>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here at the Fira Live, theCUBE's ongoing coverage of day two of MWC 23. Back in 2021 was my first Mobile World Congress. And you know what? It was actually quite an experience because there was nobody there. I talked to my friend, who's now my co-host, Chris Lewis about what to expect. He said, Dave, I don't think a lot of people are going to be there, but Danielle Royston is here and she's the CEO of Totoge. And that year when Erickson tapped out of its space she took out 60,000 square feet and built out Cloud City. If it weren't for Cloud City, there would've been no Mobile World Congress in June and July of 2021. DR is back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to see you. >> Chris. Awesome to see you. >> Yeah, Chris. Yep. >> Good to be back. Yep. >> You guys remember the narrative back then. There was this lady running around this crazy lady that I met at at Google Cloud next saying >> Yeah. Yeah. >> the cloud's going to take over Telco. And everybody's like, well, this lady's nuts. The cloud's been leaning in, you know? >> Yeah. >> So what do you think, I mean, what's changed since since you first caused all those ripples? >> I mean, I have to say that I think that I caused a lot of change in the industry. I was talking to leaders over at AWS yesterday and they were like, we've never seen someone push like you have and change so much in a short period of time. And Telco moves slow. It's known for that. And they're like, you are pushing buttons and you're getting people to change and thank you and keep going. And so it's been great. It's awesome. >> Yeah. I mean, it was interesting, Chris, we heard on the keynotes we had Microsoft, Satya came in, Thomas Curian came in. There was no AWS. And now I asked CMO of GSMA about that. She goes, hey, we got a great relationship with it, AWS. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But why do you think they weren't here? >> Well, they, I mean, they are here. >> Mean, not here. Why do you think they weren't profiled? >> They weren't on the keynote stage. >> But, you know, at AWS, a lot of the times they want to be the main thing. They want to be the main part of the show. They don't like sharing the limelight. I think they just didn't want be on the stage with the Google CLoud guys and the these other guys, what they're doing they're building out, they're doing so much stuff. As Danielle said, with Telcos change in the ecosystem which is what's happening with cloud. Cloud's making the Telcos think about what the next move is, how they fit in with the way other people do business. Right? So Telcos never used to have to listen to anybody. They only listened to themselves and they dictated the way things were done. They're very successful and made a lot of money but they're now having to open up they're having to leverage the cloud they're having to leverage the services that (indistinct words) and people out provide and they're changing the way they work. >> So, okay in 2021, we talked a lot about the cloud as a potential disruptor, and your whole premise was, look you got to lean into the cloud, or you're screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the flip side of that is, if they lean into the cloud too much, they might be screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> So what's that equilibrium? Have they been able to find it? Are you working with just the disruptors or how's that? >> No I think they're finding it right. So my talk at MWC 21 was all about the cloud is a double-edged sword, right? There's two sides to it, and you definitely need to proceed through it with caution, but also I don't know that you have a choice, right? I mean, the multicloud, you know is there another industry that spends more on CapEx than Telco? >> No. >> Right. The hyperscalers are doing it right. They spend, you know, easily approaching over a $100 billion in CapEx that rivals this industry. And so when you have a player like that an industry driving, you know and investing so much Telco, you're always complaining how everyone's riding your coattails. This is the opportunity to write someone else's coattails. So jump on, right? I think you don't have a choice especially if other Telco competitors are using hyperscalers and you don't, they're going to be left behind. >> So you advise these companies all the time, but >> I mean, the issue is they're all they're all using all the hyperscalers, right? So they're the multi, the multiple relationships. And as Danielle said, the multi-layer of relationship they're using the hyperscalers to change their own internal operational environments to become more IT-centric to move to that software centric Telco. And they're also then with the hyperscalers going to market in different ways sometimes with them, sometimes competing with them. What what it means from an analyst point of view is you're suddenly changing the dynamic of a market where we used to have nicely well defined markets previously. Now they're, everyone's in it together, you know, it's great. And, and it's making people change the way they think about services. What I, what I really hope it changes more than anything else is the way the customers at the end of the, at the end of the supply, the value chain think this is what we can get hold of this stuff. Now we can go into the network through the cloud and we can get those APIs. We can draw on the mechanisms we need to to run our personal lives, to run our business lives. And frankly, society as a whole. It's really exciting. >> Then your premise is basically you were saying they should ride on the top over the top of the cloud vendor. >> Yeah. Right? >> No. Okay. But don't they lose the, all the data if they do that? >> I don't know. I mean, I think the hyperscalers are not going to take their data, right? I mean, that would be a really really bad business move if Google Cloud and Azure and and AWS start to take over that, that data. >> But they can't take it. >> They can't. >> From regulate, from sovereignty and regulation. >> They can't because of regulation, but also just like business, right? If they started taking their data and like no enterprises would use them. So I think, I think the data is safe. I think you, obviously every country is different. You got to understand the different rules and regulations for data privacy and, and how you keep it. But I think as we look at the long term, right and we always talk about 10 and 20 years there's going to be a hyperscaler region in every country right? And there will be a way for every Telco to use it. I think their data will be safe. And I think it just, you're going to be able to stand on on the shoulders of someone else for once and use the building blocks of software that these guys provide to make better experiences for subscribers. >> You guys got to explain this to me because when I say data I'm not talking about, you know, personal information. I'm talking about all the telemetry, you know, all the all the, you know the plumbing. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Data, which is- >> It will increasingly be shared because you need to share it in order to deliver the services in the streamline efficient way that needs to be deliver. >> Did I hear the CEO of Ericsson Wright where basically he said, we're going to charge developers for access to that data through APIs. >> What the Ericsson have done, obviously with the Vage acquisition is they want to get into APIs. So the idea is you're exposing features, quality policy on demand type features for example, or even pulling we still use that a lot of SMS, right? So pulling those out using those APIs. So it will be charged in some way. Whether- >> Man: Like Twitter's charging me for APIs, now I API calls, you >> Know what it is? I think it's Twilio. >> Man: Oh, okay. >> Right. >> Man: No, no, that's sure. >> There's no reason why telcos couldn't provide a Twilio like service itself. >> It's a horizontal play though right? >> Danielle: Correct because developers need to be charged by the API. >> But doesn't there need to be an industry standard to do that as- >> Well. I think that's what they just announced. >> Industry standard. >> Danielle: I think they just announced that. Yeah. Right now I haven't looked at that API set, right? >> There's like eight of them. >> There's eight of them. Twilio has, it's a start you got to start somewhere Dave. (crosstalk) >> And there's all, the TM forum is all the other standard >> Right? Eight is better than zero- >> Right? >> Haven't got plenty. >> I mean for an industry that didn't really understand APIs as a feature, as a product as a service, right? For Mats Granryd, the deputy general of GSMA to stand on the keynote stage and say we partnered and we're unveiling, right. Pay by the use APIs. I was for it. I was like, that is insane. >> I liked his keynote actually, because I thought he was going to talk about how many attendees and how much economic benefiting >> Danielle: We're super diverse. >> He said, I would usually talk about that and you know greening in the network by what you did talk about a little bit. But, but that's, that surprised me. >> Yeah. >> But I've seen in the enterprise this is not my space as, you know, you guys don't live this but I've seen Oracle try to get developers. IBM had to pay $35 billion trying to get for Red Hat to get developers, right? EMC used to have a thing called EMC code, failed. >> I mean they got to do something, right? So 4G they didn't really make the business case the ROI on the investment in the network. Here we are with 5G, same discussion is having where's the use case? How are we going to monetize and make the ROI on this massive investment? And now they're starting to talk about 6G. Same fricking problem is going to happen again. And so I think they need to start experimenting with new ideas. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if this new a API network gateway theme that Mats talked about yesterday will work. But they need to start unbundling that unlimited plan. They need to start charging people who are using the network more, more money. Those who are using it less, less. They need to figure this out. This is a crisis for them. >> Yeah our own CEO, I mean she basically said, Hey, I'm for net neutrality, but I want to be able to charge the people that are using it more and more >> To make a return on, on a capital. >> I mean it costs billions of dollars to build these networks, right? And they're valuable. We use them and we talked about this in Cloud City 21, right? The ability to start building better metaverses. And I know that's a buzzword and everyone hates it, but it's true. Like we're working from home. We need- there's got to be a better experience in Zoom in 2D, right? And you need a great network for that metaverse to be awesome. >> You do. But Danielle, you don't need cellular for doing that, do you? So the fixed network is as important. >> Sure. >> And we're at mobile worlds. But actually what we beginning to hear and Crystal Bren did say this exactly, it's about the comp the access is sort of irrelevant. Fixed is better because it's more the cost the return on investment is better from fiber. Mobile we're going to change every so many years because we're a new generation. But we need to get the mechanism in place to deliver that. I actually don't agree that we should everyone should pay differently for what they use. It's a universal service. We need it as individuals. We need to make it sustainable for every user. Let's just not go for the biggest user. It's not, it's not the way to build it. It won't work if you do that you'll crash the system if you do that. And, and the other thing which I disagree on it's not about standing on the shoulders and benefiting from what- It's about cooperating across all levels. The hyperscalers want to work with the telcos as much as the telcos want to work with the hyperscalers. There's a lot of synergy there. There's a lot of ways they can work together. It's not one or the other. >> But I think you're saying let the cloud guys do the heavy lifting and I'm - >> Yeah. >> Not at all. >> And so you don't think so because I feel like the telcos are really good at pipes. They've always been good at pipes. They're engineers. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Are they hanging on to the to the connectivity or should they let that go and well and go toward the developer. >> I mean AWS had two announcements on the 21st a week before MWC. And one was that telco network builder. This is literally being able to deploy a network capability at AWS with keystrokes. >> As a managed service. >> Danielle: Correct. >> Yeah. >> And so I don't know how the telco world I felt the shock waves, right? I was like, whoa, that seems really big. Because they're taking something that previously was like bread and butter. This is what differentiates each telco and now they've standardized it and made it super easy so anyone can do it. Now do I think the five nines of super crazy hardcore network criteria will be built on AWS this way? Probably not, but no >> It's not, it's not end twin. So you can't, no. >> Right. But private networks could be built with this pretty easily, right? And so telcos that don't have as much funding, right. Smaller, more experiments. I think it's going to change the way we think about building networks in telcos >> And those smaller telcos I think are going to be more developer friendly. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> They're going to have business models that invite those developers in. And that's, it's the disruption's going to come from the ISVs and the workloads that are on top of that. >> Well certainly what Dish is trying to do, right? Dish is trying to build a- they launched it reinvent a developer experience. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Right. Built around their network and you know, again I don't know, they were not part of this group that designed these eight APIs but I'm sure they're looking with great intent on what does this mean for them. They'll probably adopt them because they want people to consume the network as APIs. That's their whole thing that Mark Roanne is trying to do. >> Okay, and then they're doing open ran. But is it- they're not really cons- They're not as concerned as Rakuten with the reliability and is that the right play? >> In this discussion? Open RAN is not an issue. It really is irrelevant. It's relevant for the longer term future of the industry by dis aggregating and being able to share, especially ran sharing, for example, in the short term in rural environments. But we'll see some of that happening and it will change, but it will also influence the way the other, the existing ran providers build their services and offer their value. Look you got to remember in the relationship between the equipment providers and the telcos are very dramatically. Whether it's Ericson, NOKIA, Samsung, Huawei, whoever. So those relations really, and the managed services element to that depends on what skills people have in-house within the telco and what service they're trying to deliver. So there's never one size fits all in this industry. >> You're very balanced in your analysis and I appreciate that. >> I try to be. >> But I am not. (chuckles) >> So when Dr went off, this is my question. When Dr went off a couple years ago on the cloud's going to take over the world, you were skeptical. You gave a approach. Have you? >> I still am. >> Have you moderated your thoughts on that or- >> I believe the telecom industry is is a very strong industry. It's my industry of course I love it. But the relationship it is developing much different relationships with the ecosystem players around it. You mentioned developers, you mentioned the cloud players the equipment guys are changing there's so many moving parts to build the telco of the future that every country needs a very strong telco environment to be able to support the site as a whole. People individuals so- >> Well I think two years ago we were talking about should they or shouldn't they, and now it's an inevitability. >> I don't think we were Danielle. >> All using the hyperscalers. >> We were always going to need to transform the telcos from the conservative environments in which they developed. And they've had control of everything in order to reduce if they get no extra revenue at all, reducing the cost they've got to go on a cloud migration path to do that. >> Amenable. >> Has it been harder than you thought? >> It's been easier than I thought. >> You think it's gone faster than >> It's gone way faster than I thought. I mean pushing on this flywheel I thought for sure it would take five to 10 years it is moving. I mean the maths comp thing the AWS announcements last week they're putting in hyperscalers in Saudi Arabia which is probably one of the most sort of data private places in the world. It's happening really fast. >> What Azure's doing? >> I feel like I can't even go to sleep. Because I got to keep up with it. It's crazy. >> Guys. >> This is awesome. >> So awesome having you back on. >> Yeah. >> Chris, thanks for co-hosting. Appreciate you stay here. >> Yep. >> Danielle, amazing. We'll see you. >> See you soon. >> A lot of action here. We're going to come out >> Great. >> Check out your venue. >> Yeah the Togi buses that are outside. >> The big buses. You got a great setup there. We're going to see you on Wednesday. Thanks again. >> Awesome. Thanks. >> All right. Keep it right there. We'll be back to wrap up day two from MWC 23 on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's first day of coverage of MWC 23 from Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. I'm literally in between two Daves. We've had a great first day of coverage of the event. There's been lots of conversations, Dave, on disaggregation, on the change of mobility. I want to be able to get your perspectives from both of you on what you saw on the show floor, what you saw and heard from our guests today. So we'll start with you, Dave V. What were some of the things that were our takeaways from day one for you? >> Well, the big takeaway is the event itself. On day one, you get a feel for what this show is like. Now that we're back, face-to-face kind of pretty much full face-to-face. A lot of excitement here. 2000 plus exhibitors, I mean, planes, trains, automobiles, VR, AI, servers, software, I mean everything. I mean, everybody is here. So it's a really comprehensive show. It's not just about mobile. That's why they changed the name from Mobile World Congress. I think the other thing is from the keynotes this morning, I mean, you heard, there's a lot of, you know, action around the telcos and the transformation, but in a lot of ways they're sort of protecting their existing past from the future. And so they have to be careful about how fast they move. But at the same time if they don't move fast, they're going to get disrupted. We heard some complaints, essentially, you know, veiled complaints that the over the top guys aren't paying their fair share and Telco should be able to charge them more. We heard the chairman of Ericsson talk about how we can't let the OTTs do that again. We're going to charge directly for access through APIs to our network, to our data. We heard from Chris Lewis. Yeah. They've only got, or maybe it was San Ji Choha, how they've only got eight APIs. So, you know the developers are the ones who are going to actually build out the innovation at the edge. The telcos are going to provide the connectivity and the infrastructure companies like Dell as well. But it's really to me all about the developers. And that's where the action's going to be. And it's going to be interesting to see how the developers respond to, you know, the gun to the head. If you want access, you're going to have to pay for it. Now maybe there's so much money to be made that they'll go for it, but I feel like there's maybe a different model. And I think some of the emerging telcos are going to say, you know what, here developers, here's a platform, have at it. We're not going to charge you for all the data until you succeed. Then we're going to figure out a monetization model. >> Right. A lot of opportunity for the developer. That skillset is certainly one that's in demand here. And certainly the transformation of the telecom industry is, there's a lot of conundrums that I was hearing going on today, kind of chicken and egg scenarios. But Dave, you had a chance to walk around the show floor. We were here interviewing all day. What were some of the things that you saw that really stuck out to you? >> I think I was struck by how much attention was being paid to private 5G networks. You sort of read between the lines and it appears as though people kind of accept that the big incumbent telecom players are going to be slower to move. And this idea of things like open RAN where you're leveraging open protocols in a stack to deliver more agility and more value. So it sort of goes back to the generalized IT discussion of moving to cloud for agility. It appears as though a lot of players realize that the wild wild west, the real opportunity, is in the private sphere. So it's really interesting to see how that works, how 5G implemented into an environment with wifi how that actually works. It's really interesting. >> So it's, obviously when you talk to companies like Dell, I haven't hit HPE yet. I'm going to go over there and check out their booth. They got an analyst thing going on but it's really early days for them. I mean, they started in this business by taking an X86 box, putting a name on it, you know, that sounded like it was edged, throwing it over, you know, the wall. That's sort of how they all started in this business. And now they're, you know, but they knew they had to form partnerships. They had to build purpose-built systems. Now with 16 G out, you're seeing that. And so it's still really early days, talking about O RAN, open RAN, the open RAN alliance. You know, it's just, I mean, not even, the game hasn't even barely started yet but we heard from Dish today. They're trying to roll out a massive 5G network. Rakuten is really focused on sort of open RAN that's more reliable, you know, or as reliable as the existing networks but not as nearly as huge a scale as Dish. So it's going to take a decade for this to evolve. >> Which is surprising to the average consumer to hear that. Because as far as we know 5G has been around for a long time. We've been talking about 5G, implementing 5G, you sort of assume it's ubiquitous but the reality is it is just the beginning. >> Yeah. And you know, it's got a fake 5G too, right? I mean you see it on your phone and you're like, what's the difference here? And it's, you know, just, >> Dave N.: What does it really mean? >> Right. And so I think your point about private is interesting, the conversation Dave that we had earlier, I had throughout, hey I don't think it's a replacement for wifi. And you said, "well, why not?" I guess it comes down to economics. I mean if you can get the private network priced close enough then you're right. Why wouldn't it replace wifi? Now you got wifi six coming in. So that's a, you know, and WiFi's flexible, it's cheap, it's good for homes, good for offices, but these private networks are going to be like kickass, right? They're going to be designed to run whatever, warehouses and robots, and energy drilling facilities. And so, you know the economics I don't think are there today but maybe they can be at volume. >> Maybe at some point you sort of think of today's science experiment becoming the enterprise-grade solution in the future. I had a chance to have some conversations with folks around the show. And I think, and what I was surprised by was I was reminded, frankly, I wasn't surprised. I was reminded that when we start talking about 5G, we're talking about spectrum that is managed by government entities. Of course all broadcast, all spectrum, is managed in one way or another. But in particular, you can't simply put a SIM in every device now because there are a lot of regulatory hurdles that have to take place. So typically what these things look like today is 5G backhaul to the network, communication from that box to wifi. That's a huge improvement already. So yeah, my question about whether, you know, why not put a SIM in everything? Maybe eventually, but I think, but there are other things that I was not aware of that are standing in the way. >> Your point about spectrum's an interesting one though because private networks, you're going to be able to leverage that spectrum in different ways, and tune it essentially, use different parts of the spectrum, make it programmable so that you can apply it to that specific use case, right? So it's going to be a lot more flexible, you know, because I presume the needs spectrum needs of a hospital are going to be different than, you know, an agribusiness are going to be different than a drilling, you know, unit, offshore drilling unit. And so the ability to have the flexibility to use the spectrum in different ways and apply it to that use case, I think is going to be powerful. But I suspect it's going to be expensive initially. I think the other thing we talked about is public policy and regulation, and it's San Ji Choha brought up the point, is telcos have been highly regulated. They don't just do something and ask for permission, you know, they have to work within the confines of that regulated environment. And there's a lot of these greenfield companies and private networks that don't necessarily have to follow those rules. So that's a potential disruptive force. So at the same time, the telcos are spending what'd we hear, a billion, a trillion and a half over the next seven years? Building out 5G networks. So they got to figure out, you know how to get a payback on that. They'll get it I think on connectivity, 'cause they have a monopoly but they want more. They're greedy. They see the over, they see the Netflixes of the world and the Googles and the Amazons mopping up services and they want a piece of that action but they've never really been good at it. >> Well, I've got a question for both of you. I mean, what do you think the odds are that by the time the Shangri La of fully deployed 5G happens that we have so much data going through it that effectively it feels exactly the same as 3G? What are the odds? >> That's a good point. Well, the thing that gets me about 5G is there's so much of it on, if I go to the consumer side when we're all consumers in our daily lives so much of it's marketing hype. And, you know all the messaging about that, when it's really early innings yet they're talking about 6G. What does actual fully deployed 5G look like? What is that going to enable a hospital to achieve or an oil refinery out in the middle of the ocean? That's something that interests me is what's next for that? Are we going to hear that at this event? >> I mean, walking around, you see a fair amount of discussion of, you know, the internet of things. Edge devices, the increase in connectivity. And again, what I was surprised by was that there's very little talk about a sim card in every one of those devices at this point. It's like, no, no, no, we got wifi to handle all that but aggregating it back into a central network that's leveraging 5G. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. >> I think you, the odds of your, to go back to your question, I think the odds are even money, that by the time it's all built out there's going to be so much data and so much new capability it's going to work similarly at similar speeds as we see in the networks today. You're just going to be able to do so many more things. You know, and your video's going to look better, the graphics are going to look better. But I think over the course of history, this is what's happening. I mean, even when you go back to dial up, if you were in an AOL chat room in 1996, it was, you know, yeah it took a while. You're like, (screeches) (Lisa laughs) the modem and everything else, but once you were in there- >> Once you're there, 2400 baud. >> It was basically real time. And so you could talk to your friends and, you know, little chat room but that's all you could do. You know, if you wanted to watch a video, forget it, right? And then, you know, early days of streaming video, stop, start, stop, start, you know, look at Amazon Prime when it first started, Prime Video was not that great. It's sort of catching up to Netflix. But, so I think your point, that question is really prescient because more data, more capability, more apps means same speed. >> Well, you know, you've used the phrase over the top. And so just just so we're clear so we're talking about the same thing. Typically we're talking about, you've got, you have network providers. Outside of that, you know, Netflix, internet connection, I don't need Comcast, right? Perfect example. Well, what about the over the top that's coming from direct satellite communications with devices. There are times when I don't have a signal on my, happens to be an Apple iPhone, when I get a little SOS satellite logo because I can communicate under very limited circumstances now directly to the satellite for very limited text messaging purposes. Here at the show, I think it might be a Motorola device. It's a dongle that allows any mobile device to leverage direct satellite communication. Again, for texting back to the 2,400 baud modem, you know, days, 1200 even, 300 even, go back far enough. What's that going to look like? Is that too far in the future to think that eventually it's all going to be over the top? It's all going to be handset to satellite and we don't need these RANs anymore. It's all going to be satellite networks. >> Dave V.: I think you're going to see- >> Little too science fiction-y? (laughs) >> No, I, no, I think it's a good question and I think you're going to see fragments. I think you're going to see fragmentation of private networks. I think you're going to see fragmentation of satellites. I think you're going to see legacy incumbents kind of hanging on, you know, the cable companies. I think that's coming. I think by 2030 it'll, the picture will be much more clear. The question is, and I think it's come down to the innovation on top, which platform is going to be the most developer friendly? Right, and you know, I've not heard anything from the big carriers that they're going to be developer friendly. I've heard "we have proprietary data that we're going to charge access for and developers are going to have to pay for that." But I haven't heard them saying "Developers, developers, developers!" You know, Steve Bomber running around, like bend over backwards for developers, they're asking the developers to bend over. And so if a network can, let's say the satellite network is more developer friendly, you know, you're going to see more innovation there potentially. You know, or if a dish network says, "You know what? We're going after developers, we're going after innovation. We're not going to gouge them for all this network data. Rather we're going to make the platform open or maybe we're going to do an app store-like model where we take a piece of the action after they succeed." You know, take it out of the backend, like a Silicon Valley VC as opposed to an East Coast VC. They're not going to get you in the front end. (Lisa laughs) >> Well, you can see the sort of disruptive forces at play between open RAN and the legacy, call it proprietary stack, right? But what is the, you know, if that's sort of a horizontal disruptive model, what's the vertically disruptive model? Is it private networks coming in? Is it a private 5G network that comes in that says, "We're starting from the ground up, everything is containerized. We're going to go find people at KubeCon who are, who understand how to orchestrate with Kubernetes and use containers in microservices, and we're going to have this little 5G network that's going to deliver capabilities that you can't get from the big boys." Is there a way to monetize that? Is there a way for them to be disrupted, be disruptive, or are these private 5G networks that everybody's talking about just relegated to industrial use cases where you're just squeezing better economics out of wireless communication amongst all your devices in your factory? >> That's an interesting question. I mean, there are a lot of those smart factory industrial use cases. I mean, it's basically industry 4.0 use cases. But yeah, I don't count the cloud guys out. You know, everybody says, "oh, the narrative is, well, the latency of the cloud." Well, not if the cloud is at the edge. If you take a local zone and put storage, compute, and data right next to each other and the cloud model with the cloud APIs, and then you got an asynchronous, you know, connection back. I think that's a reasonable model. I think the cloud guys figured out developers, right? Pretty well. Certainly Microsoft and, and Amazon and Google, they know developers. I don't see any reason why they can't bring their model to the edge. So, and that's really disruptive to the legacy telco guys, you know? So they have to be careful. >> One step closer to my dream of eliminating the word "cloud" from IT lexicon. (Lisa laughs) I contend that it has always been IT, and it will always be IT. And this whole idea of cloud, what is cloud? If AWS, for example, is delivering hardware to the edge where it needs to be, is that cloud? Do we go back to the idea that cloud is an operational model and not a question of physical location? I hope we get to that point. >> Well, what's Apex and GreenLake? Apex is, you know, Dell's as a service. GreenLake is- >> HPE. >> HPE's as a service. That's outposts. >> Dave N.: Right. >> Yeah. >> That's their outpost. >> Yeah. >> Well AWS's position used to be, you know, to use them as a proxy for hyperscale cloud. We'll just, we'll grow in a very straight trajectory forever on the back of net new stuff. Forget about the old stuff. As James T. Kirk said of the Klingons, "let them die." (Lisa laughs) As far as the cloud providers were concerned just, yeah, let, let that old stuff go away. Well then they found out, there came a point in time where they realized there's a lot of friction and stickiness associated with that. So they had to deal with the reality of hybridity, if that's the word, the hybrid nature of things. So what are they doing? They're pushing stuff out to the edge, so... >> With the same operating model. >> With the same operating model. >> Similar. I mean, it's limited, right? >> So you see- >> You can't run a lot of database on outpost, you can run RES- >> You see this clash of Titans where some may have written off traditional IT infrastructure vendors, might have been written off as part of the past. Whereas hyperscale cloud providers represent the future. It seems here at this show they're coming head to head and competing evenly. >> And this is where I think a company like Dell or HPE or Cisco has some advantages in that they're not going to compete with the telcos, but the hyperscalers will. >> Lisa: Right. >> Right. You know, and they're already, Google's, how much undersea cable does Google own? A lot. Probably more than anybody. >> Well, we heard from Google and Microsoft this morning in the keynote. It'd be interesting to see if we hear from AWS and then over the next couple of days. But guys, clearly there is, this is a great wrap of day one. And the crazy thing is this is only day one. We've got three more days of coverage, more news, more information to break down and unpack on theCUBE. Look forward to doing that with you guys over the next three days. Thank you for sharing what you saw on the show floor, what you heard from our guests today as we had about 10 interviews. Appreciate your insights and your perspectives and can't wait for tomorrow. >> Right on. >> All right. For Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one wrap from MWC 23. We'll see you tomorrow. (relaxing music)

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The world's leading telcos are trying to shed the stigma of being monopolies lacking innovation. Telcos have been great at operational efficiency and connectivity and living off of transmission, and the costs and expenses or revenue associated with that transmission. But in a world beyond telephone poles and basic wireless and mobile services, how will telcos modernize and become more agile and monetize new opportunities brought about by 5G and private wireless and a spate of new innovations and infrastructure, cloud data and apps? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Mobile World Congress or now, MWC23, we explore the evolution of the telco business and how the industry is in many ways, mimicking transformations that took place decades ago in enterprise IT. We'll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they're faring in the telecommunications sector, and we'll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade. First, let's take a look at what the GSMA has in store for MWC23. GSMA is the host of what used to be called Mobile World Congress. They've set the theme for this year's event as "Velocity" and they've rebranded MWC to reflect the fact that mobile technology is only one part of the story. MWC has become one of the world's premier events highlighting innovations not only in Telco, mobile and 5G, but the collision between cloud, infrastructure, apps, private networks, smart industries, machine intelligence, and AI, and more. MWC comprises an enormous ecosystem of service providers, technology companies, and firms from virtually every industry including sports and entertainment. And as well, GSMA, along with its venue partner at the Fira Barcelona, have placed a major emphasis on sustainability and public and private partnerships. Virtually every industry will be represented at the event because every industry is impacted by the trends and opportunities in this space. GSMA has said it expects 80,000 attendees at MWC this year, not quite back to 2019 levels, but trending in that direction. Of course, attendance from Chinese participants has historically been very high at the show, and obviously the continued travel issues from that region are affecting the overall attendance, but still very strong. And despite these concerns, Huawei, the giant Chinese technology company. has the largest physical presence of any exhibitor at the show. And finally, GSMA estimates that more than $300 million in economic benefit will result from the event which takes place at the end of February and early March. And The Cube will be back at MWC this year with a major presence thanks to our anchor sponsor, Dell Technologies and other supporters of our content program, including Enterprise Web, ArcaOS, VMware, Snowflake, Cisco, AWS, and others. And one of the areas we're interested in exploring is the evolution of the telco stack. It's a topic that's often talked about and one that we've observed taking place in the 1990s when the vertically integrated IBM mainframe monopoly gave way to a disintegrated and horizontal industry structure. And in many ways, the same thing is happening today in telecommunications, which is shown on the left-hand side of this diagram. Historically, telcos have relied on a hardened, integrated, and incredibly reliable, and secure set of hardware and software services that have been fully vetted and tested, and certified, and relied upon for decades. And at the top of that stack on the left are the crown jewels of the telco stack, the operational support systems and the business support systems. For the OSS, we're talking about things like network management, network operations, service delivery, quality of service, fulfillment assurance, and things like that. For the BSS systems, these refer to customer-facing elements of the stack, like revenue, order management, what products they sell, billing, and customer service. And what we're seeing is telcos have been really good at operational efficiency and making money off of transport and connectivity, but they've lacked the innovation in services and applications. They own the pipes and that works well, but others, be the over-the-top content companies, or private network providers and increasingly, cloud providers have been able to bypass the telcos, reach around them, if you will, and drive innovation. And so, the right-most diagram speaks to the need to disaggregate pieces of the stack. And while the similarities to the 1990s in enterprise IT are greater than the differences, there are things that are different. For example, the granularity of hardware infrastructure will not likely be as high where competition occurred back in the 90s at every layer of the value chain with very little infrastructure integration. That of course changed in the 2010s with converged infrastructure and hyper-converged and also software defined. So, that's one difference. And the advent of cloud, containers, microservices, and AI, none of that was really a major factor in the disintegration of legacy IT. And that probably means that disruptors can move even faster than did the likes of Intel and Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and the Seagates of the 1990s. As well, while many of the products and services will come from traditional enterprise IT names like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, VMware, AWS, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, many of the names are going to be different and come from traditional network equipment providers. These are names like Ericsson and Huawei, and Nokia, and other names, like Wind River, and Rakuten, and Dish Networks. And there are enormous opportunities in data to help telecom companies and their competitors go beyond telemetry data into more advanced analytics and data monetization. There's also going to be an entirely new set of apps based on the workloads and use cases ranging from hospitals, sports arenas, race tracks, shipping ports, you name it. Virtually every vertical will participate in this transformation as the industry evolves its focus toward innovation, agility, and open ecosystems. Now remember, this is not a binary state. There are going to be greenfield companies disrupting the apple cart, but the incumbent telcos are going to have to continue to ensure newer systems work with their legacy infrastructure, in their OSS and BSS existing systems. And as we know, this is not going to be an overnight task. Integration is a difficult thing, transformations, migrations. So that's what makes this all so interesting because others can come in with Greenfield and potentially disrupt. There'll be interesting partnerships and ecosystems will form and coalitions will also form. Now, we mentioned that several traditional enterprise companies are or will be playing in this space. Now, ETR doesn't have a ton of data on specific telecom equipment and software providers, but it does have some interesting data that we cut for this breaking analysis. What we're showing here in this graphic is some of the names that we've followed over the years and how they're faring. Specifically, we did the cut within the telco sector. So the Y-axis here shows net score or spending velocity. And the horizontal axis, that shows the presence or pervasiveness in the data set. And that table insert in the upper left, that informs as to how the dots are plotted. You know, the two columns there, net score and the ends. And that red-dotted line, that horizontal line at 40%, that is an indicator of a highly elevated level. Anything above that, we consider quite outstanding. And what we'll do now is we'll comment on some of the cohorts and share with you how they're doing in telecommunications, and that sector, that vertical relative to their position overall in the data set. Let's start with the public cloud players. They're prominent in every industry. Telcos, telecommunications is no exception and it's quite an interesting cohort here. On the one hand, they can help telecommunication firms modernize and become more agile by eliminating the heavy lifting and you know, all the cloud, you know, value prop, data center costs, and the cloud benefits. At the same time, public cloud players are bringing their services to the edge, building out their own global networks and are a disruptive force to traditional telcos. All right, let's talk about Azure first. Their net score is basically identical to telco relative to its overall average. AWS's net score is higher in telco by just a few percentage points. Google Cloud platform is eight percentage points higher in telco with a 53% net score. So all three hyperscalers have an equal or stronger presence in telco than their average overall. Okay, let's look at the traditional enterprise hardware and software infrastructure cohort. Dell, Cisco, HPE, Red Hat, VMware, and Oracle. We've highlighted in this chart just as sort of indicators or proxies. Dell's net score's 10 percentage points higher in telco than its overall average. Interesting. Cisco's is a bit higher. HPE's is actually lower by about nine percentage points in the ETR survey, and VMware's is lower by about four percentage points. Now, Red Hat is really interesting. OpenStack, as we've previously reported is popular with telcos who want to build out their own private cloud. And the data shows that Red Hat OpenStack's net score is 15 percentage points higher in the telco sector than its overall average. OpenShift, on the other hand, has a net score that's four percentage points lower in telco than its overall average. So this to us talks to the pace of adoption of microservices and containers. You know, it's going to happen, but it's going to happen more slowly. Finally, Oracle's spending momentum is somewhat lower in the sector than its average, despite the firm having a decent telco business. IBM and Accenture, heavy services companies are both lower in this sector than their average. And real quickly, snowflake's net score is much lower by about 12 percentage points relative to its very high average net score of 62%. But we look for them to be a player in this space as telcos need to modernize their analytics stack and share data in a governed manner. Databricks' net score is also much lower than its average by about 13 points. And same, I would expect them to be a player as open architectures and cloud gains steam in telco. All right, let's close out now on what we're going to be talking about at MWC23 and some of the key issues that we'll be unpacking. We've talked about stack disaggregation in this breaking analysis, but the key here will be the pace at which it will reach the operational efficiency and reliability of closed stacks. Telcos, you know, in a large part, they're engineering heavy firms and much of their work takes place, kind of in the basement, in the dark. It's not really a big public hype machine, and they tend to move slowly and cautiously. While they understand the importance of agility, they're going to be careful because, you know, it's in their DNA. And so at the same time, if they don't move fast enough, they're going to get hurt and disrupted by competitors. So that's going to be a topic of conversation, and we'll be looking for proof points. And the other comment I'll make is around integration. Telcos because of their conservatism will benefit from better testing and those firms that can innovate on the testing front and have labs and certifications and innovate at that level, with an ecosystem are going to be in a better position. Because open sometimes means wild west. So the more players like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, et cetera, that do that and align with their ecosystems and provide those resources, the faster adoption is going to go. So we'll be looking for, you know, who's actually doing that, Open RAN or Radio Access Networks. That fits in this discussion because O-RAN is an emerging network architecture. It essentially enables the use of open technologies from an ecosystem and over time, look at O-RAN is going to be open, but the questions, you know, a lot of questions remain as to when it will be able to deliver the operational efficiency of traditional RAN. Got some interesting dynamics going on. Rakuten is a company that's working hard on this problem, really focusing on operational efficiency. Then you got Dish Networks. They're also embracing O-RAN. They're coming at it more from service innovation. So that's something that we'll be monitoring and unpacking. We're going to look at cloud as a disruptor. On the one hand, cloud can help drive agility, as we said earlier and optionality, and innovation for incumbent telcos. But the flip side is going to also do the same for startups trying to disrupt and cloud attracts startups. While some of the telcos are actually embracing the cloud, many are being cautious. So that's going to be an interesting topic of discussion. And there's private wireless networks and 5G, and hyperlocal private networks, they're being deployed, you know, at the edge. This idea of open edge is also a really hot topic and this trend is going to accelerate. You know, the importance here is that the use cases are going to be widely varied. The needs of a hospital are going to be different than those of a sports venue are different from a remote drilling location, and energy or a concert venue. Things like real-time AI inference and data flows are going to bring new services and monetization opportunities. And many firms are going to be bypassing traditional telecommunications networks to build these out. Satellites as well, we're going to see, you know, in this decade, you're going to have, you're going to look down at Google Earth and you're going to see real-time. You know, today you see snapshots and so, lots of innovations going in that space. So how is this going to disrupt industries and traditional industry structures? Now, as always, we'll be looking at data angles, right? 'Cause it's in The Cube's DNA to follow the data and what opportunities and risks data brings. The Cube is going to be on location at MWC23 at the end of the month. We got a great set. We're in the walkway between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, it's booths CS60. So we'll have a full, they're called Stan CS60. We have a full schedule. I'm going to be there with Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson and the entire Cube crew, so don't forget to stop by. All right, that's a wrap. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle, does some great stuff for us. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com. And all the video content is available on demand at thecube.net. You can email me directly at david.vellante@silicon angle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you at Mobile World Congress, and/or at next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music) (bright music fades)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It's transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model, which also should be high margin through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It's doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital in the cloud. We believe Cisco's dominant position in networking combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. However, there are clear challenges ahead for Cisco, not the least of which is the growing complexity of its portfolio, a large legacy business, and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it transitions into a new business model. Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki-bond cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, who's the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, long time Cisco watcher who together with me crafted the premise of today's session. Zeus, great to see you welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. >> Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today, set the agenda. The catalyst for this session, Zeus and I attended Cisco's financial analyst day. We received a day and a half of firehose presentations, drill downs, interactions, Q and A with Cisco execs and one key customer. So we're going to share our takeaways from these sessions and add our additional thoughts. Now, in particular, we're going to talk about Cisco's TAM, its transformation to a subscription-based model, and how we see that evolving. As always, we're going to bring in some ETR spending data for context and get Zeus' take on what that tells us. And we'll end with a summary of Cisco's cloud strategy and outlook for how it could win in the cloud. So let's talk about Cisco's sort of structure and TAM opportunities. First, Zeus, Cisco has four main lines of business where it's organized it's executives around sort of four product areas. And it's got a large service component as well. Network equipment, SP routing, data center, collaboration that security, and as I say services, that's not necessarily how it's going to market, but that's kind of the way it organizes its ELT, its executive leadership team. >> Yeah, the in fact, the ELT has been organized around those products, as you said. It used to report to the street three product segments, infrastructure platforms, which was by far the biggest, it was all their networking equipment, then applications, and then security. Now it's moved to five new segments, secure agile networks, hybrid work, end to end security, internet for the future and optimized app experiences. And I think what Cisco's trying to do is align their, the way they report along the lines of the way customers buy. 'Cause I think before, you know, they had a very simplistic model before. It was just infrastructure, apps, and security. The ELT is organized around product roadmap and the product innovation, but that's not necessarily the way customers purchase things and so, purchase things so I think they've tried to change things a little bit there. When you look at those segments though, you know, by, it's interesting. They're all big, right? So, by far the biggest distilled networking, which is almost a hundred billion dollar TAM as they reported and they have it growing a about a 9% CAGR as reported by other analyst firms. And when you think about how mature networking is Dave, the fact that that's still growing at high single digit CAGR is still pretty remarkable. So I think that's one of those things that, you know, watchers of Cisco historically have been calling for the network to be commoditized for decades. For as long as I've been watching Cisco, we've been, people have been waiting for the network to be commoditized. My thesis has always been, if you can drive enough innovation into things, you can stave off commoditization and that's what they've done. But that's really the anchor for them to sell all their other products, some of which are higher margin, some which are a little bit sore, but they're all good high margin businesses to your point. >> Awesome. We're going to dig into that. So, so they flattened the organization when Geckler left. You've got Todd Nightingale, Jonathan Davidson, Liz Centoni, and Jeetu Patel who we heard from and we'll make some comments on what we heard from them. One of the big takeaways at the financial analysts meeting was on the TAM, as you just mentioned. Liz Centoni who also is heavily involved in strategy and the CFO Scott Herren, showed this slide, which speaks to the company's TAM and the organizational structure that you were just talking about. So the big message was that Cisco has got a large and growing market, you know, no shortage of available market. Somewhere between eight and 900 billion, depending on which of the slides you pull out of the deck. And ironically Zeus, when you look at the current markets number here on the right hand side of this slide, 260 billion, it just about matches the company's market cap. Maybe an interesting coincidence, but at any rate, what was your takeaway from this data? >> Well, I think, you know, the big takeaway from the data is there's still a lot of room ahead for Cisco to grow, right? Again, this is a, it's a company that I think most people would put in the camp of legacy IT vendor, just because of how long they've been around. But they have done a very good job of staving off innovation. And part of that is just these markets that they play in continue to grow and they continue to have challenges that they can solve. I think one of the things Cisco has done though, since the arrival of Chuck Robbins, is they don't fight these trends anymore, Dave. I know prior to Chuck's arrival, they really fought the tide of software defined networking and you know, trends like that, and even cloud to some extent. And I remember one of the first meetings I had with Chuck, I asked him about that and he said that Cisco will never do that again. That under his watch, if customers are going through a market transition, Cisco wants to lead them through it, not try and hold them back. And I think for that reason, they're able to look at, all of those trends and try and take a leadership position in them, even though you might look at some of those and feel that some of them might be detrimental to Cisco's business in the short term. So something like software defined WANs, which you would throw into secure agile networks, certainly doesn't, may not carry the same kind of RPOs and margins with it that their traditional routers did, but ultimately customers are going to buy it and Cisco would like to be the ones to sell it to them. >> You know, you bring up a great point. This industry is littered, there's a graveyard of executives who fought the trend. Many people, some people remember Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation. "Unix is snake oil," is what he said. IBM mainframe guys said, "PCs are a toy." And of course the history, they were the wrong side of history. The other big takeaway was the shift to software in subscription. They really made a big point of this. Here's a chart Cisco showed a couple of times to make the point that it's one of the largest software companies in the world. You know, in the top 10. They also made the point that Chuck Robbins, when he joined in 2015, and since that time, it's nearly 4x'ed it's subscription software revenue, and roughly doubled its software sales. And it now has an RPO, remaining performance obligations, that exceeds 30 billion. And it's committing to grow its subscription business in the forward-looking statements by 15 to 17% CAGR through 25, which would imply about a doubling of these, the blue lines. Zeus, it's unclear if that forward-looking forecast is just software. I presume it includes some services, but as Herren pointed out, over time, these services will be bundled into the product revenue, same way SAS companies do it. But the point is Cisco is committed, like many of their peers, to moving to an ARR model. But please, share your thoughts on Cisco's move to software subscriptions and how you see the future of consumption-based pricing. >> Yeah, this has been a big shift for Cisco, obviously. It's one that's highly disruptive. It's one that I know gave their partners a lot of angst for a long time because when you sell things upfront, you get a big check for selling that, right? And when you sell things in a subscription model, you get a much smaller check for a number of months over the period of the contract. It also changes the way you deal with the customer. When you sell a one-time product, you basically wipe your hands. You come back in three or four years and say, "it's time to upgrade." When you sell a subscription, now, the one thing that I've tried to talk to Cisco and its partners about is customers don't renew things they don't use. And so it becomes incumbent on the partner, it becomes incumbent upon Cisco to make sure that things that the customer is subscribing to, that they do use. And so Cisco's had to create a customer success organization. They've had to help their partners create those customer success organizations. So it's really changed the model. And Cisco not only made the shift, they've done it faster than they actually had originally forecast. So during the financial analyst day, they actually touted their execution on software, noting that it hit it's 30% revenue as percent of total target well before it was supposed to, it's actually exceeded its targets. And now it's looking to increase that to, it actually raised its guidance in this area a little bit by a few percentage points, looking out over the next few years. And so it's moved to the subscription model, Dave, the thing that you brought up, which I do see as somewhat of a challenge is the shift to consumption-based pricing. So subscription is one thing in that I write you a check every month for the same amount. When I go to the consumption-based pricing, that's easy to do for cloud services, things like WebEx or Duo or, you know, CloudLock, some of the security products. That that shift should be relatively simple. If customers want to buy it that way. It's unclear as to how you do that when you're selling on-prem equipment with the software add-on to it because in that case, you have to put metering technology in to understand how much they're using. You have to have a minimum baseline to start with. They've done it in some respects. The old HCS product that they sold, the Telcos, actually was sold with a minimum commit and then they tacked on a utilization on top of that. So maybe they move into that kind of model. But I know it's something that they've, they get asked about a lot. I know they're still thinking about it, but it's something that I believe is coming and it's going to come pretty fast. >> I want to pick up on that because I think, you know, they made the point that we're one of the top 10 software companies in the world. It's very difficult for hardware companies to make the transition to software. You know, HP couldn't do it. >> Well, no one's done it. >> Well, IBM has kind of done it, but they really struggle. It's kind of this mishmash of tooling and software products that aren't really well-integrated. But, I would say this, everybody now, Cisco, Dell, HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, pretty much all the traditional hardware players are trying to move to an as a service model or at least for a portion of their business. HPE's all in, Dell transitioning. And for the most part, I would make the following observation. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. They're pretty much following a SAS like model, which in my view is outdated and kind of flawed from a customer standpoint. All these guys say, "Hey, we're doing this because "this is what the customers want." I think the cloud is really a true consumption based model. And if you look at modern SAS companies, a lot of the startups, they're moving to a consumption based model. You see that with Snowflake, you see that with Stripe. Now they will offer incentives. But most of the traditional enterprise players, they're saying, "Okay, pay us upfront, "commit to some base level. "If you go over it, you know, "we'll charge you for it. "If you go under it, you're still going to pay "for that base level." So it's not true consumption base. It's not really necessarily the customer's best interest. So that's, I think there's some learnings there that are going to have to play out. >> Yeah, the reason customers are shying away from that SAS type model, I think during the pandemic, the one thing we learned, Dave, is that the business will ebb and flow greatly from month to month sometimes. And I was talking with somebody that worked for one of the big hotel chains, and she was telling me that what their CRM providers, she wouldn't tell me who it was, except said it rhymed with Shmalesforce, that their utilization of it went from, you know, from a nice steady level to spiking really high when customers started calling in to cancel hotel rooms. And then it dropped down to almost nothing as we went through that period of stay at home. And now it's risen back up. And so for her, she wanted to move to a consumption-based model because what happens otherwise is you wind up buying for peak utilization, your software subscriptions go largely underutilized the majority of the year, and you wind up paying, you know, a lot more than you need to. If you go to more of a true consumption model, it's harder to model out from a financial perspective 'cause there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the business, but over a longer period of time, it's more cost-effective, right? And so the, again, what the pandemic taught us was we don't really know what we're going to need from a consumption standpoint, you know, nevermind a year from now, maybe even six months from now. And consumption just creates a lot more flexibility and agility. You can scale up, you can scale down. You can bring in users, you can take out users, you can add consultants, things like that. And it just, it's much more aligned with the way businesses are run today. >> Yeah, churn is a silent killer of a software company. And so there's retention is the key here. So again, I think there's lots of learning. Let's put Cisco into context with some of its peers. So this chart we developed compares five companies to Cisco. Core Dell, meaning Dell, without VMware. VMware, HPE, IBM, we've put an AWS, and then Cisco as, IBM, AWS and Cisco is the integrated plays. So the chart shows the latest quarterly revenue multiplied by four to get a run rate, a three-year growth outlook, gross margin percentage, market cap, and revenue multiple. And the key points here are that one, Cisco has got a pretty awesome business model. It's got 60% gross margin, strong operating margins, not shown here, but in the mid twenties, 25%. It's got a higher growth rate than most of its peers. And as such, a much better, multiple than say, for instance, Core Dell gets 33 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE is double that. IBM's below two X. Cisco's revenue multiple rivals VMware, which is a pure software company. Now in a large part that's because VMware stock took a hit recently, but still the point is obvious. Cisco's got a great business. Now for context, we've added AWS, which blows away any company on this chart. We've inferred a market cap of nearly 600 billion, which frankly is conservative at a 10 X revenue multiple given it's inferred margins and growth rate. Now Zeus, if AWS were a separate company, it could have a market cap that approached 800 billion in my view. But what does this data tell you? >> Well, it just tells me that Cisco continues to be a very well-run company that has staved off commoditization, despite the calling for it for years. And I think the big lesson, and I've talked to financial analysts about this over the years, is that if, I don't really believe anything in this world is a commodity, Dave. I think even when Cisco went to the server market, if you remember back then, they created a new way of handling memory management. They were getting well above average margins for service, albeit less than Cisco's network margins, but still above average for server margins. And so I think if you can continue to innovate, you will see the margin stay where they are. You will see customers continue to buy and refresh. And I think one of the challenges Cisco's had in the past, and this is where the subscription business will help, is getting customers to stay with the latest and greatest. Prior to this refresh of network equipment, some of the stuff that I've seen in the fields, 10, 15 years old, once you move to that sell me a box and then tack on the subscription revenue that you pay month by month, you do drive more consistent refresh. Think about the way you just handle your own mobile phone. If you had to go pay, you know, a thousand dollars every three years, you might not do it at that three-year cycle. If you pay 40 bucks a month, every time there's a new phone, you're going to take it, right? So I think Cisco is able to drive greater, better refresh, keep their customers current, keep the features in there. And we've seen that with a lot of the new products. The new Cat 9,000, some of the new service provider products, the new wifi products, they've all done very well. In fact, they've all outpaced their previous generation products as far as growth rate goes. And so I think that is a testament to the way they've run the business. But I do think when people bucket Cisco in with HP and Dell, and I understand why they do, their businesses were similar at one time, it's really not a true comparison anymore. I think Cisco has completely changed their business and they're not trying to commoditize markets, they're trying to drive innovation and keep the margins up, where I think HP and Dell tend to really compete on price versus innovation. >> Well, and we are going to get to this point about the tailwinds and headwinds and cloud, and how Cisco to do it. But, to your point about, you know, the cell phone analogy. To the extent that Cisco can make that seamless for customers could hide that underlying complexity, that's going to be critical for the cloud. Now, but before we get there, I want to talk about one of the reasons why Cisco such a high multiple, and has been able to preserve its margins, to your point, not being commoditized. And it's been able to grow both organically, but also has a strong history of M and A. It's this chart shows a dominant position in core networking. So this shows, so ETR data within the Fortune 500. It plots companies in the ETR taxonomy in two dimensions, net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending velocity, and market share on the horizontal axis, which is a measure of presence in the survey. It's not like IDC market share, it's mentioned market share if you will. The point is Cisco is far and away the most pervasive player in the market, it's generally held its dominant position. Although, it's been under pressure in the last few years in core networking, but it retains or maintains a very respectable net score and consistently performs well for such a large company. Zeus, anything you'd add with respect to Cisco's core networking business? >> Yeah, it's maintained a dominant network position historically. I think part of because it drives good products, but also because the competitive landscape, historically has been pretty weak, right? We saw companies like 3Com and Nortel who aren't around anymore. It'll be interesting to see moving forward now that companies like VMware are involved in networking. AWS is interested in networking. Arista is a much stronger company. You know, Juniper bought Mist and is in better position. Even Extreme Networks who most people thought was dead a few years ago has made a number of acquisitions and is now a billion dollar company. So while Cisco has done a great job of execution, they've done a great job on the innovation side, their competitive landscape, looking out over the next five years, I think is going to be more difficult than it has been over the previous five years. And largely, Dave, I think that's good for Cisco. I think whenever Cisco's pressed a little bit from competition, they tend to step on the innovation gas a little bit more. And I look back and even just the transition when VMware bought Nicira, that got Cisco's SDN business into gear, like nothing else could have, right? So competition for that company, they always seem to respond well to it. >> So, let's break down Cisco's net score a little bit. Explain why the company has been able to hold its spending momentum despite its large size. This will give you a little insight to the survey. So this chart shows the granular components of net score. The lime green is new adoptions to Cisco. The forest green is spending more than 6%. The gray is flat plus or minus 5%. The pink is spending drops by more than 5%. And the red is we're chucking the platform, we're getting off. And Cisco's overall net score here is 25%, which for a company of its size speaks to the relationships that it has with customers. It's of course got a fat middle in the gray area, like all sort of large established companies. But very low defections as well, it's got low new adoptions. But very respectable. So that is background, Zeus. Let's look at spending momentum over time across Cisco's portfolio. So this chart shows Cisco's net score by that methodology within the ETR taxonomy for Cisco over three survey periods. And what jumps out is Meraki on the left, very strong. Virtualization business, its core networking, analytics and security, all showing upward momentum. AppD is a little bit concerning, but that could be related to Cisco's sort of pivot to full stack observability. So maybe AppD is being bundled there. Although some practitioners have cited to us some concerns in that space. And then WebEx at the end of the chart, it's showing some relative strength, but not that high. Zeus, maybe you could comment on Meraki and any other takeaways across the portfolio. >> Yeah, Meraki has proven to be an excellent acquisition for Cisco. In fact, you might, I think it's arguable to say it's its best acquisition in history going all the way back to camp Kalpana and Grand Junction, the ones that brought up catalyst switches. So, in fact, I think Meraki's revenue might be larger than security now. So, that shows you the momentum it has. I think one of the lessons it brought to Cisco was that simpler is better, sometimes. I think when they first bought Meraki, the way Meraki's deployed, it's very easy to set up. There's a lot of engineering work though that goes into making a product simple to use. And I think a lot of Cisco engineers historically looked at Meraki as, that's a little bit of a toy. It's meant for small businesses, things like that, but it's not for enterprise. But, Rocky's done a nice job of expanding the portfolio, of leveraging the cloud for analytics and showing you a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily get from traditional networking equipment. And one of the things that I was really delighted to see was when they put Todd Nightingale in charge of all the networking business, because that showed to me that Chuck Robbins understood that the things Meraki were doing were right and they infuse a little bit of Meraki into the rest of the company. You know, that's certainly a good thing. The other areas that you showed on the chart, not really a surprise, Dave. When you think of the shift hybrid work and you think of the, some of the other transitions going on, I think you would expect to see the server business in decline, the storage business, you know, maybe in a little bit of decline, just because people aren't building out data centers. Where the other ones are related more to hybrid working, hybrid cloud, things like that. So it is what you would expect. The WebEx one was interesting too, because it did show somewhat of a dip and then a rise. And I think that's indicative of what we've seen in the collaboration space since the pandemic came about. Companies like Zoom and RingCentral really got a lot of the headlines. Again, when you, the comment I made on competition, Cisco got caught a little bit flat-footed, they've caught up in features and now they really stepped on the gas there. Chuck joked that he gave the WebEx team a bit of a blank check to go do what it had to do. And I don't think that was a joke. I think he actually did that because they've added more features into WebEx in the last year then I think they did the previous five years before that. >> Well, let's just drill into video conferencing real quick here, if we could. Here's that two dimensional view, again, showing net score against market share or pervasiveness of mentions, and you can see Microsoft Teams in the upper right. I mean, it's off the chart, literally. Zoom's well ahead of Cisco in terms of, you know, mentions presence. And that could be a spate of freemium, you know, but it's basically a three horse race in this game. And Cisco, I don't think is trying to take Zoom head on, rather it seems to be making WebEx a core part of its broader collaboration agenda. But Zeus, maybe you could comment. >> Well, it's all coming together, right? So, it's hard to decouple calling from video from meetings. All of the vendors, including Teams, are going after the hybrid work experience. And if you believe the future is hybrid and not just work from home, then Cisco does have a pretty interesting advantage because it's the only one that makes its own end points, where Teams and Zoom doesn't. And so that end to end experience it can deliver. The Microsoft Teams one's interesting because that product, frankly, when you talk to users, it doesn't have a great user score, like as far as user satisfaction goes, but the one thing Microsoft has done a very good job of is bundling it in to the Office365 licenses, making it very easy for IT to deploy. Zoom is a little bit in the middle where they've appealed to the users. They've done a better job of appealing to IT, but there is a, there is a battleground now going on where video's not just video. It includes calling, includes meetings, includes room systems now, and I think this hybrid work friend is going to change the way we think about these meeting tools. >> Now we'd be remiss if we didn't spend a moment talking about security as a key part of Cisco's business. And we have a graphic on this same kind of X, Y. And it's been, we've seen several quarters of growth. Although, the last quarter security growth was in the low single digits, but Cisco is a major player in security. And this X, Y graph shows, they've got both a large presence and a solid spending momentum. Not nearly as much momentum as Okta or Zscaler or a CrowdStrike and some of the smaller companies, but they're, these guys are on a rocket ship, but others that we featured in these episodes, but much more than respectable for Cisco. And security is critical to the strategy. It's a big part of the subscriber base. And the last thing, Zeus, I'll say about Cisco made the point in analyst day, that this market is crowded. You can see that in this chart. And their goal is to simplify this picture and make it easier for customers to secure their data and apps. But that's not easy, Zeus. What are your thoughts on Cisco's security opportunities? >> Yeah, I've been waiting for Cisco go to break up in security a little more than it has. I do think, I was talking with a CSO the other day, Dave, that said to me he's starting to understand that you don't have to have best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, there's a lot of buyers now will tell you that if you try and have best of breed everywhere, it actually creates a negative when it comes to threat protection because keeping all the policies and things up to date is very, very difficult. And so the industry is moving more to a platform model, right? Now, the challenge for Cisco is how do you get that, the customer to think of the network as part of the platform? Because while the platform model, I think, is starting to gain traction, FloridaNet, Palo Alto, even McAfee, companies like that also have their own version of a security platform. And if you look at the financial performance of companies like FloridaNet and Palo Alto over the past, you know, over the past couple of years, they've been through the roof, right? And so I think an interesting and unique challenge for Cisco is can they convince the security buyer that the network is as important a part of that platform as any other component? If they can do that, I think they can break away from the pack. If not, then they'll stay mixed in with those, you know, Palo, FloridaNet, Checkpoint, and, you know, and Cisco, in that mix. But I do think that may present their single biggest needle moving opportunity just because of how big the security TAM is, and the fact that there is no de facto leader in security today. If they could gain the same kind of position in security as they have a networking, who, I mean, that would move the needle like no other market would. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that they're coming at security, obviously from a position of networking strength. You've got, to your point, you've got best of breed, Okta in identity, you got CrowdStrike in endpoint, Zscaler in cloud security. They're all growing like crazy. And you got Cisco and you know, Palo Alto, CSOs tell us they want to work with Palo Alto because they're the thought leader and they're obviously a major player here. You mentioned FloridaNet, there's a zillion others. We could talk all day about security. But let's bring it back to cloud. We've talked about a number of the piece in Cisco's portfolio, and we haven't really spent any time on full stack observability, which is a big push for Cisco with AppD, Intersight and the ThousandEyes acquisition. And that plays into this equation. But my take, Zeus, is Cisco has a number of cloud knobs that it can turn, it sells core networking equipment to hyperscalers. It can be the abstraction layer to connect on-prem to the cloud and hybrid and across clouds. And it's in a good position with Telcos too, to go after the 5G. But let's use this chart to talk about Cisco's cloud prospects. It's an ETR cut of the cloud customer spending. So we cut it by cloud customers. And they're are, I don't know, 800 or so in the survey. And then looking at various companies performance within that cut. So these are companies that compete, or in the case of HashiCorp, partner with Cisco at some level. Let me just set this up and get your take. So the insert on the chart by the way shows the raw data that positions each dot, the net score and the shared n, i.e. the number of accounts in the survey that responded. The key points, first of all, Azure and AWS, dominant players in cloud. GCP is a distant third. We've reported on that a lot. Not only are these two companies big, they have spending momentum on their platforms. They're growing, they are on that flywheel. Second point, VMware and Cisco are very prominent. They have huge customer bases. And while they're often on a collision course, there's lots of room in cloud for multiple players. When we plotted some other Cisco properties like AppD and Meraki, which as we said, is strong. And then for context, we've placed Dell, HPE, Aruba, IBM and Oracle. And also VMware cloud and AWS, which is notable on its elevation. And as I say, we've added HashiCorp because they're critical partner of Cisco and it's a multi-cloud play. Okay, Zeus, there's the setup. What does Cisco have to do to make the cloud a tailwind? Let's talk about strategy, tailwinds, headwinds, competition, and bottom line it for us. >> Yeah, well, I do think, well, I talked about security being the biggest needle mover for Cisco, I think its biggest challenge is convincing Wall Street in particular, that the cloud is a tailwind. I think if you look at the companies with the really high multiples to their stock, Dave, they're all ones where they're viewed as, they go along with the cloud ride, Right? So the, if you can associate yourself with the cloud and then people believe that the cloud is going to, more cloud equals more business, that obviously creates a better multiple because the cloud has almost infinite potential ahead of it. Now with respect to Cisco, I do think cloud has presented somewhat of a double-edged sword for Cisco. I don't believe the current consumption model for cloud is really a tailwind for Cisco, not really a headwind, but it doesn't really change Cisco's business. But I do think the very definition of cloud is changing before our eyes, Dave. And it's shifting away from centralized clouds. If you think of the way customers bought cloud before, it might have used AWS, it might've used Azure, but it really, that's not really multi-cloud, it's just multiple clouds in which I put things in these centralized resources. It's shifting more to this concept of distributed cloud in which a single application can be built using resources from your private cloud, for AWS, from Azure, from Edge locations, all the cloud providers have built their portfolios to support this concept of distributed cloud and what becomes important there, is a highly agile dynamic network. And in that case with distributed cloud, that is a tailwind for Cisco because now the network is that resource that ties all those distributed cloud components together. Now the network itself has to change. It needs to become a lot more agile and microservices and container friendly itself so I can spin up resources and, you know, in an Edge location, as fast as I can on-prem and things like that. But I do think it creates another wave of innovation and networking, and in that case, I think it does act as a tailwind for Cisco, aside from just the work it's done with the web scalers, you know, those types of companies. So, but I do think that Cisco needs to rethink its delivery model on network services somewhat to take advantage of that. >> At the analyst meeting, Cisco made the point that it does sell to the hyperscalers. It talked about the top six hyperscalers. You know, you had mentioned to me, maybe IBM and Oracle were in there. I always talk about four hyperscalers and only four, but that's fine. Here's my question. Practitioners have told me, buyers have told me, the more money and more workloads I put in the cloud, the less I spend with Cisco. Now, even though that might be Cisco gear powering those clouds, do you see that as a potential threat in that they don't own that relationship anymore and value will confer to the cloud players? >> Yeah, that's, I've heard that too. And I don't, I believe that's true when it comes to general purpose compute. You're probably not buying as many UCS servers and things like that because you are putting them in the cloud. But I do think you do need a refresh the network. I think the network becomes a very important role, plays a very important role there. The variant, the really interesting trend will be, what is your WAM look like? Do you have thousands of workers scattered all over the place, or do you just have a few centralized locations? So I think also, you know, Cisco will wind up providing connectivity within the cloud. If you think of the transition we've seen in other industries, Dave, as far as cloud goes, you think of, you know, F5, a company like that. People thought that AWS would commoditize F5's business because AWS provides their own load balancers, right? But what AWS provides is a very basic, very basic functionality and then use F5's virtual edition or a cloud edition for a lot of the advanced capabilities. And I think you'll see the same thing with the cloud that customers will start buying versions of Cisco that go in the cloud to drive a lot of those advanced capabilities that only Cisco delivers. And so I think you wind up buying more Cisco over time, although the per unit price of what you buy might be a little bit lower. If that makes sense here. >> It does, I think it makes a lot of sense and that fits into the cloud model. You know, you bring up a good point, the conversation with the customer was Rakuten. And that individual was essentially sharing with us, somebody was asking, one of the analysts was asking, "Well, what about the cloud guys? "Aren't they going to really threaten the whole Telco "industry and disrupt it?" And his point was, "Look at, this stuff is not trivial." So to your point, you know, maybe they'll provide some basic functionality. Kind of like they do in a lot of different areas. Data protection is another good example. Security is another good example. Where there's plenty of room for partners, competitors, of on-prem players to add value. And I've always said, "Look, the opportunity "is the cloud players spend 100 billion dollars a year "on CapEx." It's a gift to companies like Cisco who can build an abstraction layer that connects on-prem, cloud for hybrid, across clouds, out to the edge, and really be that layer that is that layer that takes advantage of cloud native, but also delivers that experience, I don't want to use the word seamlessly, but that experience across those clouds as the cloud expands. And that's fundamentally Cisco's cloud strategy, isn't it? >> Oh yeah. And I think people have underestimated over the years, how hard it is to build good networking products. Anybody can go get some silicon and build a product to connect two things together. The question is, can you do it at scale? Can you do it securely? And lots of companies have tried to commoditize networking, you know, White Boxes was looked at as the existential threat to Cisco. Huawei was looked at as the big threat to Cisco. And all of those have kind of come and gone because building high quality network equipment that scales is tough. And it's tougher than most people realize. And your other point on the cloud providers as well, they will provide a basic level of functionality. You know, AWS network equipment doesn't work in Azure. And Azure stuff doesn't work in Google, and Google doesn't work in AWS. And so you do need a third party to come in and act as almost the cloud middleware that can connect all those things together with a consistent set of policies. And that's what Cisco does really well. They did that, you know back when they were founded with routing protocols and you can think this is just an extension of what they're doing just up at the cloud layer. >> Excellent. Okay, Zeus, we're going to leave it there. Thanks to my guest today, Zeus Kerravala. Great analysis as always. Would love to have you back. Check out ZKresearch.com to reach him. Thank you again. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Now, remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Braking Analysis" podcast, and you can connect on Twitter at DVallante or email me David.Vallante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for the comments on LinkedIn. Check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time. (light music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Mobile World Congress is alive, theCUBE will be there and we'll certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now, as we approach a delayed mobile world congress, it's really appropriate to reflect in the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it. Telcos have done of really good job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that Telco has faced. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry, with revenue expectations in the low single digits. And at the same time network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually. And last year it grew at 40% to 50%. Despite these challenges, Telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the Telco industry collectively is selling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 200 5G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should Telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber. Can the Telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? Now what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the Cloud Hyperscalers play in Telco? Are they infrastructure on which the Telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague, and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis. Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. >> It is really our pleasure. So, we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can Telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that, and then obviously we're going to talk about Cloud as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it, Mobile World Congress, it's back on, what's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? >> Well Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minutes slots and we return at the end of it trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that with the last time we had a live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile, and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So, he gave you that once a year, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices, but increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software oriented players there, but always the Telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure. Increasingly in the last few years people provided the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. But of course the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes, well, of course we've also been extending that connection to connect things whether it's in the home or the different devices, monitoring of doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So, actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding, and so is the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So, we set an awful lot of different suppliers coming in, trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. >> Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up. I know a lot of people have pulled out, I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go but what's your expectation? >> Well, from an analyst point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the DSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for future for the industry interaction. But of course, like many people having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So, I'm not sure who will be there. I like you, but you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already, the difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-briefs and then have to go do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. >> You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about Telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going, Chris, how would you describe the current state of Telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what is the ideal future state look like for Telcos in your view? >> So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Telco. I think going forward, the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to the connectivity under the scenario I just described of people, buildings, things, and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So, the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It obviously includes Wi-Fi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been a pretty good state, as you said in your opening comments they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia, where we're very mobile centric. So, the fact is that every country market is different, so we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having and not ever increasing prices, because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in, and that brings in many questions that we going to touch upon now around Cloud and Hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem. >> Well, as you know, Telco is not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned, you've talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. It's easy from an IT perspective. Oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened, and it's not really flexible, but the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So, the big talk today is, "Okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems, and Open RAN, and open everything and microservices and containers. And so, the question is this, can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? >> Well, for me, this is the big trade-off and in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and to literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster. And of course, as a major corporation, these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the Hyperscalers for example, but they're large organizations, and they're trying to slim down their organization, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So, I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers. The Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdocs and so on, the Ciscos. And then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and come in, and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Curve taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, but not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major or mainframes still in the back of the organization. But of course, as mobile has come in, we've started to deal much more closely, uninteractively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually, at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more, continuous development, continuous improvement, and that sort of on demand delivery. >> Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the Cloud space, but I want to now touch on Telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic, can Telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be, an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? >> Sure. >> So Chris, can and should Telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. >> I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. Normally, pipe is a is a negative comment in the telecom world. But pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So, in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So, therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So, that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many Telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, being around media, being enterprise, being around IOT, and actually for the most part they've failed. And we've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from, owning content and not delivering content, but owning content. And the same as they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that, because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So, actually rather than the old Telco view of we going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change, it's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. I always use a phrase that there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think Telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we are on connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem things saying, "How can we support partners? How can we support everyone in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem?" So, there are opportunities out there, plenty of them, but of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach, and approach it, do I say with a little bit of humility to say, "Hey, we can bring this to the table, how do we work together? >> Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me, it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute, because one of the obvious things that Telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context, that it's different in a, you're talking about managing connectivity, but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency, but they're not going to get into devices. I mean, they'll resell devices, but they're not going to be, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices, but there's certainly the edge and that's so, it'll define in opaque, but it's huge. If there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity. And as you pointed out, there's the ecosystem, but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for Telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? >> Oh, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity, but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So, we usually talk, and MWC would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with, you can use this fixed wireless access approach, where the roots that sits in your house or your building. So, it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines. And of course, it's also, gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So, many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that more private network environment addressing those very low latency, and high bandwidth requirements. So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities. Of course, the question here is, is connectivity enough, or especially with your comment around the edge, at the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, and of course the applications. So, that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, where that's, you and I in our homes or outward as an about, or from a business point of view, an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving, and not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times, is we've got a great new wave of technology coming, how can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets. >> Yeah now, of course all of these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately, but we're going to talk about Cloud, we're going to talk about competition, But one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is, is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network, so presumably it's an opportunity for the Telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and their proximity, to various end points. But the Cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for Telco? >> I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie, whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it, and building automation into the delivery of the service, and using the analytics, whether you call it ML or AI, it doesn't really matter. But actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now, of course, Telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades, but they've never used it. So, I think what's happening is, the Cloud players are beginning to educate many of the Telcos around how valuable this stuff is. And that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data. Now, do the Telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the Cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments, and of course the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So, you've always got to look at it end to end and where the data flows are, and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the Edge, and perhaps less and less going back to the core, which is of course the original sort of mandate of the Cloud. >> Well, we certainly think that most of the Edge is going to be about AI inferencing, and then most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or conductivity, or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the Edge. >> Everything. >> Yeah. >> Everything, yeah. >> Let's get into the Cloud discussion and talk about the Hyperscalers, the big Hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the Cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms on Telecom TV at the great Telco debate. You likened the Hyperscalers, Chris, to Dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So, the question is, are the Cloud players going to suck the value out of the Telcos? Or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, there's sometimes friendly but they're unpredictable. >> Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I use that, but I think it indicates some of the direction of power shift where, we've got to remember here that Telcos are fundamentally national, and they're restricted by regulation, and the Cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like be, but some regional restrictions, but the global players, the Hyperscalers, they will use that power and they they will extend their reach, and they are extending their reach. If you think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the Telco international networks, all the submarine investments that tend to be done primarily for the Hyperscalers. So, they're building that out. So, as soon as you get onto their network, then you suddenly become part of that environment. And that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances we might have got in the past approaches from the Telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the Telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and delivering to the buildings, and putting antennas up. So, they will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with Cloud and the Hyperscalers is that they're working much more close together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google probably the best known of the of the AI and ML delivers from the Cloud side, working with many of the Telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes. They've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. And so, we begin to see that, and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the Telco networking environment, we're seeing that with AWS, and of course with Azure as well. And Azure of course acquired a couple of companies in affirmed and Metro switch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the likes there within the connectivity environment. So, it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those Dementors are swooping around and looking for opportunities, and we know that they will pick up opportunities, and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the Telcos have the control, they don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment, because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece, and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. And so, there is a tension there between the local Telco, the local market and the Hyperscaler market, but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. >> Well, and we've talked about this you and I in the past where the Telcos, portions of the Telco network could move into the Cloud. And there of course the Telcos all run the big data centers, and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the Cloud. But it's very clear, they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the Cloud players. Why would they? But there are portions of their IT that they could move into. Particularly, in the front end, they want to build like everybody. They want to build an abstraction layer. They're not going to move their core systems and their backend Oracle databases, they're going to put a brick wall around those, but they wanted abstraction layer, and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems. But the web front end stuff makes sense to put into Cloud. So, how do you think about that? >> I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time, you will, but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, they're suggested that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services. You can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about, for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So, any improvement on that is going to be good from an MPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSS OSS in the telecom world, and actually putting that into the Cloud, leveraging both the Hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved Cloud wards, but they are moving Cloud wards and they're embracing microservices and Cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week, would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seems a bit slow moving, actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the Cloud and into Cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum, to actually make sure we don't have to do the backend straight away, do it over time. Because of course the thing that we're not touching upon here, is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So, just because you don't need to change the backend to keep your revenue stream going, this is on a new, it keeps delivering every month, we keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the Telco pot. That's why it's such a big market, and people aren't going to stop doing that. So, I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets, whereas actually, we keep paying for this stuff, we keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the Telcos. So, it's not a bad industry to be in, even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic, we need it. >> Yeah, it's the mother of old golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security, and I want to touch on security here, is such an important topic. And it's top of mind obviously for everybody, Telcos, Hyperscalers, the Hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model, you know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there has been a problem. The Telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view, in the Cloud, with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? >> Security is a great subject, and I do not specialize in it. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add on issue. So, every aspect, every element, every service you build into your micro services environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction, how do you secure the customer's data? Obviously, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits, but at every level of every connection, every hop that we look through, every route to jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, it's seen as being a separate part of the industry, but actually, as we collapse parts of the network down, we're talking about bringing optical and rooting together in many environments, security should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge, when I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should've said security as well, because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link and let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. >> Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's hit on technologies and competition, we kind of blend those together. What technology should we be paying attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation. We hear a lot about 5G, Open RAN. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like, that are well positioned? >> We've touched upon it in various of the questions that have proceeded this. So, the sort of Cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the process we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations, because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, anything which is related to automation. And then the Open RAN question is really interesting. Once again, you raised this topic of when you go down an Open RAN routes or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So, therefore there are potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined, but everybody is entering the Open RAN market. There are some names that you will see regularly next week, being pushed, I'm not going to push them anymore, because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention. But there are plenty out there. The good news is, the key vendors who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more, apart from the whole shift towards Cloud and microservices, is the coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the Open RAN, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people come from the IT side able to control elements within the wireless controller piece. Now that that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it, anybody can manage it. So, more specialization is required, but understanding how the end to end flow works. What we will see of course is announcements about new devices, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year, and don't interrupt their beat with it with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers, and you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly, you'll see the people approaching it from more and more Cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging, that Cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past >> Which is kind of interesting because Cloud, a lot of the Clouds are Walled Gardens, at the same time they host a lot of open technologies, and I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the Telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the Telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so, that's something that we definitely want to watch. You've got a comment there? >> Yeah, I think the Telco developer they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? They've had their traditional, if you go back to when you and I were kids, the plain old telephone service was a, they were a one trick pony, and they've moved onto that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. So, there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country, and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite, we might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received, with the change in generation of satellite might help do that. But we've known traditionally that a lot of developer activity in there, what it does bring to the four though, Dave, is this issue of players like the Ciscos and Junipers, and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. This is where the ecosystem play comes in, because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with individual applications. And so it's opening up, it's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into, and that's what becomes so exciting. So, the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see us settling down, a stabilization of relationship between the Telcos and the Hyperscalers, because they need each other as we talked about previously, then the major providers, the Ciscos, Nokias, Ericssons, Huawei's, the way they interact with the Telcos. And then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So, it's actually a really exciting environment. >> So I want to continue that theme and just talk about Telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the Telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the Cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular, but let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset, and look at how they compare to some of the Telcos that ETR captures specifically within the Telco industry. So, we filtered this data on the Telco industry. So, this is our X, Y graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis, is net score which measures spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the Telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors, like within the technology sectors, Cloud, networking, and so it's narrow, it's a narrow slice of the 1500. It respondents, it represents about 133 shared accounts. And a couple of things to jump right out. Within the Telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis, but what's notable as they score very highly in the vertical axis, with elevated spending velocity on their platforms within Telco. Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before, Arista and Verizon, along with VMware are also elevated, as is Aruba, which is HPEs networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in Telco as we've reported in previous segments. Is no surprise You see Akamai there. Now remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT, so you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinox, both higher than many of the others including Dell, but you could see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in Telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, your Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE TELUM and Lumen which is formerly, century link via IBM. Now again, I'm going to caution you. This is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware and Red Hat appear to be well positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the Telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players, and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. >> I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen a Microsoft Azure and AWS very strong working with Telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively pushed into the market certainly the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well positioned, and they all come from a slightly different background. As I said, the Google with this, perhaps more data centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with this outpost reaching out, connecting out, and as you'll, with its knowledge of the the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course in there does have, and it's a mass scale division, a lot of activity there, some of the people collapsing, some of that rooting an obstacle together, their big push on Silicon. So, what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sorts of suppliers who are active in this market. Now Telcos is a big spenders, the telecom market, as we said, a $1.4 trillion market, they spend a lot, they probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment, to build out fiber where they need to build out. So, any anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know when you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the Cloud to deliver against it. So, what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus on one particular piece of the market. So you specialize on handsets, people specialize on home markets and home gateways. So, I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where people are, where companies are building upon, of course their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, Telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD-WAN Market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic, because it's allowed us to extend that to home, but be of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the Telco, as I said, whether they wannna reduce the number of suppliers on the roster. So that puts a question mark against some of the open approaches, and then from the Telco to the end customer, because it goes to the Telcos, 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel? Which includes all the channels, we talked about security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon and the Cloud. It's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly, customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, "Yeah, I want a piece of humans to Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel, because I need a bit of their expertise on security." So, fascinating market, and I think not telecom's no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. >> Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So, I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. >> Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, we as people, we want to be connected, we as business, we want to be connected, in society we want to be connected. So, the fundamental of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope that governments don't mess with it too much. And let's hope that we get the right technology comes through, and help support that world of connectivity going forward. >> All right, Chris, well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis, he brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for Breaking Analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on twitter @dvellante or email me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post, and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay. We're here with Thomas Scheibe, who's the vice president of Product Management, aka VP of all things Data Center Networking, STN, cloud, you name it in that category. Welcome Thomas, good to see you again. >> Hey, same here. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay. Let's get right into observability. When you think about observability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring, problem resolution across the network, how does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >> Yeah. (scoffs) Yeah. Visibility as always is very, very important and it's quite frankly, it's not just, it's not just the networking team, it's actually the application team too, right? And as you pointed out, the the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the, the data center is wherever the data is, and I think we said this a couple years back. And really what happens the, the applications are going to be deployed in different locations, right? Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on-prem and they're built differently, right? They're built as micro servers, so they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need, as an operator as well as actually a user, a better visibility, "where are my pieces?", and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is, that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge why the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's, that's really the problem statement. What, what we're trying to go after with observability. >> Okay. Let's, let's double click on that. So, so a lot of customers tell me that you got to stare at log files until your eyes bleed, then you've got to bring in guys with lab coats who have PhDs to figure all this stuff out. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> So you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time, you have to simplify things. So how, how are you doing that? >> Correct. So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that is called ThousandEyes. And so what this does is basically (chuckles) as the name which I think is a fantastic, fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere and you can have a good correlation on links between if I run a from a site to a site, from a site to a cloud, from the cloud to cloud. And you basic can measure what is the performance of these links? And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of the ThousandEyes agent, right? Instead of just having a, an inversion machine of clouds we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices, right? We announced this was the Catalyst 9000. And we're extending this now to our 8000 Catalyst product line for the for the SD-WAN products, as well as to the data center products, in Nexus line. And so what you see is, is you know, a half a thing, you have ThousandEyes. You get a million insights and you get a billion dollar off improvements for how your applications run. And this is really the, the power of tying together the footprint of what a network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >> I see. So, okay. So as the cloud evolves, it expands, it connects, you're actually enabling ThousandEyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location but out to the network across clouds, et cetera. >> Thomas: Correct. >> Wherever the network is you're going to have a ThousandEyes sensor and you can bring this together and you can quite frankly pick, if you want to say, Hey I have my application in public cloud provider A domain one, and I have another one in domain two I can do monitor that link. I can also monitor, I have a user that has a campus location or a branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the, let's say, corporation's data center or headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just the, have visibility in saying, Hey, if there's a performance I know where the issue is. And then I obviously can use all the other tools that we have to address those. >> All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us that, you know, it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of ROI. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and DevOps to this world of hybrid and specifically, how is Cisco enabling IT organizations to move to a cloud operating model as that cloud definition expands? >> Yeah, no, that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observability. So it really, really what we're seeing, and this is going on for, I want to say couple of years now it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team, more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider, right? This is really around the networking team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model, right? Where this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public cloud is operating it like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for a while. So one of the examples um that we have, we're moving some of the control software assets that customers today can deploy on-prem to an instance that they can deploy in a, in a cloud provider and just basically instantiate things there and then just run it that way. Right? And so the latest example for this is what we have, our Identity Service Engine that is now unlimited availability, available on AWS and will become available mid this year, both on AWS and Azure, as a service. You can just go to Marketplace, you can load it there and now increase. You can start running your policy control in the cloud managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus, wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our Customers Network Operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically deploying their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >> Dave: So >> What's the scope of I, I hope I'm saying it right, ISE, right? I.S.E, I think it's um, you call it ISE. What's the scope of that? Like for instance, to an effect my, or even, you know address, simplify my security approach? >> Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is, a lot of people talking about is, how do I get to a Zero Trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure, again, whether this was only campus access as well as the data center and ISE helps you there. You can use it as a pawn to define your policies and then inter-connect from there, right. In this particular case, we would, instead of ISE in a cloud as a software, alone, you now can connect and say, Hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center or my campus going to the respective controller, whether it's DNA Center for campus or whether it's the, the ACI policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage ,in one place, "what is my policy", and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure. >> Yeah. Zero Trust. It was..Pre pandemic it was kind of a buzzword, now it's become a mandate. I, I wonder if we could talk about- >> Thomas: - Yes >> Yeah, right. I mean, so- >> Thomas: -Pretty much. >> I wondered if we could talk about cloud native apps. You got all these developers that are working inside organizations, they're maintaining legacy apps they're connecting their data to systems in the cloud. They're sharing that data. These developers, they're rapidly advancing their skillsets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud native, making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >> Yeah. So you were going to the talk we saw was the visibility. We talked about the operating model how our network operates actually want to use tools going forward. Now the next step to this is, it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools? Or how they interact with this tools? As well as quite frankly, as how let's say, a DevOps team, or application team or a cloud team also wants to take advantage of the programmability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right. Which has really two angles. So it's the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure, right? And so what we have done is we're A, putting in place the on-ramps between clouds, and then on top of it, we're exposing for all these tools APIs that can be used and leveraged by standard cloud tools or cloud-native tools, right? And one example or two examples we always have. And again, we're on this journey for a while, is both Ansible script capabilities that access from RedHat as well as Hashi Terraform capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure automation. And what, what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the app team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically instantiation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools, right. Whether this is ISE, what I just mentioned, whether this is our DCN controllers in the data center whether these are the controllers in the, in the campus for all of those, we have cloud-native interfaces. So operator or a DevOps team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives on the cloud or with everything how they built the application. >> Yeah, this is key. You can't even have the conversation of of Op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on-prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's, that's very important. Last question, Thomas, are customers actually using this? You made the announcement today. Are there, are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >> We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the path and using the Cisco High-performance Infrastructure both on the compute side, as well as on the Nexus side. One of the costumers, and this is like an interesting case, is Rakuten. Rakuten is a large telco provider, a mobile 5G operator in Japan and expanding, and as in different countries. And so people, some think, "Oh cloud" "You must be talking about the public cloud provider" "the big three or four". But if you look at it, there's a lot of the telco service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with Rakuten and help them build high performance data center infrastructure based on HANA Gig and actually for a gig to drive their deployment to its 5G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is where the whole the whole world, which frankly is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility together with the High-performance infrastructure becoming a reality on delivering actually, services. >> Yeah, some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, they're enormous but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds telcos that are either proximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper-scalers may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So, so that's a great case study. Thomas.Hey, great having you on. Thanks much for spending some time with us. >> Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in tech event coverage. (upbeat music)

>>mhm, mm. All right. Mhm. Mhm, mm mm. Mhm. Yeah, mm. Mhm. Yeah, yeah. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mm. Yeah, Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Welcome to future cloud made possible by Cisco. My name is Dave Volonte and I'm your host. You know, the cloud is evolving like the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace. No longer is the cloud. Just a remote set of services, you know, somewhere up there. No, the cloud, it's extending to on premises. Data centers are reaching into the cloud through adjacent locations. Clouds are being connected together to each other and eventually they're gonna stretch to the edge and the far edge workloads, location latency, local laws and economics will define the value customers can extract from this new cloud model which unifies the operating experience independent of location. Cloud is moving rapidly from a spare capacity slash infrastructure resource to a platform for application innovation. Now, the challenge is how to make this new cloud simple, secure, agile and programmable. Oh and it has to be cloud agnostic. Now, the real opportunity for customers is to tap into a layer across clouds and data centers that abstracts the underlying complexity of the respective clouds and locations. And it's got to accommodate both mission critical workloads as well as general purpose applications across the spectrum cost, effectively enabling simplicity with minimal labor costs requires infrastructure i. E. Hardware, software, tooling, machine intelligence, AI and partnerships within an ecosystem. It's kind of accommodate a variety of application deployment models like serverless and containers and support for traditional work on VMS. By the way, it also requires a roadmap that will take us well into the next decade because the next 10 years they will not be like the last So why are we here? Well, the cube is covering Cisco's announcements today that connect next generation compute shared memory, intelligent networking and storage resource pools, bringing automation, visibility, application assurance and security to this new decentralized cloud. Now, of course in today's world you wouldn't be considered modern without supporting containers ai and operational tooling that is demanded by forward thinking practitioners. So sit back and enjoy the cubes, special coverage of Cisco's future cloud >>From around the globe. It's the Cube presenting future cloud one event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >>We're here with Dejoy Pandey, a VP of emerging tech and incubation at Cisco. V. Joy. Good to see you. Welcome. >>Good to see you as well. Thank you Dave and pleasure to be here. >>So in 2020 we kind of had to redefine the notion of agility when it came to digital business or you know organizations, they had to rethink their concept of agility and business resilience. What are you seeing in terms of how companies are thinking about their operations in this sort of new abnormal context? >>Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think what what we're seeing is that pretty much the application is the center of the universe. And if you think about it, the application is actually driving brand recognition and the brand experience and the brand value. So the example I like to give is think about a banking app uh recovered that did everything that you would expect it to do. But if you wanted to withdraw cash from your bank you would actually have to go to the ATM and punch in some numbers and then look at your screen and go through a process and then finally withdraw cash. Think about what that would have, what what that would do in a post pandemic era where people are trying to go contact less. And so in a situation like this, the digitization efforts that all of these companies are going through and and the modernization of the automation is what is driving brand recognition, brand trust and brand experience. >>Yeah. So I was gonna ask you when I heard you say that, I was gonna say well, but hasn't it always been about the application, but it's different now, isn't it? So I wonder if you talk more about how the application is experience is changing. Yes. As a result of this new digital mandate. But how should organizations think about optimizing those experiences in this new world? >>Absolutely. And I think, yes, it's always been about the application, but it's becoming the center of the universe right now because all interactions with customers and consumers and even businesses are happening through that application. So if the application is unreliable or if the application is not available is untrusted insecure, uh, there's a problem. There's a problem with the brand, with the company and the trust that consumers and customers have with our company. So if you think about an application developer, the weight he or she is carrying on their shoulders is tremendous because you're thinking about rolling features quickly to be competitive. That's the only way to be competitive in this world. You need to think about availability and resiliency. Like you pointed out and experience, you need to think about security and trust. Am I as a customer or consumer willing to put my data in that application? So velocity, availability, Security and trust and all of that depends on the developer. So the experience, the security, the trust, the feature, velocity is what is driving the brand experience now. >>So are those two tensions that say agility and trust, you know, Zero Trust used to be a buzzword now it's a mandate. But are those two vectors counter posed? Can they be merged into one and not affect each other? Does the question makes sense? Right? Security usually handcuffs my speed. But how do you address that? >>Yeah that's a great question. And I think if you think about it today that's the way things are. And if you think about this developer all they want to do is run fast because they want to build those features out and they're going to pick and choose a piece and services that matter to them and build up their app and they want the complexities of the infrastructure and security and trust to be handled by somebody else is not that they don't care about it but they want that abstraction so that is handled by somebody else. And typically within an organization we've seen in the past where this friction between Netapp Sec ops I. T. Tops and and the cloud platform Teams and the developer on one side and these these frictions and these meetings and toil actually take a toll on the developer and that's why companies and apps and developers are not as agile as they would like to be. So I think but it doesn't have to be that way. So I think if there was something that would allow a developer to pick and choose, discover the apis that they would like to use connect those api is in a very simple manner and then be able to scale them out and be able to secure them and in fact not just secure them during the run time when it's deployed. We're right off the back when the fire up that I'd and start developing the application. Wouldn't that be nice? And as you do that, there is a smooth transition between that discovery connectivity and ease of consumption and security with the idea cops. Netapp psych ops teams and see source to ensure that they are not doing something that the organization won't allow them to do in a very seamless manner. >>I want to go back and talk about security but I want to add another complexity before we do that. So for a lot of organizations in the public cloud became a staple of keeping the lights on during the pandemic but it brings new complexities and differences in terms of latency security, which I want to come back to deployment models etcetera. So what are some of the specific networking challenges that you've seen with the cloud native architecture is how are you addressing those? >>Yeah. In fact, if you think about cloud, to me that is a that is a different way of seeing a distributed system. And if you think about a distributed system, what is at the center of the distributed system is the network. So my my favorite comment here is that the network is the wrong time for all distribute systems and modern applications. And that is true because if you think about where things are today, like you said, there's there's cloud assets that a developer might use in the banking example that I gave earlier. I mean if you want to build a contact less app so that you get verified, a customer gets verified on the app. They walk over to the ATM and they were broadcast without touching that ATM. In that kind of an example, you're touching the mobile Rus, let's say U S A P is you're touching cloud API is where the back end might sit. You're touching on primary PS maybe it's an oracle database or a mainframe even where transactional data exists. You're touching branch pipes were the team actually exists and the need for consistency when you withdraw cash and you're carrying all of this and in fact there might be customer data sitting in salesforce somewhere. So it's cloud API is a song premise branch. It's ass is mobile and you need to bring all of these things together and over time you will see more and more of these API is coming from various as providers. So it's not just cloud providers but saas providers that the developer has to use. And so this complexity is very, very real. And this complexity is across the wide open internet. So the application is built across this wide open internet. So the problems of discovery ability, the problems of being able to simply connect these apis and manage the data flow across these apis. The problems of consistency of policy and consumption because all of these areas have their own nuances and what they mean, what the arguments mean and what the A. P. I. Actually means. How do you make it consistent and easy for the developer? That is the networking problem. And that is a problem of building out this network, making traffic engineering easy, making policy easy, making scale out, scale down easy, all of that our networking problems. And so we are solving those problems uh Francisco. >>Yeah the internet is the new private network but it's not so private. So I want to go back to security. I often say that the security model of building a moat, you dig the moat, you get the hardened castle that's just outdated now that the queen is left her castle, I always say it's dangerous out there. And the point is you touched on this, it's it's a huge decentralized system and with distributed apps and data, that notion of perimeter security, it's just no longer valid. So I wonder if you could talk more about how you're thinking about this problem and you definitely address some of that in your earlier comments. But what are you specifically doing to address this and how do you see it evolving? >>Yeah, I mean, that's that's a very important point. I mean, I think if you think about again the wide open internet being the wrong time for all modern applications, what is perimeter security in this uh in this new world? I mean, it's to me it boils down to securing an API because again, going with that running example of this contact lists cash withdrawal feature for a bank, the ap wherever it's it's entre branch SAs cloud, IOS android doesn't matter that FBI is your new security perimeter. And the data object that is trying to access is also the new security perimeter. So if you can secure ap to ap communication and P two data object communication, you should be good. So that is the new frontier. But guess what software is buggy? Everybody's software not saying Cisco software, everybody's Softwares buggy. Uh software is buggy, humans are not reliable and so things mature, things change, things evolve over time. So there needs to be defense in depth. So you need to secure at the API layer had the data object layer, but you also need to secure at every layer below it so that you have good defense and depth if any layer in between is not working out properly. So for us that means ensuring ap to ap communication, not just during long time when the app has been deployed and is running, but during deployment and also during the development life cycle. So as soon as the developer launches an ID, they should be able to figure out that this api is security uses reputable, it has compliant, it is compliant to my to my organization's needs because it is hosted, let's say from Germany and my organization wants appears to be used only if they are being hosted out of Germany so compliance needs and and security needs and reputation. Is it available all the time? Is it secure? And being able to provide that feedback all the time between the security teams and the developer teams in a very seamless real time manner. Yes, again, that's something that we're trying to solve through some of the services that we're trying to produce in san Francisco. >>Yeah, I mean those that layered approach that you're talking about is critical because every layer has, you know, some vulnerability. And so you you've got to protect that with some depth in terms of thinking about security, how should we think about where where Cisco's primary value add is, I mean as parts of the interview has a great security business is growing business, Is it your intention to to to to add value across the entire value chain? I mean obviously you can't do everything so you've got a partner but so has the we think about Cisco's role over the next I'm thinking longer term over the over the next decade. >>Yeah, I mean I think so, we do come in with good strength from the runtime side of the house. So if you think about the security aspects that we haven't played today, uh there's a significant set of assets that we have around user security around around uh with with do and password less. We have significant assets in runtime security. I mean, the entire portfolio that Cisco brings to the table is around one time security, the secure X aspects around posture and policy that will bring to the table. And as you see, Cisco evolve over time, you will see us shifting left. I mean, I know it's an overused term, but that is where security is moving towards. And so that is where api security and data security are moving towards. So learning what we have during runtime because again, runtime is where you learn what's available and that's where you can apply all of the M. L. And I models to figure out what works what doesn't taking those learnings, Taking those catalogs, taking that reputation database and moving it into the deployment and development life cycle and making sure that that's part of that entire they have to deploy to runtime chain is what you will see. Cisco do overtime. >>That's fantastic phenomenal perspective video. Thanks for coming on the cube. Great to have you and look forward to having you again. >>Absolutely. Thank you >>in a moment. We'll talk hybrid cloud applications operations and potential gaps that need to be addressed with costume, Das and VJ Venugopal. You're watching the cube the global leader in high tech coverage. Mhm >>You were cloud. It isn't just a cloud. It's everything flowing through it. It's alive. Yeah, connecting users, applications, data and devices and whether it's cloud, native hybrid or multi cloud, it's more distributed than ever. One company takes you inside, giving you the visibility and the insight you need to take action. >>One company >>has the vision to understand it, all the experience, to securely connect at all on any platform in any environment. So you can work wherever work takes you in a cloud first world between your cloud and being cloud smart, there's a bridge. Cisco the bridge to possible. >>Okay. We're here with costume does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco. And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product Management for cloud compute at Cisco. KTV. J. Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave to be here. >>Katie, let's talk about cloud you And I last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud and I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper Scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no that's that's that's a perfect question to start with. Dave. So yes. So the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um There's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift. In fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers they're saying well how do I in the context of my business implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DEVOPS and really harnessed that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me, and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud and that platform. Uh It's inter site we've been investing in. Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today that were closer today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud. Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any, any version of that, whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs, super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently and then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners. The streets of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective. And it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. Just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets and then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh we'll talk about some more of those day. >>Great, thank you, Katie VJ. Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCIi corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha, she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream? You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment. Smaller organizations can take advantage. But if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? Mhm. >>Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and computer group. Right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers and applications team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers and inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh As you rightly said, harsher car is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with harsher card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed i E C. To be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russian government shutdown. >>Yeah, Terra form gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there. The inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps, uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend? What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now, Cloud Native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for A. Ks. And this just geared a little over one month ago. Now, what interstate kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and clog native to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we are today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager, the Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to the KS are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of, of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we've done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud and we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mesh manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you. BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So, couple of things to close on, first of all, um Inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I close with is um, we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation, we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale, is everything they're doing to innovate superfast, All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world, including Cisco, How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thank thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you >>Dave in a moment. We're gonna come back and talk about disruptive technologies and futures in the age of hybrid cloud with Vegas Rattana and James leach. You're watching the cube, the global leader in high tech coverage. >>What if your server box >>wasn't a box at >>all? What if it could do anything run anything? >>Be any box you >>need with massive scale precision and intelligence managed and optimized from the cloud integrated with all your clouds, private, public or hybrid. So you can build whatever you need today and tomorrow. The potential of this box is unlimited. Unstoppable unseen ever before. Unbox the future with Cisco UCS X series powered by inter site >>Cisco. >>The bridge to possible. Yeah >>we're here with Vegas Rattana who's the director of product management for Pcs at Cisco. And James Leach is the director of business development for U. C. S. At the Cisco as well. We're gonna talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen. Great to see you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you because let's start with you and talk about a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving. They're supporting new data intensive and other workloads especially as high performance workload requirements. What's this guy's point of view on all this? I mean specifically interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >>Sure. First of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric that's writers that drives the processing power, the Golden city all have been evolving just an amazing place and the peace will only pick up further. But ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications leverage those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values. Very, very exciting time step. We're talking about the impact on the customers. Well, these innovations have helped them very positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with the point product based approach of delivering these platforms, innovations to the applications. What has happened is uh, these innovations today are being packaged as point point products to meet the needs of a specific application and as you know, the different applications have no different needs. Some applications need more to abuse, others need more memory, yet others need, you know, more course, something different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is very common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know, several different form factors want you to you purpose built servers. The variety of, you know, a blade form factor, you know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system, a cool music device for listening to the music. A phone device for making a call camera for taking the photos right? And we were all excited about it. It's when a smart phones the right that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient and easy to consume through one device. And you know, I could uh, that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers were benefiting from these innovations to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to go to that. >>And I like to look, it's always been about the applications. But to your point, the applications are now moving in a much faster pace. The the customer experience is expectation is way escalated. And when you combine all these, I love your analogy there because because when you combine all these capabilities, it allows us to develop new Applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's that I always say the next 10 years, they ain't gonna be like the last James Public Cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and and and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone we were swooning about low cost standard off the shelf servers in storage devices, but it quickly became obvious that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyper scale, Is how are they filtering into on prem infrastructure and maybe, you know, maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. >>Absolutely. So I'd say, first of all, quite frankly, you know, public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume, compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment, they've gotten used to or, you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application focused view, a services focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application, they wanna move outward, Right? So this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know, we're taking a different approach. We're we've decided that we're not going to chase this single pane of glass view of the world, which, frankly, our customers don't want, they don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get at the public with the public cloud, but they wanted across all of their cloud options they wanted across private cloud across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services. They want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation Orchestration, but they also need kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services, They may need terror form workload optimization. All of these services have to be available, um, from within the operating model, a consistent operating model. Right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud anywhere where the application lives. It doesn't matter what matters is that we have a consistent model that we think about it from the application out. And frankly, I'd say this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right. This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X series and inter site as that operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen >>is acute. First, first time technology vendor has ever said it's not about a single pane of glass because I've been hearing for decades, we're gonna deliver a single pane of glass is going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and, and it's just not reality. So can we stay in the X series for a minute James? Uh, maybe in this context, but in the launch that we saw today was like a fire hose of announcements. So how does the X series fit into the strategy with inter site and hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? >>Right. So I think it goes hand in hand, right. Um the two pieces go together very well. So we have uh, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems of the cost was talking about before we need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models are different sets of benefits when you want infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications. And then, you know, the operating model is very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure so that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about is the data center is not centered right? It's no longer centered applications live everywhere. Infrastructure lives everywhere. And you know, we need to have that consistent operating model but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage. Right? So we want all the sas benefits um, of a Ci CD model of, you know, the inter site can bring, we want all that that proactive recommendation engine with the power of A I behind it. We want the connected support experience went all of that. They want to do it across the single infrastructure and we think that that's how they tie together, that's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem. But both together, that's why we're here. That's why we're super excited. >>So Vegas, I make you laugh a little bit when I was an analyst at I D C, I was deep in infrastructure and then when I left I was doing, I was working with application development heads and like you said, uh infrastructure, it was just a, you know, roadblock but but so the target speakers with Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business and it wasn't until I dug in then I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure, deployment and management and change them all. I was like, okay, I got that wrong uh but but so let's talk about the the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there, X series, how does it fit into this, this converged infrastructure business that you've, you've built and grown with partners, you got storage partners like Netapp and Pure, you've got i SV partners in the ecosystem. We see cohesive, he has been a while since we we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live hopefully next year, but tell us what's happening in that regard. >>Absolutely, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year. You know, they have absolutely you brought up a very good point. You see this is about the ecosystem that it brings together, it's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can, you know, go off and running pretty quick. The converse infrastructure has been one of the corners 2.5 hour of the strategy, as you pointed out in the last decade. And and and I'm I'm very glad to share that converse infrastructure continues to be a very popular architecture for several enterprise applications. Seven today, in fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications where performance resiliency latency are the critical requirements there almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualized and business critical data bases and so forth with X series with our partnerships with our Stories partners. Those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition as a hybrid cloud world, so we are now bringing in the benefits of canvas in infrastructure uh to the world of hybrid cloud will be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CIA infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with the Stories partners to deliver the same benefits to the new ways applications as well. >>Yeah, that's what customers want. They want that cloud operating model. Right, go ahead please. >>I was going to say, you know, the CIA model will continue to thrive. It will transition uh it will expand the use cases now for the new use cases that were beginning to, you know, say they've absolutely >>great thank you for that. And James uh have said earlier today, we heard this huge announcement, um a lot of lot of parts to it and we heard Katie talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean I like that because it shows some vision and you've got a road map that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just uh, you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >>Sure. You know that's a great question. Number one. Number two, um I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for for customers in general for our customers customers in general because if you look at what's in the market, right, these rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2000 and nine when we brought you C. S to market these are what we're seeing over and over and over again. That's that's not really going to work anymore frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually put in the market. We rethought this from the ground up because frankly future proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even you're not even today proved. So we re thought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay. If you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like management inside the chassis. That's a great example, daisy chaining them together >>like who >>needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is first of all, it's ridiculous. Um, second of all, um, if you want to manage across clouds, you have to do it from the cloud, right. It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact your entire domain, your world, which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here. Right. So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you talk about the mid plane is a great example. You know, the mid plane and a chastity is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple. Just get rid of it. Like we just we took it out, right. It's not no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So, as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling or maybe we need to take advantage of some new, high performance, low latency fabrics. We can do that with almost. No problem at all. Right, So, we don't have any forklift upgrades. Park your forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade gradually. You can move along as technologies come into existence that maybe don't even exist. They they may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of. But I like to think of these technologies, they're really important to our customers. These are, you know, we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves. Right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy to consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability flexibility and and future proofing. >>I like I like that phrase True hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years and but to me this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You can support the mission critical applications. You can you can develop on the system and you can support a variety of workload. You're not locked into one narrow stovepipe and that does have legs, Vegas and James. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >>Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. >>When we return shortly thomas Shiva who leads Cisco's data center group will be here and thomas has some thoughts about the transformation of networking I. T. Teams. You don't wanna miss what he has to say. You're watching the cube. The global leader in high tech company. Okay, >>mm. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. >>Mhm. Yes. Yeah. Okay. We're here with thomas Shiva who is the Vice president of Product Management, A K A VP of all things data center, networking STN cloud. You name it in that category. Welcome thomas. Good to see you again. >>Hey Sam. Yes. Thanks for having me on. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, let's get right into observe ability. When you think about observe ability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring problem resolution across the network. How does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >>Yeah. Yeah, visibility as always is very, very important. And it's quite frankly, it's not just it's not just the networking team is actually the application team to write. And as you pointed out, the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the data center is where the data is. And I think we set us a couple years back and really what happens the applications are going to be deployed uh in different locations, right. Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on prayer, uh, and they are built differently right there, built as microservices, they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need as an operator as well as actually a user better visibility. Where are my pieces and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge while the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's that's really the problem statement. What what we're trying to go afterwards, observe ability. >>Okay, and let's double click on that. So a lot of customers tell me that you gotta stare at log files until your eyes bleed and you gotta bring in guys with lab coats who have phds to figure all this stuff out. So, so you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time you have to simplify things. So how how are you doing that, >>correct? So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that that is called 1000 Ice. And so what this does is basically as the name, which I think is a fantastic fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere. Um, and you can have a good correlation on uh links between if I run from a site to aside from a site to a cloud, from a cloud to cloud and you basically can measure what is the performance of these links. And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of these thousands agent. Right? Instead of just having uh inversion machine clouds, we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices. Right? We announced this with the catalyst 9000 and we're extending this now to our 8000 catalyst product line for the for the SD were in products as well as to the data center products the next line. Um and so what you see is is, you know, half a saying, you have 1000 eyes, you get a million insights and you get a billion dollar of improvements uh for how your applications run. And this is really uh, the power of tying together the footprint of where the network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >>I see. So okay. So as the cloud evolves and expands it connects your actually enabling 1000 eyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location, but out to the network across clouds, et cetera, >>correct. Wherever the network is, you're going to have 1000 I sensor and you can't bring this together and you can quite frankly pick if you want to say, hey, I have my application in public cloud provider, a uh, domain one and I have another one domain to, I can't do monitor that link. I can also monitor have a user that has a campus location or branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the let's say corporations that data centre, our headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just we have visibility and saying, hey, if there's a performance, I know where the issue is and then I obviously can use all the other foods that we have to address those. >>All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of R. O. I. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and devops to this world of of hybrid and specifically how is Cisco enabling I. T. Organizations to move to a cloud operating model? Is that cloud definition expands? >>Yeah, no that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observe ability. So really, really what we're seeing and this is going on for uh I want to say a couple of years now, it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider. Right? It's really around the network team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model. Right? But this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public club is operating and like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for why? So one of the examples uh then we have removing some of the control software assets, the customers that they can deploy on prayer uh to uh an instance that they can deploy in a cloud provider and just busy, insane. She ate things there and then just run it that way. Right. And so the latest example for this is what we have our identity service engine that is now limited availability available on AWS and will become available in mid this year, both in Italy as unusual as a service. You can just go to market place, you can load it there and now you create, you can start running your policy control in a cloud, managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our customers network operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically employing their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >>So what's the scope of, I hope I'm saying it right. Ice, right. I see. I think it's called ice. What's the scope of that like for instance, turn in effect my or even, you know, address simplify my security approach. >>Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is that there's a lot of people talking about else. How do I get to zero trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure. Again, whether this is only campus X as well as a data center and Ice help today, you can use this as a point to define your policies and then any connect from there. Right. In this particular case we would instant Ice in the cloud as a software load. You now can connect and say, hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center on my campus, going to the respective control over this DNA Center for campus or whether it is the A. C. I. Policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage in one place. What is my policy and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure? >>zero. Trust that, you know, it was pre pandemic. It was kind of a buzzword. Now it's become a mandate. I wonder if we could talk about right. I mean I wonder if you talk about cloud native apps, you got all these developers that are working inside organizations. They're maintaining legacy apps. They're connecting their data to systems in the cloud there, sharing that data. I need these developers, they're rapidly advancing their skill sets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud? Native making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >>Yeah. So, you know, we're going to the top of his visibility, we talked about the operating model, how how our network operators actually want to use tools going forward. Now, the next step to this is it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools, how they, how they interact with these tools as well as quite frankly as how, let's say, a devops team on application team or Oclock team also wants to take advantage of the program ability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right? Which is really two angles, that is the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure. Right? And so what we have done is we're a putting in place the on ramps between clouds and then on top of it we're exposing for all these tools, a P I S that can be used in leverage by standard uh cloud tools or uh cloud native tools. Right. And one example or two examples we always have and again, we're on this journey for a while is both answerable uh script capabilities that exist from red hat as well as uh Ashitaka from capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure, automation and what what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the ap team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically in situation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools. Right. Whether it's this ice that I just mentioned, whether this is our D. C. And controllers in the data center, uh whether these are the controllers in the in the campus for all of those, we have cloud native interfaces. So operator or uh devops team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives in the cloud, with everything how they brought the application. >>This is key. You can't even have the conversation of op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's that's very important. Last question, thomas our customers actually using this, they made the announcement today. There are there are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >>We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the past and using the D. D. Cisco high performance infrastructure, but also on the compute side as well as on an exercise one of the customers. Uh and this is like an interesting case. It's Rakuten uh record and is a large tackle provider, a mobile five G. Operator uh in Japan and expanding and is in different countries. Uh and so people something oh, cloud, you must be talking about the public cloud provider, the big the big three or four. But if you look at it, there's a lot of the tackle service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with with Rakuten and help them building a high performance uh, data and infrastructure based on hard gig and actually phone a gig uh to drive their deployment to. It's a five G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is uh where the whole the whole world where traffic is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility uh together with the high performance infrastructure becoming reality and delivering actually services, >>you have some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, your enormous, but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds. Telcos that are either approximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper scholars may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So so that's a great case study uh thomas, hey, great having you on. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. >>Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >>I'd like to thank Cisco and our guests today V Joy, Katie VJ, viscous James and thomas for all your insights into this evolving world of hybrid cloud, as we said at the top of the next decade will be defined by an entirely new set of rules. And it's quite possible things will evolve more quickly because the cloud is maturing and has paved the way for a new operating model where everything is delivered as a service, automation has become a mandate because we just can't keep throwing it labor at the problem anymore. And with a I so much more as possible in terms of driving operational efficiencies, simplicity and support of the workloads that are driving the digital transformation that we talk about all the time. This is Dave Volonte and I hope you've enjoyed today's program. Stay Safe, be well and we'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube present a future cloud one event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >>Okay. We're here with Thomas Shabbat. Who's the vice president of product management, AKA VP of all things, data center, networking, SDN cloud, you name it in that category. Welcome Thomas. Good to see you again. >>Hey Sam. Yes. Thanks for having me on. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay. Let's get right into observability. When you think about observability visibility, infrastructure monitoring, problem resolution across the network, how does cloud change thing? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >>Yeah. Yeah. Uh, visibility as always is very, very important. And it's perfect. It's not just, it's not just the network team is actually the application team too. Right. And as you pointed out, the, the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the data center is wherever the data is. And I think we set as a couple of years back and really what happens, the, the applications are going to be deployed, uh, in different locations, right? Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on prem, uh, and they're built differently, right? They are built as microservices. They might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need as an operator as well as actually a user, a bit of visibility where I, my pieces and you need to be able to correlate between where the Apres and what the underlying network is. That is a place at these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge why the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's, that's really the problem statement, uh, what, what we tried to go after was the observability. >>Okay. Let's double click on that. So, so a lot of customers telling me that you got to stare at log files until your eyes bleed. And then you've got to bring in guys with lab coats who have PhDs to figure all this stuff out. So you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time, you have to simplify things. So how are you doing that? >>Correct. So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that is called thousand eyes. And so what does DAS is basically as the name, which I think is a fantastic, uh, fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere. Um, and you can have a good correlation on, uh, links between if I run a, a site to a site from a site to a cloud, from a cloud to cloud, and you basically can measure what is the performance of these links? And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of these thousand eyes agent, right. Instead of just having them, uh, in Virgin material clouds, we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices, right. We announced this was the catalyst of 9,000. And we're extending this now to our, um, uh, 8,000 catalyst product line for the, for the sun products, as well as to the data center products, the next line. Um, and so what you see is, is there a half a thing you have sounds nice, you get a million insights and you get a billion dollar off improvements, uh, for how your applications run. And this is really, um, the, the power of tying together, the footprint of what a network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >>I see. So, okay. So as the cloud evolves, it expands, it connects, you're actually enabling thousand eyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location, but out to the network across clouds, et cetera, >>Correct. Wherever the network is, you're going to have a thousand eyes sensor and you can bring this together and you can quite frankly pick, if you want to say, Hey, I have my application in public cloud provider, a, uh, domain one, and I have another one domain, two, I can do monitor that link. I can also monitor, I have a user that has a campus location or branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location, all the way to the let's say, corporations, that data center or headquarter, or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just to be, have visibility and saying, Hey, if there's a performance, I know where the issue is. And then I obviously can use all the other sorts that we have to address those. >>All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us that, you know, it's, it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of ROI. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and dev ops to this world of, of hybrid and specifically, how is Cisco enabling it organizations to move to a cloud operating model as that cloud definition expands? >>Yeah, no, that's, that's another interesting topic beyond the observability. So really, really what we're seeing. And this has gone on for, uh, I want to say couple of years now, it's really this transition from, uh, operating infrastructure as a network and team more like a service, like what you would expect from a cloud provider, right? This is really around the network team, offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model, right? Where this is infrastructure running in your own data center, whether that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public cloud is operating at like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for a while. So one of the examples, um, that we have removing some of the control software assets that customers today can deploy on prem, uh, to, uh, an instance that they can deploy in a, in a cloud provider and just basically instantiate saying, stay, and then just run it that way. >>Right? And so the latest example for this is what we have our identity service engine that is now unlimited availability available on AWS. And we will become available mid this year. Also data, we, as a visual, as a service, you can just go to marketplace, you can load it there and now increase. You can start running your policy control in a cloud, managing your X's infrastructure in your data center and your, uh, wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see, uh, our customers' network operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model, or basically deploying their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. So >>What's the scope of, I hope I'm saying it right, ice, right. ISC. I think they call it ice. What's the scope of that? Like for instance, 10 an effect my, or even, you know, address simplify my security approach. >>Absolutely. That's now coming to, what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. Uh, what you can do is really is like, there's a lot of people talking, what I, how do I get to a zero trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure, again, whether this is on only campus X, as well as the data center and ice helps you there, you can use this as a point to, to find your policies and then any connect from there, right? In this particular case, we would instead ice in a cloud as a software, uh, load you now can connect and say, Hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center, or my campus going to the respect of controller with it's DNA center for campus, or whether does this, the, uh, ACI policy controller. And so, yes, what'd you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage in one place. What does my policy, and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure. Okay. >>Zero trust. It was pre pandemic. It was kind of a buzzword. Now it's become a mandate. I, I wonder if we could talk about yet, right. I mean, so I wonder, could talk about cloud native apps. Uh, you got all these developers that are working inside organizations, they're maintaining legacy apps, they're connecting their data to systems in the cloud. They're sharing that data. These developers they're rapidly advancing their skillsets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud native making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >>Yeah. So you were going to, the talk we saw was the visibility. We talked about the operating model, how our network operates, actually want to use tools going forward. Now the next step to visits, it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools? All they, how they interact with this tools as well as quite frankly, is how let's say a dev ops team on application team or a cloud team also wants to take advantage off the programmability of the underlying network. And this is where we moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right. Which has really two angles to, is the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure, right? And so what we have done as we're putting in place, the on-ramps between clouds, uh, and then on top of it, we're exposing for all these tools, API APIs that can be used and leveraged by standard cloud tools or, uh, uh, cloud native tools, right? >>And one example or two examples we always have. And again, we're on this journey for a while is, uh, both Ansible, uh, script capabilities, uh, that access from red hat, as well as, uh, Hashi Terraform capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure automation. And what, what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do, or even the app team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically in sedation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these, uh, capability as an interface for all our network tools, right? Whether this is ice. What I just mentioned, whether this is our, uh, DCN controllers in the data center, uh, whether these are the controllers in the, uh, in the campus for all of those, we have cloud native interfaces. So, uh, operator or a dev ops team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives in the cloud, or was everything, how they built the application, >>You can't even have the conversation of, of op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on-prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's, that's very important. Last question, Thomas are customers actually using this? They made the announcement today. Are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >>We, we do have a lot of customers out there, um, that are moving down a path and using the D D Cisco high-performance infrastructure, also on the compute side, as well as on the next site. Uh, one of the customers, uh, and this is like an interesting case, is the Rakuten, uh, record in is a large type of provider, um, uh, mobile 5g operator, uh, in Japan and expanding and as in different countries. Uh, and so people, something, Oh, cloud, you must be talking about the public cloud provider, the big, the big three or four. Uh, but if you look at it as a lot of the tackles service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very, um, proud to work together was, was Rakuten and in help them building a high performance, uh, data center infrastructure based on how they gig and actually phone a gig, uh, to drive their deployment to it's a 5g mobile cloud infrastructure, which is, which is, um, where the whole, the whole world where traffic is going. And so it's really exciting to see these development and see the power of automation, visibility, uh, together with the high performance infrastructure, becoming reality and delivering actually, uh, services. Yes. >>Some great points you're making there, but yes, you have the big four clouds are enormous, but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds, telcos that are either proximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyperscalers may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So, so that's a great case study, uh, Thomas, Hey, great. Having you on. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. >>Yeah. The same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >>Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube, the leader in tech event coverage.

>>Hi, everyone. And thanks for joining us today for our session on the 2020 Data Drivers Award winners. I'm excited to be here today with you. I'm a lease. Bergeron, vice president, product marketing for snowflake. Thes rewards are intended to recognize companies and individuals for using snowflakes, data cloud to drive innovation and impact in their organizations. Before we start our conversations, I want to quickly congratulate all of our award winners. First in the business awards are data driver of the year is Cisco. Our machine learning master is you Nipper, Our data sharing leader is Rakuten. Our data application of the year is observed and our data for good award goes to door dash for the individual and team awards. We first have the cost. Jane, Chief Digital officer of Paccar. We have a militiamen, director of cybersecurity and data science winning our data science Manager of the Year award at Comcast for a date. A pioneer of the year. We have Faisal KP, who's our senior manager of enterprise data Services at Pizza Hut. And lastly, we have our best data team going to McKesson, led by Jimmy Herff Data and Analytics platform leader Huge congratulations to all of these winners. It was very difficult to pick them amongst amazing set of nominations. So now let's dive into our conversations. We'll start with the data driver of the year. Representing Cisco today is Robbie. I'm a month do director data platform, data and analytics. >>Let me welcome everybody to the wonderful. Within a few years before Cisco used to be a company, you know, in making the decisions partly with the data and partly with the cuts. Because, you know, the data is told in multiple places the trading is not done right and things like that. So we, you know, really understood it. You know what was a challenge in the organism? By then we defined the data strategy on we put in a few plants in place, and it is working very well. But what is more important is basically how we provide the data towards data scientists and the data community in Cisco. I'm making them available in a highly available scalable on the elastic platforms. That's where you know, snowflake came into picture really very well for arrest, along with the other data strategies that we have had in place more importantly, data. Democratization was a key. You know, you along with the simplification, something technologies involved in the past. Our clients need to be worrying, laudable the technologies involved, you know, for example, we used to manage her before we make it. Snowflake Andi Snowflake, in a solve all of these problems for us with the ease on it. Really helping enabling a data data given ordinances in our >>system. In the data sharing leaders category, Rockhampton was our winner. We have mark staying trigger VP of analytics here to share their story. I >>wanna thank Snowflake for the award, and it's an honor to be a today. The ease of use of snowflake has allowed projects to move forward innovation to move forward in a way that it simply couldn't have done on old Duke systems or or or other platforms. And I think the truth the same is true for us on a lot of the similar topics, but also in the data sharing space, data sharing is a part off innovation. Like I think, most of the tech companies we work with certainly are business partners, merchants, but also with a range of other service providers and other technology vendors, um on other companies that we strategically share data with 2 May benefit of their service or thio to allow data modeling or advanced data collaboration or strategic business deals using the data and evaluated with the data on. But I think if you look Greece snowflake, you would see a lot of time and effort money going to just establishing that data connection that often involved substantial investments in technology data pipelines, risk evaluation, hashing, encrypt encryption. Security on what we found with snowflakes sharing functionality is that we can not eliminate those concerns, but that the technology just supports the ability to share data securely easily, quickly in a way that we could never do >>previously. Now we have a really inspiring winner of the data for good award door dash with their Project Dash Initiative here to speak about their work is act shot near Engineering manager >>Thank you sports to snowflake for recognizing us for this initiative. Eso For those of you who don't know, Dash, the logistics technology platform company that connects people with the best in their cities and Project Dash, our flagship social impact program, uses the door dash logistics platform to tackle the challenges like hunger and food waste. It was launched in 2018 on over the first two years in partnership with food recovery organizations, we powered the delivery off over £2 million of surplus food from businesses to hunger relief agencies across the U. S. And Canada. Andi simply do Toko with tremendous need has a much we were ableto power. The delivery often estimated 5.8 million meals to food insecure communities and frontline workers across 48 states on the 3.5 million off. These meals have been delivered since much. We do all of our analysis for our business functions from like product development to skills and social impact in snowflake On the numbers I just provided here actually have come from Snowflake on. We have used it to provide various forms of reporting, tow our government and non profit partners on this snowflake. We can help them understand the impact, analyzed friends and ensure complaints in cases where we are supporting efforts for agencies like FEMA, our USDA onda. Lastly, our team is really excited to be recognized by snowflake for using data for good. It has reminded us to continue doubling down on our commitment to using our product and expertise to partner with communities we operated. Thank you again. >>The winner of the machine Learning Master's word is unit for Energy. Viola Sarcoma Data Innovation leader is here on behalf of unit for >>Hello, everyone, Thanks for having me here. It's really a pleasure. And we were really proud to get this award. It means a lot for you. Nipper. It's huge recognition for our effort since last couple of years assed part of our journey and also a celebration off our success now for you. Newport. It would not be possible to start looking at Advanced Analytics techniques, not having a solid data foundation in place. And that's where we invested a lot in our cloud data platform in the cloud back by snowflake. Having this platform allowed us to employ advanced analytics techniques, combining data from Markit from fundamental data, different other sources of data like weather and extracting new friends, new signals that basically help us to partly or even in some cases fully automate some trading strategy. And we believe this will be really fundamental for for the future off raiding in our company and we will definitely invest in this area in the future. >>Our data application of the year is observed. Observers recognizes the most innovative, data driven application built on Snowflake and representing observed today is their CEO, Jeremy Burton. >>Let me just echo the thanks from the other folks on the coal. I mean snowflakes, separation of storage. Compute. I can't overstate what a really big deal it is. Um, it means that we can ingest in store data. Really? For the price of Amazon s three on board, we're in a category where vendors of historically charged for volume of data ingested. So you can imagine this really represents huge savings. Um, in addition, and maybe on a more technical note, snowflakes, elastic architectures really enables us to direct queries appropriately, based on the complexity of the query. So small queries or simple queries weaken director extra small warehouses and complex queries. We can direct, you know, for Excel. Or I think even a six x l is either there are on its way. The key thing there is that users they're not sitting around waiting for results to appear regardless of the query complexity. So I mean, really? The separation storage compute on the elastic architectures is a really big deal for us. >>Turning to the data Pioneer of the Year Award, I'm excited to be here with Faisal KP, senior manager of Enterprise Data Services from Pizza Hut. >>First of all, thank you, Snowflake, for giving this wonderful person. I think it means a lot for us in terms of validating what we're doing. I think we were one of the earlier adopters of Snowflake. We saw the vision of snowflake, you know, stories. Russell's computer separation on all the goodies, right? Right from back in 2017, I believe what snowflake enabled us is to actually get the scale with very little manpower, which is needed to man the entire system. So on the Super Bowl day, we have, you know, the entire crew literally a boardroom where the right from the CME, most of the CEOs to all the folks will be sitting and watching what is happening in the system. And we have to do a lot of real time analytics during that time. So with snowflake, you know, way used the elasticity of the platform we use, you know, platform you know their solutions, like snow pipe to basically automate the data ingestion coming through various channels, from the commas, from the stores, everything simultaneously. So as soon as the program is done, you know, we can scale scale down to our normal volume, which means we can, you know, way can save a lot. Of course. So definitely it snowflake has been game changer for us in terms of how we provide real time analytics. Our systems are used by thousands off restaurants throughout the country and, you know, by hundreds of franchisees. So the scale is something we have achieved with a lot of ability and success. >>In the category of data science Manager of the Year Award, we have a mission Min, director of cybersecurity and data science at Comcast. >>So thank you for having me and thank you for this wonderful award. So one of the biggest challenges you see in this other security spaces the tremendous amount of data that we have to compute every day to find the gold haystack. So one of the big challenges we overcame with by uniting snowflake was how do we go from like my other counterparts on the panel have said Theo operational overhead of maintaining a large data store and moved to more of results driven and data focused environment. And, you know, part of that journey was really the tremendous leadership. Comcast saying, You know, we want Thio through our day to day lives by relying less on operational work and Maura on answering questions. And so you know, over the last year we've really put Snowflake at the center of our ecosystem, knowing that it's elastic platform and its ability scale infinitely have given us the ability to dream big and use it to drop five cybersecurity. And while it's traditionally used for cybersecurity, we're starting to see the benefits right away and the beauty of the snowflake. Ecos, Miss. We're now able to enable folks that not traditionally have big data skills, but they have standards, sequel skills, and they could still work in the snowflake platform. So, you know, the transition to cloud has been very powerful for us as an organization. But I think the end story, the real takeaways, by moving our secretary operation to the cloud, we're now been able to enable more people and get the results they were looking for. You know, as other people have said fast, people hate to wait. So the scale of snowflake really shines. >>Yeah. Now, let's hear from our data Executive of the year. The Cost. Jane. Chief Digital Officer Packer. >>Thank you very much, Snowflake, for this really incredible recognition and honor of the work we're doing it back. Are we began. The first step in this process was for us to develop an enterprise Great data platform in the cloud capable off managing every aspect of data at scale. This this platform includes snowflake as our analytics data warehouse amongst many other technologies that we used for ingestion of data, data processing, uh, data governance, transactional, uh, needs and others. So this platform, once developed, has really helped us leverage data across the broad pack. Our systems and applications globally very efficiently and is enabling pack are, as a result to enhance every aspect. Selfish business with data. >>Ah, big congratulations again to all of the winners of the 2020 Data Drivers Awards. Thanks so much for joining us for a great conversation. And we hope that you enjoy the rest of the data cloud summit

>> 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 San Diego, everybody. You're watching Cisco Live 2019. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. Our third host, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Dave Malik is here. He's a fellow and Chief Architect at Cisco. David, good to see you. >> Oh, glad to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. First of all, congratulations on being a fellow. What does that mean, a Cisco Fellow? What do you got to go through to achieve that status? >> It's pretty arduous task. It's one of the most highest technical designations in Cisco, but we work across multiple architectures in technologies, as well as our partners, as well, to drive corporate-wide strategy. >> So you've been talking to customers here, you've been presenting. I think you said you gave three presentations here? Multi-cloud, blockchain, and some stuff on machine intelligence, ML. >> Yes. >> Let's hit those. Kind of summarize the overall themes, and then we'll maybe get into each, and then we got a zillion questions for you. >> Sure, excellent. So multi-cloud, I think one of the customers, we're clearly hearing from them is around, how do we get a universal policy model and connectivity model, and how do you orchestrate workloads seamlessly? And those are some of the challenges that we trying to address at this conference. On blockchain, a lot of buzz out there. We're not talking about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, it's really about leveraging blockchain from a networking perspective, or an identity and encryption, and providing a uniform ledger that everything is pervasive across infrastructure. And then ML, I think it's the heart of every conversation. How do we take pervasive analytics and bring it into the network so we can drive actionable insights into automation? >> So let's start with the third one. When you talk about ML, was your talk on machine learning? Did it spill into artificial intelligence? What's the difference to you from a technology perspective? >> Machine learning is really getting a lot of the data and looking at repetitive patterns in a very common fashion, and doing a massive correlation across multiple domains. So you may have some things happening in the branch, the data set, or a WAN in cloud, but the whole idea is how do you put them together to drive insight? And through artificial intelligence and algorithms, we can try to take those insights and automate them and push them back into the infrastructure or to the application layer. So now you're driving intelligence for not just consumers or devices, but also humans as well to drive insight. >> All right. So Dave, I wonder if you'd help connect with us what you were talking about there, and we'll get to the multicloud piece because I was at an Amazon show last week from Amazon, talking about how when they look at all the technologies that they use to get packages, their fulfillment centers, everything that they do as a business, ML and AI, they said, is underneath that, and AWS is what's driving that technology from that standpoint. Now, multicloud, AWS is a partner of yours. >> Yes. >> Can you give us how you work in multicloud and does ML and IA, is that a Cisco specific? Are you working with some of the standards out there to connect all those pieces? Help us look at some of the big picture of those items. >> So we believe we're agnostic, whether you connect to Amazon, Azure, Google, et cetera, we believe in a uniform policy model and connectivity model, which is very, very arduous today. So you shouldn't have to have a specific policy model, connectivity model, security model for that matter, for each provider. So we're normalizing that plane completely, which is awesome. Then, at a workload level, regardless of whether your workload is spun up or spun down, it should have the same security posture and visibility. We have certain customers that are running as single applications across multiple clouds, so your data is going to be obviously on-prem, you may be running analytics in TenserFlow, compute in EC2, and connecting to O365, that's one app. And where we're seeing the models go is are you leveraging technology such as this? Do you offer service mesh? How do we tie a lot of these micro-services together and then be able to layer workload orchestration on top? So regardless of where your workload sits, and one key point that we keep hearing from our customers is their ungovernance. How we provide cloud-based governance regardless of where their workload is, and that's something we're doing in a very large fashion with customers that have a multicloud strategy. >> So Stu, I think there's still some confusion around multicloud generally, and maybe Cisco's strategy. I wonder if we could maybe clear it up a little bit. >> Dave, it's that big elephant in the room, and I always feel like everybody describes multicloud from a different angle. >> So let's dig into this a little bit, and let's hear from Cisco's perspective. So you got, to my count, five companies really going after this space. You got Cisco, VMware, IBM Red Hat, Microsoft, and Google with Anthos. Probably all those guys are partners of yours. >> Yes. >> Okay, but you guys want to provide the bromide or the single pane of glass, okay. I'm hearing open and agnostic. That's a differentiator. Security, you're in a good position to make an argument that you're in a good position to make things secure. You got the network and so forth. High-performance network, and cost-effective. Everybody's going to make that argument relative to having multiple stovepipes, but that's part of your story as well. So the question. Why Cisco? What's the key differentiator and what gives you confidence that you can really help win in this marketplace? >> So our core competencies are our networking and security. Whether it's cloud-based security or on-prem security, it's uniform. From a security perspective, we have a universal architecture. Whether it's the endpoint, the edge, the cloud, they're all sharing information and intelligence. That's really important. Instead of having bespoke products, these products and solutions need to communicate with each other, so if someone's sick in one area, we're informing the other one. So threat intelligence and network intelligence is huge. Then more importantly, after working with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, we have on-prem solutions as well, so as customers are going on their multicloud journey, and eventually the workload will transition, you have the same management experience and security experience. So Anthos was a recent announcement, AWS as well, where you can run on-prem Kubernetes, and you can take the same workload and move it to AWS or GCP, but the management model and the control pane model, they are extremely similar and you don't have to learn anything new from a training perspective. >> Okay, but I used the term agnostic, oh, no. You did agnostic, I said open. But you don't care if it's Anthos or VMware, or OpenShift, you don't care. >> Don't care. >> And, architecturally, how is it that you can successfully not care? >> Because the underlying, fundamental principles is you can load any workload you want with this, bare metal, virtualized, or Kubernetes-based containers, they all need the same. For example, everyone needs bread and water. It's not different. So why should you be able to discriminate against a workload or OpenShare if they're using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, for example? The same model, all applications still need security, visibility, networking, and management, but they should not be different across all clouds, and that's traditionally what you're seeing from the other vendors in the market. They're very unique to their stovepipe, and we want to break down those stovepipes across the board, regardless of what app and what workload you have. >> Dave, talk a little bit about the automation that Cisco's delivering to help enable this because there's skill set challenges, just the scale of these environments are more than humans alone can take care of, so how does that automation, I know you're heavily involved in the CX beast of Cisco. How does that all tie together? >> So we're working on a lot of automation projects with our large enterprises and SPs, I mean, you see Rakuten being fairly prominent in the show, but more importantly, we understand not everyone's building a greenfield environment, not everything is purely public cloud. We have to deal with brownfield, we have to deal with third-party ecosystem partners, so you can't have a vertically tight single-vendor solution. So again, to your point, it's completely open. Then we have frameworks, meaning you have orchestrators that can talk down to the device through programmatic interfaces. That's why we see DevNet surrounding us, but then more importantly, we're looking at services that have workflows that could span on-prem, off-prem, third-party, it doesn't really matter. And we stitch a lot of those workloads southbound, but more importantly, northbound to security at ITSM Systems. So those frameworks are coming into life, whether you're a telecom cloud provider or you're a large enterprise. And they slowly fall into those workflows as they become more multi-domain. You saw David Goeckeler the other day, talking about SD-WAN, ECI, and campus wired and wireless. These domains are coming together and that's where we're driving a lot of the automation work. >> So automation is a linchpin to what business outcome? Ultimately, what are customers trying to achieve through automation? >> There's a couple of things. Mean time to value. So if you're a service provider, to your internal customers or external, time to value and speed and agility are key. The other ones are mean time to repair and mean time to detect. If I can shorten the time to detect and shorten time to react, then I can take proactive and preemptive action in situations that may happen. So time to value is really, really important. Cost is a play, obviously, 'cause when you have more and more machines doing your work, your OPEX will come down, but it's really not purely a cost play. Agility and speed are really driving automation to that scale as we're working with folks like Rakuten and others. >> What do you see, Dave, as the big challenges of achieving automation when customers, first of all, I was talking like, 10, 15 years ago people, they were afraid of automation. Some still are. But they I think understand as part of a digital transformation, they got to automate. So what are the challenges that they're having and how are you helping them solve them? >> So typically, what people have thought about automation has been more network-centric, but as we just discussed multicloud, automation is extending all the way to the public cloud, at the workload or at the functional level, if you're running in Lambda, for example. And then more importantly, traditionally, customers have been leveraging Python scripts and things of that nature, but the days of scripters are there, but they cannot scale. You need a model-driven framework, you need model-driven telemetry to get insight. So I think the learning curve of customers moving to a model-driven mindset is extremely important, and it's not just about the network alone, it's also about the application. So that's why we're driving a lot of our frameworks and education and training. And talent's a big gap that we're helping with with our training programs. >> Okay, so you're talking about insights. There's a lot of data. The saying goes, "data is plentiful, insights aren't." So how do you get from data to insights? Is that where the machine intelligence comes in? Maybe you can explain that. >> There's a combination. Machines can process much faster than humans can, but more importantly, somebody has to drive the 30 or 40 years of experience that Cisco has from our tech, our architects and CX, and our customers and the community that we're developing through DevNet. So taking trusted expertise from humans, from all that knowledge base, combining that with machine learning so we get the best of both worlds. 'Cause you need that experience. And that is driving insight so we can filter the signal from the noise, and then more importantly, how do you take that signal and then, in an automated fashion, push that down to an intent-based architecture across the board. >> Dave, can you take us inside a little bit of your touchpoints into customers? In the old days, it was a CCIE, his job, his title, it was equipment that he would touch, and today, talking about this multicloud and the automation, it's very dispersed as to who owns it, most of what I am managing is not something that's under their purview, so the touchpoints you have into the company and the relationship you have changed a lot in the last three, five years or so. >> Absolutely, 'cause the buying center's also changing, because folks are getting more and more centric around the line of business and want the outcome we want to drive for their clients. So the cloud architecture teams that are being built, they're more horizontal now. You'll have a security person, an application, networking, operations, for example, and what we're actually pioneering, a lot of the enterprises and SPs, is building the site reliability engineering teams, or SRE, which Google has obviously pioneered, and we're bringing those concepts and teams through a CX framework, through telecos, and some of their high-end enterprises initially, and you'll see more around that over the coming months. Our SRE jobs, if you go on LinkedIn, you'll probably see hundreds of them out there now. >> One of the other things we've been watching is Cisco has a very broad portfolio. This whole CX piece has to make sure that, from a customer's standpoint, no matter where the portfolio, whether core, edge, IOT, all these various devices, I should have a simplified experience today, which isn't necessarily, my words, Cisco's legacy. How do you make sure, is software a unifying factor inside the company? Give us a little bit about those dynamics inside. >> Absolutely, so we take a life cycle approach. It's not one and done. From the time there's a concept where you want to build out a blueprint, but there's no transformation journey, we have to make sure we walk the client through preparation, planning, design, architecture optimization, but then making sure they actually adopt, and get the true value. So we're working with our customers to make sure that they go around the entire life cycle, from end to end, from cradle to grave, and be able to constantly optimize. You're hearing the word continuous pretty much everywhere. It's kind of the fundamental of CICD, so we believe in a continuous life cycle approach that we're walking the customers end to end to make sure from the point of purchase to the point of decommissioning, making sure they're getting the most value out of the solutions they're getting from Cisco. >> All right Dave, we'll give you the last word on Cisco Live 2019. Thoughts? Takeaways? >> I think there's just amazing energy here, and there's a lot more to come. Come down to the CX booth and we'll have to show you some more gadgets and solutions where we're taking our forward customers. >> Great. David, thank you very much for coming to The Cube. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> All right, 28,000 people and The Cube bringing it to you live. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Lisa Martin is also in the house. We'll be right back from Cisco Live San Diego 2019, Day 3. You're watching The Cube.

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in San Mateo, California right at the crossroads. The building's called The Crossroads but it's right at the crossroads of 92 and 101. It's a really interesting intersection over the years as you watch these buildings that are on the corner continue to change names. I always think of the Seibel, his first building came up on this corner and we're here to see a good friend of SnapLogic and their brand new building. Gaurav Dhillon, Chairman and CEO, great to see you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So how long you been in this space? >> Gosh, it's been about a year. >> Okay. >> Although it feels longer. It's a high-growth company so these are dog years. (laughs) >> That's right. and usually, you outgrow it before you all have moved in. >> The years are short but the days are long. >> And it's right next Rakuten, I have to mention it. We all see it on the Warriors' jerseys So now we know who they are and where they are exactly. >> No they're a good outfit. We had an interesting time putting a sign up and then the people who made their sign told us all kinds of back stories. >> Oh, good, good Alright. So give us an update on SnapLogic. You guys are in a great space at a really, really good time. >> You know, things been on a roll. As you know, the mission we set out to... engage with was to bring together applications and data in the enterprise. We have some of the largest customers in high technology. Folks like Qualcomm, Workday. Some of the largest customers in pharmaceuticals. Folks like Astrazeneca, Bristol-Meyers Squibb. In retail, Denny's, Wendy's, etc. And these folks are basically bringing in new cloud applications and moving data into the cloud. And it's really fun to wire that all up for them. And there's more of it every day and now that we have this very strong install-base of customers, we're able to get more customers faster. >> Right. >> In good time. >> It's a great time and the data is moving into the cloud, and the public cloud guys are really making bigger plays into the enterprise, Microsoft and, Amazon and Google. And of course, there's IBM and lots of other clouds. But integration's always been such a pain and I finally figured out what the snap in SnapLogic means after interviewing you >> (laughs) a couple of times, right. But this whole idea of, non-developer development and you're taking that into integration which is a really interesting concept, enabled by cloud, where you can now think of snapping things together, versus coding, coding, coding. >> Yeah Cloud and A.I, right We feel that this problem has grown because of the change in the platform. The compute platform's gone to the cloud. Data's going to the cloud. There was bunch of news the other day about more and more companies moving the analytics into the cloud. And as that's happening, we feel that this approach and the question we ask ourselves when we started this company, we got into building the born in the cloud platform was, what would Apple do if they were to build an integration product? And the answer was, they would make it like the iPhone, which is easy to use, but very powerful at the same time. And if you can do that, you can bring in a massive population of users who wouldn't have been able to do things like video chat. My mom was not able to do video chat, and believe me, we tried this and every other thing possible 'till facetime came along. And now she can talk to my daughter and she can do it without help, any assistance from teenage grandchildren on that side, Right? >> Right, Right >> So what we've done with SnapLogic, is by bringing in a beautiful, powerful, sleek interface, with a lot of capability in how it connects, snaps together apps and data, we've brought in a whole genre of people who need data in the enterprise so they can serve themselves data. So if your title has analyst in it, you don't have to be programmer analyst. You could be any analyst. >> Right >> You could be a compensation analyst, a commissions analyst, a finance analyst, an HR analyst. All those people can self-serve information, knock down silos, and integrate things themselves. >> It's so interesting because we talk a lot about innovation and digital transformation, and in doing thousands of these interviews, I think the answer to innovation is actually pretty simple. You give more people access to the data. You give them more access to the tools to work with the data and then you give them the power to actually do something once they figure something out. And you guys are really right in the middle of that. So before, it was kind of >> (laughs) Yeah >> democratization of the data, democratization of the tools to work with the data, but in the API economy, you got to be able to stitch this stuff together because it's not just one application, it's not just one data source. >> Correct >> You're bringing from lots and lots of different things and that's really what you guys are taking advantage of this cloud infrastructure which has everything available, so it's there to connect, >> (laughs) Versus, silo in company one and silo in company two. So are you seeing it though, in terms of, of people enabling, kind of citizen integrators if you will, versus citizen developers. >> Yeah. Heck Yeah. So I'll give you an example. One of our large customers... Adobe Systems, right here in San Jose has been amazingly successful flagship account for us. About 800 people at Adobe come to www.snaplogic.com, every week to self-serve data. We replaced legacy products like TIBCO, informatica web methods about four years ago. They first became a customer in 2014 and usage of those products was limited to Java programmers and Sequel programmers, and that was less than 50 people. And imagine that you have about 800 people doing self-service getting information do their jobs. Now, Adobe is unique in that, it's moved the cloud in a fantastic way, or it was unique in 2014. Now everybody is emulating them and the great success that they've had. With the cloud economic model, with the cloud ID model. This is working in spades. We have customers who've come on board in Q4. We're just rounding out Q1 and in less than 60, 90 days, every time I look, 50, 100, 200 people, from each large company, whether it's a cosmetics company, pharmaceuticals company, retailer, food merchandise, are coming in and using data. >> Right >> And it's proliferating, because the more successful they are, the better they are able to do in their jobs, tell their friends about it sort-of-thing, or next cubicle over, somebody wants to use that too. It's so interesting. Adobe is such a great example, cause they did transform their business. Used to be a really expensive license. You would try to find your one friend that worked there around Christmas >> (laughs) Cause you think they got two licenses a year they can buy for a grand. Like, I need an extra one I can get from you. But they moved to a subscription model. They made a big bet. >> Yes. Yes >> And they bet on the cloud, so now if you're a subscriber, which I am, I can work on my home machine, my work machine, go to machine, machine. So, it's a really great transformation story. The other piece of it though, is just this cloud application space. There's so many cloud applications that we all work with every day whether it's Basecamp, Salesforce, Hootsuite. There's a proliferation of these things and so they're there. They've got data. So the integration opportunity is unlike anything that was ever there before. Cause there isn't just one cloud. There isn't just one cloud app. There's a lot of them. >> Yes. >> How do I bring those together to be more productive? >> So here's a stat. The average enterprise has most cloud services or SAS applications, in marketing. On the average, they have 91 marketing applications or SAS applications. >> 91. That's the average. >> 96% of them are not connected together. >> Right. >> Okay. That's just one example. Now you go to HR, stock administration. You go into sales, CRM, and all the ancillary systems around CRM. And there is this sort of massive, to us, opportunity of knocking down these silos and making things work together. You mention the API economy and whilst that's true that all these SAS applications of APIs. The problem is, most companies don't have programmers to hook up those API's. >> Right. To connect them. >> Yes, in Silicon Valley we do and maybe in Manhattan they do, but in everywhere else in the world, the self-service model, the model of being able to do it to something that is simple, yet powerful. Enterprise great >> Right. Right >> and simple, beautiful is absolutely the winning formula in our perspective. So the answer is to let these 100 applications bloom, but to keep them well behaved and orchestrated, in kind of a federated model, where security, having one view of the world, etc., is managed by SnapLogic and then various people and departments can bring in a blessed, SAS applications and then snap them in and the input and the way they connect, is done through snaps. And we've found that to be a real winning model for our customers. >> So you don't have to have like 18 screens open all with different browsers and different apps. >> Swivel chair integration is gone. Swivel chair integration is gone. >> Step above sneakernet but still not-- >> Step above but still not. And again, it may make sense in very, very specific super high-speed, like Wall Street, high frequency trading and hedge funds, but it's a minuscule minority of the overall problems that there needs to be solved. >> Right. So, it's just a huge opportunity, you just are cleaning up behind the momentum in the SAS applications, the momentum of the cloud. >> Cloud data. Cloud apps. Cloud data. And in general, if a customer's not going to the cloud, they're probably not the best for us. >> Right. >> Right. Our customers' almost always going towards the cloud, have lots of data and applications on premise. And in that hybrid spot, we have the capability to straddle that kind of architecture in a way that nobody else does. Because we have a born in the cloud platform that was designed to work in the real world, which is hybrid. >> So another interesting thing, a lot of talk about big data over the years. Now it's just kind of there. But AI and machine learning. Artificial intelligence which should be automated intelligence and machine learning. There's kind of the generic, find an old, dead guy and give it a name. But we're really seeing the values that's starting to bubble up in applications. It's not, AI generically, >> Correct. >> It's how are you enabling a more efficient application, a more efficient workflow, a more efficient, get your job done, using AI. And you guys are starting to incorporate that in your integration framework. >> Yes. Yes. So we took the approach, 'doctor heal thyself.' And we're going to help our customers do better job of having AI be a game changer for them. How do we apply that to ourselves? We heard one our CIOs, CI of AstraZeneca, Dave Smoley, was handing out the Amazon Alexa Echo boxes one Christmas. About three years ago and I'm like, my gosh that's right. That was what Walt Mossberg said in his farewell column. IT is going to be everywhere and invisible at the same time. Right. >> Right. >> It'll be in the walls, so to speak. So we applied AI, starting about two years ago, actually now three, because we shipped Iris a year ago. The artificial intelligence capability inside SnapLogic has been shipping for over 12 months. Fantastic usage. But we applied to ourselves the challenge about three years ago, to use AI based on our born in the cloud platform. On the metadata that we have about people are doing. And in the sense, apply Google Autocomplete into enterprise connectivity problems. And it's been amazing. The AI as you start to snap things together, as you put one or two snaps, and you start to look for the third, it starts to get 98.7% accurate, in predicting how to connect SAS applications together. >> Right. Right. >> It's not quite autonomous integration yet but you can see where we're going with it. So it's starting to do so much value add that most of our customers, leave it on. Even the seasoned professionals who are proficient and running a center of excellence using SnapLogic, even those people choose to have sort-of this AI, on all the time helping them. And that engagement comes from the value that they're getting, as they do these things, they make less mistakes. All the choices are readily at hand and that's happening. So that's one piece of it >> Right. >> Sorry. Let me... >> It's Okay. Keep going. >> Illustrate one other thing. Napoleon famously said, "An army marches on its stomach" AI marches on data. So, what we found is the more data we've had and more customers that we've had, we move about a trillion documents for our customers worldwide, in the past 30 days. That is up from 10 million documents in 30 days, two years ago. >> Right. Right >> That more customers and more usage. In other words, they're succeeding. What we've found as we've enriched our AI with data, it's gotten better and better. And now, we're getting involved with customers' projects where they need to support data scientists, data engineering work for machine learning and that self-service intricate model is letting someone who was trying to solve a problem of, When is my Uber going to show up? So to speak. In industry X >> Right. Right. >> These kinds of hard AI problems that are predictive. That are forward changing in a sense. Those kind of problems are being solved by richer data and many of them, the projects that we're now involved in, are moving data into the cloud for data lake to then support AI machine learning efforts for our customers. >> So you jumped a little bit, I want to talk on your first point. >> Okay. Sorry >> That's okay. Which is that you're in the very fortunate position because you have all that data flow. You have the trillion documents that are changing hands every month. >> Born in the cloud platform. >> So you've got it, right? >> Got it. >> You've got the data. >> It's a virtual cycle. It's a virtual cycle. Some people call it data capitalism. I quibble with that. We're not sort-of, mining and selling people's personal data to anybody. >> Right. Right. >> But this is where, our enterprise customers' are so pleased to work with us because if we can increase productivity. If we can take the time to solution, the time to integration, forward by 10 times, we can improve the speed that by SAS application and it gets into production 10 times faster. That is such a good trade for them and for everyone else. >> Right. Right. >> And it feeds on itself. It's a virtual cycle. >> You know in the Marketo to the Salesforce integration, it's nothing. You need from company A to company B. >> I bet you somebody in this building is doing it on a different floor right now. >> Exactly. >> (laughs) >> So I think that's such an interesting thing. In the other piece that I like is how again, I like your kind of Apple analogy, is the snap packs, right. Because we live in a world, with even though there 91 on-averages, there's a number of really dominant SAS application that most people use, you can really build a group of snaps. Is snap the right noun? >> That's the right word. >> Of snaps. In a snap pack around the specific applications, then to have your AI powered by these trillion transactions that you have going through the machines, really puts you in a unique position right now. >> It does, you know. And we're very fortunate to have the kind of customer support we've had and, sort of... Customer advisory board. Big usages of our products. In which we've added so much value to our customers, that they've started collaborating with us in a sense. And are passing to us wonderful ideas about how to apply this including AI. >> Right. >> And we're not done yet. We have a vision in the future towards an autonomous integration. You should be able to say "SnapLogic, Iris, "connect my company." And it should. >> Right. Right. >> It knows what the SAS apps are by looking at your firewall, and if you're people are doing things, building pipelines, connecting your on-premise legacy applications kind of knows what they are. That day when you should be able to, in a sense, have a bot of some type powered by all this technology in a thoughtful manner. It's not that far. It's closer at hand than people might realize. >> Which is crazy science fiction compared to-- I mean, integration was always the nightmare right back in the day. >> It is. >> Integration, integration. >> But on the other hand, it is starting to have contours that are well defined. To your point, there are certain snaps that are used more. There are certain problems that are solved quite often, the quote-to-cash problem is as old as enterprise software. You do a quote in the CRM system. Your cash is in a financial system. How does that work together? These sort of problems, in a sense, are what McKinsey and others are starting to call robotic process automations. >> Right. >> In the industrial age, people... Stopped, with the industrial age, any handcrafted widget. Nuts, and bolts, and fasteners started being made on machines. You could stamp them out. You could have power driven beams, etc., etc. To make things in industrial manner. And our feeling is, some of the knowledge tasks that feel like widget manufactures. You're doing them over and over again. Or robotic, so to speak, should be automated. And integration I think, is ripe as one of those things and using the value of integration, our customers can automate a bunch of other repeatable tasks like quote-to-cash. >> Right. Right. It's interesting just when you say autonomous, I can't help but think of autonomous vehicles right, which are all the rage and also in the news. And people will say "well I like to drive "or of course we all like to drive "on Sunday down at the beach" >> Sure. Yeah. >> But we don't like to sit in traffic on the way to work. That's not driving, that's sitting in traffic on the way to work. Getting down the 101 to your exit and off again is really not that complicated, in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. >> Indeed. Indeed. >> Sets itself up. >> And there are times you don't want to. I mean one of the most pleasant headlines, most of the news is just full of bad stuff right. So and so and such and such. But one of the very pleasing headlines I saw the other day in a newspaper was, You know what's down a lot? Not bay area housing prices. >> (laughs) >> But you know what's down a lot? DUI arrests, have plummeted. Because of the benefits of Lyft and Uber. More and more people are saying, "You know, I don't have to call a black cab. "I don't need to spend a couple hundred bucks to get home. "I'm just getting a Lyft or an Uber." So the benefits of some of these are starting to appear as in plummeting DUIs. >> Right. Right >> Plummeting fatalities. From people driving while inebriated. Plunging into another car or sidewalk. >> Right. Right. >> So Yes. >> Amara's Law. He never gets enough credit. >> (laughs) >> I say it in every interview right. We overestimate in the short term and we underestimate in the long term the effects of these technologies cause we get involved-- The Gartner store. It's the hype cycle. >> Yeah, Yeah >> But I really I think Amara nailed it and over time, really significant changes start to take place. >> Indeed and we're seeing them now. >> Alright well Gaurav, great to get an update from you and a beautiful facility here. Thanks for having us on. >> Thank you, thank you. A pleasure to be here. Great to see you as well. >> Alright He's Gaurav, I'm Jeff. And you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic's headquarters Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Welcome back, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Crossroads, that's 92 and 101 in the Bay Area if you've been through it, you've had time to take a minute and look at all the buildings, 'cause traffic's usually not so great around here. But there's a lot of great software companies that come through here. It's interesting, I always think back to the Siebel Building that went up and now that's Rakuten, who we all know from the Warrior jerseys, the very popular Japanese retailer. But that's not why we're here. We're here to talk to SnapLogic. They're doing a lot of really interesting things, and they have been in data, and now they're doing a lot of interesting things in integration. And we're excited to have a many time CUBE alum. He's Greg Benson, let me get that title right, chief scientist at SnapLogic and of course a professor at University of San Francisco. Greg great to see you. >> Great to see you, Jeff. >> So I think the last time we see you was at Fleet Forward. Interesting open-source project, data, ad moves. The open-source technologies and the technologies available for you guys to use just continue to evolve at a crazy breakneck speed. >> Yeah, it is. Open source in general, as you know, has really revolutionized all of computing, starting with Linux and what that's done for the world. And, you know, in one sense it's a boon, but it introduces a challenge, because how do you choose? And then even when you do choose, do you have the expertise to harness it? You know, the early social companies really leveraged off of Hadoop and Hadoop technology to drive their business and their objectives. And now we've seen a lot of that technology be commercialized and have a lot of service around it. And SnapLogic is doing that as well. We help reduce the complexity and make a lot of this open-source technology available to our customers. >> So, I want to talk about a lot of different things. One of the things is Iris. So Iris is your guys' leverage of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make integration easier. Did I get that right? >> That's correct, yeah. Iris is the umbrella terms for everything that we do with machine learning and how we use it to enhance the user experience. And one way to think about it is when you're interacting with our product, we've made the SnapLogic designer a web-based UI, drag-and-drop interface to construct these integration pipelines. We connect these things called Snaps. It's like building with Legos to build out these transformations on your data. And when you're doing that, when you're interacting with the designer, we would like to believe that we've made it one of the simplest interfaces to do this type of work, but even with that, there are many times we have to make decisions, like what type of transformation do you do next? How do you configure that transformation if you're talking to an Oracle database? How do you configure it? What's your credentials if you talk to SalesForce? If I'm doing a transformation on data, which fields do I need? What kind of operations do I need to apply to those fields? So as you can imagine, there's lots of situations as you're building out these data integration pipelines to make decisions. And one way to think about Iris is Iris is there to help reduce the complexity, help reduce what kind of decision you have to make at any point in time. So it's contextually aware of what you're doing at that moment in time, based on mining our thousands of existing pipelines and scenarios in which SnapLogic has been used. We leverage that to train models to help make recommendations so that you can speed through whatever task you're trying to do as quickly as possible. >> It's such an important piece of information, because if I'm doing an integration project using the tool, I don't have the experience of the vast thousands and thousands, and actually you're doing now, what, a trillion document moves last month? I just don't have that expertise. You guys have the expertise, and truth be told, as unique as I think I am, and as unique as I think my business processes are, probably, a lot of them are pretty much the same as a lot of other people that are hooking up to SalesForce to Oracle or hooking up Marketta to their CRM. So you guys have really taken advantage of that using the AI and ML to help guide me along, which is probably a pretty high-probability prediction of what my next move's going to be. >> Yeah, absolutely, and you know, back in the day, we used to consider, like, wizards or these sorts of things that would walk you through it. And really that was, it seemed intelligent, but it wasn't really intelligence or machine learning. It was really just hard-coded facts or heuristics that hopefully would be right for certain situations. The difference today is we're using real data, gigabytes of metadata that we can use to train our models. The nice thing about that it's not hard-coded it's adaptive. It's adaptive both for new customers but also for existing customers. We have customers that have hundreds of people that just use SnapLogic to get their business objectives done. And as they're building new pipelines, as they are putting in new expressions, we are learning that for them within their organization. So like their coworkers, the next day, they can come in and then they get the advantages of all the intellectual work that was done to figure something out will be learned and then will be made available through Iris. >> Right. I love this idea of operationalizing machine learning and the augmented intelligence. So how do you apply it? Don't just talk about it, don't give it a name of some dead smart person, but actually apply it to an application where you can start to see the benefit. And that's really what Iris is all about. So what's changed the most in the last year since you launched it? >> You know, one thing I'll say: The most interesting thing that we discovered when we first launched Iris, and I should say one of the first Iris technologies that we introduced was something called the integration assistant. And this was an assistant that would make, make recommendations of the next Snap as you're building out your pipeline, so the next transformation or the next connector, and before we launched it, we did lots of experimentation with different machine learning models. We did different training to get the best accuracy possible. And what we really thought was that this was going to be most useful for the new user, somebody who hasn't really used the product and it turns out, when we looked at our data, and we looked at how it got used, it turns out that yes, new users did use it, but existing or very skilled users were using it just as much if not more, 'cause it turned out that it was so good at making recommendations that it was like a shortcut. Like, even if they knew the product really well, it's still actually a little more work to go through our catalog of 400 plus Snaps and pick something out when if it's just sitting right there and saying, "Hey, the next thing you need to do," you don't even have to think. You just have to click, and it's right there. Then it just speeds up the expert user as well. That was an interesting sort of revelation about machine learning and our application of it. In terms of what's changed over the last year, we've done a number of things. Probably the operationalizing it so that instead of training off of SnapShot, we're now training on a continuous basis so that we get that adaptive learning that I was talking about earlier. The other thing that we have done, and this is kind of getting into the weeds, we were using a decision tree model, which is a type of machine learning algorithm, and we switched to neural nets now, so now we use neural nets to achieve higher accuracy, and also a more adaptive learning experience. The neural net allowed us to bring in sort of like this organizational information so that your recommendations would be more tailored to your specific organization. The other thing we're just on the cusp of releasing is, in the integration assistant, we're working on sort of a, sort of, from beginning-to-end type recommendation, where you were kind of working forward. But what we found is, in talking to people in the field, and our customers who use the product, is there's all kinds of different ways that people interact with a product. They might know know where they want the data to go, and then they might want to work backwards. Or they might know that the most important thing I need this to do is to join some data. So like when you're solving a puzzle with the family, you either work on the edges or you put some clumps in the middle and work to get to. And that puzzle solving metaphor is where we're moving integration assistance so that you can fill in the pieces that you know, and then we help you work in any direction to make the puzzle complete. That's something that we've been adding to. We recently started recommending, based on your context, the most common sources and destinations you might need, but we're also about to introduce this idea of working backwards and then also working from the inside out. >> We just had Gaurav on, and he's talking about the next iteration of the vision is to get to autonomous, to get to where the thing not only can guess what you want to do, has a pretty good idea, but it actually starts to basically do it for you, and I guess it would flag you if there's some strange thing or it needs an assistant, and really almost full autonomy in this integration effort. It's a good vision. >> I'm the one who has to make that vision a reality. The way I like to explain is that customers or users have a concept of what they want to achieve. And that concept is as a thought in their head, and the goal is how to get that concept or thought into something that is machine executable. What's the pathway to achieve that? Or if somebody's using SnapLogic for a lot of their organizational operations or for their data integration, we can start looking at what you're doing and make recommendations about other things you should or might be doing. So it's kind of like this two-way thing where we can give you some suggestions but people also know what they want to do conceptually but how do we make that realizable as something that's executable. So I'm working on a number of research projects that is getting us closer to that vision. And one that I've been very excited about is we're working a lot with NLP, Natural Language Processing, like many companies and other products are investigating. For our use in particular is in a couple of different ways. To be sort of concrete, we've been working on a research project in which, rather than, you know, having to know the name of a Snap. 'Cause right now, you get this thing called a Snap catalog, and like I said, 400 plus Snaps. To go through the whole list, it's pretty long. You can start to type a name, and yeah, it'll limit it, but you still have to know exactly what that Snap is called. What we're doing is we're applying machine learning in order to allow you to either speak or type what the intention is of what you're looking for. I want to parse a CSV file. Now, we have a file reader, and we have a CSV parser, but if you just typed, parse a CSV file, it may not find what you're looking for. But we're trying to take the human description and then connect that with the actual Snaps that you might need to complete your task. That's one thing we're working on. I have two more. The second one is a little bit more ambitious, but we have some preliminary work that demonstrates this idea of actually saying or typing what you want an entire pipeline to do. I might say I want to read data from SalesForce, I want to filter out only records from the last week, and then I want to put those records into Redshift. And if you were to just say or type what I just said, we would give you a pipeline that maybe isn't entirely complete, but working and allows you to evolve it from there. So you didn't have to go through all the steps of finding each individual Snap and connecting them together. So this is still very early on, but we have some exciting results. And then the last thing we're working on with NLP is, in SnapLogic, we have a nice view eye, and it's really good. A lot of the heavy lifting in building these pipelines, though, is in the actual manipulation of the data. And to actually manipulate the data, you need to construct expressions. And expressions in SnapLogic, we have a JavaScript expression language, so you have to write these expressions to do operations, right. One of our next goals is to use natural language to help you describe what you want those expressions to do and then generate those expressions for you. To get at that vision, we have to chisel. We have to break down the barriers on each one of these and then collectively, this will get us closer to that vision of truly autonomous integration. >> What's so cool about it, and again, you say autonomous and I can't help but think autonomous vehicles. We had a great interview, he said, if you have an accident in your car, you learn, the person you had an accident learns a little bit, and maybe the insurance adjuster learns a little bit. But when you have an accident in an autonomous vehicle, everybody learns, the whole system learns. That learning is shared orders of magnitude greater, to greater benefit of the whole. And that's really where you guys are sitting in this cloud situation. You've got all this integration going on with customers, you have all this translation and movement of data. Everybody benefits from the learning that's gained by everybody's participation. That's what is so exciting, and why it's such a great accelerator to how things used to be done before by yourself, in your little company, coding away trying to solve your problems. Very very different kind of paradigm, to leverage all that information of actual use cases, what's actually happening with the platform. So it puts you guys in a pretty good situation. >> I completely agree. Another analogy is, look, we're not going to get rid of programmers anytime soon. However, programming's a complex, human endeavor. However, the Snap pipelines are kind of like programs, and what we're doing in our domain, our space, is trying to achieve automated programming so that, you're right, as you said, learning from the experience of others, learning from the crowd, learning from mistakes and capturing that knowledge in a way that when somebody is presented with a new task, we can either make it very quick for them to achieve that or actually provide them with exactly what they need. So yeah, it's very exciting. >> So we're running out of time. Before I let you go, I wanted to tie it back to your professor job. How do you leverage that? How does that benefit what's going on here at SnapLogic? 'Cause you've obviously been doing that for a long time, it's important to you. Bill Schmarzo, great fan of theCUBE, I deemed him the dean of big data a couple of years ago, he's now starting to teach. So there's a lot of benefits to being involved in academe, so what are you doing there in academe, and how does it tie back to what you're doing here in SnapLogic? >> So yeah, I've been a professor for 20 years at the University of San Francisco. I've long done research in operating systems and distributed systems, parallel computing programming languages, and I had the opportunity to start working with SnapLogic in 2010. And it was this great experience of, okay, I've done all this academic research, I've built systems, I've written research papers, and SnapLogic provided me with an opportunity to actually put a lot of this stuff in practice and work with real-world data. I think a lot of people on both sides of the industry academia fence will tell you that a lot of the real interesting stuff in computer science happens in industry because a lot of what we do with computer science is practical. And so I started off bringing in my expertise in working on innovation and doing research projects, which I continue to do today. And at USF, we happened to have a vehicle already set up. All of our students, both undergraduates and graduates, have to do a capstone senior project or master's project in which we pair up the students with industry sponsors to work on a project. And this is a time in their careers where they don't have a lot of professional experience, but they have a lot of knowledge. And so we bring the students in, and we carve out a project idea. And the students under my mentorship and working with the engineering team work toward whatever project we set up. Those projects have resulted in numerous innovations now that are in the product. The most recent big one is Iris came out of one of these research projects. >> Oh, it did? >> It was a machine learning project about, started around three years ago. We continuously have lots of other projects in the works. On the flip side, my experience with SnapLogic has allowed me to bring sort of this industry experience back to the classroom, both in terms of explaining to students and understanding what their expectations will be when they get out into industry, but also being able to make the examples more real and relevant in the classroom. For me, it's been a great relationship that's benefited both those roles. >> Well, it's such a big and important driver to what goes on in the Bay Area. USF doesn't get enough credit. Clearly Stanford and Cal get a lot, they bring in a lot of smart people every year. They don't leave, they love the weather. It is really a significant driver. Not to mention all the innovation that happens and cool startups that come out. Well, Greg thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day to sit down with us. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> All right, he's Greg, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Welcome back, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Crossroads, that's 92 and 101 in the Bay Area if you've been through it, you've had time to take a minute and look at all the buildings, 'cause traffic's usually not so great around here. But there's a lot of great software companies that come through here. It's interesting, I always think back to the Siebel Building that went up and now that's Rakuten, who we all know from the Warrior jerseys, the very popular Japanese retailer. But that's not why we're here. We're here to talk to SnapLogic. They're doing a lot of really interesting things, and they have been in data, and now they're doing a lot of interesting things in integration. And we're excited to have a many time Cube alum. He's Greg Benson, let me get that title right, chief scientist at SnapLogic and of course a professor at University of San Francisco. Greg great to see you. >> Great to see you, Jeff. >> So I think the last time we see you was at Fleet Forward. Interesting open-source project, data, ad moves. The open-source technologies and the technologies available for you guys to use just continue to evolve at a crazy breakneck speed. >> Yeah, it is. Open source in general, as you know, has really revolutionized all of computing, starting with Linux and what that's done for the world. And, you know, in one sense it's a boon, but it introduces a challenge, because how do you choose? And then even when you do choose, do you have the expertise to harness it? You know, the early social companies really leveraged off of Hadoop and Hadoop technology to drive their business and their objectives. And now we've seen a lot of that technology be commercialized and have a lot of service around it. And SnapLogic is doing that as well. We help reduce the complexity and make a lot of this open-source technology available to our customers. >> So, I want to talk about a lot of different things. One of the things is Iris. So Iris is your guys' leverage of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make integration easier. Did I get that right? >> That's correct, yeah. Iris is the umbrella terms for everything that we do with machine learning and how we use it to enhance the user experience. And one way to think about it is when you're interacting with our product, we've made the SnapLogic designer a web-based UI, drag-and-drop interface to construct these integration pipelines. We connect these things called Snaps. It's like building with Legos to build out these transformations on your data. And when you're doing that, when you're interacting with the designer, we would like to believe that we've made it one of the simplest interfaces to do this type of work, but even with that, there are many times we have to make decisions, like what type of transformation do you do next? How do you configure that transformation if you're talking to an Oracle database? How do you configure it? What's your credentials if you talk to SalesForce? If I'm doing a transformation on data, which fields do I need? What kind of operations do I need to apply to those fields? So as you can imagine, there's lots of situations as you're building out these data integration pipelines to make decisions. And one way to think about Iris is Iris is there to help reduce the complexity, help reduce what kind of decision you have to make at any point in time. So it's contextually aware of what you're doing at that moment in time, based on mining our thousands of existing pipelines and scenarios in which SnapLogic has been used. We leverage that to train models to help make recommendations so that you can speed through whatever task you're trying to do as quickly as possible. >> It's such an important piece of information, because if I'm doing an integration project using the tool, I don't have the experience of the vast thousands and thousands, and actually you're doing now, what, a trillion document moves last month? I just don't have that expertise. You guys have the expertise, and truth be told, as unique as I think I am, and as unique as I think my business processes are, probably, a lot of them are pretty much the same as a lot of other people that are hooking up to SalesForce to Oracle or hooking up Marketta to their CRM. So you guys have really taken advantage of that using the AI and ML to help guide me along, which is probably a pretty high-probability prediction of what my next move's going to be. >> Yeah, absolutely, and you know, back in the day, we used to consider, like, wizards or these sorts of things that would walk you through it. And really that was, it seemed intelligent, but it wasn't really intelligence or machine learning. It was really just hard-coded facts or heuristics that hopefully would be right for certain situations. The difference today is we're using real data, gigabytes of metadata that we can use to train our models. The nice thing about that it's not hard-coded it's adaptive. It's adaptive both for new customers but also for existing customers. We have customers that have hundreds of people that just use SnapLogic to get their business objectives done. And as they're building new pipelines, as they are putting in new expressions, we are learning that for them within their organization. So like their coworkers, the next day, they can come in and then they get the advantages of all the intellectual work that was done to figure something out will be learned and then will be made available through Iris. >> Right. I love this idea of operationalizing machine learning and the augmented intelligence. So how do you apply it? Don't just talk about it, don't give it a name of some dead smart person, but actually apply it to an application where you can start to see the benefit. And that's really what Iris is all about. So what's changed the most in the last year since you launched it? >> You know, one thing I'll say: The most interesting thing that we discovered when we first launched Iris, and I should say one of the first Iris technologies that we introduced was something called the integration assistant. And this was an assistant that would make, make recommendations of the next Snap as you're building out your pipeline, so the next transformation or the next connector, and before we launched it, we did lots of experimentation with different machine learning models. We did different training to get the best accuracy possible. And what we really thought was that this was going to be most useful for the new user, somebody who hasn't really used the product and it turns out, when we looked at our data, and we looked at how it got used, it turns out that yes, new users did use it, but existing or very skilled users were using it just as much if not more, 'cause it turned out that it was so good at making recommendations that it was like a shortcut. Like, even if they knew the product really well, it's still actually a little more work to go through our catalog of 400 plus Snaps and pick something out when if it's just sitting right there and saying, "Hey, the next thing you need to do," you don't even have to think. You just have to click, and it's right there. Then it just speeds up the expert user as well. That was an interesting sort of revelation about machine learning and our application of it. In terms of what's changed over the last year, we've done a number of things. Probably the operationalizing it so that instead of training off of SnapShot, we're now training on a continuous basis so that we get that adaptive learning that I was talking about earlier. The other thing that we have done, and this is kind of getting into the weeds, we were using a decision tree model, which is a type of machine learning algorithm, and we switched to neural nets now, so now we use neural nets to achieve higher accuracy, and also a more adaptive learning experience. The neural net allowed us to bring in sort of like this organizational information so that your recommendations would be more tailored to your specific organization. The other thing we're just on the cusp of releasing is, in the integration assistant, we're working on sort of a, sort of, from beginning-to-end type recommendation, where you were kind of working forward. But what we found is, in talking to people in the field, and our customers who use the product, is there's all kinds of different ways that people interact with a product. They might know know where they want the data to go, and then they might want to work backwards. Or they might know that the most important thing I need this to do is to join some data. So like when you're solving a puzzle with the family, you either work on the edges or you put some clumps in the middle and work to get to. And that puzzle solving metaphor is where we're moving integration assistance so that you can fill in the pieces that you know, and then we help you work in any direction to make the puzzle complete. That's something that we've been adding to. We recently started recommending, based on your context, the most common sources and destinations you might need, but we're also about to introduce this idea of working backwards and then also working from the inside out. >> We just had Gaurav on, and he's talking about the next iteration of the vision is to get to autonomous, to get to where the thing not only can guess what you want to do, has a pretty good idea, but it actually starts to basically do it for you, and I guess it would flag you if there's some strange thing or it needs an assistant, and really almost full autonomy in this integration effort. It's a good vision. >> I'm the one who has to make that vision a reality. The way I like to explain is that customers or users have a concept of what they want to achieve. And that concept is as a thought in their head, and the goal is how to get that concept or thought into something that is machine executable. What's the pathway to achieve that? Or if somebody's using SnapLogic for a lot of their organizational operations or for their data integration, we can start looking at what you're doing and make recommendations about other things you should or might be doing. So it's kind of like this two-way thing where we can give you some suggestions but people also know what they want to do conceptually but how do we make that realizable as something that's executable. So I'm working on a number of research projects that is getting us closer to that vision. And one that I've been very excited about is we're working a lot with NLP, Natural Language Processing, like many companies and other products are investigating. For our use in particular is in a couple of different ways. To be sort of concrete, we've been working on a research project in which, rather than, you know, having to know the name of a Snap. 'Cause right now, you get this thing called a Snap catalog, and like I said, 400 plus Snaps. To go through the whole list, it's pretty long. You can start to type a name, and yeah, it'll limit it, but you still have to know exactly what that Snap is called. What we're doing is we're applying machine learning in order to allow you to either speak or type what the intention is of what you're looking for. I want to parse a CSV file. Now, we have a file reader, and we have a CSV parser, but if you just typed, parse a CSV file, it may not find what you're looking for. But we're trying to take the human description and then connect that with the actual Snaps that you might need to complete your task. That's one thing we're working on. I have two more. The second one is a little bit more ambitious, but we have some preliminary work that demonstrates this idea of actually saying or typing what you want an entire pipeline to do. I might say I want to read data from SalesForce, I want to filter out only records from the last week, and then I want to put those records into Redshift. And if you were to just say or type what I just said, we would give you a pipeline that maybe isn't entirely complete, but working and allows you to evolve it from there. So you didn't have to go through all the steps of finding each individual Snap and connecting them together. So this is still very early on, but we have some exciting results. And then the last thing we're working on with NLP is, in SnapLogic, we have a nice view eye, and it's really good. A lot of the heavy lifting in building these pipelines, though, is in the actual manipulation of the data. And to actually manipulate the data, you need to construct expressions. And expressions in SnapLogic, we have a JavaScript expression language, so you have to write these expressions to do operations, right. One of our next goals is to use natural language to help you describe what you want those expressions to do and then generate those expressions for you. To get at that vision, we have to chisel. We have to break down the barriers on each one of these and then collectively, this will get us closer to that vision of truly autonomous integration. >> What's so cool about it, and again, you say autonomous and I can't help but think autonomous vehicles. We had a great interview, he said, if you have an accident in your car, you learn, the person you had an accident learns a little bit, and maybe the insurance adjuster learns a little bit. But when you have an accident in an autonomous vehicle, everybody learns, the whole system learns. That learning is shared orders of magnitude greater, to greater benefit of the whole. And that's really where you guys are sitting in this cloud situation. You've got all this integration going on with customers, you have all this translation and movement of data. Everybody benefits from the learning that's gained by everybody's participation. That's what is so exciting, and why it's such a great accelerator to how things used to be done before by yourself, in your little company, coding away trying to solve your problems. Very very different kind of paradigm, to leverage all that information of actual use cases, what's actually happening with the platform. So it puts you guys in a pretty good situation. >> I completely agree. Another analogy is, look, we're not going to get rid of programmers anytime soon. However, programming's a complex, human endeavor. However, the Snap pipelines are kind of like programs, and what we're doing in our domain, our space, is trying to achieve automated programming so that, you're right, as you said, learning from the experience of others, learning from the crowd, learning from mistakes and capturing that knowledge in a way that when somebody is presented with a new task, we can either make it very quick for them to achieve that or actually provide them with exactly what they need. So yeah, it's very exciting. >> So we're running out of time. Before I let you go, I wanted to tie it back to your professor job. How do you leverage that? How does that benefit what's going on here at SnapLogic? 'Cause you've obviously been doing that for a long time, it's important to you. Bill Schmarzo, great fan of theCUBE, I deemed him the dean of big data a couple of years ago, he's now starting to teach. So there's a lot of benefits to being involved in academe, so what are you doing there in academe, and how does it tie back to what you're doing here in SnapLogic? >> So yeah, I've been a professor for 20 years at the University of San Francisco. I've long done research in operating systems and distributed systems, parallel computing programming languages, and I had the opportunity to start working with SnapLogic in 2010. And it was this great experience of, okay, I've done all this academic research, I've built systems, I've written research papers, and SnapLogic provided me with an opportunity to actually put a lot of this stuff in practice and work with real-world data. I think a lot of people on both sides of the industry academia fence will tell you that a lot of the real interesting stuff in computer science happens in industry because a lot of what we do with computer science is practical. And so I started off bringing in my expertise in working on innovation and doing research projects, which I continue to do today. And at USF, we happened to have a vehicle already set up. All of our students, both undergraduates and graduates, have to do a capstone senior project or master's project in which we pair up the students with industry sponsors to work on a project. And this is a time in their careers where they don't have a lot of professional experience, but they have a lot of knowledge. And so we bring the students in, and we carve out a project idea. And the students under my mentorship and working with the engineering team work toward whatever project we set up. Those projects have resulted in numerous innovations now that are in the product. The most recent big one is Iris came out of one of these research projects. >> Oh, it did? >> It was a machine learning project about, started around three years ago. We continuously have lots of other projects in the works. On the flip side, my experience with SnapLogic has allowed me to bring sort of this industry experience back to the classroom, both in terms of explaining to students and understanding what their expectations will be when they get out into industry, but also being able to make the examples more real and relevant in the classroom. For me, it's been a great relationship that's benefited both those roles. >> Well, it's such a big and important driver to what goes on in the Bay Area. USF doesn't get enough credit. Clearly Stanford and Cal get a lot, they bring in a lot of smart people every year. They don't leave, they love the weather. It is really a significant driver. Not to mention all the innovation that happens and cool startups that come out. Well, Greg thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day to sit down with us. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> All right, he's Greg, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in San Mateo, California right at the crossroads. The building's called The Crossroads but it's right at the crossroads of 92 and 101. It's a really interesting intersection over the years as you watch these buildings that are on the corner continue to change names. I always think of the Seville, his first building came up on this corner and we're here to see a good friend of SnapLogic and their brand new building. Gaurav Dhillon, Chairman and CEO, great to see you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So how long you been in this space? >> Gosh, it's been about a year. >> Okay. >> Although it feels longer. It's a high-growth company so these are dog years. (laughs) >> That's right. and usually, you outgrow it before you all have moved in. >> The years are short but the days are long. >> And it's right next Rakuten, I have to mention it. We all see it on the Warriors' jerseys So now we know who they are and where they are exactly. >> No they're a good outfit. We had an interesting time putting a sign up and then the people who made their sign told us all kinds of back stories. >> Oh, good, good Alright. So give us an update on SnapLogic. You guys are in a great space at a really, really good time. >> You know, things been on a roll. As you know, the mission we set out to... engage with was to bring together applications and data in the enterprise. We have some of the largest customers in high technology. Folks like Qualcomm, Workday. Some of the largest customers in pharmaceuticals. Folks like Astrazeneca, Bristol-Meyers Squibb. In retail, Denny's, Wendy's, etc. And these folks are basically bringing in new cloud applications and moving data into the cloud. And it's really fun to wire that all up for them. And there's more of it every day and now that we have this very strong install-base of customers, we're able to get more customers faster. >> Right. >> In good time. >> It's a great time and the data is moving into the cloud, and the public cloud guys are really making bigger plays into the enterprise, Microsoft and, Amazon and Google. And of course, there's IBM and lots of other clouds. But integration's always been such a pain and I finally figured out what the snap in SnapLogic means after interviewing you >> (laughs) a couple of times, right. But this whole idea of, non-developer development and you're taking that into integration which is a really interesting concept, enabled by cloud, where you can now think of snapping things together, versus coding, coding, coding. >> Yeah Cloud and A.I, right We feel that this problem has grown because of the change in the platform. The compute platform's gone to the cloud. Data's going to the cloud. There was bunch of news the other day about more and more companies moving the analytics into the cloud. And as that's happening, we feel that this approach and the question we ask ourselves when we started this company, we got into building the born in the cloud platform was, what would Apple do if they were to build an integration product? And the answer was, they would make it like the iPhone, which is easy to use, but very powerful at the same time. And if you can do that, you can bring in a massive population of users who wouldn't have been able to do things like video chat. My mom was not able to do video chat, and believe me, we tried this and every other thing possible 'till facetime came along. And now she can talk to my daughter and she can do it without help, any assistance from teenage grandchildren on that side, Right? >> Right, Right >> So what we've done with SnapLogic, is by bringing in a beautiful, powerful, sleek interface, with a lot of capability in how it connects, snaps together apps and data, we've brought in a whole genre of people who need data in the enterprise so they can serve themselves data. So if your title has analyst in it, you don't have to be programmer analyst. You could be any analyst. >> Right >> You could be a compensation analyst, a commissions analyst, a finance analyst, an HR analyst. All those people can self-serve information, knock down silos, and integrate things themselves. >> It's so interesting because we talk a lot about innovation and digital transformation, and in doing thousands of these interviews, I think the answer to innovation is actually pretty simple. You give more people access to the data. You give them more access to the tools to work with the data and then you give them the power to actually do something once they figure something out. And you guys are really right in the middle of that. So before, it was kind of >> (laughs) Yeah >> democratization of the data, democratization of the tools to work with the data, but in the API economy, you got to be able to stitch this stuff together because it's not just one application, it's not just one data source. >> Correct >> You're bringing from lots and lots of different things and that's really what you guys are taking advantage of this cloud infrastructure which has everything available, so it's there to connect, >> (laughs) Versus, silo in company one and silo in company two. So are you seeing it though, in terms of, of people enabling, kind of citizen integrators if you will, versus citizen developers. >> Yeah. Heck Yeah. So I'll give you an example. One of our large customers... Adobe Systems, right here in San Jose has been amazingly successful flagship account for us. About 800 people at Adobe come to www.snaplogic.com, every week to self-serve data. We replaced legacy products like DIBCO, informatica web methods about four years ago. They first became a customer in 2014 and usage of those products was limited to Java programmers and Sequel programmers, and that was less than 50 people. And imagine that you have about 800 people doing self-service getting information do their jobs. Now, Adobe is unique in that, it's moved the cloud in a fantastic way, or it was unique in 2014. Now everybody is emulating them and the great success that they've had. With the cloud economic model, with the cloud ID model. This is working in spades. We have customers who've come on board in Q4. We're just rounding out Q1 and in less than 60, 90 days, every time I look, 50, 100, 200 people, from each large company, whether it's a cosmetics company, pharmaceuticals company, retailer, food merchandise, are coming in and using data. >> Right >> And it's proliferating, because the more successful they are, the better they are able to do in their jobs, tell their friends about it sort-of-thing, or next cubicle over, somebody wants to use that too. It's so interesting. Adobe is such a great example, cause they did transform their business. Used to be a really expensive license. You would try to find your one friend that worked there around Christmas >> (laughs) Cause you think they got two licenses a year they can buy for a grand. Like, I need an extra one I can get from you. But they moved to a subscription model. They made a big bet. >> Yes. Yes >> And they bet on the cloud, so now if you're a subscriber, which I am, I can work on my home machine, my work machine, go to machine, machine. So, it's a really great transformation story. The other piece of it though, is just this cloud application space. There's so many cloud applications that we all work with every day whether it's Basecamp, Salesforce, Hootsuite. There's a proliferation of these things and so they're there. They've got data. So the integration opportunity is unlike anything that was ever there before. Cause there isn't just one cloud. There isn't just one cloud app. There's a lot of them. >> Yes. >> How do I bring those together to be more productive? >> So here's a stat. The average enterprise has most cloud services or SAS applications, in marketing. On the average, they have 91 marketing applications or SAS applications. >> 91. That's the average. >> 96% of them are not connected together. >> Right. >> Okay. That's just one example. Now you go to HR, stock administration. You go into sales, CRM, and all the ancillary systems around CRM. And there is this sort of massive, to us, opportunity of knocking down these silos and making things work together. You mention the API economy and whilst that's true that all these SAS applications of APIs. The problem is, most companies don't have programmers to hook up those API's. >> Right. To connect them. >> Yes, in Silicon Valley we do and maybe in Manhattan they do, but in everywhere else in the world, the self-service model, the model of being able to do it to something that is simple, yet powerful. Enterprise great >> Right. Right >> and simple, beautiful is absolutely the winning formula in our perspective. So the answer is to let these 100 applications bloom, but to keep them well behaved and orchestrated, in kind of a federated model, where security, having one view of the world, etc., is managed by SnapLogic and then various people and departments can bring in a blessed, SAS applications and then snap them in and the input and the way they connect, is done through snaps. And we've found that to be a real winning model for our customers. >> So you don't have to have like 18 screens open all with different browsers and different apps. >> Swivel chair integration is gone. Swivel chair integration is gone. >> Step above sneakernet but still not-- >> Step above but still not. And again, it may make sense in very, very specific super high-speed, like Wall Street, high frequency trading and hedge funds, but it's a minuscule minority of the overall problems that there needs to be solved. >> Right. So, it's just a huge opportunity, you just are cleaning up behind the momentum in the SAS applications, the momentum of the cloud. >> Cloud data. Cloud apps. Cloud data. And in general, if a customer's not going to the cloud, they're probably not the best for us. >> Right. >> Right. Our customers' almost always going towards the cloud, have lots of data and applications on premise. And in that hybrid spot, we have the capability to straddle that kind of architecture in a way that nobody else does. Because we have a born in the cloud platform that was designed to work in the real world, which is hybrid. So another interesting thing, a lot of talk about big data over the years. Now it's just kind of there. But AI and machine learning. Artificial intelligence which should be automated intelligence and machine learning. There's kind of the generic, find an old, dead guy and give it a name. But we're really seeing the values that's starting to bubble up in applications. It's not, AI generically, >> Correct. >> It's how are you enabling a more efficient application, a more efficient workflow, a more efficient, get your job done, using AI. And you guys are starting to incorporate that in your integration framework. >> Yes. Yes. So we took the approach, 'doctor heal thyself.' And we're going to help our customers do better job of having AI be a game changer for them. How do we apply that to ourselves? We heard one our CIOs, CI of AstraZeneca, Dave Smoley, was handing out the Amazon Alexa Echo boxes one Christmas. About three years ago and I'm like, my gosh that's right. That was what Walt Mossberg said in his farewell column. IT is going to be everywhere and invisible at the same time. Right. >> Right. >> It'll be in the walls, so to speak. So we applied AI, starting about two years ago, actually now three, because we shipped iris a year ago. The artificial intelligence capability inside SnapLogic has been shipping for over 12 months. Fantastic usage. But we applied to ourselves the challenge about three years ago, to use AI based on our born in the cloud platform. On the metadata that we have about people are doing. And in the sense, apply Google Autocomplete into enterprise connectivity problems. And it's been amazing. The AI as you start to snap things together, as you put one or two snaps, and you start to look for the third, it starts to get 98.7% accurate, in predicting how to connect SAS applications together. >> Right. Right. >> It's not quite autonomous integration yet but you can see where we're going with it. So it's starting to do so much value add that most of our customers, leave it on. Even the seasoned professionals who are proficient and running a center of excellence using SnapLogic, even those people choose to have sort-of this AI, on all the time helping them. And that engagement comes from the value that they're getting, as they do these things, they make less mistakes. All the choices are readily at hand and that's happening. So that's one piece of it >> Right. >> Sorry. Let me... >> It's Okay. Keep going. >> Illustrate one other thing. Napoleon famously said, "An army marches on it's stomach" AI marches on data. So, what we found is the more data we've had and more customers that we've had, we move about a trillion documents for our customers worldwide, in the past 30 days. That is up from 10 million documents in 30 days, two years ago. >> Right. Right >> That more customers and more usage. In other words, they're succeeding. What we've found as we've enriched our AI with data, it's gotten better and better. And now, we're getting involved with customers' projects where they need to support data scientists, data engineering work for machine learning and that self-service intricate model is letting someone who was trying to solve a problem of, When is my Uber going to show up? So to speak. In industry X >> Right. Right. >> These kinds of hard AI problems that are predictive. That are forward changing in a sense. Those kind of problems are being solved by richer data and many of them, the projects that we're now involved in, are moving data into the cloud for data lake to then support AI machine learning efforts for our customers. >> So you jumped a little bit, I want to talk on your first point. >> Okay. Sorry >> That's okay. Which is that you're in the very fortunate position because you have all that data flow. You have the trillion documents that are changing hands every month. >> Born in the cloud platform. >> So you've got it, right? >> Got it. >> You've got the data. >> It's a virtual cycle. It's a virtual cycle. Some people call it data capitalism. I quibble with that. We're not sort-of, mining and selling people's personal data to anybody. >> Right. Right. >> But this is where, our enterprise customers' are so pleased to work with us because if we can increase productivity. If we can take the time to solution, the time to integration, forward by 10 times, we can improve the speed that by SAS application and it gets into production 10 times faster. That is such a good trade for them and for everyone else. >> Right. Right. >> And it feeds on itself. It's a virtual cycle. >> You know in the Marketo to the Salesforce integration, it's nothing. You need from company A to company B. >> I bet you somebody in this building is doing it on a different floor right now. >> Exactly. >> (laughs) >> So I think that's such an interesting thing. In the other piece that I like is how again, I like your kind of Apple analogy, is the snap packs, right. Because we live in a world, with even though there 91 on-averages, there's a number of really dominant SAS application that most people use, you can really build a group of snaps. Is snap the right noun? >> That's the right word. >> Of snaps. In a snap pack around the specific applications, then to have your AI powered by these trillion transactions that you have going through the machines, really puts you in a unique position right now. >> It does, you know. And we're very fortunate to have the kind of customer support we've had and, sort of... Customer advisory board. Big usages of our products. In which we've added so much value to our customers, that they've started collaborating with us in a sense. And are passing to us wonderful ideas about how to apply this including AI. >> Right. >> And we're not done yet. We have a vision in the future towards an autonomous integration. You should be able to say "SnapLogic, Iris, "connect my company." And it should. >> Right. Right. >> It knows what the SAS apps are by looking at your firewall, and if you're people are doing things, building pipelines, connecting your on-premise legacy applications kind of knows what they are. That day when you should be able to, in a sense, have a bot of some type powered by all this technology in a thoughtful manner. It's not that far. It's closer at hand than people might realize. >> Which is crazy science fiction compared to-- I mean, integration was always the nightmare right back in the day. >> It is. >> Integration, integration. >> But on the other hand, it is starting to have contours that are well defined. To your point, there are certain snaps that are used more. There are certain problems that are solved quite often, the quote-to-cash problem is as old as enterprise software. You do a quote in the CRM system. Your cash is in a financial system. How does that work together? These sort of problems, in a sense, are what McKinsey and others are starting to call robotic process automations. >> Right. >> In the industrial age, people... Stopped, with the industrial age, any handcrafted widget. Nuts, and bolts, and fasteners started being made on machines. You could stamp them out. You could have power driven beams, etc., etc. To make things in industrial manner. And our feeling is, some of the knowledge tasks that feel like widget manufactures. You're doing them over and over again. Or robotic, so to speak, should be automated. And integration I think, is ripe as one of those things and using the value of integration, our customers can automate a bunch of other repeatable tasks like quote-to-cash. >> Right. Right. It's interesting just when you say autonomous, I can't help but think of autonomous vehicles right, which are all the rage and also in the news. And people will say "well I like to drive "or of course we all like to drive "on Sunday down at the beach" >> Sure. Yeah. >> But we don't like to sit in traffic on the way to work. That's not driving, that's sitting in traffic on the way to work. Getting down the 101 to your exit and off again is really not that complicated, in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. >> Indeed. Indeed. >> Sets itself up. >> And there are times you don't want to. I mean one of the most pleasant headlines, most of the news is just full of bad stuff right. So and so and such and such. But one of the very pleasing headlines I saw the other day in a newspaper was, You know what's down a lot? Not bay area housing prices. >> (laughs) >> But you know what's down a lot? DUI arrests, have plummeted. Because of the benefits of Lyft and Uber. More and more people are saying, "You know, I don't have to call a black cab. "I don't need to spend a couple hundred bucks to get home. "I'm just getting a Lyft or an Uber." So the benefits of some of these are starting to appear as in plummeting DUIs. >> Right. Right >> Plummeting fatalities. From people driving while inebriated. Plunging into another car or sidewalk. >> Right. Right. >> So Yes. >> Amara's Law. He never gets enough credit. >> (laughs) >> I say it in every interview right. We overestimate in the short term and we underestimate in the long term the effects of these technologies cause we get involved-- The Gartner store. It's the hype cycle. >> Yeah, Yeah >> But I really I think Amara nailed it and over time, really significant changes start to take place. >> Indeed and we're seeing them now. >> Alright well Gaurav, great to get an update from you and a beautiful facility here. Thanks for having us on. >> Thank you, thank you. A pleasure to be here. Great to see you as well. >> Alright He's Gaurav, I'm Jeff. And you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic's headquarters Thanks for watching. (techno music)

okay welcome back day two of the cube here and Las Vegas for live this is looking angles exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services reinvent I'm John furrier with Dave vellante co-host of the cube Dave we got our first segment here we're pleased to have Jerry chin new venture capitalist cloud guru was at VMware it's been in the enterprise for a while guys welcome welcome to the cube Jay to kick off here at amazon reinvent Jerry welcome back decided Amy thanks for having guys cube alumni how was Hong Kong you just back from I'm stack I think Hong Kong was great my my body and time clocks someplace our Pacific though so I don't know them jet lag but thank God in Vegas I never need to leave the building so I don't need to know what time is on my mom actually in so it's good to be here so Amazon's pushing the cloud hard obviously they are the cloud huge market share on infrastructure as a service check the boxes there they got like thirty six percent by are not I think it's much higher than that actually her but jesse was saying today well I mean by vechs the next 14 it's got to be higher than thirty six percent I think it's closer to seven but ok that's infrastructure service but the actions platform as a service and SAS yeah if you can I got to get your take on guys we're following OpenStack you were just in Hong Kong you got amazon public cloud you get OpenStack coming up you know as that horse those a two-horse race right now clouds Dax out there but really it's OpenStack is like the enterprise hope it's the great hope for the enterprise with Amazon kind of rolling rolling out massive services what's your take on the two and and and is it a two-horse race and what's what's what's the what's the difference between the two you know I don't think it's a it's a two horse race yet but Amazon is quickly becoming the marker soph monopoly of the public cloud at the rate they're going and and it there have the size and scale that pretty soon to be really hard to compete and I think only google and maybe Marcus off and the public cloud space can really compete but if you take a step back and look at you know to your question OpenStack versus amazon I was in Hong Kong last week the OpenStack design summit and openstax philosophies one be all things to all people right it's open source multiple projects Amazon's philosophy is they want to be one cloud all people so you saw their announcements today around enterprise use cases desktop use cases startup use cases me to use cases there won't be one cloud to all people so it is not the race isn't over yet but very different philosophies right now between the two different cams was there much to talk about incorporating amazon api's into the whole OpenStack framework you know six months ago you heard a lot about that we had a crowd chatter on that run what was the the buzz there you know I I'll be honest into to the point that you guys brought up early around the Amazon ap is almost are becoming a lingua franca for infrastructure of a service but quite frankly debating whatnot they're the right api's or not isn't I think where the actions and the actions add to the point you made around pass and other developer services so the actual API so you do the api's right should be pretty easy for developers to adopt you just create really great developer service around it database services storage services security services those are what developers really care about so I feel like we have you know sometimes called cloud plus there are infrastructure service plus and you got sass minus you know it's like what you have with Salesforce do you feel like we really need that pass layer does that just sort of bifurcate into one of those two there's there's a there's a school of thought that says the world goes into two worlds a long telus a sax so there's an app for everything in which case you have SAS or SATA minus and then you know infrastructure private cloud for a budget likes the apps there's no middle ground for pass you know I'm more towards the middle ground because in a world where we have multiple SAS providers in multiple clouds I believe you're going to have multiple SAS multiple clouds you're going to need to integrate and stitch together a mash-up of applications right you have work day for HCM Salesforce for crm applications your own custom website running on amazon there are three different kinds now servers now how are you connect the data are going to move data around there's going to be at least some kind of past layer integration layer or cloud layer that needs to help stitch together this multi-cloud world so you like the pivotal play a pill I think the concept Indian concept right I think Paul is is a pulse of visionary and bus my friends to work there their announcement yes sir was was I think a step in the right direction that they're planning a flag saying that there has to be something beyond amazon there has to be a relevant private cloud initiative be it VMware or OpenStack of someplace else and let's create some services around it and the angle are taking around data and data services i think is proud of the right the right bed because all these new applications will need these data services to be relevant we were talking about pivotal yesterday one of the things that we were critical on and but also hopeful as you pointed out it's early right so true pivotal a mulligan or a pass if you will is this early and it's really a new company if you think about a 1,600 employees but new but it's window dressing announcement it really wasn't really i mean so the same logos i mean come on that they're trying to overhype and that's that was that's what people are talking about saying hey guys just be honest and say we're working as fast as i can because amazon is not going to break the enterprise right away I mean they also have a longer road going hard at the enterprise so they are going after IBM we must saw in the keynote that called out IBM specifically around some of the advertising there on the show yeah so Amazon is clearly trying to knock on the door or the enterprise so the question we are asking and talking about is how much time is it till they proliferate the enterprise I mean they're in there now toe in the water little beachhead still not enterprise-ready in the ends of the SLA s and the demands or does it matter so what's your take how much time is really on the radar for Amazon when will the clock be expiring for the IBM's HP pivotal's in terms of retooling so I think the evolution around enterprise public cloud like Amazon would take three potential paths so path one around amazon amazon invests enough engineering and product talent to make their cloud enterprise friendly privacy security reliability and they're they're hiring a bunch of folks a bunch of folks my old place vmware try to do that that's path one path to is you see a category of startups out there trying to meet amazon more cloud and enterprise friendly security privacy reliability right so that's path to and as a Greylock a venture capitalist we're investing a bunch of companies trying to you make that happen or past three is developers out there I'm engineer around the weaknesses amazon so the new Amazon is an enterprise friendly they know and about Amazon's got a bunch of weakness around security and privacy and he's just right there application around those weaknesses so I think those are the three evolutionary path paths I think it's a race to see who wins right one two or three yeah there's no doubt that Amazon is forcing the hand of the big guys he's seeing that clearly we have a question on our crowd check go to crowd chatting at / reinvent we've got a live live crowd-sourced thought leader chat there all those to Twitter and LinkedIn pendulum will you sign in but the question Jerry to you is how our cloud providers catering to provide low latency access to developing markets like India Indonesia Philippines etc you know given that the Hurricanes just destroyed all the infrastructure considering there's huge potential explosive internet growth so given that those new emerging markets are essentially refreshing their infrastructure what is the the cloud providers take on the end you do you work in that area what you're giving the opinion on what's going on in those areas sure I mean I think that the world is looking at two or three different clouds you say there's a u.s. dominated cloud maybe a China dominate cloud and rest of the world right generally a lot of analyst kind of segment the world in three major pockets when you think about developing markets or other geographies like Asia South Asia or South America huge markets lot of developers all applications it's the reason why I think there's only a handful of providers that can have the scoop in the reeds to reach globally I think Equinix Rackspace on Google Marcus off or all global footprint players everyone else I think you're going to look at a Federation of multiple players so every region has a local telco cloud provider it could be like an entity or rakuten in Japan it could be a sink tell in Singapore South East Asia so I think you're going to see a global brand around like Amazon or or VMware and VMware trying to franchise our own cloud or Microsoft and then I would see partnerships working between the different geographies and maybe OpenStack is that partnership maybe amazon API is the way different class communicate its remains to be seen what that interface between the different gos look like in the future what do you see as IBM's role I mean first of all do they have the global scale are you sort of purposefully leaving them out or just forget about them and just don't feel like they can compete on that global scale what do you see is their role in OpenStack so um bunch of questions there IBM didn't mean to leave them out there are definitely relevant especially for the large enterprises so I think you're seeing enterprise adoption come from large startups or small starts growing up in the cloud as well as large enterprises that are looking to modernize your applications and I think IBM has a great role to play from kind of that top-down approach I think IBM between a combination of a soft layers which is their their acquired cloud provider combined with their global services and their consulting business will be really relevant to large enterprises my mind so talk about the Amazon enterprise marchi obviously they're talking about cloud trails which is kind of like a monitoring service compliance oriented and I'll see vbi so you you've been close to the vdi movement so that's those are I started VDI hearted the beady eye movement so you know being there what is your take on that because that's very enterprising and that's rude good for business I'm what sir what's their chances there well I think so first on the vdi market we started that at VMware at 05 06 we coined the term VDI and I think it's a great service for large enterprises than need secure mass desktops I think I would love to see in a VDI service from VMware in Amazon five six seven years ago because now video i think is part of a larger solution it's it's it's significant but not enough right he's now enterprise to care about their madness desktops like VDI but my ipad devices iOS devices Android devices they really want kind of a holistically managed desktop or workspace environment so if i were amazon i would expand beyond windows and two other you know operating systems to manage like android and iOS but that's other serious about you know managing enterprise workspaces do they have do they have advantage and you're in your opinion despite the fact that they're so late to market do they have an advantage in that and I mean in essence they are starting around mobile developers aren't they whereas when you started that was especially a consideration Wright and Citrix sort of found its way there right but I think between um amazon I think Google's in a great position because they own so much of the Android stack right if they want to create an enterprise friendly manage um Android environment for Chromebooks Android devices they can start creating a bunch of great developer services like magic google drive but secured on on kind of a google cloud or something like that that could be pretty compelling I don't know if they're going there i think dropbox has a great opportunity kind of be that back and platform obviously Greylock investment but dropbox has a huge opportunity to be that kind of manage secure servers across mobile devices and desktop devices it's all a sudden the one overarching fact you have between Windows iOS and Android is your data and drop boxes on all three platforms chair we got to get rolling and we got in our next guest but I want to ask you actually talk about what you're investing in at greylock rate locked here 1dc you guys have done amazing deals I mean just recently in the past decade Greylock has emerged from just a tier 1 BC to a mega success good investments and if you're on the enterprise team they're actually the consumer side kick ass what's going on for you guys what are you investing in what are you looking at and if price is not an easy game to invest in obviously it's hard but what are you guys doing what are you investing what are you looking for I'm thinking about looking at across the categories most relevant for this audience is I'm really interested looking at startups that can either a make amazon a more enterprise funding cloud or be startups that will pose alternative or challenge to amazon in the enterprise cloud space and you do that either by you know focus on enterprise requirements or focus on enterprise services like data storage security that matter enterprises focus on doing that really really well better than vmware better than Microsoft there in the Amazon I think in the build a really big enterprise cloud business around those technology services you're essentially betting on that transformation from the way the world is the cloud is post of the world known as buying servers they're all trying to find a lab partner that's the direction and and are you bullish on this integrated stack offering obviously DevOps has been a big success you see Facebook you see Google you see Amazon building their own gear they were kind of saying we're not playing an open compute but sure that aside DevOps is a software model absolutely and so the integrated stack which are common on integrated stack and how that's going to involve for both the mainstream of DevOps absolutely so you see this DevOps culture permeating first development of applications now how you manage your infrastructure so you look at what's happened with open compute and open source switches which I think open compute project announced a couple days ago you're seeing that kind of DevOps culture and how they manage and update their applications / minate storage compute and now networking that's going to be kind of a common adoption curve throughout the cloud so the way DevOps technologies are getting adopted from languages to frameworks of databases is the same way we're seeing storage compute and networking technologies get adopted in this next cloud wave what's your take on the iphone for the enterprise amazon cloud kind of metaphor and OpenStack being more the Android we were talking earlier right just get your thoughts there an OpenStack also has a lot of legs right now but it's very open iPhone model or Amazon is kind of closed or some say lock in alright but it still apps are not closed right so the metaphor the metaphor was you know iphone is to Amazon as Android is to OpenStack and I think at a high level that kind of makes sense but not really because there's no Google behind OpenStack like there's a google behind Android so I think Rackspace is was an early leader and still as a leader in the OpenStack space but there's also red hat there's a bunch of the players there so as a result there's no single entity kind of driving OpenStack like Google's driving Android so that analogy can breaks down and then as far as Apple analogy to Amazon I I think Amazon is a lot more open than the iOS ecosystem is because just the fact that there's no governing board to prove her apps to launch on amazon right I can go stand up on an ec2 instance lost my application use it I don't need wait for this there's not a 20-page approval process so knowingly directionally that's more correct than not but it's analogy breaks down when you really get into it and OpenStack your prospects roman sec what's your what's your outlook on OpenStack real quick I think OpenStack so holistically i think is great a more bullets than sort of sub projects that i am overall I think they keep launching new projects some are better than others the core processing around compute and storage and this um API management I'm bullish on I'm supposed to be bullish on what they're doing around containers like docker and core OS and kind of adopting this next generation of cloud platforms well we got to go we got some fans out there want to hear what your take on VDI so go tweet to at jerry chen j ER are wide CH en we got a break here we'd love to have you on a little longer we got our next guest coming on it's the cube live in Las Vegas day two of Amazon's reinvent changing the cloud game and the enterprise and we get all the detailed coverage here on the key we'll be right back after this short break the cute