live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back to Barcelona Spain everybody this is the cube the leader and live tech coverage and we're here day one for us at Cisco live Barcelona even though we did a little preview game preview yesterday my good friend kena Reilly is here he's the director of customer experience at Cisco and he's joined by Kyle winters Technical Marketing engineer for the customer experience technology and transformation group it's six to go guys great to see you thanks for coming on and you know we love talking customer experience Cisco is a it's a big company big portfolio and a lot of complexity for clients and so bring it all together and customer experience is very important can't we have it a conversation with Alastair early today and he was talking about Cisco's commitment from the top chuck Robbins on down to really improve that customer experience bring essentially a digital virtual experience to your customers and you guys obviously fit into that right absolutely so about two years ago when Chuck brought in Maria Martinez that was the first step into really pushing Cisco to focus more on successful outcomes for customers so we had already always sold that way but with the complexity of technology and how fast technology is moving accelerating value realization for customers has never been bigger especially in the security space because as we've talked before you know with everything that goes on today and the fact that the bad guys are trying to get data faster quicker and different getting the technology in play operational and production it has never been more important and we're gonna dig in with Kyle with some detail and double click into the lifecycle specifically and the different points of that journey but that's really important for any customer experience is really understanding that lifecycle that maturity model can you talk about that a little bit yeah so so with us you know we've been at it for about six years when we started as Lancope so we've got a great model and you know our approach to getting outcomes for customers is completely in line with with the strategy of our products and technologies and all security so it's really important that you align with that strategy because salespeople sell and they sell you the what we sell the how we're gonna get you and so you have to understand what it is that customers need and how that technology maps because you don't want a shelf where and you don't want products or technology sitting there waiting to be implemented because you know these days especially with the move to the cloud it's got to get up and running you know within an hour so our model has always been that way we built our model with customer first and so we are you know we are the security experts we're the trusted security adviser so when we go in and work with customers we completely know exactly those outcomes that they need and with all the sort of technologies and products that we have not only with stealthWatch but the other products that sent ulema tree to us we have in Kyle will talk about how our service is completely aligned with those outcomes and the journeys that we will take our customers on yes a faster adoption means faster time to value obviously let's focus in on stealthWatch Kenneth you came in with the stealthWatch acquisitions been very successful I mean Cisco security business grew 22% last quarter we'll talk more about the sort of umbrella but let's drill in with Kyle to stealthWatch services specifically maybe you could sort of take us through you know at a high level what what the areas are and then we can sort of follow up on yeah yes so so our customer maturity model when it comes to services there's kind of three different stages to it it starts with the visibility stage so we have services around being able to deploy an operational I stealthWatch will bring in our best practices and help customers get up to speed and using the system quickly and efficiently from there we also have services around detection capabilities so being able to use automation and integrations to further the detection capabilities of stealthWatch things like being able to classify host groups through automation from source like IP address management systems things like asset discovering classification service that helped drive segmentation efforts all of these things help improve the behavioral algorithms and processes that stealthWatch is using to detect these threats in real time and then from there we have an integration stage as well - which is all about bridging the gap between stealthWatch and the rest of not only Cisco's portfolio but the entirety of our customer security portfolio as well and some of those services include things like sim integrations being able to integrate stealthWatch with Splunk we have services such as our proxy integration service as well a lot of different types of services that we're able to help get our customers to the next stage with their stealth watch environments I got a lot of questions yeah we could get to it and you guys could take it by stage so yes the sort of visibility that's where you start that's when you do the discovery right so what what are you discovering how do you actually do that discovery so a lot of that is about making sure that we've got all the flow and telemetry that we need from the various different sources of our network coming into stealthWatch feeding into the processes and algorithms that are going on there so a lot of things is not only net flow data but getting ice integrated in there as well being able to pull that user attribution data and being able to find sources of data where we maybe can convert it into net flow if it's not already net flow and be able to ingest that data as well we also in that space typically to help set up customers with a lot of different best practices that kind of get them operationalized very quickly and things like being able to build custom reports and dashboards for them will work through them which is kind of understanding the system from a base level to more of a professional fully operational level a lot of times we come in during the stage two and customers don't even understand what's going on in their network they're seeing things that maybe they've never seen before one stealthWatch turns on a great example actually as we were at a large financial firm and we were able within 30 minutes of being on site with them through our services team we were able to identify rogue DNS servers unsecured telnet going on sequel injections suspicious SMB and that's the sage traffic this is all just within 30 minutes of us coming on there and taking a look at this stuff you don't even want to look at sometimes yeah so who's doing this can I mean is this sort of all automated you've got professionals sort of overseeing it in our society yeah so the team that we have the technology transformation team when we've talked about it before that team is kind of on the bleeding edge of helping customers and you know a lot of these services that that Kyle talked about is we are building services that customers are consuming based on their needs today and that's why the team is very flexible we build you know a lot of these integrations with those requirements in mind and then we take those and we can scale that so these are all field engineers we have developers so in in essence it is like a mini development team that goes out and works on the specific things that customers need to protect themselves okay and my understanding is there's a there's an ongoing learning with the customers and a it's a transfer of knowledge from day one right there the customer is with you on this in each of these phases and you're sort of learning as they go along and that's sort of part of the transfer of knowledge it's I would say even a tool a transfer knowledge too because we're teaching them our best practices and how to best be successful with these systems but we also learn from them what's going on what are the trends that they're seeing how can we help get them to the next stage and that's where our technology and transformation group comes and they're able to be on the cutting edge here the problems that the customers are talking about and be able to take stealthWatch to the next level okay let's dig it to the detection phase so this is where you're classifying things like host groups etc I'm interested in how that happens is that you know it used to be you'd get everybody in a room you start drawing pictures and that just doesn't scale it's too complicated today so can you auto classify stuff how does that all work and use them oh yeah genius math to do that so so traditionally the the you know the MIT's a manual effort to classify your whole group somebody who's very familiar with the network comes in and they say okay these are the DNS servers these are the web servers these are this network scanners oh oh today but the problem is that today's networks are so dynamic and fluid that what the network looks like today is not necessarily going to be the same tomorrow so there needs to be that relief from the analyst to be able to come in there needs to be that automation that they can go in each day and know that their system is going to be classified accurately and meaningfully that way the behavioral detection that is built into stealthWatch is also driven and accurate and meaningful - so we have this service so for example our host group automation service and through that we're able to pull in telemetry and data from various different sources such as IP address management systems cmdbs we can do threat feeds as well external threat feeds and we're able to drive the classification based off of the metadata that we see from these different sources so we're able to write different types of automation rules that essentially pull this data in detect the different patterns that we're seeing with that metadata and then drive that classification stealthWatch that way when you come in that next day you know that your network scanners are gonna be classified as Network scanners and your web servers are gonna be web servers etc etc so you you have that integrity of data coming in every single day yeah so a lot of different data sources data quality obviously really important I mean you'd love it if somebody had like you know a single CMDB from ServiceNow boom and pop it right in but that's not always the case we never always the case there's always a challenge and that's where kind of our services engineers come in they're able to work through these different environments and understand what the main admit what the metadata is where we need to go and how we need to classify and driving the classification from there so it does require a little bit of a human element on the front-end but once we get it worked out it can be fully automated you know there's lots of different sources and the quality of the data is not always there we've seen for example customers who have Excel spreadsheets and everything is just you're all over the place and we have to figure out a way to work with that and that's part of what our engineer success is so before we get to the integration piece can you been following this industry for for a while um security is really exciting space it's growing like crazy it's really hard I did a braking analysis piece you know a few weeks ago just talking about the fragmentation in the business you see startups coming out like crazy big valuations at the same time you see companies like Cisco with big portfolios yeah you mentioned Splunk before and they've kind of become a gold standard for for log files but very complex and you talk to security practitioners and they'll tell you our number one problem is just skillsets so get you know paint a picture of what's going on in the security world and what's in the house cisco is trying to address that so the security teams the analysts all the way up the management chain to the sea so they're under tremendous pressure their businesses are growing and so when their businesses are growing the sort of a tax base is growing and the business is growing faster than they can protect it so with the sort of increase in the economy more money more investment to build more point products so you've got a very stressed team a lot of turnover skill sets aren't great and what do we do as an industry we just give them more technology right more tools more tools complexity avalanche ok they're buried all right so we feel and we've made great strides within the security group within Cisco is we're taking the products that we have and we're integrating them under one platform so that it is in a bunch of point products and so that the that's what everybody else is doing I mean the other guys are acquiring companies then they're trying to integrate those because the customers are saying I don't need another point protocol yeah yeah it's too much so you know with us that's the way we approach it and now with the platform that's going to be launching this year the cisco threat response that we've launched you're gonna see later on in this year that we will be selling and positioned in implementing the entire platform yeah so I have a stat I came up with this and my one of my analyses it was the the worldwide economy is like 86 trillion and we spent about 0.014 percent on security so we're barely scratching the surface so this sort of tools avalanche probably isn't gonna change though integration becomes an extremely important aspect of the customer journeys and it's through that and to continue on that point you just made as well - I believe in our Cisco cybersecurity report from 2017 only fifty four six percent or fifty seven percent of actual threats are being investigated remediated so there's always that need to kind of help build bridge that gap make it easier for people to understand these threats and and mitigate and prioritize know what to go after right which part the integration exactly so we do have a lot of different integration services as well - for example I mentioned our sim integration service one thing that we can really do that's really awesome with that is we're able to deploy for example with Splunk a full-fledged stealthWatch for Splunk application that allows you to utilize stealth watches capabilities directly inside of Splunk without having to actually store an index any data inside of Splunk so all these api's are on demand inside of this app and available throughout the rest of the Splunk capabilities as well so you can extend it into other search reporting correlate that against other sets of data that you have and Splunk you can do quite a bit with it we also have other ways absolutely advantage of that is just obviously integration you're not leaving the environment plus its cost you're saving customers money a lot of a lot of customers kind of see their sim as a single pane of glass so being able to bring that stealthWatch value into that single pane is a huge win for our customers not to mention that reduction in licensing costs as well we have other ways to that we can reduce licensing costs some customers like to send their flow data into their sim for deeper analytics and long-term retention and we have a service we call it our flow adapter service and through this service we're essentially able to take buy flow off of the stealthWatch flow collectors and the buy flow is essentially when the raw net flow hits the stealthWatch flow collectors it's coming from multiple different routers and switches on the network this is gets converted into bi flow which is bi-directional deduplicated stitched together flow records so right there by sending that data into a sim or a data Lake as opposed to ronette flow we see data reduction cost anywhere from 15 to 80% depending on how the customers network is architected great any any favorite customer examples you have that you can share where ya guys have gone in you know provided these services and and it's had an outcome that got the customer excited or you found some bad guys or there's one that's one of my favorites so we have this service we call it our asset discovering classification service and I mentioned the host tree of automation service that's if you have some sort of authoritative source we can pull that information in but if a customer doesn't have that authoritative source they don't know what's on their network and a lot of times too they want to do a segmentation effort they're undergoing network segmentation but they need to understand what's on their network how these devices are communicating and that's where our asset discovery classification service comes in we're able to pull in telemetry not just from stealthWatch but other sources such as ice tetration Active Directory I Pam's again as well and we're able to essentially profile these different devices based off of the nature of their behavior so we were at a kind of a large technology company and we were essentially in this effort trying to segment their security cameras and upon segmenting their security cameras we were able to build this report where we can see the security camera and how its communicating with the other parts of the network and we noticed that there was essentially two IP addresses from inside of their network that were accessing all these different security cameras but they were not authorized to so with this service we were able to see that these different these two hosts were unauthorized actually accessing these devices that got reported up through the management chain and ultimately those two employees were no longer at that technology permanence that was discovered nice to love it alright bring us on we're here in the dev net zone sort of all about hit for structures code and software and and and and talk a little bit about the futures where you see this all going yeah so for us for Cisco security the future is really bright we've either built or acquired a portfolio that the customers really need that get absolute outcomes that customers need and through the customer experience organization certainly stealthWatch is fitting into the broader play to to get customers who have all those technologies get that operational and get them success so when we talked last summer I told you the jury was still out we would see how the journeys gonna go and the journey has started it has gotten much better since the summer and this year I think we're gonna be doing some great things for our customers just we can't get in too much of the business but stealthWatch customers are still expanding because I think we told you last time customers can never get enough stealthWatch okay the attack surface is too big right so so we we feel really good about that and the other technologies that they're building really fit into what customers need we're going to the cloud so they're gonna be able to consume cloud on-prem hybrid protect networks the campus protect their cloud infrastructure so we're really checking a lot of boxes in our group brings it all together and takes all the complexity out of that for customers just to get them the outcomes that I named us Cisco is one of my four star security companies for 2020 okay based on spending data that we share from our friends at ETR and the reason was because cisco has both a large presence in the market and but also you have spending momentum I mentioned 22% you know growth last quarter and the security business but you've also got the expertise you put your money where your mouth is you know the big portfolio which helps if you can bring it together and do these types of integrations it simplifies the customers environment and so that's a winner in my book so I named you along with some other high fliers right you know and you see some really interesting startups coming out and probably acquisition targets probably something that aren't your radar but guys thanks so much for coming on the cube thank you thank you I keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest is a Dave Volante for the cubes 2 min Amanda John Faria are also in the house at Cisco live Barcelona right back

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCube, covering Cisco Live US 2019, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, day three of our coverage of Cisco Live. We're in the DevNet Zone, we've been here all week. Dave, this DevNet Zone is the place to be at Cisco Live. >> Well, first of all, it's so packed downstairs, not that it's not packed here, but there's a little space you can walk around in, number one, and number two, it's where all the action is from the learning standpoint and education. People are just eating it up, they're like sponges. >> They are eating it up. Speaking of learning, we are pleased to welcome Mike Adams, the VP and GM of Learning at Cisco. Mike, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here. >> We talked to Susie a number of times, she's actually coming on to guest host with me in an hour or so, and looking at the DevNet evolution in the last five years, 600,000 members in this community, which is mind-boggling how this is, I teased that it was like a field of dreams. >> (chuckles) >> Dave: Which also was 30 years ago. >> It is, yes. That's kind of scary isn't it? But also so is Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, I think those are two really good ways of looking at DevNet. If we look at some of the things that you guys have announced with respect to bringing software skills and software practices to network engineers, it's a big signal in Cisco's evolution. Talk to us about some of the things you guys have announced from the certification perspective and why that's a signal of changing winds. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's been exciting. Susie and I have been working together very closely for the last year in preparation for this. I'm not sure if I'm Bill or Ted in the combo. >> Lisa: Either one's pretty good. >> You're the one who started the excellent adventure. >> That's right. There's some really fundamental significant changes to the program. The most exciting, of course, is the launch of our DevNet branded software certification. It's one of a kind in the industry. There is not other company that has the mix of network engineering certifications and software certifications like Cisco does, certainly not at the scale that we do. We've certified over 1.7 million people since the program has launched over 25 years ago. You imagine the power of bringing together the community of developers with this community of network engineers that we've created. The sky's the limit. It's going to be amazing. That's the biggest announcement is the launch of the software certification, DevNet certification. We've made some other pretty important changes too, and all of these were based on the feedback that we got from customers and partners. One is you can now use continuing education credits to maintain your certification at any level. Rather than having to go back and retake the test every three years, now you can branch out and learn new things, like software as a continuing education credit to maintain that certification you have. We've also added flexibility into the program. In the past, you had to start at associate level and then go to professional and then go to expert. Today, if you feel like you're ready for professional, we invite you to start right there. If you feel like you're ready for that very rigorous CCIE Lab Exam, bring it on, we'll welcome you into it. We feel like that's going to give learners more of a choice in terms of how they process their learning and training and which certifications they want to pursue. Go on, I could go on. >> Let's keep goin'. You could essentially cut the line if you've had some field experience, and/or you just naturally have an affinity towards this. >> That's right. If you have developed depth of expertise and skill and experience, but you haven't started the certification program, why would I make you go back and take an entry level engineer exam just to work your way into the direction you wanted to go, rather we welcome you to come in and start working where you feel like you're ready. >> Can you explain more about the continuous certification, because if I infer correctly, it used to be every three years you got to re-up, kind of like an EMT has to get re-certified. That's not required anymore? You can traverse across the portfolio? >> I'll answer it very specifically. In today's program, the highest level, the CCIE, the expert level, that level can use continuing education credits to re-certify, to maintain their certification. We've extended that same principle to all the others, so today, if you had a CCNA, and you wanted to maintain that CCNA, you would have to go take that exam again. We think it's a lot more valuable, and it's interesting you would mention EMTs, there are lots of other verticals and professions, there's a lot of data and science behind this, that will say that there's more value in terms of extending and maintaining your skills by doing continuing education rather than studying for a test. >> Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. You're allowing the folks to have more control over their education. >> Mike: Exactly. >> Choose your own adventure kind of thing. >> Mike: That's right. >> Also, one of the things that sort of strikes me about what Cisco has done in this big pivot, software's becoming developer friendly, which for a large organization with a history and the girth that Cisco has is not easy to do. From a competitive advantage perspective, what are you hearing from customers, in terms of, are you seeing this as a dial-up on Cisco's competitive edge? >> Yes, absolutely. We took counsel from Gerri, our Head of Sales, she believes very strongly that the DevNet certification, in combination with our network certification program, gives us a real selling edge because it demonstrates the commitment we have to solving real world problems for our customers. We know our customers are anxious to take advantage of what software on top of the network creates for them. To take advantage of those APIs, to build applications and programs that let them maximize the use of their technology as they compete in their own marketplaces. We're absolutely hearing very positive things about how this differentiates Cisco. I'll just add one more point. Even though it looks like there's two tracks, there's a network engineering track and a software track, that's really not the case. It's one certification program. As an example, at the professional level, to earn that CCNP, you have to take a CORE exam, and then you take a concentration exam in the same technology vertical. Data Center, Enterprise, Collaboration, Security Service Bribe, or DevNet. Interestingly, in each of the first five that I mentioned, you'll take the CORE exam and then the concentration can be a DevNet concentration. So we're inviting people to begin to add that software skills into the traditional network certification track that they've had. >> I wonder if you could help us understand the philosophy of the programs. I've seen some education programs, it's like a Chinese menu. It's deep and wide. My sense is that a lot of companies, some companies, not a lot, have said, "Okay, we're really not relevant to the Cloud market, "Let's do some Cloud certifications," stamping it premature there. It seems like Cisco's strategy is to be very focused. Is that fair? Maybe you could add some comments to that. >> It's absolutely fair. We've been very thoughtful about how we have structured the program and what content we have put into it. We've been very mindful to focus on need-to-know information in the CORE exams, and then allowing the learner to choose concentrations for the nice-to-know, the things they want to round themselves out with. Around relevancy, we built the program with job-role specific skills in mind. As an example we've been talking about it this week. Dev Sec-Ops Engineer is an example. It would maybe get their CCNP in Enterprise, route switch, and then they could add on to that various DevNet concentration exams to earn them specialists that would mix that, whether it be WebEx or IOT, and then those combination of skills speak to a very specific job role, this Dev Sec-Ops Engineer, as an example. There are other ways you can mix and match the components to create the capability around skills for a job. >> I imagine as time goes on with these new certifications that you guys are going to be analyzing the different pathways that each person is taking to understand, maybe looking at some consistencies and maybe even offering some recommendation, recommended pathways. >> That's exactly right, because as those job roles evolve in the industry, we're constantly evaluating what skills are needed for those, making sure that we're bringing those to the market. I just can't say enough how important it is to DevNet certification is. Being able to have developers demonstrate their capabilities and skills through a certification is really powerful. >> What's the strategy with regard to partnering with universities, are you doing things along those line? >> I'm so glad you brought that up. There's another leader that Susie and I have been working with, Laura Quintana, she's runs Networking Academy. Networking Academy reaches out to higher education, and also to high schools, they also create networking academies in underserved areas around the globe. Laura and her team have been at this for a while. They have trained over 9.2 million people and have a goal to graduate another two million within the next year. The reason I mention that is that's the arm of Cisco that reaches into higher education and invites people in underserved areas into our industry by giving them those fundamentals. The primary certification that they graduate with is the CCNA, is that entry-level engineer, and now entry level software DevNet associate, those are the graduation that they'll focus on out of Networking Academy. We do a lot of that. >> How about the technology of learning. When you started this almost three decades ago, this is a massive scale of learning. How has the technology of learning evolved? >> Massively. Think about how you like to learn new things. Much of it is going to the web, or finding some digital format, and then doing it at your own pace. That's the other important thing here as well. We are massively transforming the way we are meeting our customers through digitized products. It's very important. Another one of the other big announcements this week was the move from Cisco's services to customer experience, you may have heard Maria Martinez on stage, day two. If you noticed there were four main pillars to the CX Strategy, one of them was learning, active learning. We know that by embedding learning and education into the digital products that we have and getting it to our customers just in time, and ideally by looking at telemetry coming back from how they're using our products, maybe I can predict what training you need before you know you even need it. That's where we're going. >> Very awesome. Last question for you, Mike. Cisco's a massive part of our Ecosystem, we've been talking with a lot of them this week, and at many events, what's to them, to your partners, what does the certification and this massive change signal to them in terms of Cisco's evolution? >> It absolutely signals where the company is going, our commitment to software, our commitment to continue to evolve and stay on the forefront of technology, giving them what they need to go serve their customers and make money in the meantime. Our partner ecosystem is so critical to this company. The software certification, as an example, is going to allow them to demonstrate to their customers, in a very quantifiable way, how many DevNet certified engineers they have. Some of these partners have over a thousand DevNet members already, but wouldn't it be great via certifications? It's a real differentiator for them. I'll mention one other thing. We have a group of very strong learning partners that we work with that extend our capability globally, that are able to take the content that we create and then form that to meet the needs of very specific customers. There's another aspect of partners that are critical to this transformation. >> So you talk about partners to your customers, to the engineers, when I was at IDG one of the most frequently read articles was the Annual Computer World Salary. >> Mike: (laughs) >> You know what, if everyone's going to publish salaries, I'm going to look and see where do I stand. That's part of it, getting more certifications, you're going to be worth more in the market. >> It is. We've got some really good data that says what an investment in professional or expert level certification should do for your W-2 at the end of the year, and we're very mindful of that. >> DevNet bringing the street-cred. Mike, it was great to have you in the program. I can only imagine how dynamic you and Susie are together. >> We have a lot of fun. >> I got to see that next time. Congrats on all the success. It's palpable. >> Thanks. >> Cool stuff. For Dave Velannte, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube Live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

[Music] everyone welcome to the special cube conversation here to talk about the big announcements big news big concepts and big trends happening Cisco live in Barcelona I'm John for your host of the cube we're here with Fabio Gauri senior director cloud solution marketing at Cisco I've been great to see you things are spending time to me to unpack all the exciting news in Barcelona great stuff thank you thank you for having me John so one of the things that's happening with Cisco we've covered certainly we've been reporting and reporting are other outlets as well and you guys have been transforming and continuing to innovate Cisco has transformed itself into the next level building on your successes we've been covering that and that's been all about the clouds been all about networking going you know software driven you know software powered network operations DevOps the whole thing is now infiltrating into into the new model but it's clear now there's no debate that on-premise data centers on-premise environments of IT service providers the entire old you know computing industry is connecting with the cloud that's been kind of validated and we've been staring at that for a couple of years and now everyone's starting to take action this is a key theme here in Barcelona for you guys and we heard you see you talking about it last year at Cisco live in North America that transition to cloud validated across the voice or Andy chassis the CEO of AWS actually announced an on-premise device hybrid cloud has been validated so public cloud and on-premise and now visibility into what kubernetes is enabled with multi cloud mm-hmm this is the new normal describe that impact in the marketplace what does it mean for customers what do they do what what is it what does this mean when now enterprises are seeing on-premise and cloud coming together absolutely well you know if you think about it you gotta start from the application so if you take a step back right we've been talking about digitization for so long but what does that ultimately mean right people need to build more and more applications to digitize their their business processes their customer experience and so on and so forth ultimately what we're seeing is that this applications are becoming exceptionally distributed right because they go what it makes sense whatever the data is whatever the user is you may have low latency needs you may have actually just you know the right needs to go all the way to the cloud in reality you have a mix of this kind of needs but workloads are distributed and people want to harness this multi cloud world and that's what we're seeing I love these chips it's kind of like people have been living on two sides of the street you know old way new way it's clear that the migration to this new model cloud is the new way and that's been validated again so you've got the old way in new way describe in your mind the old way and the new way from Cisco because if you look at the history of Cisco the dominance and the success I had and recently had an opportunity to be John Chambers at his house and he talked about that that dynamic of how Cisco is so dominant the culture and then going the next level the datacenter you guys have a great success networking edge this is New York or business yeah that's still relevant with the cloud in the new way so talk about what's changed all the way new way Francisco I'll give you a try so fundamentally if you if you if you remember where we're coming from we are coming from an era where we've been seeing infrastructure kind of dictating application requirements through the other way around as well but you had an application you will buy specific hardware networking and everything else including firewalls for a specific infrastructure right so that era actually is not going away is there because it's built an immense amount of legacy that you can not all of a sudden throw away however the new world is a world where you see applications fundamentally going pretty much across multiple type of domains not just to do the center domain anymore but here comes the cloud we have a lot of applications that are going to the edge if you have a branch office right you may want to take your application over there because it's simpler it's it's sometimes it's more economic you don't need to move all the data and still you can have those applications collaborating with your data center with your cloud so what you're now seeing is a completely from world where applications want the infrastructure to be programmable and easy accessible and still extremely secure that's interesting in the old way was you know the you dictate applications you can only do as much as the network and the infrastructure will let you to do yeah and then now as infrastructure becomes more abundant yeah data tsunamis have spent a lot of data's coming in so that's why the storage industry never docking it's always growing storage industries always growing servers as always need for compute but as is more abundance than that it almost as a limitless opportunity for applications so it's not a you know kill the old and bring in the new it's more of a foundational hold as now foundational it is literally next level thing so kubernetes service meshes these programmable policy-based abstractions are showing the way and that's a network construct policy is a network concert so the first time we're seeing is the coming together of the app market with infrastructure absolutely and if you think about it even a step before the apps people have when they build application they have a business intent right let's make an example you take healthcare application right you want in a hospital you want the doctors to be able to access you know the full extent of the data of a customer record for instance you may not want the nurses doing the same thing or for instance you don't want the nurses and the doctors to get access to the financial system of the hospital so this is actually a business intent that that given application will have to respect well the infrastructure can and has to cope with this kind of requirements by delivering the appropriate kind of segmentation right so that you'll be able to ensure that what the application wants to do the infrastructure delivers what has changed in the on premise and cloud world in your mind because to have that kind of coordination and you guys are have announced here it's some great announcements around seamless end-to-end as a theme we're seeing you're seeing hyper convergence anywhere are you seeing application centric infrastructure concepts everywhere but when you actually go into the hood and look at how complex it is it's almost magical in the sense that it's going on its I know it's hard work and people who know networking know it's hard what are the innovations what's enabling that what is the key driver that's making you guys connect an on-premise data complex data center environment that is now edges private networks hybrid private cloud IOT edge enterprise edge campuses the old stuff now with cloud what are the key linchpins well hey I'm gonna take on one of the the words that you use complexity people are looking for the opposite of complexity people are looking for simplicity easy to say more difficult to do but what sits between complexity and and and turning it into a more simple kind of architecture is automation so what you have to have is fundamentally an infrastructure that becomes automated programmable that takes the business intent or the application intent as an input and actually with a closed-loop system fundamentally monitors and gives you the assurance okay the implementation the assurance that actually what you want to do gets delivered by the infrastructure and this has to be literally annalistic and cross-domain kind of architecture what do I mean with cross-domain you're going out of the data center you're going out to the edge you're now going to the cloud this should be seen as a cohesive almost fluid environment where you can actually push your policy your security models right and transform in this highly fragmented the architecture into a set of domains or a multi domain architecture that you can control that you can automate as if it was all yours so to speak even though in the cloud for instance you're going into a domain that you don't control end-to-end so big concept here being discussed in Barcelona is multi domain you just get that explain that a little bit and then take that to where cloud integration comes in because the other thread that we're seeing here is multi cloud yeah so multi domain multi-cloud the same are they different what's the nuance points there yeah again the the critical point is let's think applications applications want to go and it's convenient to go into multiple domains right depending on what you want to do what you want to access to you wanna access clouds innovation from whatever they come from so that's why we have a multi cloud world the data center is still there is critically important you have a lot of applications databases that are still there and now we're seeing the big new shiny object which which is more and more super Robo remote office branch office applications where for instance IDC believes 30% of applications are going to be deployed into this kind of environments so your problem is now connecting all of this together right and because the applications are going anywhere are the designer strategy is that the data center needs to follow the applications and support them wherever they go so it's a data center anywhere kind of kind of strategy the data center has to flex and provide that yes be ready for anything basically from from applications what you're getting at and all the all the plumbing and all the all the intelligence underneath it have to be reactive to what the application wants absolutely a vocation doesn't have to get into the provisioning or any kind of policy because that's the infrastructure as code DevOps the point is that that kind of absolutely the application has an intent right there's also application policy etcetera but it needs to be translated into infrastructure policy where we've been talking about it a minute ago when we were doing the the healthcare kind of example right well we've been super excited in collaborating with you guys on kubernetes we have a special section on silicon angle called the kubernetes special report that's evolving into multi cloud special reports the folks watching Silicon angle comm check out the multi classify syrup or that should be up and yeah by now it was the COO Bernays but ton of interest was seeing startups coming out of the kubernetes you're seeing a cloud native world CN CF and Linux foundation promoting tons of great ecosystem development pulling together those developers want more infrastructure and so that and they wouldn't want to deal with it right so this is where you the cloud strategy has been paying off for you guys you guys have had done deals with Google as your AWS s ap Red Hat among others you guys are well poised for this talk about cloud Center that's a big piece of the story here yeah cloud Center suite a new capabilities talk about the impact of cloud and cloud Center yeah so let me let me let me take us the buck if you want and tell you a little bit more about what we're announcing here right because it's a pretty big announcement I mentioned at the center anywhere what does it mean right well of course our data center portfolio is sent around two big components the first one is networking right particular application center came first structure a CI based on the Nexus 9 K kind of architecture and the second one is our computing portfolio particularly you know the hyper-converged infrastructure cisco hyper flex that's of course you know an extremely efficient way of condensing you know what you need to make it very flexible in your application implementation where we have two major news here right in this two areas and the third is absolutely what you were asking for which is Cloud Center so with a CI and it's interesting because they're going into two if you want different directions when it comes to the small T cloud domain AC I was already visualized in the previous releases sorry application centric infrastructure is fundamentally cisco in ten base networking for the data center okay it gives you program ability of the infrastructure it gives you segmentation gives you security and a high degree of automation capabilities exactly okay continue and so in the previous in the previous if you want developments releases of ACI what we've been doing was to aggressively visualize a CI right so that you will have constructs like virtual poles and virtual leaves to rescale your data center implementation to the edge now where we're going with this new announcement is exactly on the other side which is we're standing ACI to the cloud to usher in AWS so that the construct that you have typically on Prem under your control such as tenants EP G's and things of this nature will be translated into the equivalent construct in AWS whether it's VP C's or security groups and the likes the two things end up fundamentally corresponding so now we have one construct that extends from the edge to the data center to the cloud that's a pretty big deal and what does that mean to the customer just give an example it means a high degree of automation security and control on the resources right so that you can impose one policy it propagates all across the board one way of monitoring you know the data center flows and discovering for instance if you have if you have any kind of security threat monitoring application performance thanks to the inter so this fully checks this hybrid cloud box this ship I say yes is one a hybrid deployment this checks the box saying I can operate and say whatever cloud and on-premise in the datacenter with a CI both places without changing any code is it seamless what's the what's that well with a CI is gonna come with a specific software this is all software that's that's the beauty of it right it's it's in line with the transformation the company that you were referring to it's all software and it goes into AWS and uses of course all the api's to connect 2d to the AWS resources that you were you're you're acquiring from AWS right so that's one big bucket of news the second bucket o news is hyper flex that's actually heading to the edge because what we're seeing is more and more applications that have components of the application itself or even entire applications that are going into remote office branch offices and the reason are many right it could be cost reason it could be did a gravity reason it could be just low latency reason right we all know that you know to go back and forth from the cloud that's not always convenient as well as if you lose the connectivity your branch is dead right so you have to you need to have business continue it in all of this and so it doesn't mean that you don't want the cloud you want a collaboration across this again fluid sort of infrastructure so I purflex come with a very efficient kind of kind of fun factor over there now it's either flex edge and its control Emilia this is that because you have many remote offices and branch offices is controlled from the cloud with cisco inter side which is of course our console and cloud system to manage all these hand points no just hyper flex but also UCS so when you think of this now you understand what do we mean with the dissenter anywhere because we're taking both our networking and our computing platforms anywhere the application needs them right and the third component which actually is where your questions started from is application lifecycle management in this kind of infrastructure becomes even more of a problem right it is extremely complicated now to have applications in multiple clouds and then in your data center and to the in India JH and in you know all these different kind of places so what we've done with cloud center which is our flagship club management and an orchestration system is two big things first we have expanded the functionalities by adding new modules especially the cause optimizer the helps operations team at Center suite now it's the cloud center suite and I'll explain you in a moment why we remove the branding slightly from cloud center to cloud center suite because we highly modularize the software and and make it and made it really much more easy to consume I'll go there in a moment but going back to what is new first of all is cost optimizer right that's that's brand new and it helps Operations team to right-size the workload to pick up the the best instances in the cloud are you using to actually minimize your investment or reach your your goal of performance and cost right that's one big thing the second one is that we're adding a very smart so called action Orchestrator which is a workflow manager that helps you automate in there tear connection of your cloud management system to all the other systems right some of these plugins and integrations come outer-box particularly with the higher level tiers of licensing such as with service now for instance or we give you already built-in integration with cisco inter side or UCS director which is the infrastructure manager for Cisco infrastructure but you can use the kind of platform and module to build your own integrations with the other systems that's very important because the cloud management system doesn't exist in isolation right it needs to integrate with all the other IT management solution that you have on Prem and that's one big thing the second big thing as you said before when you said about the suite is the fact that because we have written all of this new software and cuber Nerys right this is highly scalable highly portable so now we can give you different tiers of licenses you can start very small as small as around $50,000 right for subscription service and you can actually bite subscription on pram or that's big news you can buy Nate software-as-a-service so cloud center is now Asaf offering yes available when it's gonna be so all the subscription use the new software is going to be available literally a next month in a few days for now right in February and the SAS version is gonna be available in North America in March so right away for Europe of course due to the GDP our implementation our customers will have to wait until the summer but it's pretty immediate and you hear a bit of an extra work done yeah okay so bottom line me on the cloud Center suite what is the the purpose is it to be the high level management suite how is it connecting into other systems so if I have all these different management tools out there when Cisco and others is it connecting into am i connecting up and you just explain quickly you know the purpose of it yeah works so really the goal of Cloud Center is to do a salute three things the first one is a he wants to simplify cloud management and how it does it right one of the key patents that we acquire together we clicker right click a cloud center when we brought them in more than two years ago was the really unique way that they have to model applications right the way that people are managing cloud management and an organization is still extremely manual I mean many customers are still kind of doing scripting we have cases of customers that are scripting like 1200 lines of codes just to upload a piece of software onto the cloud we think the approach should be different right the approach should be you should be able to model that application your application model wants and then thanks to cloud API so we have 16 different API into a cloud integrations with AWS our Google you name it right I BM and the likes we realize of course on parameter private cloud once you model your application you can use any of these other clouds as a target for implementation okay that allows you to have a very very effective cloud management solution because don't risk to make mistakes you leave the tool so you said it's written in kubernetes absolutely we scraped all this now we program all this in Cuban Eddie's so you may tell us hey you're walking the talk absolutely doing that and that's very in that sow actually we can do it on Prem in a Cuban IT infrastructure by the way if you need one we have the Cisco cloud center platform a hyper flex underneath to do it or you can buy from the cloud because we're uploading a little dot to the cloud you guys have done a good job at kubernetes just as a side note you guys done the work it's doing the cloud integrations and I think wasn't she about kubernetes unlike other trends I've seen in some of these open-source projects some hype comes up and then it kind of drops off or it gets hyped up and it's too hard to roll out or use it cost too much and so people actually using kubernetes for not just standing it up they're actually pulling it for a purpose so congratulations on that I think it's a real good thank you for thank you know we're a big believer in to this so simplifying really multiplayer management is one big thing reducing time to value is another big thing because with the integrations and the ability you know to integrate with the other tools you can put it in production very very quickly and then it's incredibly easy to consume you can start small and grow up so I did a little checklist here I want to just run this by you and then I'm going to ask you a question around what all this means to your to your customer base because I'm sure the world's changing we've done a lot of kind of you know surveys and interaction with a lot of network guys to kind of spiel out how the markets going get your reaction so interesting thing you guys have a this builder model very similar to Amazon you know toolkits for cloud builders you guys are really investing heavily and it's a security you got stealthWatch tetration analytics you've got app dynamics and tetration as well datacenter hyper flex UCS Nexus check cloud apps WebEx I know what else is in there there's also cloud apps cloud native apps which you're connecting into management cloud center container platform and IOT kinetic and networking the edge Meraki cloud service route or bunch of other things so you guys are building quite the portfolio on here right so given that you guys have that security to network and kind of end-to-end with the application centric infrastructure are kind of expanding and intent based networking combined cloud seems to be kind of the end-to-end is the theme it really is it's it's again end to end and across multiple domains because that's the thing that doesn't come across with end to end is the fact that you need to cross different domains that are exceptionally different from from each other and so having consistent policies and a single security model having one mean of networking and securing all this in a containerized world which which is where we're progressively going that's everything and you know it's not me saying it but if you look at the CN CF surveys they'll tell you the securing and working containers is one of the toughest things so I got to ask you that the tough question totally makes sense you got my buy-in on it I totally believed in the vision making it work okay making it smart and making it at scale are the three kind of things I'm looking at give us your take on how you guys are looking at those three kind of you know checkpoints you got to get this up and running so one make it work you know end-to-end mobile domains yeah make it intelligent that's data smarter you know automation kicks in and I'll see scaling it up but you know with all the checkbox security everything else so take us through the strategy yeah and what you guys are thinking there and and the impact with that in mind so the person on the other side your customer the buyer and customer Sisko to manage it that's that's a big sea change yeah and the benefits are pretty lucrative on the other side if you can pull this up yeah yeah upon three big aspects so first of all we mean we've been talking about architectures but architectures doesn't mean that you shouldn't have Best of Breed products right it starts from there those are the atomic components of any strategy right you gotta have best of the products now these products need to integrate into an architecture that solves true business problems such as the intent base you know architecture that we've been talking about the third aspect is actually how you help customers to be successful and I will love to call out our partner strategy right which for I would say for as long as 30 years has been Cisco's critical differentiator and I think this is an enormous asset especially when you look at the number one problem in IT out there which is not kubernetes and it's no cloud is actually lack of talent people don't have the skillset and talents so relying on an ecosystem that helps you expanding what you need because you don't have it inside its fundamental importance on you guys absolutely but this is a critical asset and you know we're doing a lot of investments also on the customer experience side of the house with our leader Maria Martinez the staking actually this customer experience so approach to the next level more and more it's about these architectures also being cloud a touch so you heard me talking about inter-site it doesn't come by chance right the more you can rely on on this kind of architectures the more you can harvest analytics you can do cross correlation across multiple networks and domains and figure out what is going wrong that's something that providers of pinpoint products just cannot even dream of delivering as final question for first of all thanks for spending the time and chatting and he was going to be rolling out a lot of content we're gonna be following what's going on with on your end to really like Cisco's vibe you guys are very transparent and collaborating appreciate being there working with you guys final question if someone's watching this I'm a Cisco customer you know we've been talking about the network I which I've talked to a couple you know and surveying some some enterprises where you know the network's they've done the heavy lifting that's been part of the computing industry you know networking compute they've been running the show and really have moved the needle campus networking the list goes on and on but now that foundation set we're going to a whole nother level it's almost like a sea change on the personality side persona of the people who've built it out and now have to build the next generation yeah and my relevant am I gonna be the mainframe guy am I gonna be leading the charge or may be left behind there's a lot of cognitive dissidence around decisions so that go here should I go there architectures so there's a lot of psychology and also decision-making that's gonna be determined by your core audience mm-hmm that person out there is your target audience they're thinking about these things because they want to do well and they don't wanna be left behind what do you say to that audience about Cisco now the opportunity for them personally their ability to one grow their skill gaps or have an impact to being a key change agent for this next generation what do you say that that person out there about the Cisco and the opportunity for them it's it's a very big question I would split a question in two parts first of all is what is your advice to IT professionals right how can they not just survive but thrive and be the heroes of this this transition and it's pretty simple actually you have to understand what your business wants we've been talking about how do you close this gap between of infrastructure and application but in other terms is covering the gap between what you do and what the business wants you've got to understand that right so that's number one second part of the question is okay considering this is cisco the right partner for me and the answer of course from cisco standpoint is approximately yes because our entire company strategy is wrapped around this concept of intent-based architecture where our goal is to map the business intent into the infrastructure underneath and that's exactly your core business mr. IT professional right so I see this as a as a marriage in heaven right in terms of where I see really the talent need for IT going right in IT professionals and where the company is going right if we if we're right and I think we are this is gonna be a great ride and not a threatening one I think everything's lining up you're getting clear visibility into what the role of cloud is the scale PC and personal links are just undeniable and that the role of technologists now are super important there's no jobs really going away they're shifting this is this is the reality this is kind of what the exciting opportunity it is but but again it's about bringing IT very close to the business in the end I believe it's just it's just gonna be continuity between what we call today line of business and IT it's just a company that wants to win in the marketplace right wants to get faster efficient usual kind of you know terminology but you know does this gap is gonna go away Fabio thank you for taking the time to share this conversation I'm John furry this is a cube conversation here at Barcelona live go live Europe back to the cube coverage go to the cube dotnet to check out all the live coverage and cube interviews in Barcelona I'm here with Fabio Korey senior director cloud solutions marking Cisco I'm John for the cube thanks for watching [Music] you