>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Dave Vellante as well, Stu Miniman, who's been doing interviews with us all week, our next guest is Roland Acra, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Data Center Group. He's in charge of that core business of data center now, at the center of cloud and the edge. Roland, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So a lot of announcements, a lot of the big guns are out there for Cisco, you got the data center, you got the networking group, and you got IoT, and then cloud center suite was part of the big announcement, your team had a big piece of the keynote yesterday and continues to make waves. Give us a quick update on the news, the key points, what was the announcements? >> Yeah, the two big announcements for my group were ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex Anywhere, and we captured them under a common moniker of There's Nothing Centered About the Data Center Anymore, because both of these speak to things going outside the data center. ACI Anywhere is the integration of ACI, our software-defined networking solution, into two of the most prominent public cloud providers out there, Amazon and Azure, and for HyperFlex Anywhere, the exciting news is the expansion of HyperFlex, which is our hyper-converged solution, also outside the data center, to the edge of the enterprise, specifically branch offices and remote locations. >> And the other thing that came out of our conversation here on theCUBE and also on the keynote, is that the center of the value is the data center, as you guys pointed out with the slides, big circle in the middle, ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, but the network and the data and the security foundation has been a critical part of this new growth. >> Yes. >> Take a minute to explain the journey of ACI, how it started, where are we? It's been a progression for you guys, certainly inside the enterprise, but now it's extended. What's the journey, take us through that. >> When ACI came into the market five years ago now, we have a five year anniversary, ACI brought a software-defined networking solution into the market. It brought an automated network fabric capability, which said you can no longer screw yourself up by having incoherence between one part of the network and another, it's all managed coherently as one thing, and it brought, to your point about security, what's called segmentation of applications. Today, applications have data, they have databases, they have different sensitive pieces, and it's important to be able to tell the network not only get the traffic from one place to the other, but also selectively get the traffic that I tell you to get there, and not the one, and don't get the traffic that has no business getting there, and that's known as segmentation, which is a security concern, particularly when you have sensitive data like consumer data or things that have regulatory things around them. ACI has brought that to the market. That was the value proposition of ACI. We worked on then expanding ACI in the direction of scale. Customers have two or more data centers for disaster recovery, for resiliency, we made that possible. We got to bigger and bigger footprints. Then we took ACI to the edge of the enterprise. What if somebody wanted to put some computing capability in a store, or in a logistics center. ACI then was expanded with that. Step N minus one, was we took ACI to bare metal clouds. Customers now want to deploy also things in co-locations or bare metal clouds. We decoupled ACI software from the Cisco switches, which is the ACI hardware, and ACI became completely virtualized, and still able to be doing everything it does in hardware on premise, in software instead, in somebody's else's capability. And yesterday we announced the full combination of this, which is what if you don't want the ACI soft switching or hard switching, can you use the native switching of a public cloud, like Azure or AWS, and you tell the other APIs, please let those packets go from A to B because they're part of the whitelisted paths,, and don't let packets from C to D go because they're part of the blacklisted paths. And that was the full integration with these clouds-- >> Can you abstract that complexity? >> Completely, completely. One orchestrator, which is the multi-site orchestrator, the same one people have used on premise, that they've developed their policies around, so that we have invested a lot of sweat equity in that controller, it's where also they put their compliance, verification, and audit and assurance, and they use that thing even when something goes to Azure or it goes to AWS. >> So you mentioned the progression. So it's now your full progression, from core to the cloud, including edge-- >> Going through edge. >> What has been some of the results? You mentioned that segmentation's one of 'em, I get that. How has ACI been used, what are some highlights that show the value, because people start looking at ACI, saying, hmm, I like this, I like scale, I have a scale challenge with the new cloud world and edge, and complexity's abstracted away with software, okay, check, so far, so good. Where has been the success of ACI and how do you see that unfolding specifically in the cloud? >> Yeah, the biggest value our customers have gotten, cloud or no cloud, has been with ACI, they've been able to shorten the speed of change, shorten the time for change, therefore increase the speed of change of their network, because now the network needs to operate at the speed of the applications. Applications reconfigure themselves sometimes on hourly or daily basis, and it used to be that changing something in the network, you sent a ticket to somebody who took weeks to reconfigure things. Now that software-defined capability means the network reconfigures and people can change generations of compute on the fly, and the network is in lockstep with that. The agility and speed has been great. The other value has been the value of automation, which is people can run a bigger and bigger and bigger network with a small number of people. You don't have to scale your people the more switches you have. Again, because programming and automation comes to the rescue with that. >> Well I'll tell you, people who are watching right now can look behind Roland and see that it's a packed house. We're in the dev net zone, which has been the massively growing organization within Cisco. Community's been growing very fast, people are developing on top of the networks, and these are network folks, and as well there's new talent coming in. So skill gap is shortening, so you're getting a different makeup for a Cisco user, your customers are changing and changing, growing, existing base plus new people. Talk about that dynamic about how that impacts this intent-based networking, this notion of policy software is defined. >> Yes, you it's you know what many people have been calling infrastructure as code, which is you go from scripting to actually coding and composing very sophisticated automation capabilities and change management capabilities, for an automatable system, which is what ACI is. It's made for people drawing on the strengths that they were doing in the application domain or in the server domain, and bringing that into the network. And that's a new and exciting thing, it brought the network within the purview of coders, people who know how to do Python and know how to do Go language and things which are modern and exciting for the younger generation. It's made also for bringing the analytical capabilities, you know, a lot of what those young coders are used to is a lot of logs, a lot of visibility, a lot of analytics running on, because they've done that on web servers, they've done that on applications that run in the cloud, and we now offer the network, which is very rich in data. If you think about, we see every packet, we see every flow, we see every pattern of how the traffic is changing, and that becomes a data set that is subject to programming because then from there you can extract anomaly detection, you can extract security signatures of malware, you can extract prediction of where the traffic is going to be going in six months. There's a lot of exciting potential from the telemetry and the visibility that we bring into that framework. >> And as you point out, devs love that. I mean Cisco, we've talked about this, is one of the few large established companies that has, in our view, figured out developers, right? There's a lot of examples of those companies that haven't and continue to struggle, we've just witnessed here the dev crowd. I want to ask you about ACI and how it's different from, for example, VMware NSX. What's the differentiation there? >> The biggest differentiation is ACI is one system through which you manage the entire network, the overlay which is the virtual view of the network that the applications care about, as well as the underlay, which is the actual real delivery system that makes the packets get from A to B with quality of service and so forth. So that's first thing. It actually does a lot more, it has much more scope than NSX does. The other thing that's very unique about ACI is we have integrated it with every hypervisor on the planet and every container management framework on the planet, and ever bare metal system on the planet, which means that any workload, something sitting on a mainframe, something sitting on a Sun Oracle server, something on OpenStack on OpenShift, on VMware or on Hyper-V, and now on the EC2 APIs of AWS or on Azure, all of those are integrated with ACI. We're not wedded to one hypervisor, and our cloud implementation that we announced yesterday is a true integrated cloud capability, it's not a bring your own license and go put it on bare metal at AWS, which has been VMware's cloud strategy is to team up with AWS and let customers bring their software licenses into AWS bare metal. That's not EC2. And of course that's not Azure and that's not the other clouds we're going to be doing. So the openness to being multi-cloud on premise, which means every hypervisor and every container framework, and bare metal, with one system. We're extending that into the cloud to give customers choice and openness, that's really a very fundamental philosophy in networks. >> So much wider scope. That's kind of always been Cisco's philosophy in partnership. When you think about HyperFlex going back 10 years when you guys sort of created that with partners and then multiple partners now, maybe talk about that journey a little bit. >> HyperFlex? >> Yes. >> Yeah, 'cause hyperconvergence is another very exciting and fast growing trend in our industry. And really, HyperFlex started off with the hyperconverged infrastructure, started of being the notion of putting a mini-cloud in a box on-premise for application developers to rapidly deploy their applications, as if it was in the cloud. So speed and simplicity were really at a premium, and that's really what defines hyperconvergence. And we've done a tremendous amount of work at Cisco to make speed and simplicity there, because we've integrated network compute storage and a cloud management system called Intersight to give that whole capability to customers. We then hardened it. We took it from being able to do VDI kind of workloads and rather benign workloads, to mission-critical workloads. So databases are now running on HyperFlex. ERP systems are running on HyperFlex, the real crown jewels of the enterprise are now running on HyperFlex. Then we made it multi-cloud. We opened it to all hypervisors and to all container frameworks. We announced OpenShift yesterday, we have already done Hyper-V, we had done OpenStack and DSX, so again, same spirit of openness. And yesterday's announcement was, what if I want to take hyperconvergence outside of the data center in hundreds or thousands of remote locations? Think a retailer. In a retail environment, some of the most interesting data is born outside the data center, it's born in a store. The data is center that follows the customer who's interested in a plasma TV, and that data has a perishable lifetime. You act on it on location and on time or you lose the value. So sending it over, taking two hours to do a machine learning job on it and come back, the customer's already back home watching a movie. And so the window of opportunity for the data is often right there and then, and that's why our customers are taking their computing environment off into where the data is, to act on it fast and on location. >> It sounds easy but I want to just get your thoughts on this, because this is a critical data challenge. If data's stored in classic old ways, data warehouses and fenced off area, it's kind of in the internet, you're not going to have the latency to get that data in real time. Talking about real time data that's addressable for part of the application value. So this is a new notion that's emerged with dev ops and infrastructure as code. >> That's right. >> That's hard. How do you guys see that progressing, how should customers prepare to have that data centered properly for app addressability, discovery, whatever the uses of the data contextually is, time series data or whatever data it is, this is a critical thing. >> It's a critical thing, and there's no one answer, because depending on what the data is, sometimes you only see the value when you concentrate it and consolidate it, because the patterns emerge from rolling out a thousand stores worth of data and seeing that people who buy this toothbrush tend to buy that toothpaste. There may be that value where you want to concentrate the data, but there are also many things where acting on the data in the moment and on location quickly without referring to the other thousand stores extracts 90% of the value of that data. So that's why you want to do forward deploy computing on that data. >> So this highlights network programmability, this means the applications driving the queries or the network for that data, if it's available... So there's two things, network programmability from the app, and availability of the data. >> Yeah, and the ability for the entire infrastructure, network, compute, and storage, and hyperconvergence is the automation of all three to be able to deliver its value equally in remote locations or in a cloud, as it would have in a data center, because that's where, the application's going to want to go where the value is, and if the infrastructure can't follow it there, then you get a degraded ability to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Right, real time decisions happen at the edge, but then as you describe, you got to bring data back, certain data, back to the cloud, do the modeling there and then push the models back down. So you're going to have-- >> And you're going to have decision making distributed. >> And you've got to have low latency to be able to enable that. >> Yeah, and the same goes for other considerations. For example, why is it important to do, allow people to put data both on their premises and in the cloud? For disaster recovery, for data replication, for resiliency. Sometimes for governance reasons. GTPR in Europe says the data of European citizens that's personally identifying has to stay in Europe. Somebody may not have a data center in Europe. Could they take advantage of a co-location ability or somebody else's cloud? >> This is the theme we're seeing at this show this year, and certainly at the center of the news is, complexity is increasing 'cause it's just evolution, more devices are connected, diverse environments, scale for cloud and connectivity, but software driving that. So I got to ask you the question. Go back to the old days, you know, the 1990s, multi-vendor was a big word. Now multi-cloud feels the same way. This is the openness thing. How would you describe multi-cloud strategy for Cisco in context of this notion of being open? >> It is really the new dimension of openness, right? We've been open in the past to multiple forms of physical networks. Customers to use wireless or fiber or copper or what have you, we need to give them an IP network that operate equally well over all media. That was one dimension of openness. Another dimension of openness was, does a product from vendor A work with a product from vendor B? My router, your router, my switch, your firewall, those are other dimensions. Hardware and software coupling. Can I buy the hardware from Peter and the software from Mary, will it work well? The new dimension of openness is, can a customer avail themselves of any form of cloud, either because they like the tooling and how well their developers are more efficient on a given cloud, or because the pricing of the other guy, or the third guy has a point of presence in Tokyo, which this one doesn't. All of those are business choices that if we make our technology, let them take advantage of them with no technical restriction, they will, because now they can shop on the merit of what they want to do, and not on, oh well, sorry, if you want to go to Azure, I can't help you, but if you're willing to settle for your own premise or for Amazon, then I have a story for you. So that's-- >> Roland, you're leading the team on the core crown jewels for Cisco, as you guys, the rising tide's floating all boats here within the company. What's your plan for the year, what's your goals, you'll be out there pounding the pavement with customers, what's your objective, what do you hope to accomplish this year in 2019? >> Well 2019 is the year of many things for us, it's a very exciting year. It's the year of, on the physical infrastructure side, we're taking our switches to 400 gigabit per second. We have our new silicon capability, our new optics, so we're going to be able to scale for the cloud providers who are heading the next frontier of speed and density and scale. So performance will always, always be there, and when we're done with 400, we're already going to be asking about 800. So that's an exciting new generation of switches. ACI Anywhere getting deployed now and adopted across multiple clouds, is another exciting thing. HyperFlex Anywhere, we're really looking forward to the potential in financial services, in logistics, in retail, where's there's a lot of deployed data at the edge. And then, security is a never finished journey, right? Everything with give our customers in the way of security, because there, there's an active actor who's trying to make you fail, right? It's not that you're only fighting physics to get to 400 gigabit, then you win. There we have a guy who's trying to foil your schemes and trying to foil their schemes. Security is a great-- >> Constant attacks are on the network. You guys have seen this movie before, so you know how critical, Roland thanks so much for spending the time, congratulations on ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, intent-based networking at the core. It's theCUBE bringing you all the data, we have an intent here to bring you the best content from Cisco Live in Barcelona. I'm John, Dave Vellante, stay with us for live coverage, day two of three days of coverage here in the dev net zone, packed with developers learning new skills. We'll back with more after this short break.

>> 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 we're here at the San Diego convention center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman we've had three days wall to wall coverage my co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house and I'm really excited to actually sit down one on one with one of the users at this user conference the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco with their users and partners over 28,000 so speaking for all of them right? We have Sebastien Morissette who's an IT architect specialist at Intact Financial Corporation come to us from beautiful Montreal Canada. >> Exactly. >> All right thank you so much for joining us so Sebastien first of all how many Cisco Lives have you been too? >> Honestly this is my first. >> Oh absolutely exciting for that, my first one I came too was actually 10 years ago I joked at the 20th anniversary they went back 20 years to have some 80's bands they had The Bangles and Devo on and now on the 30 year they moved 10 years forwards they have two great bands from the 90's Wheezer and Foo Fighters so your first time at Cisco Live give us your general impressions of the show. >> Well actually it's been very great I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well so I got some sessions in I did some work as well so it's amazing to see how these events unfold right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths how many technical sessions you can have so, I was very pleased I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intact so you know we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well so it's interesting right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love which is technology but at the same time spend some time together outside of work. >> That's awesome, we've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego hope you definitely get to see the sights before we geek out on some of the technology just give our audience a little bit about Intact and the insurance business but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. >> Okay well Intact is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions we've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010 and afterwards we were publicly traded now so we're Intact Financial Corp. Typically we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative which is kind of a new offering of you know modern IT services within Intact. >> Okay great and just to, your purview in the company and just the comment about the company is you know when you talk about those transformations you know MNA is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're doing that but tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people however you measure you know what, boxes or ports or whatever. >> Okay well you know typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America Intact through acquisition we actually bought OneBeacon Insurance last year, so typically we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines so typically whenever we're looking at different technologies we look at the skills sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to you know accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology so in some cases whatever we're looking at building up these new features like I was talking for data center 2.0 it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco which is why we are here today with the team. >> All right so Sebastien you talk about data center 2.0 and transformation there at the organizational level is it branded data center transformation does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? >> Yeah data center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years but it really is at the essence a digital transformation, what we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the Cloud so we're building an on-prem private Cloud offering with multi-sites so we have three sites in the scope right now and the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the Cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment when we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public Cloud our software engineering teams our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there so it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team so we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team and that we can share with them so they can actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VM's or stuff so trying to accelerate that. >> Awesome I love that 'cause sometimes you hear okay we're going to 2.0 it's basically a fancy refresh but we're going to keep things mostly the same when I hear DevOps I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that, I have to ask you without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private Cloud that's in your data center we understand some of the covenants and reasons what you have but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a Cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? >> I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president typically we were looking at how can we access the Cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go what I asked him to do is say you know trust me I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for Cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services so typically in the end we didn't overhaul anything that we had we built a brand new sandbox for Intact to be able to work with so we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move we've built a three site approach because when I was looking at kind of my capex expenditure if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity when you go to three sites it seems awkward but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements, so in the end you're actually spending 150% of your capacity, or your capex to buy the compute, so there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely it's very easy for us to see how it's a Cloud because we're not operating it the same way we're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch every process has been revised we haven't kept everything we had before so we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software engineering groups were asking us to do. >> All right that's exciting stuff there when you look at these multi-site deployments I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments, management, security and networking are absolutely critical, I hear oh okay I've got 50% in each oh my God what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two so luckily I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your rollout, we're obviously here at Cisco Live so give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially you know what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? >> All right well you know typically the way that our story started was kind of weird the first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ but actually rebuild our whole design to you know integrate ACI into the fabric and then when you start talking about firewalls or switches they tell you well with ACI you have contracts so it really started that way so we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure as our compute layer so typically think of it as Intact is building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that we have all the components so we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier which is running like you know VMware on site, on top of the HyperFlex and then we have the ACI since we had three sites we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites and in the end we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that and when we were looking at it early on it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker we were looking at finding a Cloud management platform, so we ended up using CloudCenter which is now CloudCenter Suite and in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using CloudCenter today we're taking it into the data center and out to the Cloud whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week he was saying you know what sometimes our clients buy it more for the Cloud first and I was like well we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite but it works as well, so typically where we stand today I have the three sites we're able to deploy with CloudCenter we've got multi-site on top of that and the idea it really is that, I spoke about training wheels earlier well we're taking them off right? In the next couple of weeks we're starting to look into negotiations with public Cloud providers trying to move towards the public Cloud and you know there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now you know they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS and now they have all the three major Cloud providers covered with ACI Anywhere so that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all, everywhere so to be honest I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back I think we're in our sweet spot right now. >> Yeah and you're right it's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers which is I have all of these public Cloud's and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the CloudCenter Suite is there so you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public Cloud or public Cloud you choose are you at the point there that do you know which public Cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? >> Well to be honest you know we're keeping our options open you know we have different providers that are offered, you know the major public one there's Amazon there's Google Cloud we're not closing any options it's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure that we get all the information back so I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating but in the end we're not limiting ourselves we just want to be able to scale. >> Right you're confident that the Cisco solution that you choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or need to make switches along the way? >> Yeah. >> Question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-Cloud one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skillsets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected but understanding how I manage each of those environments so do you feel CloudCenter Suite's going to help you through that? You know what do you see as you look out over your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for you know your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public Cloud? >> Actually I'm feeling really confident because you know especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and Kip have announced for the data center and for the Cloud piece we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different Cloud providers. So for me what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a Cloud we need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products you know Cisco's branding it the Anywhere right? They have the HX Anywhere the ACI Anywhere and typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skillsets and allow the people to use it one thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the Cloud First ACI right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the Cloud I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the Cloud you're going to be able to to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on prem or anywhere in other Clouds afterwards so I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to you know transparently migrate apps between sites. >> All right so Sebastien you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco you talk about the HX the ACI the CloudCenter Suite what advice do you give to your peers out there and they say you know I've used Cisco products for a long time Cisco makes great products but you know simplicity and management across the product lines was something that you know needed some work what does the Cisco of today look like you know what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? >> Well you know for us one of the things that was nice like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield so I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built so my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment there's nothing in Cloud native applications that is you know symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center, it's completely different ways of working we have one week sprints we patch everything as it comes out if an application goes into the environment it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every time we're at n or n-1 so, my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure, let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere right? So that's one of the things I would say, from what you said about Cisco and the integration you were right, we have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half, however I've noticed that these new software components like CloudShare and everything not necessarily the hardware part Cisco nails hardware like it works they've been doing it for years the thing is with these software teams they're very customer driven we have access to the engineers now I mean we've had meetings with the Canadian execs Roland Acra's team we were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US so, every company has challenges I would be lying if I told you that even at Intact we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together but I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. >> Well it's interesting Sebastian you bring that up because I look at you say okay, you've got a greenfield environment awesome, we can go do some new tech, well let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces you're like completely overhauling your environment how much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that or you know I look people, process and technology sounded like you were taking it all on at once, did that work well? Would you have if you looked back would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe you know gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of you know start brand new start fresh and get everything going? >> Well I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh however, it helped us get really good pace and work you know it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group so all of that was great learning experience the only thing I would say is you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach but where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get onboard. because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups here's a new area where you can play in but you know typically I'd say that it's been well received we have not had the need to build new skillsets because we're doing infrastructure as code so typically a lot of the stuff we're building we're making sure it's automated so that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy so lessons learned like you've asked me I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of Intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology it's fine for the time it took and everything it's fine, it's really people the change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts it's like if we were disrupting our own company right? So typically I'd say, that would be something that I would say to people manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. >> Well Sebastien I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation I want to just give you the final word sounds like you've got great access to Cisco really hope you're happy with what you've done final word is to you know your expectations coming into a show like this and you know what your take aways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego? >> Well outside from the amazing weather you mean or yeah? so you know typically I like the event I've been to other events before, like I said this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology so they're really present so I really liked how you know we were given the opportunity to do hands on labs and actually learn new technologies so typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. >> Well Sebastien Morissette congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. >> Thank you so much. >> All right we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall to wall coverage Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. 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