business outcome oriented things. So, I want you to take a minute to explain the DevNet story because you guys just didn't throw a PowerPoint at this. You dug in, you built it up, and you threw a lot of resources for Cisco, I mean small for Cisco's scale, but you guys dug in, you did the homework and you're doing new things. So take us to the DevNet story and what's happening this year in the momentum. Take us through that little journey. >> Yeah, so the story was back in actually 2013. Cisco was saying, "Hey, we're gonna get into software "we're doing software, we have a software strategy." And all of that is fantastic, either... But the thing that was missing, was like, Hey, we need an ecosystem, like the reason you do software is to have an ecosystem. And in order to have an ecosystem you want people to build upon your stuff. You need to expose your API's. It doesn't happen by itself, you need to have a developer program so that you can actually really let people use all of that and partake in the ecosystem. So we, kind of, I evangelized, evangelized, evangelized, gave a couple hundred pitches, got the okay to start DevNet, and that was in 2014. And then in 2014, then we said okay. So now we got the okay to start a developer program for Cisco. But, y'know, it's still not a sure shot that it would work. >> Yeah. >> And then we said our dream is to have a developer conference at Cisco Live. And so we wanted to have that developer conference at Cisco Live and then three months later, we had it. And we're like okay, 24 hour hack-a-thon, deep dive API sessions, but would the people come? Would they be ready? And then, they came. Like, they came, it was packed. It was just like wall to wall of people, who are excited to learn about software. So now you go and then you fast forward, y'know, four years, and now we just hit 500,000 developers. 500,000 people have registered for DevNet. And you can be like, "Well what does that mean?" We have half a million developers. Is it a real number? Well, my team kept scrubbing the database. Like so, we had hit 400,000 and then our numbers got lower and I was like "Come on guys, stop it!" And they were like, "No, no, no, we have to scrub it, "we gotta out the duplicates." And then finally we got it up and we've grown it. It basically is at 500,000 registered developers. And what that means is like, now we have a community. We have a community of people who are getting up on network API's, we have a community of people who can develop, and once you do that you hit this completely different inflection point. Where at first our mission was just to help networkers be developers, to help the app developers understand that the network has API's and to do stuff there. That's still our goal, to enable developers. But now we have a community, what we can do is really catalyze that community into business and impact. >> Suzie, first of all congratulations. It's been so much fun to be here in the DevNet Zone. It'd been a few years since I'd been to Cisco Live. And y'know, people in these sessions every time. And you go, people are coding, they're white-boarding, they're, y'know building. Playing with Legos, they're doing all sorts of stuff. Over the last five years, y'know, we all knew that, y'know, developers of the new Kingmakers. It's been talked about a lot. But we've seen many infrastructure companies try. They create little developer conferences, they bring in speakers, they'll get some momentum, and then after a year or two, it kind of fizzles out. >> Yes. >> Give us a little bit behind the scenes, as to, y'know is it because networking people are worried about their jobs and they're getting on-board? Is it, y'know, I know part of it is your team and the ecosystem you've built here. But, give is some of the reasons why this has succeeded when so many other have, kind of, come and gone. >> Yeah well, I mean we're very fortunate that we've kind of executed in a way that it has continued to be here and we know that's really hard to do. It takes executive support, it takes the troops, it takes fighting anti-bodies, and kind of all of that kind of stuff. But I think, like, the key has been that we've been working with the community. When we had that first DevNet Zone, that first developer conference at Cisco Live four years ago, people came. And that told Cisco something, right? And then as we've continued to build it out, we've actually been not doing it as a silo within Cisco. We've been doing it with our sales organization, with our partner organization, we've been doing it with our ecosystem and our partners and out there. We've just continuously been doing it based on what their needs are. >> And Suzie, I love that, because there are some of the events I saw, they were like, "Well, the developer "is this special unicorn", and we're gonna have this special area, it's velvet rope, we're gonna treat 'em really well. But, this is the first thing you see when you come in, you're very approachable. The line I've heard from your team is, "We are going to meet them where they are." There are no, y'know, "Gosh I haven't "touched programming in 20 years." No, no, no, you're fine, you're good come on in. I'm not sure if I'm really (mumbles). Well you're not programming, you're coding. So, I think that's part of the success, is these people. Y'know, this is their careers, and you're giving them that path forward. >> It is, and when we look at like, developer programs, you'd think it would be easy to start a developer program. But, there's no formula for it, y'know? And when we did it for Cisco, like as we've grown this, it depends on the products that we have, it depends on the community that we have, the types of solutions, what our customers want. And basically what happens is, we did have a core set of networkers who are scared. And we, instead of making DevNet the elite place for the elite developers, we said it is the place to bring in the community. We're gonna be welcoming, we're bringing them in on the journey, because they're the ones who need to be there. And so we've really tried this more open approach. And if you look at Cisco's community of networkers, they're amazing, like, they are developing and installing and operating networks around the World in every country. They've been dedicated, but they are scared of that transition to software and programmability. And they've been dedicated to us, we're dedicated to them, getting to that next level. >> You just did a good job of bringing that tribe kind of mentality and co-development, co-creation, people who are learning. So you have first time learners kicking the tires on coding and growing and experts. So Cisco Champions coming in; Powerhouse developers. >> Yeah >> Not Cisco employees, it's Cisco Champions, and so a nice balance. So that's a good sign of success. >> And you're right, that's key because it's not just, like just beginners. I mean, first of all, there is a very large stage of new people who are just coming in and then wanting to get started and that's awesome. And in addition, very advanced folks, who are like, y'know, just the most advanced developer you'd find, who also has networking expertise. And then of course, the app developers. We're talking to app developers and cloud developers and DevOps pros, and they're coming in as well. >> Yea, and Suzie you bring up a great point. Cause one of the challenges when you have the cool new innovation stuff, is the business, like well how does that connect back? So help connect the dots, we heard Chuck Robbins on stage. Not only was it just DevNet and 500,000 but the new products that are coming out just tie right into it. >> It's crazy, like yea, it's awesome. Because what happens is, programmability, Cisco, is building programmability into our entire portfolio. It's not that we have one product that has API's, I mean that's where we were a few years ago. But now we look... Our enterprise networking products, y'know, for the data center, for service provider, for wireless. All of those products are programmable. Our security products are programmable. IoT, collaboration, our entire portfolio is now programmable, so it gives you this kind of whole portfolio of programmability to play with, and that cross-domain. Who covers that many domains? And that's really powerful. When we take a look at the programmability, it was like for the network devices themselves. Like those have Asics that are programmable. So if there's like a new protocol that comes up to handle IoT things, we can actually re-program the Asics to get that going at line rates. You can do like, on-board application hosting on those network devices. We have controller levels, so you can hit the network, and then now you have like analytics and insights that you can do to pull out information from the network, and then be able to, y'know, operate at that level as well. >> So a strategic advantage architecturally for Cisco, certainly in the network side and scaling up at the stack with Kubernetes and (mumbles). We saw Google on-stage, kinda giving an indicator of where it's going. I want to ask you about the culture question for DevNet. Obviously people are fascinated with the success of DevNet, we've been great to follow the success through your journey and being part of it. But for the folks that are now seeing the success, and want to join: What can they expect, if I join the DevNet mission? What's the expectation? What's gonna be the vibe? What would you share to someone watching, that's gonna jump in and join the journey, what can they expect? >> Well, I think that first of all, it's going to be very welcoming. Like, they're gonna feel welcome. And I'm just proud of my team, because people come in and they actually say, "Wow, sometimes you go to developer conferences "and it's a little bit intimidating." And yea, you might be intimidated, but here you're going to feel welcome. Because, y'know, we really want things to happen. And then there's gonna be this kind of like, intrigue in terms of what you can build. Because what we're building is different. It's not a well known area, like everyone knows how to build apps for a mobile device. People don't know how to build applications for programmable infrastructure. Like, the fact that hey, your wireless access points now give you location and proximity information. I can write an indoor location app. Sounds simple, but it's awesome. >> Connect a camera to it. >> It's amazing, right? >> Hello! >> And then what happens is, as you're doing that, you have like, connect a camera, you're like put a Playstation into a hospital... The Children's Hospital of L.A came and spoke, and they were talking about the business problem. They had a patient, who was very sick, a young boy. And his wish was to have Playstation so he could play it. And then they had to go to their networkers cause you don't put Playstations in hospitals. They had to make that happen and intent-based networking lets you make that wish, and then activate that in the network, that's now a programmable infrastructure. So the types of problems that you can solve are different, it's amazing. >> The new apps are coming out and you're creating a new, first generation green field of networked apps. >> Yes. (chuckles heartily) >> Like what iPhone did for mobile apps, you guys are doing for networks. >> That's right, that's right. >> So that's awesome, it's super cool. Programmable infrastructure, all DevOps kinda geeky stuff. For the next steps, as you guys are now at the beginning of the next inflection point. >> Yes. >> What're you guys focused on? What's happening with the team? What's happening with some of the initiatives you're doing? Also demos get better and better. The training classes are still going on. What's your focus? >> So with some of the things that are happening now, which is... So we've hit this milestone of half a million developers. But what does that mean? What that means is that, we have half a million people who can use network API's. What that means also, is that they're contributing code. So it's no longer just, "Here I'm gonna help "you use your API", but now it's also like, they're contributors back. And what we're doing, is we're actually embracing that and making that part of the innovation model for networking. So, you're not just taking Cisco's platforms and the innovation there, which is of course growing tremendously, but now you can also add in innovation by the community. And I know it's a straight forward concept for software. It's not a straightforward concept for networking and infrastructure. >> To bring an open-source ethos, to code sharing, co-contributing. >> Exactly, and something that we've released is code exchange, definite code exchange. And what it is, is just a list of curated software. Software that's out of GitHub, that works for our platforms, y'know. But the thing that developers are always like, "Okay there's a lot of software out there, "which one should I use?" and then basically giving them like, the curated list of here's the stuff that you can use. >> So Suzie, it's been fun to watch the transformation of Cisco overall. As we look at... Before, we used to measure in boxes and ports. What's the measurement internally? When you talk about saying, "Okay how are we doing "on our journey to become a software company?" Give us a little insight as to internally how Cisco measures that. >> The way that we measure that now is, we're talking to our customers and our partners and their adoption of API's, of programmability, their ability to execute on that and to be successful in this business. And so, it's really an external looking view. So it's all just like okay, how much do they get it? How much can they use it? How much are they building the skills? So it's really looking at the success of the community and being able to build the skills and use these products and build solutions with them. >> Suzie, congratulations on continuing growing, hitting a major milestone, 500,000 developers, half a million developers, that's a real community. It's just the beginning now, it's the start line. >> (chuckling) The start line, it is. >> One finish line is another start line. >> It is a start line, it's absolutely the start line. >> And you guys had a great event last night at the Mango party, the Mango Cafe. Talk about that, you had a celebration. Turns out a lot of people showed up. It was supposed to be a little private party. >> It was a little private party, yea. So we, y'know, just wanted to thank the team and thank our community. Because, quite honestly, to get to this half a million it wasn't just the people who work for me who got it there. It's the fact that, there's of course our team who's very dedicated to that, but then it's our partners. It's even you guys, right? It's our partners who have like... I understand this mission, I'm gonna jump in, I'm gonna help it happen. It's our systems engineers, it's our partners, it's our innovation folks, it's people from the community who understand the mission and have joined in to push it forward. So we had this party last night at Mango Cafe, you guys were there. The people were callin it kinda the best one. It's really just appreciation for our community and what they've done to get it there. Because it's not us, it's our community who've done it. >> This is the open ethos. Cisco becoming open. What's it like to be on the inside and seeing Cisco open up like this? >> It's, I mean, it's amazing. And what's amazing is like, when I started DevNet you'd think like okay, "I'm gonna run a developer program." The thing that surprises me is just, how hurtful it is to so many people. Like, people, they find a path. They see a new opportunity, they figure out a new way they wanna advance their businesses and their careers. And it's like, all heart. And that's how it grew. Like with the resources, it's just because people who had felt this heart and this connection into this mission and drive, they're taking it to the next level so it's amazing >> Like open-source software, people love to be part of a great project. >> It is, it is. >> And DevNet certainly is. And DevNet Create. Don't forget DevNet Create is your other event that bring the cloud native world with the networking world together. >> It is. >> Great project. >> You were with us at DevNet Create and that's where it's this mixing of communities of like, the app developers with the networkers who are getting out there. And what's funny is, we didn't know how those communities would interact. And they're mixing, they're getting it. They're just like "Okay, I have this location software, "I need to work together with the guys "who are gonna install the network and then "we can make this amazing experience." And they're mixing and when they do it the right things happening. >> Very complimentary, there's love going wild. >> App guys love the network guys to take care of the network and the network guys love the app guys that take care of the apps. >> Exactly! Exactly. >> It's a win-win. Great stuff, congratulations. Again, a new way to program. Just like we saw the iPhone creating the app store. Networking now is programmable. We expect to see a lot of great creativity, new problems, new things being created. And that's an opportunity for all. We're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action from the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live. More live coverage. Day three, stay with us, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, 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)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman. It's our third day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next two guests are from NetApp. Russell Fishman, Director of Product Management, and Keith Barto, Director of Product Management, both directors of product management. One was the former CEO of Immersive, now with NetApp for a few years. Guys, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us, John. Thank you. >> We saw you guys in Barcelona, obviously. The NetApp story just keeps on getting better. Also, you have core customer base. Cisco's going under transformation. You guys have been transforming ever since I started seeing NetApp arrive on the scene in the 90s. Every year there's always a new innovation. But now, more than ever, you're hearing even Cisco Bellwether in the routing networking business putting up old way network, hey there's a firewall. There's some devices in there. To a completely new, obviously, cloud made in the modern era really things are changing. So what's your reaction to that? Obviously, you guys are a part of that story. You have a relationship with Cisco. What's your reaction to that? And talk about your relationship with Cisco. >> So we obviously have a huge relationship with Cisco. And most folks will know about our FlexPods, I think that's probably the most famous way that we collaborate with these guys. We just came off the back of an amazing year, five straight quarters of double-digit, year-on-year growth, killing in the market. Obviously, we have to brag a little bit, right, come on. >> It's theCUBE, come on! >> It's theCUBE, we gotta be a little bit excited about it. So we're really excited about that, it just really talks to the strength of the relationship, right? So there's a very strong relationship there, and it's been there with FlexPod for eight years, and there's been a lot of transformation, exactly to your point John, a lot of transformation during that time, a lot of focus on the clouds. So one of the questions I always get asked, is why is converged infrastructure still relevant in a cloud-first world? And it is not obvious answer, now clearly our customers think that it is, and so do our partners. But it is not obvious why that is. NetApp has gone through, you talked about transformation, NetApp has gone through this massive transformation, huge focus on clouds, I mean, we have these cloud-first, cloud-native, focus around our data management platforms. We talk about a concept called the data fabric, I don't know if you've heard of the data fabric before. >> Yeah. >> And the data fabric really talks to how, our vision for how enterprises want to manage that new digital currency that is data across all the silos that they want to leverage, right? We've been able to bring some of that goodness into FlexPod, and that's why we're still relevant now. >> Yeah, so Keith, I think back to when converging infrastructure was built as about simplification, we were gonna take all these boxes and put it down to a box and that was the new unit of measurement. Well, Russell was just talking about we've got multi-cloud, when I think of NetApp now, it's always been a software company, but now software in that multi-cloud world, help connect the dots for us, as to management of converged infrastructure into that whole multi-cloud story. >> Yeah, we were very privileged to be acquired by NetApp last March, and my company Immersive, a lot of us came actually out of Cisco. So I was one of the original FlexPod architects from Cisco and had the privilege of helping to build the network, the storage that we brought into FlexPod, and a lot of our customers and our retailers kept on saying, "How do we know we put it together properly? "How are we following the best practices from the CVDs, "from the NVAs, from the TRs?" And so we took those rules and those analytics and we put them into platform, into a SaaS-based platform, and we were able to analyze that, coming from our customers' FlexPods, from within their deployments, from within their multi-data centers, and bring that into our service, run those analytics, prove those best practices, show the deficiencies, get our resellers out there to help our customers, 'cause FlexPod is a meet in the channel play, and we relied heavily on our resellers to make it a success. >> What was the driver for that product? When you started that company and that happened, what was the main motivation behind that? Was it analytics, was it insight, what was some of the things that you guys were building in, was it operational data? >> The real reason was people kept on asking, "How do I know?" Because it's a reference architecture, not a product, "How do I know I did it right?" Because it's really important, we're gonna run our key business applications on this platform, right? My SAP, my Oracle, my Sequel, my SharePoint, my Outlook. I gotta make sure this stuff is really gonna work properly, and it's going to grow in scale with the business. So I need to make sure that those redundant links are there. I need to make sure that when I do VMWare upgrade, or a Microsoft upgrade, that the firmware is alignment with the best practices in the interoperability matrix, so we wanted to make that as easy as possible, so that from a single dashboard, you can see all of those things, you can diagnose it quickly, you can get those email alerts and notifications, and because you end up with disparate operation teams, the server team, the network team, the storage team, the hypervisor team, sometimes they don't always talk effectively with each other, and from one single dashboard, we're now able to show everybody where things are today, and then, one of my favorites, when there is a problem, you call either Services or Support, and you say, "Hey it's not working," and they say, "What did you change?" And you say, "I didn't change anything." We have that historical-- >> Finger pointing kicks in, it was his fault! >> Yeah we have the historical snapshot and trending, so we can go back and look at where things were and do a comparison to where they are today, and it allows us to have a much faster mean time to resolution. >> And what do you guys call that product now within Cisco? What's it... >> It's now called Converged Systems Advisor in NetApp. >> Awesome, so what's next for convergers. Obviously, people, both cloud growth, we're seeing the on-premise, Wikibon has reported, the true private cloud numbers, which basically say there's a lot of on-premise activity going on, that's gonna look like cloud, it's gonna operate like cloud, so they need to have that. There's migration going on, but it's not a lift and shift, to cloud, there's gonna be, obviously, the hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So, cloud folks still buy hardware, too. You gotta still run stuff, networks aren't going away, storage isn't going away, so what's next for the converged infrastructure play with FlexPod? How do you guys manage that roadmap? >> So, we just announced some things coming into, jointly with Cisco, coming into Cisco Live. One of those things we announced was something called Managed Private Cloud on FlexPods, or actually no, FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, sorry, I switch it around. And FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, it really talks to exactly what you're talking about, John, which is... What we find, cloud has fundamentally changed customers' expectations of what they want on-prem. They recognize the need on-prem, we live in a hybrid world. Those of us that've been in the industry long enough, and have a couple of gray hairs, know that there are very few transitions that are really absolute in the business. A lot of people pronounce that it's gonna be this way or that way, and the reality is, it's something in between. And that's fine because cloud is just another tool in the toolbox, and you don't want to hit every nail with the same hammer, you want to find the right tool for the right job. So what we've done is we've taken some of that cloud goodness, which really means not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, all right. Worrying about the applications, being more application-focused, more business-value-focused, more line-of-business-focused. And being able to deliver that in a way that people can consume it on-premise. So it really feels like a FlexPod delivered like a cloud, but from a management day-to-day perspective, you don't have to do it-- >> So, it's flexible. >> It's flexible-- >> FlexPod. >> But it's done for you, so it's your little piece of cloud, sitting on-prem, and you don't have to manage it or run it day-to-day. >> Let's talk about what you just said about the whole transformation, people say a certain way, basically you're kind of saying, a lot of press, and a lot of analysts say, "Oh, you've got to do this digital transformation." Customers will take a pragmatic approach, but you guys at NetApp have been talking for a long time, I've been following it, non-disruptive operations. >> Yes. >> So what you see in the cloud if people wanna take those first three steps, but they don't want to have to overhaul anything, containers have proved to be great resource there, Kubernetes is showing a great way to have life cycle management on the app side of infrastructure. How does your customers, and Cisco customers, maintain that non-disruptive operational playbook, because Cisco guys are gonna start changing, moving up the stack too-- >> Absolutely. >> Doesn't mean storage is gonna go away, but they don't want to disrupt anything, your thoughts? >> And it doesn't mean any of it goes away, that's the funny thing, we talk about where we want to focus, but it's as much about not having to worry about the things that we had to worry about that are just there in the future, right? So it's kind of like if you went back 200 years, going to get fresh water was a big hassle, now it isn't, it's delivered to you, right? I know it sounds like a crazy analogy, but the reality is is that we shouldn't have to worry about the basics of on-premise, private cloud, it should just be automatic, it should be simple to execute, simple to manage, simple to order, simple to deploy, and then you focus on the value, so that's what we've been really focused on. >> Keith, when I listen to my friends in the networking space management's still a challenge. The punchline is usually, they hear single pane of glass, and they said that's spelled P-A-I-N. >> I've heard that one too. >> Talk a little bit about how your solutions tie into some of the broader tools out there. >> Well, we first looked at the compute layer and said, because of the extensibility of USC Manager and the API integration, we're able to take advantage of that, and be able to pull that data out, and XOS, right? We're able to do that exact same thing, and the background that we had at Cisco, and knowing those products really well, we were able to gather all the specific data we need to look at those best practices. And it's a complex architecture, but it's a very elegant architecture, because of the high availability, it can provide the performance, the non-disruptive operations that you were bringing up, John. We want to make sure that we're able to keep those things in line, so as we bring our next release of CSA out, we're going to be adding Enterprise Fibre Channel, so the new MDS switches, we're gonna be bringing our relationship with VMWare in our engine to be able to ingest the configuration of VMWare in. We're also bringing back our partner-centric reseller portal so when customer is running Converged Systems Advisor, they can share it to their reseller, and the reseller's going to be able to provide managed services, support services, and professional services to expand, to repair, to augment those existing FlexPods in their customers' environments. So we're really excited to be able to bring that solution back to our resellers-- >> What's that going to do, what's the impact of that, because I almost imagine that's going to enable them to want to be tightly integrated but also get data from their customers. What do you guys see as the value for the partners to take advantage of that? >> Well, I just met with a partner at our booth, just a few moments ago, and walked them through the solution they had never seen it before. It takes a reseller a week, or even multiple weeks, depending on the size of the FlexPod, to actually go through the configuration of the servers, the network, the storage, the hypervisors, and correlate that into a deliverable to their customer. We can do that in sub-10 minutes, sub-15 minutes. >> So faster time to the customer value. >> Faster time to customer value, faster time to resolution if there is a problem, and then again, they're running in their key business applications on this platform, we've been doing it for eight years, we want to continue to expand upon the value the FlexPod can offer. >> But I wanted to add just a couple of things to what you were saying. We talked about FlexPod really being a channel play. That's important to us in product management, not so important to our customers. What it really means to our customers is they tend to have a very close relationship with their partners. Their partners are the ones that are really enabling FlexPod for them. What we're doing with Converged Systems Advisor, is we are creating such a close relationship at a technical level, technology level, between the customer and the partner, that the partner's there to help them on a daily basis. Where there is a problem, it's almost like the telematics in your car, right? All the cars now, they're phoning back home, they're telling where there's something wrong, you get this letter or an email, you need a service, you need... This is exactly what we're achieving with the Converged System Advisor-- >> When you call support, what don't you want to hear? What's your model number, what's your serial number, what's your contract ID? Wouldn't it be great if everybody's singing off the same sheet of music? >> Well, you bring a great point there. There was so much discussion, well, converged infrastructure a public lot, those are gonna be really simple, and they're gonna be homogenous, and they're all gonna be great, but yeah, you're smiling and laughing because the reality is you're never gonna find two customers that have the same environment, no matter what you're talking about. >> No. >> So I need the tooling, I need the data and the analytics, to help get through that. I shouldn't have to spend half an hour on level one support. >> And that's all-- >> I shouldn't have to go through multiple forms the same time. >> Yes, and you're right Stu, that's always been, that's always been the mantra for FlexPod since the word dot. We don't get to an 11 billion dollar install base unless you're doing something right, and the word, the reason the word flex is in there, it's a dichotomy, whenever you go into these sorts of discussions, do you make it really fixed, right? Which is almost like, I call it like straight jacket, right. But you know what you get, right? Or do you make it flexible, right? And the flexibility really addresses the business need as opposed to the technology need. So the product guys love it when it's fixed, the customers love it when it's flexible. >> Yeah, you're talking about basically, changes... You want changes to be rolling with the... Technology rolling with the changes. >> Yes. >> Not be stuck in the straight jacket, or we'll also say tailor-made suit, but things change, you wanna... Fashion changes, so this is a real big issue, and talk about support, I think the ideal outcome is not to even call support, with analytics and push notifications and AI, you can almost see what DevNet's doing here, around how developer are getting involved with DevOps and network DevOps. Coders can come in and use the analytics, if tightly integrated in, so that you get the notifications, or they know exactly your environment. Is that, how far along are you guys on that path, because analytics play a big role, you've got the command center there, the Converged Systems Advisor, implies advising, resolution, prescription, what's the vision? >> So Immersive was a Cisco solution partner at the very beginning, so we were a part of this group right behind us, and it was exciting to be a part of that, to attend Cisco Live and be a part of DevNet, and we expanded upon, as you mentioned, the API, integrations of all these platforms, and when cluster data ONTAP came out for NetApp, we did the exact same thing, right? So we get integrated with NetApp, and very easily able to bring all that data in. Now, massaging that data is the hard part, right? Understanding what is noise and what is the real goodness, so you have to find those best practices, look at the hard work that our teams have done around validated designs between Cisco and NetApp, and look at the best practices that come from those particular pieces of hardware. And then once that intelligence is built, correlating that in the cloud service is really where the magic happens. So our teams are back there talking with the network experts the storage experts, the compute networks, the virtualization experts, and so when we have that data, and now you can decision-eer, right? You can start advising your resellers. So we bring up the rules dashboard, and then we do have alerting that we can send to ticketing systems to the remedies, the ServiceNows-- >> It's interesting, I'd love to get the product perspective on this, and across the bigger picture, because the trend we're seeing, certainly on theCUBE, over the past few years, and most recently this year, is the move from device, hardware, to system. So the systems approach really becomes more of a holistic view where, you're looking at the holistic view of multiple things happening. >> Yes. >> It's not just, this is the box, here's where the rack is, command line interface, you guys taking that same approach, can you just add some color on NetApp's vision on looking at holistically, 'cause that's really where software shines. >> No, no, and that's absolutely, so we have a way of seeing FlexPod as a, we call it a converged system, and for that exact reason. So what CSA is able to do is look at anything that happens within that converged system and the context of the overall system, and that really is the key, right? When you understand things in context it means so much more. Just think about when you listen to someone talk, a word taken out of context means nothing, right? So when we listen to that infrastructure, what it tells us is understood in context. And what it will ultimately do, and I think you were kind of hinting at this, John, the vision here is that there will be self-healing infrastructures, self-healing converged systems, just like the cloud, right? So we are continuously monitoring the configuration, the availability, and other aspects of your converged system and we are able to take action to make sure it stays on the rails. >> We saw you guys at the RSA event, you guys had a small little party we went to, and we were riffing, having fun with some of the NetApp folks, and the big trend in cloud is server-less. So the joke was, is this storage-less solution coming? To your point about this, if you think about it, it's just storage somewhere. This is kind of a joke, but it's also kind of nuanced. This is elastic-- >> No, no! It's absolutely true, if you look at NetApp's strategy, if you look at our cloud strategy, we're the first third-party branded services part of the AGI core services, we're not in the marketplace, we're actually part of AGI core. It's NetApp cloud volumes for AGI, and a customer doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes but let's be clear, we're talking about software-defined storage here, right? >> And cloud-ified, too, as well, talk about cloud operations. >> Yeah, still at the end of the day, for us, our intellectual property is not really tied to hardware, we obviously use that as a way to get our intellectual property in the hands of our customers. But we're not tied to a-- >> You guys made a good bet on cloud, I remember talking before Kurian took over, you guys were kicking the tires on Amazon years ago. >> Yes, yes, yes, that's right. >> So it's not like a Johnny-come-lately to the cloud, you guys have been deep in the core. >> Absolutely. >> To end this segment, I wanted to get your thoughts, because you guys are here at Cisco Live, what should the audience understand that couldn't make it out here as the top story at Cisco Live, and what is your role with Cisco here, what's the big story, top line, high-order bit, NetApp, Cisco story. >> So I'll go first, and I'll let my friend here go second. We were really excited coming into Cisco Live, right. We had this pretty big announcement last week, there were a few different aspects to it, but I'll talk about two of them. A new focus between Cisco and NetApp on verticals around FlexPod, and what that really means is that we're focused on very specific verticals, including healthcare, but there'll be others that come down the line. We announced a new solution base on Epic PHR. We announced some lead customers, including the Mercy Technology Services, which is part of the Mercy Hospital group. So that was super exciting, I think what it does is it just demonstrates that our focus is on the outcomes, as opposed to the actual infrastructure, the infrastructure is the way to deliver that. So we're very excited about that at Cisco. The second thing that we announced was, I said, mentioned this Managed Private Cloud, we actually announced it with four of our major joint partners, Dimension Data, ProAct, Microland, and oh my Lord, ePlus, yes of course. That was super exciting as well, and what it does is it captures the imagination, and it's always very fun when you're standing at a booth, and people say, "Oh, I've known FlexPod, "I've seen you guys around." But there's always something new to talk about. >> The relevance is more than ever. >> Absolutely. >> Keith, what wave is NetApp riding right now, if you look at the Cisco action going on, what they're going through, what should people know about the big wave that you guys are taking advantage of right now? >> I think the big wave is absolutely gotta be what we're doing with the hyperscalers. We by far have taken the industry by storm, when you think about what we've done with Microsoft, what we're doing with Google, you know, sorry? >> And Amazon. >> And Amazon, thank you. >> Small companies. >> Yeah, just small hyperscalers, right? It's amazing what we can do with cloud ONTAP, across those vendors, and when we look at what our customers have done with FlexPod, and their relationship with Cisco and NetApp, and our ability to work together to help customers get their data from their core data centers to cloud, back, to their customers, and for us to be able to use analytics the way we do on FlexPod, I think there's a real opportunity-- >> And riding the scale wave too, scaling is huge. Everyone's talking about large-scale, talking about hyperscale as that is the largest scale you can see. >> Well, and our ability to control where the data lives, right? Because you want to be able to hold control of your data, and being able to use familiar tools like what you're already using in your own data center and in your own converged infrastructures, being able to use that ONTAP operating system to be able to control that experience is gonna be very important. >> Guys, thanks for coming in for the NetApp update, great news, great alignment with Cisco. It's a large-scale world, and certainly, the world is changing, storage is gonna be a critical part of it, server, storage, infrastructure, cloud operations on-premise, and in the cloud. TheCUBE, bringing you live coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more day three of three days of coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the CUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and the CUBE's ecosystem partnership. >> Hello there, and welcome back to the CUBE's exclusive live coverage of Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with cohost Stu Miniman. This is the third day of three days of live interviews. Go to thecube.net, siliconangle.com for all the great stories. Of course it'll be on YouTube after as well. Our next guest is Christine Heckart, head of global marketing for all Cisco's business units in a really great role, focusing on the outcomes. Christine, great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> You're wearing the DevNet hat that says DevNet Social Club which is very interesting, because they had a huge party last night celebrating with 500,000 developers. Quite a social party. >> Right. >> And they had the hats, looking good. >> Unbelievable, unbelievable milestone. Really changes the nature of the industry, you know. The network is becoming an open platform for business innovation. It's time. It's high-impact. We're very excited. >> It's a new Cisco you're seeing. You have a new role. You're trying to get a holistic view across all the business units which have marketing, but the interesting thing about the DevNet success is in only four years, the success on the numbers is really kind of amazing to see that kind of growth of, you know, real, active developers. This points to the digital transformation. Cloud native companies like Airbnb, these are proven case studies. Now the enterprise is moving there. What's your view of that? How do you look at the digital transformation? >> Everybody's talking digital transformation. You know, it's like, I've been in the industry 30 years. To me, the digital transformation happened in the '90's when we truly went from analog to digital. This is wave two, maybe three, and it's not so much that we are digitally transforming. It's more that we are now learning to harness networks in new ways. And I don't just mean like technology networks, but networks of customers and partners and developers and allowing them to co-create value for each other. And when that happens, you know, more usage creates more value, creates more usage. You get this virtuous cycle, this network effect that's happening. That's the big network. And of course, if you're going to do that as a business, you need a different kind of architecture, small n. You need a new business architecture to build that new business model on. And that to me is the really big transformation that's happening. It's what makes it fun to be in this industry again. Very exciting. >> Yeah, Christine, I love that. I say most of my career is like I talk about networks of networks because I'm a networking guy by back ground, but, you know, at the CUBE, we're about community. Talking about that network effect, we've had on some of the research from MIT talk about this second machine age and how you're gonna be able to leverage some of these things, so just speak a little more of some of the cultural changes we see, and, you know, how the different networking and networking play together. >> Yes, I love the network of networks, 'cause that's another way to say network effect. There's a guy in MIT, in the MIT media lab, named David Rose. He wrote this book called Enchanted Objects, and I just love that concept of, you know, living in an enchanted world. That sounds amazing. But he talks about kind of a ladder of enchantment or a ladder of connected value, and the way I internalize it is when you connect an object, you change its nature. But we're not just connecting things back to a central data center anymore. David Goeckeler kinda talked about this. Chuck in his keynote referenced it. The whole world has changed. It's now about connecting things to each other, and it's creating the context and the socializing of things, the network of networks. And then how do you let those things and let people interacting with those things co-create value for each other? And DevNet comes in there, opening up the API's, opening up the data, allowing people to create new applications that have never been thought of before. But this, to me, is the big opportunity that we all have together, and we're. This is the age of networks. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote that book Seventh Sense, which I think should be the bible of everybody in this industry, and it says we are truly in the golden age of networks and probably just at the beginning of it. There's a lot of change to happen. >> We love network effect, so we totally love where you're going with this because our business has got a network effect dynamic in how we do our media, but I think, more importantly, you're talking about value creation with networks. This is a fundamental, new trend that's now taking the connected world to another level. So we're all connected. >> Right. >> Audiences are out there. People are out there. So people who are building the networks are the ones that are creating the value. >> Right. >> The question that we're looking at and trying to understand is where is the value capture? We see open source as a great example of co-creation. How do you view that in your mind? Is network effect capture, is it collaboration? What's your thoughts and what's your reaction to the notion of if we're connected, how do we come together and how do we capture it? >> So, the way I've been thinking about it recently. I don't know if this is the right way, but companies are at different stages of this. You've got companies that are very traditional. You've got companies like Cisco and Microsoft that are transitional, and then you've got companies that have transformed. And for any of those companies, you can create. You can harness that value of network effect. You can do it at the infrastructure level. So we talked about that a lot in the keynotes, like with security, where one person gets sick, everybody gets inoculated because of what we did with Talos, and that's a network effect, but it's captured inside your infrastructure. When you're using AINML or you're automating things, that's a network effect inside your business infrastructure. You can do it at the product and service level. Just a single product. You can do it at the internal people level. How do I get my people collaborating in new ways and creating better value, co-creation of value, network effects among the people? You can transform the company, and your business model can be based on that. Or you can transform the whole industry. You know, if you look at what all the normal examples, Airbnb and Uber, they didn't digitize. They created network effects by having a network of drivers and riders or a network of people who own houses and people who want to rent houses. It's the capital N, right, that's at the business level, and ultimately it's transforming whole industries. >> I got to get your thoughts 'cause this is right in line with Chuck Robbins's keynote around an open new, modern era. >> Right. >> He put the classic network architecture slide up. Hey, firewall, old way. Let's go look at the new way. This is really kind of a thought leadership point that's super important because as we engage with intent networking changes, the outcomes are driving a lot of the architectures. It used to be the other way around. >> Right, exactly. >> Here's what you've got and here's what you can do with it. Now it's what do you want to do? >> Right. >> How does that affecting change? Obviously DevNet is a great example. That's a freight train. It's gonna go another inflection point, we believe, but this new mindset is changing how people are organizing, and the future of work is involved. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you know, it's so many layers, but ultimately it's about harnessing the wonder and taming the chaos of this hyper-connected world, and I don't think you can build a new business on an old architecture. If your business infrastructure was built 30, 20, even 10 years ago, it's just not built for the modern age. And it's about mindset shifts and architectural shifts, but going from hardware to software because you need that realtime agility. Going from closed to open. Going from CLI to API, right? The DevNet orientation. There are these big shifts that we have to make in the way we fundamentally think about architecture, and then there are shifts we have to make in the way we architect networks, in the way we build applications, and all of that is what we have to do together as an industry. >> So Christine, you know, we've been in the networking world for awhile. One of the challenges we saw for businesses many times is the network was slow to change, and, you know, enterprises would be like, oh no, I can't do that because, you know, it's a bottleneck for innovation. So we've been excited to see Cisco moving up the stack. The DevNet momentum here, explain how we can flip that bit and make sure that, you know, networking is now a driver for innovation rather than an anchor? >> Right, it should be the driver. We say the network is now open for business. The network needs to be the platform for business innovation so I could answer in a technical level, but where I'm gonna go is higher level. You think about Cisco's logo as a bridge, and what bridges do in the physical world, is bridges collapse space and time. Right? If I live in the bay area, to get from San Francisco to Pleasanton, you used to have to go all the way around the bay. And you built a bridge, and you gain time. You collapse space, and you accelerate things. And that's what technical bridges do, too. It doesn't matter if we're collaborating with people around the world, we're collapsing space. It doesn't matter if we're trying to accelerate the pace at which we bring something to market, we're accelerating time, time to market. Technology bridges collapse space and time, and you get that acceleration effect, that small world effect, as a result. Now ultimately, that's what these technologies have to do. We do it through automation. We've gotta simplify things. We've gotta make it possible to program a network in the language of business, which is what intent-based networking is about. And you take an API, and you say what you want to do, and it automatically calls up those resources from the network and makes it happen. >> Talk about Cisco's role in that vision. By the way, it's a beautiful vision. We see it the same way, but the language of business is changing. You mentioned outcomes. These are new things. You mentioned API's, intent-based. What are some of the things Cisco's playing in the role of that future innovation? What's the role for Cisco? >> Well, Cisco has to play a couple of roles. Well, two of them at the same time. One, we're transforming our own business, and while we do that, we have to help all of our customers transform their businesses. And to me, we play two really important roles. One is as technology leaders and visionaries and evangelists. That's what this whole show is about. Like, the smartest people in the world are doing this stuff. How do you bring them all together, and how do you collectively move forward, collectively make each other smarter? We've got a network effect just here, right? Because we all make each other smarter. We learn from each other, and we learn how to take things forward. So Cisco with its R&D engine, and, you know, everything we do to automate and automate business and kind of create that hidden magic that makes the modern world possible, we gotta be doing that. But at the same time, companies and cities and governments look to Cisco as somebody to help show the way at the business level, at the human level, at the impact on the world, and, you know, that's where all of our social responsibility stuff comes in. We talk about everything from connected rhinos that help to preserve the ecosystem in Africa and make sure that there's not as much poaching going on with the rhinos, all the way to how we change education or change health care, and we have to play a role in all of that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, because, you know, the statistics we look at, certainly it's been well-documented that millennials want to work for a mission-driven organization, but you're bringing up something where a mission-driven organization actually impacts network effect. >> Yes. >> So it's more than ever now having a mission. Not only do you attract people who want to work for a mission-driven company, there's actually a benefit and impact through that. Can you expand on that? Because I think you're really off to something with network effect. I think network effect is a new dynamic that isn't just a paper exercise to think about, and looking at it as a formula or gamification kind of growth hack. It's actually a real business dynamic. Talk about that. >> It is. Well first of all, network effects are timeless, and frankly, they don't even need people. Bees and flowers create a network effect. It just means more usage creates more value for all users. It's been cities, language. Network effects tend towards kind of natural monopolies. You tend to get oligopolies, smaller numbers with big impact, and, you know, it does go to mission, because what I see happening is every industry right now is being transformed. Just like we saw back in the 90's, the Internet kind of went through every industry, and it changed it drastically and ultimately changed the whole world. And we see that happening now, but where we see it is at the whole ecosystem level because you're seeing network effects happening in entire industries. And our mission is to help every company in the world find its relevance, and really every person in the world, certainly every person in our industry, find their relevance. People are searching for how to become relevant in this very hyper-connected, changing time, and Cisco can help people in this industry find their relevance. We can help each company and each industry find their way and find their relevance, and when you do that, goodness is created. And when you fail to do that, a lot of people, jobs get impacted, companies get impacted, communities get impacted. And we want to see the positive impact, not the negative. >> It's so interesting. Cisco's core competency. I'm just seeing some of the signs around here, 25 years of CCIE. It's a networking company, but you're bringing network effects at a whole nother level. It's a business architecture. >> It's a capital N, not just a small n. >> You're bridging the network effects of technical with business network effects, and that's where the secret sauce is. >> That's where the magic happens. >> Christine, great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Thank you for having me. >> See you supporting DevNet with the hat there. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. Good to see you. Great stuff here. Network effect is a business dynamic influenced by actual technical network. Cisco's at the center of it. So CUBE with our network effect is bringing the data to you in realtime. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be back with more after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (electronic music flourish) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando Florida. Joining me, my co-host for this segment Dave Vellante sitting in for John Furrier and happy to welcome to the program Jeff Eckard, who's the Vice President of Storage Solutions at IBM. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, good to see you guys. >> All right, and 26,000 people here. It'd been many years since I'd been to Cisco Live. There's some things that are same, many of the same faces, but a lot of new jobs, a lot of buzz going on. What's your impression been of the show this week? >> Yeah, it's been an interesting, great show for IBM and our presence, but it's a very large ecosystem of Cisco partners, a lot of their, our joint end users and a lot of focus on multi-cloud. You've consistently heard that as a theme from Cisco as well as IBM since last fall at their partner forum and they've continued it here with a lot of focus on being able to take tools and capabilities and enabling enterprises to manage data where they want to manage it. And it's really interesting, from traditional systems vendors like Cisco, to see that focus particularly around developers. >> It's been fascinating for me to watch. Jeff, you and I have some background in the storage and storage networking piece, specifically, where it was like, OK, where I sit in the stack and I've got a couple of integrations, and we work on our standards here. It's much broader. >> Oh, absolutely. The things that we're working on. We're talking about cloud. There's a lot of software that flows. Data and applications are critically important. Talk a little bit about some of that transformation and how you're seeing the expansion, and-- >> Yeah, no, it's a interesting time. If you think about the opportunities and challenges facing all enterprises, data is at the core of digital transformation, digital enhancement, whatever term you wanna use with it. Typically, it's focused in on wanting to provide realtime insights so that you make better decisions against threats or opportunities. Being able to deliver personalized services to your clients, and then also improving your internal processes and business outcomes. And so data is core for digital transformation, and you kinda see, kind of this web of what we're talking about here and then what we're doing with clients as well. >> You know, Jeff, you talk about multi-cloud, you've been in the business for a while, and throughout your career you've tried to help customers simplify their lives, and everybody felt, I thought, OK, I'm gonna put stuff in the cloud, it's gonna get simpler, and now you see this spate of clouds, whether it's infrastructures of service, private clouds, SaaS, and complexity is, in some regards, never have been higher, particularly as it relates to the data. >> That's right. >> You've gotta figure out, where do you put this stuff? How do you protect it, what about governance? Even if you think security's better in the cloud, it might be different for every cloud. So how is IBM approaching, generally in your team, specifically approaching simplifying the complex of this multi-cloud world? >> Sure, so from an IBM Perspective, at the top level we approached it with innovative technology and a lot of industry expertise, whether it's in financial services or healthcare, cloud and what we do with the public IBM cloud is really important around the services we provide there, data and AI, and then as you come down from that, modern infrastructure is key because modern infrastructure supports the data. So when you look at 80% of enterprises are intending to be multi-cloud. Something like 70% already are, right? Because of what you referenced with the consumption of SaaS. So, multi-cloud is the defacto operating model for applications and then, therefore, for the data. So from an IBM storage and SDI perspective, we kind of view... There are three primary adoption patterns that we're seeing with our clients. The first is around modernizing traditional applications or workloads, which also drags modern infrastructure, flash-based systems, leveraging more of storage efficiency technologies, like compression and dedupe, being able to protect that data, whether it's in a traditional VMware environment or the emerging containers environment. So, yeah, data's at the core. The partnership that we have with Cisco around VersaStack enables us to support traditional private clouds, whether those are built on the VMware set of tools or now, as last week we announced, the VersaStack for IBM Cloud Private. IBM Cloud Private is an enterprise platform for developers to leverage microservices and containerized IBM Middleware Services, whether that's WebSphere or MQ or Microservices Builder, as well as a whole catalog of open source technologies and tools to get agility out of the DevOps process and then also layer on analytics on top of that. >> So customers, they're gonna want consistency across all those clouds. So what role do you guys bring? Are you trying to be a platform of platforms, or is that too aspirational? Obviously, you can't have 100% market shares, so that's not practical. But to the extent that people adopt your technologies, is that how we should be thinking of about it? >> Well, so IBM Cloud Private is an open platform. It's built on Docker runtimes and Kubernetes orchestration. It's open to where you can leverage things like Red Hat OpenShift if you've chosen them for your containers platform, and then we also support the traditional Private Clouds with VMware. So, there's a whole set of tools in there. What we're trying to do from a data management perspective is protect it, whether that's backup and recovery, morphing into this new category of secondary data reuse. So, for instance, from a traditional workflow of just doing backup and recovery, we can now take native format copies of the data, whether that's in Oracle or SQL Server database, et cetera, and take that data to the Public Cloud, where different personas and use cases can act on that data. So you can spin up a VM from that Native format within our tools in the IBM cloud. So that's from a data protection standpoint. On data management, we have, later this year, we'll talk more formally about programs that we have around metadata management. That's where you can index and classify, for instance, unstructured or structured data, and act on that in terms of, where was it last accessed? Who should be accessing it? Is it personally identifiable information? Do I wanna run analytics on it? So the metadata management is an opportunity to plug in to broader IBM things, whether it's Watson data platform or information governance catalogs, to provide that kind of uber across cloud infrastructure management. >> And that's a machine sort of intelligence, automation component, that scale, right? >> It could absolutely be used for augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, some of the machine learning pieces as well. >> Jeff, Jeff, I'm wondering if you could give us a little insight of some of the places that customers are falling down. We were just talking to a systems integrator before you came on and he said, "Well, sometimes I take a virtualized environment "and I move it and it's not really geared "for this modern platform." Containerization can help in a lot of these environments, so when you talk about the pattern we've seen that works many times is you modernize the platform, and then I can modernize the application, start pulling things apart, start refactoring, start playing with some of these environments because I can't just... Lift and shift can help, but it can't be that's the only move. There's a lot of work that needs to get done, and a lot of time that's underestimated. >> Right, well it's not a panacea, but there is a key tool called Transformation Advisor that is part of the IBM cloud platform. It's intended to assist with the challenge that you just stated, which is, OK, how do I take a traditional workload, determine if it's ready to be containerized, and then start the process of containerization. You can go back to some of the VM migration pieces, too. There's a whole set of tools that enterprises have used. Transformation Advisor is one tooling example of what we can do in the platform. And then we obviously have services through Global Services that can help at a large scale for enterprises to kinda make that step. >> You bring up a good point there, 'cause we always struggle with some of these tool transformations, but if you go back to virtualization it was really some of the organizational things that had to shift. Wonder if you can talk about some of the things that are changing here. This show, we've spent a lot of time talking about Cisco's moving up the stack, network people are much more closer tied to some of those new application development, especially with things like intent-based networking. >> Well, it's a interesting reminder that we get often from clients, 'cause you're really touching at some of the remember the operational steps, things like containerization are interesting new technologies, and there's a lot of advantages to them. But just going back a minute, of the heritage with what we've been doing with Cisco around VersaStack, leveraging it on a VMware environment, we hear a lot from customers that their operational practices really are set around Vmware and the VMware tooling. So one of the things that we did with IBM Cloud Private is, it can run on top of VMware. So as customers want to take a kind of transitive step towards microservices, they can continue to leverage their operational practices around VMware. So it's important to, it sometimes takes enterprises a little bit longer than you may guess, right, to embrace the new set of things. Our product portfolio and our directions are set where they can leverage some of the operational pieces they already have. >> Well, just for our viewers who may not know, I mean, the recent history of IBM and Cisco is quite interesting. IBM at one point purchased a company called BNT, which got sold as part of the X86 sale to Lenovo. That opened up a huge opportunity for IBM and Cisco to partner because it was very clear swim lanes. And that sorta catalyzed a relationship that from your standpoint, VersaStack was sort of the first instantiation of that relationship. So, take us through, sort of, where you guys are in the partnership and where you see it going. >> Sure, yeah, so VersaStack, for folks who may not be familiar, it's a Converge System, right? So it's IBM storage, flash or otherwise, leverages Cisco UCS servers, and then their Nexus and MDS Switching. So it's integrated, validated as a single solution to, as the name implies, to be very versatile and provide agility and flexibility. And so, through our routes to market, either with distribution or resellers or system integrators, it is a way that we can address platforms that matter to our joint customers. We've talked about IBM Cloud Private. A lot of heritage around VMware and SQL server and Oracle and a lot of focus around SAP HANA. So, we typically will partner around which enterprise platforms are we going, and then we also partner, in general, around MDS Switching with Cisco, and we'll talk more about that in months to come as we enhance that relationship. >> So, the solutions part of your title, you just mentioned VMware, Oracle, SAP HANA, there may be others. How do you guys approach solutions? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so a solution, at a PetaLogic level, is a successful repeatable outcome. And what we focus on, then, are the integrations that matter. Those could be, integrations with IBM tools, like we talked about with IBM Cloud Private. Could be the integrations that we do jointly with Cisco through the validated design process for some of these applications or databases. And so we have teams that do the validation work and figure out how we marry IBM capabilities with ecosystem capabilities. And there's a whole, whether we're automating private clouds or accelerating workloads including the partnership that IBM and Cisco have with Horton Works. And then in industry context as well, particularly in healthcare and financial services. We'll pick the platforms that really matter and then do the integrations that enable us to take, whether it's our systems or our software or IBM level capabilities to market. >> I wanna come back to this simplicity theme, specifically in the context of data protection. With all this multi-cloud, data protection has become a really hot topic. You guys have dramatically simplified your data protection offering with Spectra Protect Plus. Talk about data protection, how it's changing from where it used to be just, OK, it's a virtualized world. We kind of understand the challenges of virtual data protection. That has played itself out, and now there's a whole new wave coming. What's your perspective on this? >> Well, I don't know if the virtual is play, I mean, the virtualized environment is still kind of paying the freight, if you will. >> Yeah, played out in terms of-- >> Yes, no, no, yeah, right. >> We understand what had to change. >> Right. And customers have made that change >> Yeah, and your simplicity point on that is really key. So one of the enhancements that we announced last year at VMWorld was Spectrum Protect Plus. So that's an agent list, OVA based, VM based backup and recovery tool. And it's very simple to use. The trick is that we've focused its capabilities around secondary data re-use. So I mentioned earlier, that whole workflow has evolved to where the data has increasing value beyond its primary use, right? So backup and recover, but then we can leverage those native format copies. Spectrum Protect Plus is available either on a bring your own license or a monthly subscription in the IBM cloud, other clouds over time. And so we enable enterprises to not only do the traditional backup and protection, but very simply, move that data to either a secondary or tertiary data center, if that's still a part of their backup architecture, or into the public cloud. And so the simplicity factor comes in, again, that it's agent lists. There's a catalog of where all your copies are, and you can reuse that data for whether it's DevOps or DevTest or analytics purposes. >> OK, so that's helpful. So what I'm trying to get to was sort of the enablers, maybe from a technology standpoint, because in the virtualization world, it was all about efficiency because you didn't have the underutilized physical resources anymore. >> Yep, right. >> All the servers utilized 10%. (chuckles) Well, I got rid of a lot of those physical servers, and the one job that needed that power was backup, so I needed a new way to approach it. What I'm hearing is, in this multi-cloud world, it's a focus on simplicity. I'm inferring from that, a cloud-like experience, maybe some other capabilities that you guys are-- >> Yeah, so. >> Doing away with. >> The containers are a progression. I mean, VMware came around to maximize your CPU and storage utilization. Containers provide yet another level of efficiency on top of that. They bring with them the need for changes in your data protection. And so we, at Think in March, we talked about our directions around container aware data protection and container aware snapshots. Most vendors will use snapshots and then volume level controls of how we've traditionally done backup. We have a progression, and we'll talk more about it later in the year, of how we do snapshots, again, that are container aware. They leverage our tools, such as Spectrum Copy Data Management, Spectrum Protect Plus, integrate with our arrays. But they'll bring the same level of capability that we've had traditionally in a virtualized environment to also support data protection in a container world. >> Well, it's an interesting landscape right now in data protection. >> Oh, it's awesome! There's so many new tools, and it's great to be able, (Dave chuckling) like we talked about earlier, to partner with Cisco around some of this as well. >> Great, Jeff, I wanna give you the final word, as if, for those that couldn't make it to the show, either share key conversation you're having, you're hearing from customers, or a big takeaway from the show that you'd like to share. >> Sure, yeah, we've had a lot of customers come up and wanna know, OK, well, how do you start, right? And we talked about, there are three primary adoption patterns, whether it's modernizing, and typically it will start with modernizing traditional workloads. 70% of private cloud usage is for that particular use case. Well, you can pretty quickly show them, then, the progression to, OK, they wanna be more agile. They wanna go cloud-native. From that private cloud infrastructure, you can do that, and then you can have a consistent way that you interact around services in the public cloud. And so that's what we've been talking to clients about. They wanted to know, how do I start with what I have, and then how do I get to this better future? And how do I leverage your tools and capabilities? And so whether that's with IBM systems components or what we do with our partnership with Cisco, we're showing them how we, collectively, can help them on that journey. >> All right, Jeff, I really appreciate all the updates. Dave, thanks so much for joining me for this segment. >> Yeah, thank you. >> We still have a full day here, three days wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, Cisco Live 2018. Thanks so much for watching. (techno musical flourish)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCube's Ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. It's theCube's exclusive coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. It's day three of three days of live coverage. Go to thecube.net, siliconANGLE.com, to get all of the stories. And of course, I'm here with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon, my co-host for the week. Our next guest is Gary Harrison, Head of Technology Services, Metsi Technologies, welcome to theCube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you guys, it's good to be here. >> So, you're in the Cisco Ecosystem, so Stu and I have been talking about this all week. A couple of big trends: open, Cisco's opening up, you've got DevNet success with developers. Cloud is a new architecture, okay. Intent driven architectures are huge. Sounds like outcomes to me, so I hear a lot of these conversations about "what's the outcome?", and then building a technology. So I wanted to get your thoughts on that, from your perspective, what does that mean to you? When you hear that, intent networking, developer community, it sounds a lot like a different Cisco. >> It's a different model. It's changing, I think, the way business processors are today, and getting organizations to understand the process of capturing what they want the infrastructure intent, and their application intent look like. And then understanding how that drives different models for deploying services, as well as the operations behind it. >> You guys do a lot of stuff with customer, I want you to take a minute to explain what you guys do, your company. What are some of the things you guys get involved in? Where are you in the ecosystem? What kinds of projects are you engaging on? >> We're a company, so we're a professional services partner, we're a service only integration partner with Cisco. So it's just through, we don't resell, so we get to focus on purely customer success, and we help enable the channel and the partners directly. And the focus is the Enterprise Cloud Suite. So it's really around helping customers understand how to get the most out of those technologies, how to choose the right element of the cloud suite for the job. >> Gary, so you're in an interesting position, to watch some of the transformations going on in Cisco. We said the old way of measuring Cisco was boxes and ports, and the new way is, you know, software, to open and those things. Since you're not one of the, you know, not in a derogatory way, box sellers, you know, give us your viewpoint as to how Cisco's going through that transformation and how your customers are reacting to that. >> So it's definitely a good shift towards those softer elements of it. And we're seeing the strength of the software and the products that come out, and the capabilities, it's rapidly changing. And you're seeing the increase in the product suite recently, the number of, the move towards analytics and other software to support operational life cycles as well as just the provisioning cycles. I think a challenge for the customers is a lot of complexities introduced. A lot of the new tools out of the box out there. And the difficult question is always how to best use each particular tool to get value for the business. >> Yeah, it's one of the big questions is it used to be, I really understood my network because I built it. I racked it, stacked it, wired it, you know. Configured it in the CLI, today a lot of the pieces of the network you're managing, you don't own. They're in the cloud, they're extending beyond. How do your services and solutions help customers get their arms around this, kind of, multi-cloud world? >> It's always the focus on, I guess, is reducing that complexity. There's a lot you can do with the different software that's out there. And really, to try and step back from just the solo tools, and looking at the cloud stack as a whole, and starting small, starting simple. Identifying those early use cases that will help drive cloud adoption in an organization, and then understanding how the software and the tools benefit them to do that. You know as you say, you can't see inside the software easily. If you're going to bare the infrastructures code, you need a way to make sure that as you build that code and those processors that you keep that visibility into what that softwares meant to be doing for you. >> Gary, on that point, I want to just double down on that concept holistically. We hear that, all week we've heard from interviews, from Cisco executives as customers, that it's the systems view almost, it's not the box view. What does that mean to the customer today, and how far along are your customers in that mindset? Are they there, are they kicking the tires? 'Cause you got to engage on real frontline projects where there's outcomes involved and the plumbing's in place. Okay, so how do you get there without disrupting? Right, that's the question we hear. But so how do I get the holistic view without disrupting the business? What's your thoughts on customer's position on that? >> I think to get the holistic view, it's about the business needs I think embrace that. And understanding, though, it's about delivering applications and services now. And the infrastructures there to support that. And not focus on these infrastructure-centric models. So that's the first journey, is understanding, you know, what are the services that are important to the business, and how those services are involved. And then I think the challenge we see from the customers is actually, you know, intend to your organizational and process challenges. The technology itself is not necessarily all the complexities, it's how that aligns to the organization. And so I think those early wins and those early outcomes are a organization that's aware of those challenges. >> Like almost getting a little stepping stone, you get a little success, you know, don't take a big project. What's your take on road-mapping in that? Because that's challenging. What have you seen for success use cases that customers can take right out of the gate to get this intent thing going? What are some of the low-hanging-fruit opportunities? >> So one thing we focus on, I guess, is changing our engagement model with the customers. It's something we sort, I guess, of pride ourselves on. Is we're a lot more flexible and agile, ourselves, as a, in terms of delivering infrastructure services. So again, we try to communicate to our customers find used cases that deliver value and return on investment early. And focus on delivering that, sort of, one use case. It doesn't matter what it is in the cloud-sect, whether it's through automation of network infrastructure, orchestration of services on top of there. We pick a very clear use case and develop that first, and then once you understand how the technology's stitched together end to end, you can then start to grow that inside the organization. >> Is there any use cases that pop out that you can just point to, anecdotally, that seem to be popular? >> So there's a couple different extremes, so ACI is a massive enabler at the moment. You know, it's really, since SDN's come along it's a catalyst to drive the rest of the cloud change infrastructure. So we have some very specific use cases around automating that infrastructure. Not just what ACI does itself, but to create that automation layer on top of that. So, you know, people are deploying lots of infrastructure, so that's one of the specific use cases we see. >> Gary, I really like what you said about it's changing the engagement model, because it used to be "I'm gonna' roll out a new application, "okay, I need to figure out the plumbing." Now when I look at intent based offerings there, it's really more about I'm building new applications and the network is a critical piece of it, it actually helps me drive some of these new, you know, modern micro architectures there. You've got to, I'm sure, be talking to a little bit of a broader, you know, jobs inside the customer. How does that change your engagement? Who are the roles that you're talking to today? >> Well actually this is what we find, is tools like Cloud Sender, and for me one of it's strengths is it's fine ability to tangibly capture intent in a application blueprint. And I find that's a good way to bring organizations together, because now we have a focal point for your network and infrastructure, your platforms teams, and your application teams to come together. And it provides a common language to talk about it. And that's one of the real strengths we find to start having those conversations with those different teams within the organizations. >> Gary talk about the old way and new way. We always like to kind of break things down in a very simplistic way. And Chuck Robbins, the CEO, on stage said "that's the old way", it looked like an architecture, hey, firewall, I get that. And he's like, some people actually have this today. And he's kind of looking at the modern cloud, obviously the circle with all the different services. So kind of Cisco plug. But from your standpoint, when you talk to customers, what was the older conversations, that you could point to saying "we used to do it this way", this is what we would talk about, these are the meetings we would have, now the shift is towards this. What's the old way, and what's it transforming into, when you actually have those conversations, what is it like? >> So the big difference for the infrastructure projects, where they were projects, they're very traditional waterfall model. You work out what you want to buy, where you want to be, you put a project plan around that and deliver that. But the engagement we have today to say to people, all the importance is in the software. It's the services you're delivering on the software, and the capability to develop in the software. And that's not something out of the box. It's very difficult to say: where do I want to be in six months, or where do I want to be in a year? So again the way we encourage and the way we engage with our customers is to put a roadmap together, but to identify something in a much shorter term that you can deliver. Start delivering something, and then take a more agile approach around it, to come back, review, and re-plan again, and look at what your priorities are. >> What's the role of the solution architect on this, 'cause a lot of the things we're seeing and then we're trying to, kind of, connect the dots here. Holistic roadmaps are interesting, because you've got have to have a foundational architecture. What is the preferred kind of consistent theme you're seeing around architectural decisions? Are there table stakes, are there certain things that are always going to be in flux? How do you view the big picture on the solution architect piece of it? Is there certain things that are must-haves, weight on this? What's your reaction to that? >> I think a solution, I think it's a challenging piece. I think it's probably where you see organizations are probably weaker, is having a cloud-solution architecture function. We still see infrastructure architecture, enterprise architecture, but that solution architecture for the cloud model, I think that's actually more a challenging piece. I don't think there's any obvious answer in what, you know, for the customers we see, there's no common answer. >> That's a really hot area right now. >> Gary, one of the biggest challenges we see in multi-cloud, is no two customers are alike. >> No. >> But through the customers that you're talking to, what are some of the common stumbling blocks or hurdles for really getting, you know, full value out of their solutions that you see from customers today? >> I think it's understanding the end to end life cycle of a service. So we can do a lot with a multi-cloud capabilities, in deploying when an internal infrastructure to external. But the processes have to be the same, with security, compliance, these other aspects that come into it add a lot of complexity. And also it's not just the way the applications and the infrastructure are built, patching life cycles, you know, post-deployment of, you know, virtual images. The way people then update and maintain them and that life cycle around it. And I think it's different in a virtualized world, in a containerized world we see a lot more advancements around it, and multi-cloud is easier. I think it's for people to take their legacy applications and try and move them into a cloud-native scenario, which is a real challenge. >> Gary, pretend that I'm a friend of yours and I come to you and say "hey Gary, you know, "I'm new to this whole intent-based networking thing, what is it?", how would you describe it? What's your definition of, what is intent based networking really mean? >> There's two parts of it: one is to identify somewhere to capture what the definition of your applications and services are, and what that means, and the infrastructure that lies underneath. Say cloud centers one part of it, other organizations may have other models, but it's rather than working two traditional high level design, low level design, and we see your requirements analysis, now capturing that intent in somewhere that's both software consumable and can be software defined. You can use software to push intent in there, and you can consume it through software. And the next major bit of the puzzle is to provide that freedom to the infrastructure layers underneath so they get to decide how they implement that intent. And that's what gives you this multi-cloud freedom, you know, how we're implemented in our public cloud can be different to how we're implemented in the private cloud. The tools, the processes, the infrastructure, the software, can be different, but the outcome that's delivered is the same. >> Yeah it's interesting to show, you mentioned SDN earlier, we see a lot of activity on software defined data center, architectural things, and again, it's challenging because not everything looks the same, but it's super important. But then we hear things like Google Cloud on stage, and we hear Kubernetes, we hear ISTIO, which is a service mesh, so you start to see up the stack, the applications taking, kind of, almost a network services-like mindset. I mean, micro services are basically, have the same feel as networking, but it's more up higher in the stacks. So you've got some really interesting dynamics. You've got the SDN thing going on, and then you've got in the middle of the stack, towards the application, these cool Micro services with cloud native. This is an opportunity for network engineers. I mean, how would you describe to the audience out there the opportunity for a network engineer, or someone who's in the network game, to take advantage of that, this new trend that's coming very fast? >> It's a different model of networking. And again, the good thing about containers is they do provide this very application-centric focus. Networking is now about providing a service for the application sit on there. And Container Frameworks make that very obvious. So I'd say network engineer, it's a good place to understand that model and that ecosystem. And then see how that can be applied to what we've done in virtualization. And as SDN comes along in a more traditional private cloud infrastructure, on top of the data center infrastructure we have today, take some of those models that we learned from things like Container Frameworks and how do we apply them to virtualization. >> That's a great point about the virtualization, it's almost a roadmap to how to understand the impact and interplay between the networks. It really is. Okay final question for you is, you know, Cisco Live this year seems to be different, what's the vibe of the show, what's your, if you had to, for someone who didn't come here that's watching, say "hey, I missed it this year, "heard there's a lot of action, DevNet's got 500,000 developers", what's different about this year for Cisco Live, what's the most important story? Can you share your opinion on what's happening? >> I guess for us, being the definite village, it is about the definite zone. The buzz we're seeing, the people, the types of questions we get asked on the stand now, there's definitely a lot more interest in this development side of it. >> What's some of the questions you're getting? What are the hot topics if you stack ranked them? >> People just want to understand, you know, new trends in software, coding, you know, how can I apply my coding skills to coding the network, or where do I learn about that, and we get asked lots of questions as people pass the stands. >> Gary, thanks so much for coming on theCube, great to see you, thanks for coming on and sharing your commentary here. Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, this is the live Cube cover day three here at Cisco live, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we're here breaking all the action down, we'll be back with more. Stay with us for day three coverage. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 Orlando. Getting to the end of two days of three days of wall to wall coverage, happy to welcome to the program Wayne Ogozaly who's a cloud architect with Cisco. From my neck of the woods up in New England. Thanks so much for joining us down here. >> Pleasure to be here. It's getting towards the end of the day which means thundershowers will probably hit for an hour or so. >> Exactly, exactly, it's sunny in the morning and I brought an umbrella, who knew. >> Absolutely, so Wayne you've been with Cisco for a few years Why don't you give us a little bit about your background before we get into it. >> Sure, I started out with Cisco as an engineer. Actually before Cisco, a rocket scientist at Raytheon Company, so I had all sorts of fun before I got hooked on the internet stuff. So I've been a data center architect, spent quite a few years in the media area providing mogul applications, as well as some of the content development side of the media part of Cisco And now I'm into service provider markets which is fantastic >> So before we get into service providers give us your impression of the show this year It'd been a few years since I've come and it's changed quite a bit you know. Big crowd here, we're in the DevNet zone definitely some of the buzz of the show here. What's your impression of the show so far? >> I feel a huge amount of energy. I deal with service providers and we've had so many service providers come by our booth. There's a huge amount of excitement about bringing new managed services to market. DNA Center launch was huge for us. We're showing live demonstrations of that at our booth as well, and I feel like it's almost at a tipping point, where we're going to be talking about software defined networking and NFV. It's been a long time coming but now we're actually kind of crossing the chasm hopefully where we'll be sharing with you some pretty big announcements very soon on large customers deploying those exact services at massive scale. >> Yeah, so we love talking about service providers, we're talking to service providers on theCUBE because when you talk about scale, when you talk about pace of change, when you talk about pressures of financials. Well there's very few places where they all come together for the service providers. Why don't tell us about the product solution set that you're working on and what the news is here. >> Sounds great So I'm part of the Managed Services Accelerator group that has developed a new cloud product. It's been around for a couple years. We've had some major deployments namely at Verizon and Vodafone and a couple other tier ones. A couple huge announcements coming out very shortly. But Managed Services Accelerator allows service providers to deploy many different services across a multi-tenant platform that runs exclusively in the cloud. So we'll talk about what cloud native means what some of the services are. But we're able to bring services to market much more quickly than you were ever able to do in the past. We're able to go from service creation to actual service deployment in literally weeks As some of our major SP's, and those services span a wide range of opportunities, like deploying Meraki or deploying Viptela SD-WAN, or deploying a managed routed service Or even deploying DNA center for a managed SD access. So it's a broad spectrum of services that we can help service providers bring to market very quickly. >> Yeah I love that 'cause if you look at the service providers the applications are so critically important. >> It all starts with the app. If you don't have a compelling app nobody wants to buy it. >> Look the public cloud players are adding new application and new services on practically a daily clip these days. And service providers, many of them partnering with the public cloud but there's still lots of things that they need to do themselves, locally or in certain verticals. So give us some insight, what are some of the things your customers are looking for. How do they keep up with that pace of change and how does this offering help them do that? >> So the cool thing about MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator is it provides a service provider platform for multi tenancy, many different customers in one platform many different services from both Cisco and third party vendors, and those services span both physical devices, traditional ISRs, ASRs, third-party Juniper boxes, whatever, as well as VNFs, virtual network functions. That run in a public cloud like AWS or in your private data center, as a service provider or, in a universal CPE, or a virtual branch or for our Cisco folks, ENCS, Enterprise Network Compute System. It's a virtual branch x86, where we can run service chains down there, we provide a wide range of services that provide the ability to configure and deploy multiple services toward a single customer all from one place. Some of the challenges that our service providers have, is that they have many different service offers but each of those service offers is in its own silo. And every time they want to bring a new service to market, they have to spend many millions of dollars trying to integrate whether they're northbound OSS or BSS system. Or integrate with a new set of vendors. We, from a singe cloud platform allow them a single platform to integrate many different services from one place in a beautiful sort of cloud managed way. >> There's a large portfolio that customers need to sort out. One of the areas we're hearing a lot of discussion about has been the SD-WAN, how does that fit into this whole discussion? >> The SD-WAN service is one of our most popular services. It's being deployed at scale at Vodafone and Verizon. The Viptela acquisition for Cisco Cisco SD-WAN, now that it's named, has been very popular in that it allows customers, enterprises to have a choice of NPLS, internet, or even 4G or soon to be 5G backbone networks that they can run the traffic of their choice across. Enterprises want SD-WAN not just for the ability to choose policies and map applications to certain overlays or tunnels. But they're also using it to lower their cost significantly. So they can, from the cloud, kind of like a Meraki cloud. Manage many different devices with a single click of a button, I can push a new policy down in a software defined way to a hundred different devices and maybe move Netflix that might have been running on an NPLS circuit, to a internet access circuit with the click of a button. That's the power that SD-WAN provides and it provides enterprises that capability natively. Service providers offer it as a managed service, enterprises can log into our MSX platform and be able to control the traffic that they want and steer it with clicks of buttons, not large amounts of configurations. >> Wayne you've mentioned a couple of very large customers that are using this, is this something that is geared for the top 20 large service providers or will it hit hundreds, thousands of services providers around the globe? >> It's really both, it's targeted, and I can say that because architecturally it's a cloud-native platform. It's built with Docker containers, Kubernetes microservice framework, when Google, it's built on a similar architecture of Google. So when Google's rolling out 1,500 services a year, the MSX platform's goal is to get more than 100 services a year rolled out in this platform. So the service creation portion of it allows large service providers, like Verizon or Vodafone or many others to be able to offer those services more efficiently from the cloud and manage them. But the smaller guys, are also able to tap into these services because we offer a kind of a pay as you grow model. We offer a one year of three year term license to purchase the product which is very small And then there's like a little three to five dollar a month management fee for every device you have under management. So there's a very low cost of entry that you're able to tap into this powerful cloud management platform and offer any sort of service that you want for both large service providers as well as small service providers. >> You touched on some of the pricing there. How does that work today, do you look and feel like you know most cloud models today, really more of a Opex and a Capex? >> It's a tremendous opex savings. This is really an opex play when we look at it from a service provider perspective. Service providers are challenged today because they're trying to offer many different services but each service is a unique silo. And they've got to integrate a wide range of different pieces of that silo for every new service. So in a multi-tenant environment I need to have billing, I need to have northbound OSS BSS integration, I need to have a consistent user interface, I need to have notifications, I need to have tenancy, user roles, single sign on. Do I really want to integrate that uniquely for every new service or do I want to have Managed Services Accelerator manage all of that for me and then the service provider can focus more on the service. So it's an opex play to allow them to not only bring new services to market more quickly, but once they're brought to market through both REST APIs and our Network Services Orchestrator configure them very rapidly. >> Wanna step back for a second. When we look at this whole kinda cloud discussion for a while, you know there was discussion of like oh well maybe, how much is really going to go to the public cloud or fighting the public cloud and the service providers were caught being pulled from the old world in the new world. I don't think we've really hit equilibrium yet but service providers really understand and the message that I've heard from Cisco this week and really for the last year or so has been that hybrid multi cloud world is where we live. It's not going to be an answer. We always know everything's an additive in IT and nothing really ever dies. What do you hear from your service provider partners you know, how are they feeling, what do they think about, the changing dynamic of this world? >> Like John Chambers used to say, "We need to deal with the world the way it is "and not the way we'd wish it to be." Service providers realize that it is a multi cloud environment. They need to be able to accommodate different services and different service models based on what their customers are looking for. They also need to be able to achieve operational efficiency when they're rolling out those services to be able to make it commercially viable. So what we're hearing from our service providers is that they want a multi service environment that MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator, provides them where they can manage maybe deploying a device in AWS, to front end and application space for a particular tenant and then connect that device. Whether it be a Meraki virtual managed device or a Viptela vEdge device, to an SD-WAN that's connected to rest of their enterprises And then when they walk out of one of their branch devices and they get on their mobile network we can enable through Cisco, the connection between 5G slicing and a SD-WAN service so that the service that they get on their phone and the policies that are applied on their phone are identical to those that they've worked so hard to deploy actually in their branches, in their headquarters, in their campuses, or in the cloud. It is a multi-cloud environment. Almost every single application domain spans all of those components. MSX, or Managed Services Accelerator, allows you to kind of centrally manage all of those functions from one place. >> Okay, so Wayne MSX, new branding, some new features some new customers, give us a little bit of what we can expect to see through the rest of this year with this solution. >> You're going to see some pretty big announcements of some new service providers doing some new services with MSX. Those new services include the deployment of new SD-WAN networks, very exciting on our virtual branch platform where our ENCS, or X86 based branch will be rolled out at large scale with a couple service providers. Where you can decide what VNFs you want to put on there. What service chains they represent and how you want to monetize them. Been talking about universal CPs for a long time, this is the year it's going to happen at scale using MSX and ENCS, and then you're going to see managed devices cloud connect to AWS and wide range of other services including Meraki and others that build out the portfolio. But bottom line with MSX is, we know our service providers want a diversity of services. It's a service creation platform. We expect service providers to bring their service to the table, we can accommodate it, monetize it, bring it to market very rapidly. And I would expect to hear a wide range of wonderful announcements from Cisco and the MSX team in the next few months. >> Alright well Wayne really appreciate you bringing this service provider angle to us. We're at the end of two days of three days of live coverage covering all the angles from Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando, be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the replays as well as all the shows that we will be at in the future. For Stu Miniman and my co-host John Furrier, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> 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, my co-host, for the next two more days. We're in three days of coverage. Our next two guests here from Cisco Ronnie Ray, Vice President of Cisco, and Prakash Rajamani, Director of Project Management at Cisco. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> So all the buzz is about the DevNet developer aspect, the rise of the network engineer moving up to the stack while taking care of business in the software-defined data center, software-defined service provider. Everything is software-defined. You guys are involved in the DNA Center Platform. We talked about the DNA Center, the product. This is a real innovation environment for you guys, so take a minute to explain, what is the DNA Center Platform? And how does that compare from the DNA Center? How should customers think about this? What is it? what's the offering? >> Absolutely. So if we just walk back about a year. A year ago we launched DNA Center. DNA Center is the product, and that supported things, like SD-Access, which is absolutely a new innovation about Software-Defined campuses. Through the year, we've launched showrooms, through the year we've launched Enterprise Network Functions Virtualization, we have capabilities in automation, and these are all product capabilities that DNA Center has. What we're doing today and this week in Cisco live and in the DevNet area right now is that we have launched DNA Center platform, which is the ability to open up and expose all of the APIs and the STKs that now makes DNA Center a product that our customers, our partners and developers out there can now work on and create new value. It could be apps, it could be integrations, it could be new devices, third-party devices that Cisco's never supported before, but they can now make that supportable in DNA Center because we're giving them the tools to do that. >> So this is not so much a customer thing, it's more of a partner or app, is that kind of how this goes? So if I'm a partner, makes sense. is this kind of where it's different? I mean, where's the line here, or is it open for everybody? >> It is for everybody. If you are a networking expert and you've done CLI in the past, what we are doing is making API simpler, we are making them intent-based, which means that they can achieve a lot more and this is open to you as a networking expert, you as an application developer, you as a partner that is providing, creating your services for your end customer or client. All of you can now use DNA Center platform to create new value. >> This is great, it's for everyone. So this is where, if I get this right, we love this notion of DevOps on cloud, Susie and you guys have been talking about network programmability. Is this kind of where it is? We're talking about network programmability, is this where the APIs shine, and what's our vision? >> This is truly network programmability, in fact in the past what we've talked about is device programmability, but now what you're doing in DNA Center platform is really expressing intent and using APIs that apply across the whole network. Prakash can probably give you some examples of what these intent APIs look like. >> I think as Ronnie said, we like to call it Network DevOps, I think Susie calls it that too. And this is the way in which Network DevOps is conductible. There are two kinds of target market that we look at. One is the network engineer who understands everything network-centric, who knows all the nuances, and are very comfortable with those, but then being able to achieve those through a programmable API, that's one market. The way we want to go with the intent API is for the software engineers who want to be able to say, I want to prioritize YouTube traffic less than my network, and I want to prioritize my custom-built app as the most critical for my enterprise, as the most critical on my network. And I want to express that as an intent through an API, and then let the DNA Center platform take care of making that real on the network without having to worry about all the technologies and all the, >> How to provision it, what's going on under the hood, essentially to them it's a call. >> To them it's a call, and it's taken care of. >> That is actually seamless to the software developer, by the way, who doesn't want to get in the weeds of networking. The networking guys who are under the hood, what does it mean for them? They get to provide services to the developers, so it sounds like everyone's winning here. What's the benefit to the network engineers? They get scalability? I see the benefits to the software developer, that's awesome, but where's the network engineer, what are they getting out of it? >> They can achieve more things faster, they can get deeper, and this is absolutely making it simpler for them operationally to run their network. So they can basically free up time to do other tasks, like design and architecture that typically is, very hard to explain. >> Cooler tasks. (laughs) Not boring, mundane, cut and paste the scripts, CLI scripts, to another device. >> Absolutely and that's one part. The other part is about the cool new apps that they can create because there are use cases, even if you look at all the show floor, the companies that are here in Cisco Live and that they come every year, there are use cases out there that even collectively as an industry we cannot solve, that needs to be solved in the context of the company and the environment that you're in and so the network expert that's sitting in a customer environment can say, "Okay, I have this problem, let me solve it, "let me go build-" >> But they're gettable problems to solve now. Because now you're taking off more time, but also cloud and some of the software-defined things are now at the disposal to create that creativity. Is that what you're getting at, this is the new opportunity. Is that what Chuck was kind of referring to in his keynote around getting at these new use cases? >> Certainly, this opens up a new use case because this is a new way to program across the entire network in a much more simpler fashion than it's ever been done before. >> So when I hear a new way to program, I want to understand, what's the learning curve for this? If somebody understands the rocky APIs, is this a short learning curve, if they don't, is it a longer learning curve? >> So what we have done from a learning curve perspective, we have worked with a development team, we have learning labs where somebody who's not familiar with programming completely can start with the basics of, okay, how do I get started with DNA Center platform APIs and get started and go through a sequence of learning labs to get them completely familiarized with everything. Somebody like what you said, like a Meraki person, who's already using the Meraki API, for them, anybody who understands REST XML APIs can just turn around and there's a bunch of new APIs available that they can understand, program, try within the product, and then get sample codes and then build on top of that. So it's that easy as that. >> It was interesting, I was walking through the show floor, talking to some of the customers here, and for some of them, what's off the shelf is good, but I hear them griping about, not about Cisco, some of the partners, like "I can't customize what I need." One of the challenges we've always had in IT is, it's great if you can take the off the shelf, but everybody needs to tweak and adjust what they have. How's that addressed with this solution? >> From a customer's perspective, because we provide in our product we provide a specific set of capabilities, but when it comes to API, we make it much, much, much richer and granular so that people can create any workflow that they want. The workflows that we create in the API context is in three formats. We have what we call as tasks, which are individual operations that we perform, and then we group the tasks and offer them as workflows. And we group the workflows and offer them as an intent. So as a user, based on what level of granular they need, you can go to the lowest level task, or you can go all the way up to the intent based on your skillset and then use them and customize them as it fits your needs. >> So they can get up and running pretty quickly, sounds like, and if you know APIs then it's just JSON, it's all the same XML, all the great stuff, but I gotta ask where this goes from here because one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera is, we've been covering all the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF, you've got Docker Containers, and containers now have been a great thing. Pretty much check, standard, everyone's using containers. And it's great, put a container around it, a lot of great things could happen. Kubernetes and then microservices around Service Meshes, Diane Greene mentioned in her keynote with Chuck Robbins, Istio was a big hot, one of the hottest projects in the Linux foundation, so that's kind of microservices, this sounds like it's got a lot of levels of granularity. I love that word because now when you get to that point, you can really make the software targeted and strong and bullet-proof. How is that on the road map, where does someone who's actually looking at microservices as a North Star, what does your offering mean for them? Is it right in line? What's the progression, what's the road map? >> So, from a microservice perspective, DNA Center as a product itself is completely microservice-based architecture. There's 110 microservices today that make up what is DNA Center. This gives us a flexibility to really update every single service, every single capability, and make it almost like giving customers ability to do this every two weeks or every four weeks, new changes, new announcements, in a very simple fashion. That's kind of how the part is being built. What we eventually want to do is extend the platform as an ability for partners and others to build microservices that can be built and deployed within DNA Center over time. That's further down the road, but given that solution and given the strategy where we are as a product architecture that lends us to extend that to them. >> It's natural extension, so basically you're cloudified. You've got all the APIs, so if a customer wants to sling APIs, customers want to integrate in, like you mentioned, ServiceNow, they can do that easily today, and then you've got some extensibility in the road map to be kind of Cloud Native when things start growing. Timing's everything, it's kind of evolving right now heavily at the Cloud Native. >> I mean that's the benefit of this architecture, that you can really pick and choose where you want to run over time. We are right now on a box, an appliance that helps us solve the solution, but there's nothing that stops us from going anywhere. >> So Ronnie, I want you to talk about the significance, this is an open platform. I've watched Cisco my entire career, and always Cisco's been heavily involved in standards, but takes arrows from people as to how they do this. This is open, what does that mean? And what's that mean to your customers? >> Absolutely, this is basically opening up Cisco to industry-wide innovation. So until now, if you look at everything that we've done on DNA Center and on some of the other Cisco platforms that Cisco developed, but we are now getting to a point where with DevNet, now with 500,000 developers registered, we have the critical mass to basically say the industry can come and develop on top of Cisco platforms. And so this is completely new kinds of innovation that we will see, use cases that we've never thought of, and this will happen. And of course we will continue to contribute to all whether it's IETF or whether it's OpenConfig, all of these in with the YANG models that we are doing across the industry, those will continue, the open source confirmations that we do, but this is really saying, okay, let's provide our best customers and our partners and of course the individual developer that's out there a way to today build new creations and maybe tomorrow there's a part to monetize that. >> It's interesting you bring that up, I love the open. We love open, we're open content. You guys are now open networking, for lack of a better description. Chuck Robbins talked about in his keynote, one of the things I was really impressed on, he highlighted something that we've been talking about, is that the geo-political, the geo-technical world, is a huge factor, you look at just cloud computing, you've got Regis, you've got GDPR, I mean all these things going on, you mentioned assurances off camera, this is like a huge deal, right. You've got a global tech landscape, you've got global tech compliance issues, so you got this now open source and it's whatever fourth generation where it's part of the entrepreneurial fabric. So Ronnie, I've got to ask you, you've been an entrepreneur before. With bringing entrepreneurship into networking, what's the guiding principles, what's your inspirational view on this because this is really, not only save time for engineers, it makes them part of an open collaborative culture, like open source which you're used to, bringing an entrepreneurial vibe to it. >> Absolutely. >> This is a big dynamic, what's your view on this? >> It's a huge dynamic and I can talk from personal experience, you know when I've done start-ups and I've raised money or put my own money into it, 70% of your calories go in building a platform. So you're just looking at how do I store data, how do I process data, how to I look at availability of systems, and 30% of it really goes into building a use case. What we are doing with DNA Center platform is basically saying forget about the 70%. We will give you normalized data, whether it's for Cisco equipment or whether it's for third-party equipment. So the STK will allow you to bring in Juniper or Huawei or Aruba or whoever that's out there and you can bring that into DNA Center, so now you have a view of the entire network, Cisco and Non-Cisco. You have normalized data for all of those and you can configure all of those, you can image update all of those. It's very very powerful. Just from an ISV standpoint, individual available standpoint now you are kind of unlocking, making this almost democratic. >> You've done the heavy-lifting. >> Yep, absolutely. >> That's what Cloud is all about, but talk about the creativity because you mentioned that entrepreneurial, a lot of the energy goes into trying to find the fatal flaw, is the product gonna be product-market fit, you do all that heavy-lifting and bootstrap it, right now it's simply, okay, I can sling some APIs together, get a prototype, then the creativity starts. Talk about the creativity impact. How do you see that impacting some of these new use cases, these hard problems. This is gonna come from, not some guy coming out of business school saying, "Hey, I'm gonna go hire "some engineers and solve that big, hard problem." It's gonna come organically, this is a huge deal. >> This is a huge deal, and because we're making it simpler it can come from any quarters, it doesn't have to be an established company, it can be an individual person that can't solve any use case, and then we ask Cisco, not only do we have, and of course the majority share in the market, but will also we have the platforms, like DevNet, and DevNet now has an equal system exchange, so if something that's cool can float up in the exchange can be voted on, can become something that becomes an absolutely easy part to monetization for somebody, that basically saying, "Okay, how do I marry business "and how do I take network and bring them together." >> This is awesome and it's also external to Cisco, but talk about the global impact. Just outside North America, massive growth, you're seeing things going on in Europe, but really in the Asia and China, huge growth markets going on. When you go to China, talk about mobility, they have mobility nailed down. India is absolutely on fire, growing like crazy. The talent, this is a melting pot of tech talent. How do you make all that work from a Cisco standpoint because what you want to do is bring the goods to everybody, that's open source. >> Absolutely, so think about any of the logical place that people go to with, given the way that the platform is already built, which is, it is Cloud Native. We've not in the cloud yet, but at some point the platform will go to cloud. And we are looking at harnessing the creative talent worldwide, whether it be in Asia or whether it be in Europe, or whether it be in the Americas, really doing that new value creation and taking that to the masses. And Cisco has the right to claim this market, we are absolutely in support of folks that want to do that. That's why DevNet has all of the learning labs and the sandboxes and everything else that's there in support, these are free to use. We want people to come and learn and co-create on the platform. >> And making it open and collaborative, the community aspect of it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, final question while you guys are here, obviously you're at the Cisco perspective, but put your industry landscape hat on, people who couldn't make Cisco Live this year here in Orlando, they might be watching this video either live or on demand when it goes up to YouTube. What's the big story, I mean obviously what you guys are doing, across the whole show, what's the most important stories that are developing here this week that people should pay attention to deeply? >> So in terms of looking at the openness of the platform, Cisco is an open platform, API is really the new CLI because that's the way that you'll talk to the network. And think about what Chuck said at the opening keynote, this starts from the user, the things that you want to do to the applications, wherever they live, whether it be in a cloud, in a multi-cloud environment, Cisco is bringing all of that together. >> Prakash, what's your thoughts? >> Adding on to Ronnie's point, the openness and something that new that we are doing, not just from campus perspective, but campus, branch, data center, and making it open across everything, which is what Dave Goeckeler covered today in his keynote, I think that's something that Cisco is not just looking at one infrastructure, but across all of his portfolio and making it unique is really something that people should take away from this one. >> That's awesome. Great stuff, well guys, thanks for sharing. Thanks for co-sharing, co-developing content with us. I gotta say just from the hallway conversations, people are impressed that you guys are taking a very practical approach, not trying to boil over the ocean here with all these capabilities and announcements, focusing on the network value, where it fits in, and being Cloud Native from day one with microservices is a good start, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for sharing. Live coverage here in theCUBER. Day two of Cisco Live, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage, stay with us here at day two as we start winding down day two here at Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida, be right back.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back live here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live. Gonna go throughout the events, extract them. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Three days of live coverage, our next guest is Sachin Gupta, Senior Vice President and Product Management, Cisco, 20 plus year career, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So we love the product execs, because you've got visibility into the customers but also into the engineering roadmap, which now, as Chuck the CEO laid out, is in a new modern era. >> Exactly. >> So you guys are busy (laughs), right? >> Yeah. >> What does that mean? I mean, what do you guys think about, what do you talk about in the product teams, to go modern with cloud, obviously a lot going on. You got cyber-ops go-- really heavily on with the routers right now, and all the core products. You gotta maintain that. >> Right. >> But yet build out a future path. >> Yeah. >> What are you guys working on? What's the core story? >> I mean this has been pretty significant, I mean we had to reinvent the entire network. And, the motivation behind this is, for many many years, our customers could go in, manually operate these networks, go box by box, they're putting command line in, they're deciding the configuration of each element, setting it up this way, and they provide connectivity, some basic security, some experience this way. And what's happening now is, it's just a sheer volume and scale of things that they're having to deal with. I mean everybody comes in with four mobile devices, there's all these things that are connecting. We talk about 26 billion things connected to the network in 2020. It's mind boggling. And then at the same time, the applications are moving to the cloud, which means your threats surface has expanded. We needed to do things fundamentally differently. And so we reinvented the entire stack, and we're serious about that. The ASICS, the platforms, that they're built on, the operating system, modular, programmable, API driven, the controller system on top. Everything had to be redone from scratch. >> One of the exciting things in following Cisco over the years, Stu and I have been following you guys from really the beginning, you go back, say 15 years ago. The big debate in Cisco is, should we move up the stack, and how should we move the stack? But now, the time, it's almost a perfect path, 'cause you got software defined data center, completely going full throttle, really relevant, lot of stuff going on at the root level of the networks, so networking's not going away anytime soon, and as the things I mentioned, security's obviously a big concern, and then now you got Kubernetes and Diane Greene from Google Cloud saying, "Hey this Kubernetes and containers and service meshes, feels a lot like some of the kind of coolness of networking." So the network engineers now have a kind of a path, if you will, to take their core competence, and drive more value around that. Talk about what that actually means. >> Yeah, so there's a couple of things, interesting things that you mentioned. First of all the data center moving to a software defined path. So we've applied a lot of learning from that. And so we've taken the fabric approach, the automation approach, and brought that to the campus with DNA Center, right. Basically Software-Defined Access and DNA Center. And DNA Center actually is built on a Kubernetes model, so in a cloud type of platform, to allow it to scale out with service offers. So we've actually taken both examples applied it. What does it mean from a network engineer point of view? Instead of repeating mundane tasks again and again, now they can automate network wide. The entire network operates as a single system. I can define a policy, and say "I need this user group, I need these doctors, to have access to these medical records. I want this telepresence application to get high priority." Specify intent, let that system automatically apply that everywhere. And then take data and analytics out of that infrastructure, to ensure that the intent was delivered as expected. It's a very powerful-- They can sort of instead of be boxed by box network engineers, now they're system wide looking at the entire network as a whole system. >> Yeah, Sachin, wondering if you can give us a little bit of insight here. You talked about customers not being box by box. Well, from the product side, you know, you spent a lot of your career helping define the catalyst boxes, and we watched the generations of catalyst switches over the years. Cisco transforming from being measured in boxes and ports, to being a software company. How do you, on the inside, measure that transformation? You talked about things like, the DNA Center and the like, but, what's that been like on the inside, and how do you measure internally that balance between software and kind of the hardware world? >> We measure it through customer success through that software. So how many customers were actually able to get a DNA Center - it's an appliance that has software embedded in it - and get value through the network. And I think one thing I'll tell you is, we found that while, reinvention of the network sounds scary, or "Hey, how do I even start reinventing my entire network, as a customer how do I start?" That you can take DNA Center, take the network that you have, and start sending data from DNA Center, as from your network, sorry, from your access points, from your switches, your routers, your identity product. Send it to DNA Center, and start getting immediate value. Immediate value. So what was the experience for this user at this time, how do I pinpoint where the issue is and go fix it? And so we find that, for these customers, yes the switches, the, all the new products we brought out are important because they're programmable, they have rich capabilities, rich data streaming. But, at the same time a lot of the products they have through a software model they can now get network wide assurance. They can troubleshoot, get automated remediation steps that Cisco recommends. And now the new announcement, if we go there is, how do we expose all of this through an API layer? >> Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause if you think back 10, 15 years ago, doing a network upgrade, oh my God, that was a scary thing for customers. You're thinking forklift, am I doing some major build out, I start up my core, I build out to the edge, it's generation shifting. What we hear from the DevNet team here is you gotta meet them where they are, add value, and then you can make change along the way, almost like we do with applications, slowly pulling things apart. >> Absolutely right, and one of the immediate values is assurance, analytics for assurance. Helping you troubleshoot better. But other piece of value that customers love and that we get great feedback, is you know, racking and stacking a switch sometimes, like in a branch site, they would pay more to get it stacked than the switch itself. Because imagine you know you've got a remote side, you don't have a highly trained person flying somebody out, getting them, installing it, spending a few days there, costs a lot of money. And now we're seeing we can automate onboarding your product, we can automate software upgrades for those products, using DNA Center with intent-based networking. So you start there. Then you start transforming it for policy based automation, some of the more advanced security capabilities that the system provides. >> Yeah, we hear day zero a lot, when some of those use cases, and then you see the shift happening with software as a holistic view. Wanna explore that with you for a second. Because if you think about the system, which I totally agree with by the way, it's awesome. Then you got the DNA Center. A lot of people like, understand it, and people are now moving to that, now trying to understand it. Share the mental model, on how people should think architecturally around DNA Center. Is it an abstraction layer, is it just a set of API's? What are you enabling with the API's? What's actually gonna be the result from that architecture? So, how should I think about it, architecturally, and then what are some of the enabling things that could come as a result? >> Let me explain this a little bit, maybe with two examples, right? On, an example of how it works, an example of where we think we can take this. So how it works is, before the API's on the switch would mean that, you can say, "Hey, how much memory do you have left," you know, "Let me copy an image to you," "Let me reboot the switch to upgrade it," "Let me check if it works." And that's the level you were operating at. When we say DNA Center is a platform and has API's, now you have an intent that you could express which says, "Take all the switches of this type, on this site, and upgrade all of them." Right, and now you have to go through all those steps behind the scenes and that's the abstraction that it provides. So those are intent-based API's. So what's exciting first of all is, look, with that, I can extend, integrate it with IT services, I can integrate it with ServiceNow for example, IP address management schemes, cross network domains. I can support third party, I could do all those things. What's exciting for me is, I'm gonna pull out my device, right? You think about it, this thing has a phone, it has a camera, accelerometer, all sorts of things. But the way it's exposed through the app developer, is through very simple API's and through an app store. We are-- >> So you're essentially enabling. >> We're unleashing innovation on that network. By taking away the need to understanding the depths of networking for the developer that sits on top. >> So it's really on top, a holistic view. So, you're taking away steps it takes to get something done. >> Right. >> And integrating other things. Is that-- on the app side. >> Yeah, from the app side now, I mean, you look at DevNet, and the capabilities that DevNet brings to the table, and now, of the app developer, our systems integrator can invoke powerful network technology without understanding the depths of networking. 'Cause what they're looking for is, you know what I'll give you an example, I'll talk about doctors and medical records. If you need to onboard a group of contractors to help out for six months and have secure access, you can now define that in an application layer, at an identity layer, and automate that completely through DNA Center, without understanding exactly what the network will need to do, in a highly sophisticated way, across all those boxes to make it happen. >> So is DNA Center a net new capability for your customers? >> It is. DNA Center's been around since last August. So less than a year. It is a new controller built for the enterprise. And so yes, many many customers are using it. But for a lot of customers, it's a net new powerful piece of technology. >> I gotta ask you a personal question. You've been in Cisco for a long time, you've seen waves come, and new waves emerging. Why has DevNet been so successful? And you got DevNet Create with the cloud native side kinda coming together, bringing those two worlds together. I mean timing's everything, right? In life, right? So is it timing, is it just-- What is the, I mean the success is pretty significant. 500 thousand developers, you know you guys have. And that's a great developer program. That's robust. >> Yeah. >> So it's on its way to continuing to rise. Why is it so successful? >> I'll give you my honest example. I think you know, networking, people have thought, is sort of big, you know, big boxes, is sort of what networking is. And we always tell people, that even when you think about switches, the majority of our engineering investment is in software. So my network engineers, yes they're plugging in a switch, but the majority of their life is operating the software on that infrastructure. And so by the very nature of networking and network engineers, they're actually very comfortable with software. They're very comfortable with scripting and those kinds of capabilities. Now you enter DevNet. DevNet says, "I am now going to give you a easy way, sandbox way, learning and enablement, for you to learn the API's not just on the network, on the collapse systems, on the security systems, in the data center, and be much more powerful at how quickly you can move. You're much more agile." So I think it was a pretty natural evolution for the network engineer. Now, the last piece of the puzzle was the network. And now with DNA Center, we provide the same sort of API abstraction for the network itself. And I mean, look, so far, network engineers are loving it. I was talking to Paul, who's at Presidio, who's a network engineer. He's actually one of the DevNet Creator award winners. And, loves it. He's a network practitioner, and now can solve problems for his business as a partner and his customers, could never do before. >> Great point. I mean we interviewed Paul, great guy. But you just said something I think is really interesting. The people in the community, the network engineers, they've been solving problems. That's what they do. >> That's what they do! And with software! >> And so now you add scripting to your point, this is not new things, it's not foreign, but the networks are core. >> Yes. >> They're not learning Python to get a career change. They're extending their capability. >> That's exactly right. They're not doing Python just to do Python. They're using Python, they're using the API's, they're using the DNA Center platform to become more powerful as a network engineer. For networking, to solve business problems. >> Yeah, I think the timing, combined with just where cloud is, where you guys are with the programmability, it really is, right, again, timing's everything. >> It's exciting. I think-- >> So, one of the things we've been looking at with Cisco is, Cisco's moving up the stack. And I think, we want you to help connect the dots for us. Intent-based networking really is one of the ways that networking people are building applications. I think in the key note, they walked through some specific examples. What kind of things are people building with intent-based networks that they couldn't do before? >> I think, you know, so some of the app examples that sit on top, right? So, I'll give you simple examples, and some other interesting things. Accenture, for example, is doing automated software updates, much more intelligent software updates, based on you know business information, like who, how many people will get impacted with the update, tying it to the service process with ServiceNow. That's an Accenture use case. World Wide Tech has taken DNA Center, made it mobile. So instead of consuming it on your laptop like this, you can now consume network status, client status, health, on your mobile device. You've got, Dimension Data, that's actually doing SSID leasing. So in your sites as a customer, if you need to create temporary network connectivity, for certain types of users, you can deliver that automatically. Right, so you've got examples of all kinds that are leveraging the power of the network, without actually have to understand all the nitty gritty details behind it. And as a developer or a systems integrator, providing tremendous more value to our customers. >> It's interesting too, one of things that World Wide Technology said here when we interviewed them on the first day yesterday, was, in the old model, there was dislocated capabilities. They'd go talk about business outcomes, essentially what the intent was on the business side, and then, "Great we're done. Now let's shake hands with Cisco." Cisco would come in, and the networking guys would come in, "Okay, here's what you can do." So now, those are coming together. >> Yes. >> Which shrinks the accela--, the time frame, on the execution. So, to actually put it together, that is really kind of DevOps-like. I mean, this is integration, this is kind of like-- >> Right. >> This is a big trend. >> It's a big trend, because now the network has an ability through DNA Center, to take that business outcome, you described it as an intent, translate that into what the network understands, activate it, and then provide the data analytics and assurance, back to the application. And so, you're absolutely right. Before, you'd have to go manually, take that business outcome, and figure out now, how do I, you know, make this happen, through a network that did not operate as a single system. >> Yeah. >> And now the worlds are coming together, and our partners and our customers can move much much more quickly. >> Well you guys are doing a great job, we really think that the clear path to the stack, where the stack is integrating with networking, is colliding - in a good way - you've still got the hard core, software defined, networking in the data center and the networks. So it's awesome. I wanna get your thoughts on, as an industry participant, also Cisco executive, for the folks that couldn't make Cisco live this year, what's the biggest story? I mean we heard a lot of things. If you had to boil it down, what's the most important development happening this year at Cisco live? >> I think the big announcement is DNA Center platform. Where, it is an open API system which supports third party infrastructure, and has that API layer, accelerating innovation through our partners. But what I will tell you, is, that the important message I'd like to deliver, is they can start on this network reinvention today. It is not about a rip and replace of the gear that they have. They can add the software capabilities of DNA Center on the infrastructure they have. And get immediate out the gate benefit, with things like network assurance, DNA assurance. And so I really encourage everybody to look at this and say, "Yes, you know what? Maybe I'll get to the last step later." Start now. You're gonna see immediate value. >> And there's not a lot of-- there's really no disruption. >> And there's no disruption in that. >> They can put their toe in the water, or jump all-- full throttle. >> Exactly. And once you like the controller approach, you can see how it integrates with API's, with everything else in your IT processes, you can then take more steps, like software defined access, policy based automation. Which are more intrusive, and but provide tremendous value. But there's a way to start that's not intrusive. >> Well we're super excited to see how DNA Center continues to accelerate, we love what's going on in DevNet, DevNet Create, you're seeing the cloud growth happen, you're seeing all kinds of new modern era things that we've never seen before. So congratulations. >> DNA Center platform, multiplied by DevNet, right? It's exponential growth. >> Yeah, so it's a great wave. People's jobs will become easier, again, automation for the right reasons, accelerating new value creation opportunities. This is theCUBE. Here in Orlando. Bringing you all the action at Cisco Live. Extracting the signal of noise. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Stay with us, we've got more. Here on day two of three days of coverage. Stay with us. (music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando Florida. It's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to Cisco NetApp and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube's Live coverage here in Orlando Florida for Cisco Live 2018. It's the Cube's coverage. >> I'm John Furrier. The host. Here for three days of wall-to wall-coverage. Our next guest is Shubha Govil. Whose the director of product management for Cisco DevNet. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John. Thanks for having me on Cube. >> Great conversation before the cameras came out. We're talking about development and Cloud Native. But we're super impressed with the work you guys have done at DevNet. Certainly it's the top story of the show here is that Cisco has now crossed over the flywheel of innovation where 500,000 registered developers. >> Developers. Not visitors to a website. >> Yes. Or some marketing program. >> Correct. >> Real engaging developers. >> Absolutely. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you John. Thank you. >> A couple of years. Four years and you're here. You've got DevNet. And DevNet Create. Which we've been covering extensively as well. >> Yes. >> Which is the Cloud Native world coming together. >> Yes. >> This is for the first time in Cisco's history where you have now a clear line of sight for network engineers network developers network experts who have been certified in the CCIE and other certifications. CCNA, CCNP. All the stuff you guys do. You can now see a clear line where you can extend the capabilities and knowledge and expertise in power of networking. >> Absolutely. >> Up the stack. >> Absolutely. >> Finally Cisco's moving up the stack. >> Yes. >> Tell us what's going on in the product side? >> Yeah Absolutely. And I'm gonna talk about very specific example today. And today if you heard the keynote speak. And Susie opened up a few things and announcement. One of them was DNA developer center. And I'm gonna talk about that. Because part of it is how network is an open platform now. And that was part of the announcement. You will hear a lot about that. And linking it back to Dev reports. Quite right. They should care about why they should look into it. So three things I'm gonna talk about. DNA, developer center and what they can find there. And once they go there and they really start learning about our platform on API's on DevNet. What cord exchange does for them. And how they can start not only programming the Intent based on our Intent API's and what they want network to do for them but also sharing some community cord. Are using that community cord. Community Cord if they are just getting started. Right? So on DNA Developers Center we have four capabilities highlighted. These are the API's. Whether they are Intent API's Integration API's to connect with other third parties. Or SDK's to manage multi-party devices. Or there for ITSM or a specific use case integrations. >> So hold up. Go slow. >> I'm kind of not on the uptake as you are on this. Because you're in it. IF DNA is a set of abstractions API's on top of the equipment. >> Correct. >> So it's not natively. It's a set of API. >> Set of API's. >> So that people could use those API's to create services. >> To manage their network wealth. To automate and drive these right use cases. So I might. >> Give me an example. >> Yeah let's talk about an example. Intent. My intent might be to. We were talking about radio conferences awhile back. And I come from that environment. I want to drive a Butler QS for certain level of execs. Right? If they are on the call this was the thing of like eight ten years back. If my execs are on a call make sure they have the best experience. So the QS quality of your network should be set up to a level that there's no disruption. There's no latency in the call. Right? So that's an intent. That's a business intent. Give best experience to my execs. >> So really that's combining policy and QOS together to make it meet the outcome. Which is no latency. >> To meet the outcome. But for the network engineer now let's connect back to the developer. The network engineer whose trying to make this intent possible for the execs. There's a places they need to set up the SQSS. And won't it be easy of them if there was a simple API that they can use to create that solution to drive that policy across the devices. Whether Cisco devices or non Cisco devices. >> This has been the challenge for network engineers in general. Because you want to have things in control and locked down but as you want to do more things that are programmable. >> Correct. >> There's been some provisioning and some configuration management things. >> Correct. >> You're saying, hey you're gonna lock down all the architecture and then move up. Use the API's to do better integration. Make things run smoothly without disrupting the network. Is that right? >> That's part of it. But also it's about making it easy for them. Correct? Simplify the process of doing it. The process of making it happen was long steps of CLI command. That now that network engineer was going continuously. A lot of the time people actually tells us that they would have this cut and paste copy of the command. That they will take from one place go to the next place next device and next device. And continue to do that step. And that's the productivity game we are driving by simplifying where one API call can go across all the devices and make that change happen. >> We've heard that a lot from on DevNet and the hallway conversations that said DevNet's made my life easier. >> Yes. >> I don't have to do those mundane tasks. >> Exactly. >> That were part of getting things done. Okay. Let me ask you personal question. As director of product management for DevNet. What is your product scope? What are you working on? Can you take a minute? >> That's a very good question. And that's where some of these offers we were talking about earlier come in to play. So for example, within Devnet we create a lot of offers to make developers lives simple. Whether we are talking about giving them the best quality of learning content. Or giving them hosted Sandbox environment to try and test. All of that requires a lot of product management knowledge and the need. But really what the 2ADS we have work more closely to get them out to market. One is the thing called Code Exchange. It's a tool for our developer committee. Where we have aggregated the public git code across the Cisco technologies. >> That's on GitHub I think. >> GitHub code right. Absolutely. But the second powerful thing on top of that is our Ecosystem Exchange. This is where we are bringing an aggregated view of every partner out there. Every Cisco partner whose creating great solutions on our API's in a single place our developers can go and find that solution. To really address the business outcome they are looking to address. >> Shubha, I want you to put some color commentary around of some of the feedback you've heard. We hear people of the DevNet community saying I've come to Cisco Live and I spend all my week here in DevNet. Because it really is kind of like a kid in the candy store. (Shubha laughs) >> From a computer science or developer prospective. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the cool examples and demos that you guys have here? What's your favorite? What are some of the things that are jumping out that people are gravitating towards? >> I will tell you one of the most popular sessions that I have seen in the last few days here is Network Programmability for Networking Juniors. That's one. There's also a very Network Programmability one-on-one. Coding one-on-one class. It's basic Python. But applying it in network context. Those are some of the most popular sessions that I have seen. But when it comes to cool demos there's a cool demo around Flex IQ. I think you might be talking to Ashish later about that. >> Yes. >> And really it's a retail scenario how you are tracking. Using the location based service example. But in this case camera feed. Really analyzing where people are. And you'll get to hear more about this. >> We took a ad. I saw the demo. >> Yeah. >> The Flex IQ. First of all I love the name. I said trademark it immediately. (Shubha laughs) Get it out there. First use wins. And it's already out there. But it's really taking a A access point. >> This is an access point. >> And it plugs into a camera. And a great example of some of the coolness you can do with a preexisting condition. In this case an access point. >> So each of these information points that data one that they are collecting. Whether it's a camera feed. It's a location service. Like information about the devices and the environment. Each set of data is the relevance in this. Which is driving the newest use cases. And this data is coming through API's that have labeled but I'd say morockie access point API. All the camera API that are labeled that have enabled C Space. >> This is really the aha moment for me. I've been following Cisco really since the 90's. >> Yeah. >> Or at least when they formed. Being the young gun at the time. Younger than I am now. 30 years ago. But it was really networking. Connecting companies together. It was the plumbing. It was the core. >> Yes. Unstoppable since then. Now the success is still there. But it's really the problem solving is never going away. I saw this security challenges that were outlined in the keynote. We all know Cybe Ops is a huge issue. Cloud is here. You've got industrial IOT going on. And IOT. But these examples that DevNet is showing is that these new capabilities with I won't say a hack but a maker faire culture. >> It is a maker culture right. Which is lot of DIY stuff. So this lot of learning by playing with the API's and multiple one of them. And you'd really find use cases you have never addressed before. We also have a design thinking workshop here going on. And part of it is really thinking about the use cases from the user prospective. What you are trying to address. Before finding the cool technologies. Really understand what your users' needs are. >> Yeah. >> And we are doing a lot of things around that. And bringing it connecting it back to the APIs. Once we learn the right needs. And finding these use cases that were never possible before. >> Well I talked to Susie all the time about this. >> Yeah. >> And I know she's really hardcore on this. But you guys have nailed the community aspect as well. You've brought that open source ethos into the formula. Which makes it more collaborative. No one wants to be alone. I mean the last thing a network engineer wants to do is be the old way of being tied to the chair on the network. Troubleshooting problems. They want to have more collaboration As some of this creativity kicks in. So it's really a new time. How are you guys handling this? Is it like people are having an awakening moment? Or what are you guys doing to nature this? What are some of the exciting things? >> And the best part about the community is that communities learning with each other. Right? It's this feeling of we are enabling our community both traditionally and through even like Cisco Live and DevNet Create. We bring them together to be able to learn from each other much as we learn with them. And trying to define the right use cases and solutions. And that's what the company's behind. The 500,000 developers who are coming and learning with us. They have found the use cases they were addressing for their business. They also found a new skill set that they were looking to learn before. >> Yeah. >> And a lot of them have come along where they are showing their tech cred in the community. Really being the community leaders. >> You know it's been kind of a downer some of the narrative I've seen from press outlets other press outlets and other kind of naysayers has been Hey network guys. You're gonna be automated away. Go learn how to code to save your career. Actually that's not happening. >> That is not happening at all. >> The power of networking certainly as security moves down lower on the stack. And policy and these cool service oriented service meshes. Kubernetes. Really points to the relevance of the network engineer more than ever. You've got SDN. Software Defined Data Center. That's not going away. Automation is going to take mundane tasks away. >> Yes. >> But actions happening at the app layer. >> They have that expertise and 20 years plus experience knowing how networks should be running to make these things possible. The use cases around the applications possible. >> They're more relevant than ever. >> They are more relevant than ever. I would say. Exactly. That's the key. >> Well you guys are at the beginning I think of another set of inflection point. Certainly DevNet's gone in a quick four years. You're connecting to the Cloud Native World with DevNet Create. Which is phenomenal. Those are two worlds that are coming together. I just see another inflection point coming. Maybe it's a million developers. But you've been success in the enterprise where it's been really difficult. Even Microsoft with their legacy developer program .net. The Visual Basic and all the MSDM stuff. >> At the by GitHub >> Yup. >> To kind of maintain relevance. Other companies like Oracle VM wear and other ones they're having a hard time. You guys are just kicking butt. >> So part of it for us is not only focusing on traditional infrastructure. But also talking about the app developer. So these application developers who did not know about network at all. A lot of times they had to fight with their networking juniors to get their application the particular function they wanted to have. Right? So that what we are enabling by bringing them together. Also we have been running small programs like we are trying new markets. Global markets. China, India and some of the things like really reaching out to the big large hackathons. Which are traditionally. For example in India we were recently doing a smart India hackathon. >> Nice. >> There are 500,00 students participated in solving real problems for the country. And DevNet was the provider of applications and API's. Bringing them into the application world with the understanding of network. >> A lot of growth in India and China. Certainly massive new developers coming on board. Okay final question to wrap up the segment. I gotta get your prospective. Take your DevNet hat off for a second. >> Okay. Put your Cisco hat on. >> Sure. For the folks who couldn't make Cisco Live this year what's the big story coming out of the event this year? You guys have been successful with the 500,000 developers. What's the big story developing here? What should people know is the most important story for Cisco Live 2018? >> I think the biggest story I would like to call out is that network is open for business. Network is really open for you to really come and make your intent. Your use cases. Your business outcomes possible. And that's the biggest story I will call out. >> Shubha Govil here product management for DevNet. Here on the Cube. Live coverage. Day two of three days. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more live coverage. As we start winding down day two. A lot of great action. The network is programmable. It's creating value and new use cases. And the developers are in the center of the action. The network engineers seeing a clear path of the Cloud and more. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President Global Channel Sales for IBM Storage. CUBE alum, great to see you. Thanks for comin' by. >> Great, we always love comin' and talkin' to theCUBE. >> Love havin' you on. Get the insight, and you get down and dirty in the storage. But I gotta, before we get into the storage impact, the cloud, and all the great performance requirements, and software you guys are building, news is that the CEO of Cisco swung by your booth? >> Yes, Chuck did come by today and asked how-- Chuck Robbins came by today, asked how we're doin'. IBM has a very broad relationship with Cisco, beyond just the storage division. The storage division, the IOT division, the collaboration group. Security's doin' a lot of stuff with them. IBM is one of Cisco's largest resellers through the GTS and GBS teams. So, he came by to see how were doin', and gave him a little plug about the VersaStack, and how it's better than any other converge solutions, but talked about all of IBM, and the strong IBM Cisco relationship. >> I mean, it's not a new relationship. Expand on what you guys are doin'. How does that intersect with division that he put on stage yesterday with the keynote. He laid out, and said publicly, and put the stake in the ground, pretty firmly, "This is the old way." Put an architecture, a firewall, a classic enterprise network diagram. >> Right, right. >> And said, "That's the old way," and put in a big circle, with all these different kinda capabilities with the cloud. It's a software defined world. Clearly Cisco moving up the stack, while maintaining the networking shops. >> Right. >> Networking and storage, always the linchpin of cloud and enterprise computing. What's the connection? Share the touch points. >> Sure, well I think the key thing is everyone's gotta realize that whether you're in a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud configuration, storage is that rock solid foundation. If you don't have a good foundation, the building will fall right over, and it's great that you've got cloud with its flexibility, it's ability to transform, the ability to modernize, move data around, but if what's underneath doesn't work, the whole thing topples over, and storage is a cruel element to that. Now, what we've done at IBM is we have made all of our solutions on the storage side, VersaStack, our all-flash arrays, all of our software defined storage, our modern data protection, everything is what we'll say is cloudified. K, it's, I designed for multiple cloud scenarios, whether it be private, hybrid, or public, or, as you've probably seen, in some the enterprise accounts, they actually use multiple public cloud providers. Whether it be from a price issue, or a legal issues, because they're all over the world, and we're supporting that with all our solutions. And, our VersaStack, specifically, just had a CVD done with Cisco, Cisco Validated Design, with IBM Cloud Private on a VersaStack. >> Talk about the scale piece, because this becomes the key differentiator. We've talked about on theCUBE, many of the times with you around, some of the performance you guys have, and the numbers are pretty good. You might wanna do a quick review on that. I'm not lookin' for speech and feeds. Really, Eric, I'd like to get your reaction, and view, and vision, on how the scale piece is kicking, 'cause clients want scale optionality. They're gonna have a lot of stuff on premise. They have cloud goin' on, multi cloud on the horizon, but they gotta scale. The numbers are off the charts. You're seein' all these security threats. I mean, it's massive. How are you guys addressing the scale question with storage? >> So, we've got a couple things. So first of all, the storage itself is easily scalable. For example, on our A9000 all-flash array, you just put a new one, automatically grows, don't have to do anything, k? With our transparent cloud tiering, you can set it up, whether it be our Spectrum Scale software, whether it be our Spectrum Virtualize software, or whether it be on our all-flash arrays, that you could automatically just move data to whatever your cloud target may be. Whether that be something with an object store, whether that be a block store, and it's all automated. So, the key thing here on scalability is transparency, ease of use, and automation. They wanna automatically join new capacity, wanna automatically move data from cloud to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to on premise, and IBM's storage solutions, from a software perspective, are all designed with that data mobility in mind, and that transportability, both on premise, and out to any cloud infrastructure they have. >> What should Cisco customers know about IBM storage, if you get to talk to them directly? We're here at Cisco Live. We've talked many times about what you guys got goin' on with the software. Love the software systems approach. You know we dig that. But a Cisco deployment, they've been blocking and tackling in the enterprise for years, clouds there. What's the pitch? What's the value proposition to Cisco clients? >> So, I think they key thing for us talkin' to a Cisco client is the deep level of integration we have. And, in this case, not just the storage division, but other things. So, for example, a lot of their collaboration stuff uses under pitting software from IBM, and IBM also uses some software from Cisco inside our collaboration package. In our storage package, the fact that we put together the VersaStack with all these Cisco Validated Designs, means that the customer, whether it be a cloud product, for example, on the VersaStack, about 20 of our public references are all small and medium cloud providers that wheel in the VersaStack, connect 'em, and it automatically grows simply and easily. So, in that case, you're looking at a cloud provider customer of Cisco, right? When you're looking at a enterprise customer of Cisco, man, the key thing is the level of integration that we have, and how we work together across the board, and the fact that we have all these Cisco Validated Designs for object storage, for file storage, for block storage, for IBM Cloud Private. All these things mean they know that it's gonna work, right outta the box, and whether they deploy it themselves, whether they use one of our resellers, one of our channel partners, or whether they use IBM services or Cisco service. Bottom line, it works right out of the box, easy to go, and they're up and running quickly. >> So, Eric, you talked a bunch about VersaStack, and you've been involved with Cisco and their UCS since the early days when they came up, and helped drive, really, this wave of converged infrastructure. >> Right. >> One of the biggest changes I've seen in the last couple years, is when you talk to customers, this is really their private cloud platform that they're building. When it first got rolled out, it was virtualization. We kinda added a little bit of management there. What, give us your viewpoint as to kinda high-level, why's this still such an important space, what are the reasons that customers are rolling this out, and how that fits into their overall cloud story? >> Well, I think you hit it, Stu, right on the head. First of all, it's easy to put in and deploy, k? That is a big check box. You're done, ready to go. Second thing that's important is be able to move data around easily, k? In an automated fashion like I said earlier, whether that be to a public cloud if they're gonna tier out. If I'm a private cloud, I got multiple data centers. I'm moving data around all the time. So, the physical infrastructure and data center A is a replica, or a DR center, for data center B, and vice versa. So, you gotta be able to move all this stuff around quickly easy. Part of the reason you're seeing converge infrastructure is it's the wave of what's hit in the server world. Instead of racking and stacking individual servers, and individual pieces of storage, you've got a pre-packed VersaStack. You've got Cisco networking, Cisco server, VMware, all of our storage, our storage software, including the ability to go out to a cloud, or with our ICP IBM Private Cloud, to create a private cloud. And so, that's why you're seeing this move towards converge. Yes, there's some hyperconverged out there in the market, too, but I think the big issue, in certain workloads, hyperconverged is the right way to go. In other workloads, especially if you're creating a giant private cloud, or if you're a cloud provider, that's not the way to go because the real difference is with hyperconverged you cannot scale compute and storage independently, you scale them together, So, if you need more storage, you scale compute, even if you don't need it. With regular converge, you scale them independently, and if you need more storage, you get more storage. If you need more compute-- If you need both, you get both. And that's a big advantage. You wanna keep the capex and opex down as you create this infrastructure for cloud. 'Member, part of the whole idea of cloud are a couple things. A, it's supposed to be agile. B, it's supposed to be super flexible. C, of course, is the modern nomenclature, but D is reduce capex and opex. And you wanna make sure that you can do that simply and easily, and VersaStack, and our relationship with Cisco, even if you're not using a VersaStack config, allows us to do that for the end user. >> And somethin' we're seeing is it's really the first step for customers. I need to quote, as you said, modernize the platform, and then I can really start looking at modernizing my applications on top of that. >> Right. Well, I think, today, it's all about how do you create the new app? What are you doin' with containers? So, for example, all of our arrays, and all of our arrays that go into a VersaStack, have free persistent storage support for any containerize environ, for dockers and kubernetes, and we don't charge for that. You just get it for free. So, when you buy those solutions, you know that as you move to the container world, and I would argue virtualization is still here to stay, but that doesn't mean that containers aren't gonna overtake it. And if I was the CEO of a couple different virtualization companies, I'd be thinkin' about buyin' a container company 'cause that'll be the next wave of the future, and you'll say-- >> Don't fear kubernetes. >> Yeah, all of that. >> Yeah, Eric Herzog's flying over to Dockercon, make a big announcement, I think, so. (laughing) >> Evaluation gonna drop a little bit. I gotta ask you a question. I mean, obviously, we watch the trends that David Floy and our team, NVMe is big topic. What is the NVMe leadership plan for you, on the product side, for you? Can you take a minute to share your vision for what that is gonna be? >> Sure, well we've already publicly announced. We've been shipping an NVMe over fabric solution leveraging InfiniBand since February of this year, and we demoed it, actually, in December at the AI Conference in New York City. So, we've had a fabric solution for NVMe already since December, and then shipping in February. The other thing we're doing is we publicly announced that we'd be supporting the other NVMe over fabric protocols, both fabric channel and ethernet by the end of the year. We publicly already announced that. We also announced that we would have an end to end strategy. In this case, you would be talking about NVMe on the fabric side going out to the switching and the host infrastructure, but also NVMe in a storage sub-system, and we already publicly announced that we'd be doing that this year. >> And how's the progress on that plan? You feel good about it? >> We're getting there. I can't comment yet, but just stay tuned on July 1st, and see what happens. >> So, talk about the Spectrum NAS, and other announcements that you have. What's goin' on? What are the big news? What's happening? >> Well, I think that, yeah, the big thing for us has been all about software. As you know, for the analysts that track the numbers, we are, and ended up in 2017, as tied as the number one storage software company in the world, independent of our system's business. So, one of the key powers there is that our software works with everyone's gear, whether it be a white box through a distributor or reseller, whether it be our direct competitors. Spectrum Protect, which is a, one of the best enterprise backup packages. We backup everybody's gear, our gear, NetApp's gear, HP's gear, Pure's gear, Hitachi's gear, the old Dell stuff, it doesn't matter to us, we backup everything. So, one of the powers that IBM has, from a software perspective, is always being able to support not only our own gear, but supporting all of our competitors as well. And the whole white box market, with things that our partners may put together through the distributors. >> I know somethin' might be obvious to you, but just take me through the benefits to the customer. What's the impact to the customer? Obviously, supporting everything, it sounds like you guys have done that with software, so you're agnostic on hardware. >> Right. >> So, is it a single pane of glass? What's the benefit to the customer with that software capability? >> Yeah, I feel there's a couple things. So, first of all, the same software that we sell as standalone software, we also sell on our arrays. So if you're in a hybrid configuration, and you're using our Flashsystem V9000 in our Storwize family, that software also works with an EMC, or NetApp box. So, one license, one way to do everything, one set of training, which in a small shop is not that important, but in a big shop, you don't have to manage three licenses, right? You don't have to get trained up on three different ways to do things, and you don't have to, by the way, document, which all the big companies would do. So it dramatically simplifies their life from an opex perspective. Makes it easier for them to run their business. >> Eric, we'd love to get your opinion on just how's Cisco doin' out there? It's a big sprawling company. I looked at the opening keynote, the large infrastructure business doing very well in the data center, but they've got collaboration, they do video, they're moving out in the cloud. Wanna see your thoughts as to how are they doing, and still making sure they take care of core networking, while still expanding and going through their own transformation, that they're talkin' very public about. How do we measure Cisco as a software company? >> Well, we see some very good signs there. I mean, we partner with 'em all the time, as I mentioned, for example, in both the security group and our collaboration group, and I'm not talkin' storage now, just IBM in general, we leverage software from them, and they leverage software from us. We deliver joint solutions through our partners, or through each of the two service organizations, but we also have products where we incorporate their software into ours, and they incorporate software in us. So, from our perspective, we've already been doing it beyond their level, now, of expanding into a much greater software play. For us, it's been a strong play for us already because of the joint work we've been doing now for several years on software that they've been selling in the more traditional world, and now pushing out into the broader areas, like cloud, for example. >> Awesome work. Eric, thanks for coming on. I gotta ask you one final, personal, question. >> Sure. >> You got the white shirt on, you usually have a Hawaiian shirt on. >> Well, because Chuck Robbins came by the booth, as we talked about earlier today, felt that I shouldn't have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on, however, now that I've met Chuck, next time, at next Cisco Live, I'll have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on versus my IBM traditional shirt. >> Chuck's a cool guy. Thanks for comin' on. As always, great commentary. You know your stuff. >> Great, thank you. >> Great to have the slicing and dicing, the IBM storage situation, as well as the overall industry landscape. At Cisco Live, we're breakin' it down, here on theCUBE in Orlando. Second day of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more live coverage after this break.