live from Orlando Florida it's the cube covering enterprise connect 2019 brought to you by five nine hello from Orlando Florida Lisa Martin with the cubes to minimun joining me we are at Enterprise Connect 2019 day three graciously hosted by five nine we've had great conversations with five nine folks customers partners and we're very pleased to welcome back to the cube but the first time live the CEO of five nine Rowan trollope Bruin thank you so much for joining Stu and me today thank you Lisa thank you sue great to be here and for hosting us I was telling you before we live we've had a great three days of talking to your customers your partners this contact center is hot it's electric it's electric I think they should rename Enterprise Connect to contact center connector or central or something it's it really all the innovation I've heard this from people in the financial community and the customers that wow there's so much innovation happening in the contact center and they're 100% right and not just us but the whole industry is just absolutely on a tear right now the rise of the powered consumer yeah it's incredible how this consumer behavior that's the driver absolutely and every company has to react because we have as consumers so much choice yeah we call it the experience economy it's like you know we're all and we all can relate to this because we're all consumers and when we deal with brands we want to have a great experience all around like not just when we're you know buying or when we're using or but you know from the very first moment we discover that brand all the way through to the renewal of that product and the use and the install and the support that we get and we're really really focused on that so that's the driver and your enterprises have realized that businesses in general have realized that if they can deliver an outstanding experience from an engagement perspective to their customer that can drive fierce loyalty amongst customers unlike any other thing they can do so it's it's emerging as this like as this extraordinarily important part of every business yeah Rowen one of the things Lisa and I talking about what we learn this week is I wish as a consumer I had visibility into some of the technologies that were using it behind them it would give me an indicator of how much they value me as a customer right and if I do need to call them what that experience would be like that's right we're so we think a lot about customer love what you know what does it take to get a customer to love your business and it doesn't only take having a great product it takes having a great experience with your brand and nothing is closer to your customer than the contact center it's where all the action happens right it's right at that front line it's for the moment you hear the ring when you call that company or what the website looks like and how you get answers to your questions and how do they engage with you how do they greet you what is it like do you does the person know who you are do they give you that delightful experience and you know the thing is we all know what great looks like and therefore we see when it's not great and it's just grates on us you know great great and and five nine is fundamentally solving that problem for our businesses one of the things we heard - in terms of omni-channel and you know as these empowered consumers we we want a company to communicate with us so as you were saying before I know us on whatever channel that we want but one of the things that did surprise me is that social isn't as high yet as a communications tool that that really companies of any industry saying I will go to Twitter if I'm not getting what I want from an agent on the phone so I just was surprised to learn that that social wasn't as high on the radar yet but then other things that we're surprising to row and it's voices sexy voices back it's we have to have the humans and the empathise or some some sort of old-school things that are coming back and resurfacing is critical yeah well you know on the omni-channel things that sort of very fancy word for just saying communicate with me as a customer in the way that I want in the best way possible and if we think about I keep this really simple for people think about how you and I would communicate if we were just chatting sometimes I would call you sometimes I would text you sometimes I might send you an email they're all different not one or the other is better or worse they're just different if I'm in line at Starbucks and I'm trying to like you know I'm not gonna call you and be that person who's like loudly yapping to Lisa on the phone I might send you a couple texts but then I walk out I jump in the car what a minute I'm gonna phone Conny on the phone the call center or the contact center needs to deliver that same seamless experience across whatever channel you want whether it's messaging or whether it's in the product itself or an email or phone and voice when it's needed so that's really the that's where we're driving towards and that's what our product offers the fancy word for that is omni-channel you know you'd be surprised that not as many customers do it as you know you would like and we're able to deliver it deliver that out of the box right and we can also do that with our partners like Salesforce and Oracle and you know whoever the backend is that you're using so we can we partner with that and do that very effectively yeah Rowen one of the other things we heard this week is just how important cloud is to a lot of the changes that are happening one of the panels though I was actually a little surprised to hear they're like oh how do we call kind of the hybrid environment I have my own premises I have my cloud deployments and you know hybrids in the middle it's you know we're at certain parts along the journey of maturation in the industry and sometimes they're like oh well there's certain things that will never go to the cloud because of you know it's very large and part of me looks at it's like well I look at the largest technology companies in the world they're the cloud companies and they're scaling you know and they're enabling companies to scale even more I know clouds one of the main reasons you know for 5/9 success yeah in one of the regions that came over we're a market leader in cloud you know that's how we started we're born in the cloud so we don't have any on-premises technology you know think about a call center today that has phones on the desks and wires and this you know we're all about the agents login to our website at five nine com they get an incredible experience and they plug in their headset to the computer and so it's super lightweight there's nothing to deploy there's no closets of equipment anywhere it's all very seamless and lightweight and that's what customers really love about the solution the idea back to your point that you know there's some things are too big for the cloud that's total BS I just say to have to say it that's not true you know what I would agree with though is that we're on a journey you know we're not at a point where every company should hit a button right now and lift and shift everything to the cloud right and so there are sort of steps along the way that we think some companies need to make and you know that frankly if all you have is a legacy on premises set of technology then that's the story you're gonna tell and it's not a it's not a lie it's true that for some companies but what's true for most companies almost all the time is that the cloud is the best answer and we're essentially we're through the evangelism phase here there's not really any question anymore whether that's a viable solution for most large businesses it is you know we've got over 40 customers now paying us over a million dollars a year then that's doubled in the last two years so it's a fastest growing segment of our business is large-scale contact centers running a hundred percent on the cloud and they are loving it and another thing we talk about is cloud as an enabler of AI we've that's been a theme I know that hey I came up sort of a little bit controversially on that panel that you were on this morning but talk to us about AI as an accelerant of the customer experience and the agent experience yeah well I'll tell you a little story I was call center agent my first job we're talking about that earlier and you know I took a lot of calls and 8000 calls actually in a call center that I took after you take 8,000 calls your brain gets really good at predicting what the calls are about you've heard them all you're never gonna be surprised by an inbound sort of call or message or whatever you've seen it all and frankly by the time the customer says two or three words you already know where they're going but the big challenge in the context so if you got me on the phones I would know the answers to your questions after you think $8,000 you're fast you're efficient you can deliver that great experience the big problem in the context Center it's mostly a labor driven operation there's very high turnover contact center reps once they've taken out phase 8,000 calls the first thing they want to do is get the heck out of the contact center we think that AI offers a brand new way to solve that problem to deliver the intelligence and the prediction to your most junior agents let them focus on the empathy we say let the Machine bring the mastery and let the human bring the heart because it's really important that you have the human touch in that experience right that drives that's what people crave in life they don't it's like I don't want to talk to a bot whether it's on text or the IVR as far as I'm concerned this rash of bots that we've seen are sort of the new IV ARS nobody likes talking to a computer you want to talk to a human so our goal right now is to see how we can make those humans more efficient how we can arm them with real-time interactions and that's all about leveraging data right because the data in this case is voice so de voices the new data it's the biggest source of dart data in the enterprise customer voice actual voice like WAV files what's new in the last year or two is that we can now take that in real time take that customer voice convert it into text real time with with high accuracy better than humans can do and we can then use that to generate predictions about what that rep should say or do next right that sort of superpower rep who's taken 8000 calls how do you make every rep like that we are sort of heading down a path to enable that the very first step though is you have to get to the cloud because this technology cannot be done on premises so you know you can dance around that all you want but the reality is you cannot get data at scale on-premises with the legacy approach you have to be in the cloud and that's where we are and that's where we were that's where we started well that that data driven story is something that definitely resonated with us this week of the show and something we heard a lot from your team something that that's happening just across industries I'd love to hear a little bit about you know just future growth where you you know 5/9 had a very strong product great customer experience to begin with but yourself and Jonathan now on the team starting moved down the AI path data becomes more and more important part of the story well what should we be looking at four five nine kind of the next you know 12 to 18 months yeah well I think five 9s got the best experience for our customers and you know where we're heading the big opportunity here is to deliver that next generation of innovation to the contact center to enable an experience unlike anything they've ever delivered before so that you can take in any company anywhere in the world and deliver that sort of best best-in-class experience right that predictive you never wait you get someone whether it's text whether it's email whether it's chat you get a great answer you get a human touch but you also get the answer you want and whether that's inbound or outbound if its outbound it's really important that it is not only predictive but that it's anticipating what your needs are because I like to say if I have to call support like that's already a problem why am i calling you you know with IOT and with instrumentation going on and with the ability to gather data part of what you should be of doing every business should be doing is anticipating what their customers are gonna need and sharing that information across their company and a contact center is really where that all comes together to be able to say look we know this customers are already having a problem with this like let's not have an outbound marketing call to try and upsell them we should be calling them to figure out how do we can make that experience better so really honing and optimizing and anticipating your users needs is sort of the other side of this so it's both the inbound case I talked about but also that outbound case and and that that proactive engagement that that I think every end user really would like in an effective way five nine has about five billion recorded conversations customer conversations a year you have billion minutes a year five billion minutes thank you a year tremendous amount of opportunity there for your customers to start digging into that dirk data and becoming predictive talk to us about that as a competitive advantage yeah the very first step is lighting that data up we're lighting it up now with machine learning we signed a partnership with Google and we're using their speech-to-text in a secure way in a private way that doesn't expose anyone's data so very very secure obviously our our name is 5/9 we're known as the trusted you know brand in this industry five nines of reliability is what we're all about so this is for our customers is when it comes to the next step it's really okay take that voice data which is not very useful like you can have agent spot check or supervisors listen in on calls but that doesn't scale as I pointed out earlier the more important opportunity here is let's convert all of that to text let's then take that text and it becomes computable you can summarize it we can use modern natural language processing technologies to summarize it to include a summary of every call in your CRM system so that whenever the person calls you can they can quickly scan down and see what's happened also to be predictive hey we think that this person's been complaining about this for a long time we can actually go predict what they might you know what what the challenge might be or and you can do that across your whole data set so there's incredible business insight and value that can come from the voice of your customer from from really being able to translate that from voice into digital data so we're turning voice into the next digital channel and we think that that has profound implications on every contact center and every business yeah Ron one of the interesting things is if you look around this at this show floor you've got a lot of partnerships but there's some of the overlaps and blurring the lines between some of the environments we had carfax on good customer of yours started out with the the contact center agents but you know they've got quite a lot of seats just for the sales doing outbound not a traditional contact center you're partnering with marketing cloud and unified communications but you know some of those lines blur out quite a bit so what is it call - yeah a contact center that the lines of that are blurring you know the traditional thing you would imagine like what I was working in 20 years of 30 years ago was like you know rows of cubes people on headsets like that's mostly what people think about but increasingly some of our largest customers it's nurse practitioners it's doctors it's other experts that are interacting with their customers it's education consultants and specialists these are all customers of ours that are using our platform today you know I think about 10 years ago I'll give you an example of this transition 10 years ago I my wife Steph was giving me a hard time about my garage being messy as she likes to do cuz it was messy and I sort of successfully ignored this for about two years and then eventually had to do something about it she didn't give up she's very persistent and so I ran down to Home Depot and I got some like rack things that I could bring home and I organized all my junk so fast forward to a year ago and we've moved we now live in San Francisco and Steph's on me again about the same thing consistent and I ignore her for a while and I go out all right all right I'll get it done so what do I do I think about well last time I did this I got a rack how am I gonna get a rack I went on my phone and I searched garage organizing systems and I find a few companies and I go under their websites and I do a little bit of self-service likes discovery and learning about their products I'm an empowered consumer at this point right I find three different companies I call one of them because like this is a big purchase I don't want this huge thing to show up steal blah blah blah my house if it's the wrong thing I guess gonna get ahold of someone I talked to them I have a good experience I hang up my called one other one just to kind of compare it I compared the two then I ordered it and it showed up at my doorstep so ten years ago let me give you the punchline here ten years ago one trip to brick and mortar zero calls to the call center ten years later now zero trips to brick and mortar two calls to a call center and those calls to call center were the differences between a sale and no sale that's the experience economy in action and that tells me that there may even be more contact center agents in the future and they will look very different than how they look today it's a really interesting view that you give us of how different a contact centre agent is I wouldn't have thought of it as you're right these are nurse practitioners it's so diverse speaking of diversity I know that five nine has several thousand customers globally one of the ones that you mentioned during the panel this morning was Estee Lauder which I thought was so interesting because woman founded company woman founded company not a tech company talk to us about how 5/9 helped this business transform and actually did George Clooney a solid yes we did George Clooney a solid so in the case of Estee Lauder they were a they're a huge company eleven billion dollars in sales they're an amalgamation of 40 different brands very high-end skin care products and so they had a big challenge which was they bought 40 companies they did not integrate any of them so you call any one of these places there was all different contact centers they didn't even know when we began how many call center agents they had we had to sort of to make that a part of the discovery process and global they're in all over the world they're in asia-pacific they're in France and Europe they're here they had telecom contracts in almost every single one of those cases they had independent technology contracts and almost every single one of those cases and I don't even know how many systems that were coming together but it was a lot so we engaged with them and basically provided we we help them write the RFP we help work through that process we got them on board with our software nothing to deploy nothing to install right just have your agents login we did a training and we're able to on board you know well over a thousand agents onto the platform and those were folks who were engaged across many many different businesses and some of the things that they wanted in this upgrade was not just to sort of like how fewer contracts or a better system but it's also to tie that system back into the business so you know they have a some products that are they give away at like the Oscars and the Emmys or whatever gift bags and you know they want brand representatives and influencers to use their products so they encourage them to call in to order more or to find out more about their products and so on they don't want them coming into the same contact center that you or I you know would use maybe you would go to the VIPs but now it's called a regular contact center they want those to go right into their VIPs and make sure that you get the right specialist at the right time to that that customer that well I think actually while we were in helping them out with one of the deployments and one of the on boardings George Clooney's people had called in and the team was actually dealing with that and so we were able to get that to the right agent at the right time and that's about knowing the skills you know being able to route things in a complex way understanding oh this is a contact coming from an event that event has some you know some VIPs at the event we've got a specialist here who's got this skill and that skill this is the right person for it to go to they're really good at dealing with VIPs and you can get it to the right person at the right time so we saw it in action it was obviously great and what made us made us felt good that we could help them deliver on what they wanted Wow all that contacts Rowan thank you so much for joining Stu and me and also for 5/9 for graciously hosting the Q the last three days we've had a venture to hear great conversations and can't wait to see what happens next year me too stay tuned stay tuned for Stu min Amman I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube [Music]

>> Welcome to the special. Keep conversation. I'm John Furrier in the Palo Alto Studios of the Cube. We're a special guest Rowan Trollope of CEO of Five9, formerly of Cisco formerly CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Thanks for joining me today. >> Great to see you, John. So let's talk about >> the future. The Contact Center. You got a new role. CEO Five9. Looks like a great opportunity. Tell us about it. >> Well, the Contact Center is really where it's at right now in the UC space on in the collaboration space. And frankly, in the digitization trend for most companies, they're realizing that the experience that they give to their customers has got to transform. You know, customers are telling them that if they don't fix the experience they deliver, they're going to leave. The business is that they're doing business with him. So I think that's, you know, it's It's really emerging as this really hot space and interesting space in a place where businesses recognize they have to spend money and do a much better job. >> One of the things that we talked about the past, certainly that you're always on the wave of cloud data. You've always had that vision in our previous conversations. Five9 Now in this contact center, kind of an old legacy old way of doing things. Voice over i p. You know, managing customer relationships. Whether it's support or outbound seems to be changed with cloud computing in the role of data. And now, machine learning and eyes really been an accelerant. Yet what's your vision over the next five years as this starts to transform and people re imagine what that's going to look like for their businesses? Because certainly customer relationships are changing. People have multiple devices here on any platform, there, there horizontally, moving around different websites, different places different on the undergo. A lot of change happening. What's your vision? There >> is a lot of change happening, and it's changed. But that's primarily driven by consumer behavior and sort of enabled by technology. So the biggest factor, in my opinion, that's affecting businesses, that you have the age of this empowered consumer. You know, ten years ago, for example, my wife stuff is you're bugging the crap out of me about fixing cleaning up my garage and so at the time, the way that I did that as I ran down to Home Depot, I looked at what they had on the shelf. I picked a, you know, a shelving system, and I brought it home, and I set it up ten years later, and this is just about a year ago. We have moved since then and, you know, the garages yet again, a mess. And I've been giving getting a hard time about it. So she's finally I said, Okay, okay, I'll organize the garage. And so what do I do this time? I go out and I get on my phone and I search for garage organizing systems, and I get lots of different forms and people talking about things and reading customer reviews and so on and so forth. I do a whole bunch of research, actually call a couple of the companies that made three different calls just to get some details about their product that I couldn't get online and ultimately ordered one. And it shows up at my house. So ten years ago, you have sort of, you know, not very empowered consumer. I took what was on the shelf. That's what I got. Ten years later, you have zero trips to retail brick and mortar. You have a very empowered consumer. Me. It has lots of options, lots of choices and three calls to a contact center that happened in the span of ten years, powered by the Internet, >> power by my mobile phone, powered >> by connectivity and so on and so forth. So any business, who's in, you know, every business essentially is dealing with this challenge and my expectation in terms of who I'm gonna do. Businesses with heavily influenced by the quality of their website, the quality of the experience that they had the quality of their community, that user reviews, they were coming back and, you know, some of them. Some of the commentary, Like, I got this thing it was missing. Some stuff I couldn't get hold of them was super hard to deal with. I'm not going to do business with that company. So what? You know, part of that transformation over the last ten, twenty, thirty years has been the empowered consumer gets to make a choice, and they don't have to do business if you don't have a great experience. So that's moving the contact center industry from being a sort of an extension of the phone system that we really don't want to think about very often into some that's really, really important for businesses, and I was seeing that left and right coming from my previous job. >> It's interesting. It's an opportunity to its challenge on one hand, for company dealing with the old way to do it, it becomes an opportunity when the user expectations and experiences impacted. That's a buying decision or relationship. Emotional decision. What is this opportunity mean for companies? Because now this now flips to the potential sellers of services and products. They have now an opportunity to take advantage of this new dynamic where users are in charge of being empowered. What's the opportunity for companies? >> So so it's two things. One, if you're a disruptive company coming out, you know any or starting up a new company and you're going after this. You can look at the user experience as part of your differentiation value proposition. I'm not only going to have a great product, but I'm gonna wrap that in the great experience. And that's the expectation today that any new company company will take a company like Square, for example, Yes, they have a beautiful little card swipe reader, and they have a, you know, nice industrial design. But that's not just what you get. You get a team behind that coming from, you know, the company that provides great support and a great experience. And when you sign up for square, the first thing you get is an email from their CEO sort of welcoming you to the community, and you see that with a lot of modern companies. Tesla's another great example where you see a really tremendous experience being around what is fundamentally a great product. Uh, and that's not something that you would see with the the incumbents. I think if you're a disrupter or new company, or you're looking at transforming an industry, then the opportunity is think about the holistic customer experience. If you're an incumbent or you've been in the business for a while and you're facing one of these sort of digital disruptors, if you want to call them that, then your opportunity is to re imagine your customer experience end to end and put some time and effort into it. You know, the reality is still, and I was in the call center thirty years ago, almost. The customers at the call centre. In most businesses, most incumbent businesses today is a call is a cost center because it's something that you sort of essentially have to deal with once this product has been sold. And it's not a place that most executives in most businesses want to go. In fact, in many cases it's been sent to other countries. Your contact center is You don't even know where it is. It's in the Philippines or it's and you know, some other country or it's in India or it's it's in a state, you know, less expensive state, which is all fine. But it's not fine that executives and companies don't want to go and see where the frontline of their business is, which is the place where they that experience meets the customer. So if you're an incumbent, you really have to think about, you know, you have to think about putting your contact center as a priority for your business and re imagining the experience and look, go walk a day in their shoes and experience what it's like. >> One of the things that we've been reporting on over the years and and you know you've been following the Cube and it's looking angle is the talk of CX or custom experience been going on for many, many years, somewhat aspirational outside of the corner cases of companies that actually specialize in, you know, differentiating on customer satisfaction and user experience. And that's obvious than you check the box there. But as as the market changes its now attainable, we're seeing that the rial actionable execution for companies to modernize what was once a call. Soon, as you pointed out, >> how do they >> do that? What's what's happening? Certainly, cloud computing helps data, and I are kind of at the table. How does a company that wants to modernize and have a real advantage and change their business business approach? What do they do? What's the What's the plan? You guys seem to be position for that. What do I do? What's the playbook? >> Go to Five9.com. No. The reality is that the first thing you have to do is really believe that this is an important aspect of delivering your business to your end consumer and and look at what's making up your competitors offer not just their product, but their offer and and sort of internalize and get the idea that OK, yes, this turns out it is important and I care about it. I'm going to go spend time on it because, look, the reality is we know how to deliver any business. You don't have to be a genius to figure out how to deliver great customer service. You know, what customers want is actually really simple. When I call you answer the phone. Don't send me through some rigmarole of IVRs and other technology hurdles. Don't hide your phone number when I want to get a hold of you make it easy for me to contact you. And when I contact you, what I want, I want someone who understands me. Who knows the problem that I have, Who's an expert who can help me and who has empathy, you know who can really connect with me and relate with me. And if there's a problem, it's not just about I'm going to solve the problem. But it's like we understand and we're sorry, you know, and we're going to make this better for you, and we're going to follow up with you, so that's a big part of what you have to-turns out doing that is not hard. You don't have to be a genius to figure out how to do it. Now. There are lots of technology companies that are out there today that make that easy. And the history of the Contact Center, essentially over the last twenty five years, has been essentially kind of stuck in the, you know, in a phone closet, somewheres with some technology that has actually hindered what smart people knew. We knew how to do this. We knew how to deliver a great experience. The problem was, you had like this legacy technology, and you had to call somebody in the data center somewhere else, and they were like, That's going to be hard. It's going to cost millions of dollars and our system doesn't support that. And so there is a technology sort of shackles that were on customer service experts and executives in businesses was like, Wow, that sounds like it's going to be expensive. It's going to take a long time now. We're in a world with the cloud where within a few clicks and a few minutes, You can deploy a contact center >> so we go to >> our side or other sites, and you can instantly have, you know, very, very quickly have a contact center that is modern that is flexible, that is, you know, has all the latest features and functionality. And so technology is no longer the hindrance that has been taken off the table. Our company was born in the cloud. There's other companies out there people can use. The bottom line is this is not really a technology problem anymore. >> So people have multiple devices and a lot of different channels of how people engaged. That's expectation on the Cust company side variety of sets of resource is that could be deployed at any given time. So you kind of have this now integrated kind of philosophy with cloud. How What does Cloud and Data? And now Aye, aye, due to the context. And how's the contact center change? Yeah. Does it look like >> that? Yes. Of the real, most important thing that has happened with the cloud computing wave is, you know, first that it made technology easy to consume. You know, it used to be really hard and expensive like we just talked about just to get technology. And then once you've got it, you were stuck with it and didn't change ever. Okay, we're kind of beyond that now with the cloud and that those were the table stakes. But something else happened when we started moving technology to the cloud that was more important. That and that was that we started collecting data, and as we started to collect data >> that >> became really interesting because of one other thing that happened, which was the revolution that happened in machine learning, and it started about ten years ago with some very, you know, big scientific breakthroughs on deep learning, more specifically, and what that deep learning approach needed was lots and lots and lots of data in order to work. It was a great scientific breakthrough, but it kind of stalled a little bit at the beginning because you didn't. There wasn't a lot of data out there that could actually you could get the benefits. Well, as companies have more, more been moving to the cloud. What that's creating his centers of data and not just data for your company, because lots of businesses don't have enough data actually to power machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms are famously data hungry. You know that there's a famous saying from, you know, a bunch of folks in the AI industry. But it's that more data is better data. You know, the more you have, the better you are. In fact, you can also say that you know if you have more data, it's better than having a great algorithm right. The more data will always win. So what the cloud has unlocked is massive amounts of data, and that data is important to actually get at the root cause of the problem of bad customer service and support, which is with that data and the breakthroughs in machine learning. And that data in our industry is customer conversations. What your customers are actually telling you, either by text or by voice or by email that information is really interesting and can be married with machine learning technology to provide automation. It's >> interesting you mentioned customer. I think that's, I think, a key point. And you know, as we look at the data world, people look at certainly from a tech perspective that supply technology to data great that could assist then things. But we tell what customers and you're in business to serve customers. That's probably most valuable data. So as you said earlier, people hide the phone Or is it that they want to shy away from engaging with customers to not support them or hope they go away? They might be indifferent of serving them. You're saying the reverse Be proactive, engaged the customer, get that data so you can iterated on that. So I get that I think that Israel innovation in terms of the direction but as you did with customers is also the human side of it. Yeah, customers want to know that there's someone on the other side. You brought your garage organizing system because that component, how is the role of humans and machines impacting this new transformation from customer center to custom contact Sent it to essentially customer center. Yeah, what is the What is that piece of human? Super important? >> Yeah, we don't see technology replacing all the humans, actually, because and this goes back to my experience in the in the contact center many years ago. And, you know, many years ago. And my observation was and I, in fact, my first job I said, you know, in between two different agents and one of them was named Dave and one was named Ken. And Ken was really warm and effusive, and he got, I remember, he used to get gifts on his desk from customers. They would send him flowers and chocolates and, you know, like their products and so on. And he could tell a customer to shut up in a nice way, and they would love him after it. I mean, it was amazing that he could do this. It was all about empathy. He didn't. He didn't actually know all the answers to all of the questions. But he created these, like, incredible fans amongst the customers. The guy to my right, Dave, he was super smart. He just had, like, as much empathy as a rock. And he could answer all the questions really fast. Okay, And I So I use that cause I would learn things from him, but customers didn't like him. And the answer, you know, what I saw in those two folks, was that you can't do one or the other. You need both And what computers, are and what machine learning specifically. But now that we're getting all this data through the cloud is is able to do is we're able to predict the answers to what customers. You know what the questions from customers will to predict those things really quickly. So that's a sort of a mastery, so machines can help with mastery. They can help with being able to answer every question instantly or know the best thing to say at it to a customer at any given time. But what machines can't do is empathy. Humans are the ones that have to bring the heart. So what we're working on at Five9 is using machines to help agents. Human agents give them mastery, and we're letting the humans then focus on what they do really well, which is bringing the heart to the customer. And that creates a a bond between a brand and a customer that is like, unbreakable. >> I think you're onto something big here because we look a digital, the impact of digital technologies And you could look at variety examples mainstream media to technology companies to any kind of industry of vertical. There's a lot lack of emotional I Q or emotional quotient, and this seems to be what people are looking at you. I'm just looking further than some of the polarization in with digital in terms of media coverage, politics or whatnot. You started to see this focus on how to bring Mohr empathy and Mohr emotional like, yeah, two systems. And I think users are responding to that. Can you comment on your reaction to that? >> Yeah, part of this starts with confusion that the contact that is rampant in the contact centre industry, which is that people don't really want to talk anymore. And, you know, this has been observed because of the fact that, you know, we have new generations entering the work force like millennials. You know, we'll have our kids out there who would prefer to text us than talkto us often. But the reality is, and we surveyed this that actually even millennials still prefer voice as the primary form of communication and and that what has happened, that is the mistake. What is the error that people made? The error that people made is assuming that no, if it were actually conflating a bad voice experience with the fact that voice is bad and that's just not true, and it's observable. Not too. We've gone and actually proven this. So So what we've sort of realised is that what you need to fix is the bad voice experience. What is that? It's like, Wait, going into an Ivy are Okay, That's frustrating. You know what's >> a G are real quick to >> find the interactive voice response. So it's the push one for this push to for that. Everybody hates everyone hates, you know, every company uses it, and it's like a stain on humanity. We need to get rid of those things because they're just awful. So you go into this tree and all that, Okay, so get rid of it. By the way, everybody, you know, five years ago said, Oh, we can fix that problem with bots. Oh, and that actually is almost worse. You know, I've been trying to use bots for the last three months. I've been doing my own little test on this and communicating, you know, using only using text and whenever I hit a But it's like the last thing I want to do is talk to a computer. I want to get to a human. So my first question now is Are you human, which is my version of push zero to get through the I v. R. Gets again to an agent. Okay, so you know, there's been a confusion about this, and when you go back to what you had said earlier, this notion that users that, you know, the empathy is what has tend to be lost. Well, turns out it's much harder to make a emotional connection on text. Then it is with voice, and people just in general are not as good at communicating that emotional content on text because they're not very good writers generally, and they don't have time, Whereas they're excellent at doing that with their voice. You know, I'm not happy verses. I'm not happy, you know, there's a huge range of emotion that commune can be communicated with the human voice, which is extremely powerful. So if we can fix the bad voice experience, take away all that crap so that when you get someone they know, you know they know who you are. It's a you know, if they understand you, they can get to the root cause of your problem very quickly. Then it turns out that the human voice is extremely useful and and we're in now entering into an era where we can use the computer to talk to humans in unique and interesting ways now that I believe is actually still a little bit further out because of a variety of reasons. But in the meantime, computers and a I can help agents master their craft and let them focus on the embassy side of >> things. So in terms of Five9, the core problem that you're solving is what. >> So we provide a flexible, easy to configure, easy to deploy, cloud based contact center. OK, and it's it's it's it's minutes or hours before you can have this technology deployed. You don't need to have a phone system. So you look at a call center that sort of from the old days, and it's like lots of phones on desks in our world. You sweep those away. You have a computer in a Web browser. You plug in a headset, your agent could be sitting anywhere in the world. They get a beautiful web UI that's deeply integrated into Sales Force or Zen desk or service. Now >> our Oracle or >> any CRM system that you have, and we give you this really, really tightly integrated end to end experience. And we just make all of that easy and it handles any kind of contact, whether it's voice or text or email, it all goes through our system. It's all in the cloud. It's really easy and it's affordable. >> And the data management is pretty straight forward. Is that going to be flexible and agile enough to use with other things as people start having different touchpoints? >> Absolutely. In fact, with our system, all your calls are recorded into the cloud, as are all of your contacts. All of that is stored securely in our servers and is accessible to you. You can. There's a whole range of APS in the contact center. You can plug in on >> top of our platform >> and including things like variant Collab Rios. You know this whole area of workforce optimization and and so on, so lots and lots of technologies are actually built on Five9. So when you, by our technology, really banged up technology platform with ah rich ecosystem of APS that plug in on top of it and where we sit really in that value chain, you know, is the core platform that delivers that delivers the data and the pipes, and we sort of provide the intelligence. Also, that runs on top of that data, and that's where we're heading >> and that's your core innovation. Pretty much get that cloud based in it up fast. Get the focus on >> that part of it, and I'd say the second part of it that's sort of product on platform. The second part is really the offer. So it turns out that if you go to most companies, the things that make their customer experience poor that they want to fix, ah, solvable through capabilities that are already available in the platforms that they generally already have. What they're missing is a partner who can help them make that happen because it turns out it's not easy. You know, we've got a very flexible platform. It's been built over more than a decade, so it's like, really rich and in features. But the question and more and more what we see our customers wanting from us is a complete offer, and that includes professional services on site support, you know, people to help you, you know, handhold walk you through that process so well, kind of go the extra mile for our customers and give them in end end solution to their problem, not just a piece of technology. Now, if just technology is what you wanted, Our technology works for businesses with two support center reps. So it's, you know, weeks scale >> all the >> way down to folks. But we also have context are running that have for thousand reps. So we run that entire that entire spectrum for the small customers. They want something easy pre configured off the shelf. Just go. Okay, There's nobody coming on site for those customers. You have four thousand reps, We've got people on site. We darken the skies with our support people and our our engineers and everyone else actually provide a complete solution to our customers. >> That's great. We'll congratulate. I think having that innovation and having the cloud approach gets it up fast, gets the value delivered. And then as they grow, you can flex it, flex with flex the size, the organization not limited. So I want to get Teo. You're doing a panel discussion. Enterprise connect coming up in Orlando That's where we first met. This has been a show that's been talking to the enterprise customers who are been evolving from voice over i. P. Integrated communications, unified communications. Though that world of voice, data and systems to now and open cloud based data A. I So should be exciting. Yeah, panel want to get I don't want to give it away, but what are you talking about? The title is why customer engagements leading the Enterprise communications conversation Give us a quick teaser. What? >> I'm going to be focused on what's coming next, and one of the big reasons that drove me to this company that's attracted some top talent in the industry is that many of us see that the era of the cloud has actually opened these golden doors to a new land, which is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that we see that solving some of the root cause problems that we talked about earlier, bad customer service and experience that have essentially been talked about for a long time but haven't been solved. That finally, the technology is actually caught up to the problem. And so our big play at Five9 is to become the world's best self learning intelligent contact center platform. And we see that the Contact Center has--is shifting from being less a contact center and more a center of customer data and that that is the key insight that that is the key and said that we had is that wow, this is a lot of really interesting data, you know? Turns out what your customers say to you. It's really, really important. And today, in almost all contact centers, almost everywhere that data goes nowhere. It goes away because it's not very useful. Most of the most of what customers they're telling you is actually voice traffic, and that sits in wave files. If you recorded at all, which many customers don't and then they're not very useful, so they get thrown away. We figured out that that information is ridiculously valuable, but it's only become valuable recently because of advances in machine learning that allow us to do speech to text reliably as good as humans. Okay, speech to text has been around for a while. It's just been really crappy. Now it's really good. And now that it's gotten really good and affordable. Every customer can take advantage of it. So because all of our customers have all of their data stored on our cloud and all calls get recorded, we can now start to translate those voice wave files into text and provide that as insight back to the customer. We signed a partnership with Google to leverage their technology to help us make sense of all of those spoken conversations and then, ultimately all of the text. So we believe the next generation of the Contact Center is going to be less about a contact center and more about a center of customer data, which can be used to drive automation and insight back into the business. That's the big transformation for the next decade in the Contact Center. >> taking the Contact center making gets a customer center. This is kind of compatible with >> Hostage Data Center. That's runner of customer data. >> I mean, it's it's really kind of in line with how dev ops change cloud computing, where you had Devon ops coming together and you're taking that concept, that ethos to the context center, You know? Look, >> um, >> I'm not sure that it's exactly like Deb ops, but I guess you could draw that correlation. I think what you do see in businesses that there's new functions >> popping up all >> the time. A recent function that's popped up his customer, uh, customer success and what his customers success. It's all about reaching out to your customer to help make them successful in the insight that led to customers successes. When you have a services business, if you engage with your customer proactively, you actually can make more money and drive higher value both for the customer and for the business. And you know, I relate this back to my first experience in business, and I remember and I was in support and we're on the twelfth floor. We had a >> whole floor of people, >> and I remember our boss came down one day and they said something really interesting. They said Every time you guys pick up the phone, we lose money. I mean, if you can believe that is that it is now. It sounds crazy, but that's what happened in America. I felt kind of bad about that was like, Wow, I don't want to answer the phone, but it's ringing all the time. So what am I going to do? Well, the answer was we hired someone, not me. But the team hired someone to hide the phone number, which is sort of logical if you're told that when you pick up the phone, you're going to lose money. What do you want to get less phone calls? Well, how are you going to do that? Well, the company's customers can't find about Guess what tons of customers did this other thing we did? Was we employment in an i. V. R. Let's try and give themselves service. So they really the motivation >> of hiding the customer experience that we were running away from the customer experience, >> that iron Iwas and this is in hindsight. I see this that right on the floor above me was it wasn't the thirteenth. It was the fourteenth floor. It was a sales floor and they were doing everything they could tow proactively reach out and contact customers who didn't want to really hear from here from the sales people. So you had this situation. We had a floor of people, my floor, which were sort of running away from customers and a floor of people they were trying to run towards customers and like we're both missing them. It was insane. And what's now transpired in businesses that people get this and go? Wow. If I can deliver a great experience, it actually increases loyalty. It increases the amount of services that my customer will get. They get more value, I get more value. We want to run way, want to run towards customers. We want to reduce the distance between a business and their customer to zero. We want that to be like this kind of connection. We want our businesses, you know, their customers, toe love them. And the way that you get that love actually often comes through the contact Center. So it's becoming much more >> strategic, connecting in, engaging with customers. We're only going >> to be powered by machine learning like you can't do this. Okay? Just by going, I mean, you could do it by hiring lots and lots of humans, but it's really expensive. OK? Does not scale. So the only answer to this problem, which we know how to solve, is toe leverage technology. And it starts in the cloud. >> Right? Great stuff. We'll see you at Enterprise Connect the Cube will be there and great degree to see you. Thanks for coming and great to see this's The Cube Conversation Special Cube comes here in Palo Alto. Grown trial of CEO of Five9. Solving the contact problem. Bring it in. Modernizing it. Running towards customers Customer engagement and big panel coming up. Enterprise connect. I'm John for here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here at Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE with my partner co-host this week, Stu Miniman, host theCUBE hundreds of events also an analyst at Wikibond.com. Our next guest is Rowan Trollope, who's the SVP and General Manager of the applications division groups plural applications. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, too. >> So you did the Keynote up on stage here in Europe and, obviously, Europe is the 2018 kickoff. So it's officially Cisco Live Europe but it's 2018. >> Rowan: Welcome to 2018, it's here. Europe is a big exploding area. You got GDPR on the horizon, you got sophisticated customers, lot of networking, lot of cloud discussions, lot of futuristic views in your speech. How is Cisco changing now? That just really nailed it in the Keynote. What is the future vision that you see for Cisco? >> You're really seeing a new Cisco emerge at this point, I think. A software-defined, faster-paced company, frankly. The idea that what got us here won't get us there, we have to reinvent the company. We have to reinvent what we'd done for so long. And that's what the team is doing. And that was, what was so impressive, frankly, about the network intuitive launch last year was just how dramatically that team had reimagined the concept of, in this case, campus networking, right? But we know that it doesn't stop there. As David said yesterday, it's going to go into the data center, it's going to apply across the rest of, and even the cloud. >> One of the things that Cisco's always had and observe in just as an industry participant over the past 30 years is, you know when open standards TCP/IP came out, that created an industry. So much happened from there, but Cisco's been an enabling company. You guys enable people to be successful. That's always been kind of the network stack. The disruption from going after the old SNA and DECnet protocols, Sonova protocols. >> You're going back before me. (laughing) >> Yeah, but going forward and your speech was not about looking back, it was about looking forward. So now, how is Cisco going to be enabling that future generation of customers, stakeholders, developers, and where is that value going to be unlocked? Where's it going to come from? >> I think that if we were to have a history book and be living the world 2050 right now and then we had a book called the history of the internet, the last 50 years, what would that book say? And how would it talk about 2018 and the world we live in today? And I bet you that it would sort of almost be quaint or sort of Jurassic era internet to the users of 2050 or the inhabitants, the citizens of 2050. That we would look back on this era that we're in today and just say, "Wow, I can't, could you believe the." You know I could imagine my kids are like, "You guys had all these security problems? "Oh my God that's crazy, how could you have lived that way?" >> You carried a phone around? (laughing) >> Yeah, like this is crazy, in other words, we kind of haven't even really started with the internet yet. We just tried a few things and it seems pretty cool and we know there's a few problems and one of them's like, "Gosh, it can't be so manual." We know we're going to have to fix that. "Gosh, it can't be so insecure." We know we're going to have to fix that. "Oh my gosh, this cloud thing's "pretty cool but turns out there's "a little more complexity." We solve that, you know, as well. So it's really going through those things and, at least the way my brain works, it's kind of that I put myself in the future and look backwards and it helps me to sort of think that, gosh, we just got to really think about this in a bigger way and start moving faster. >> Rowan, I love that. If they go back in the history book and it was like, okay, that era networking, dominated by Cisco, tracked by ports and revenue and the old Cisco and the seven dwarfs. Now the future era: software, it's applications. What defineds who Cisco is in the market and how do we track who the winners and losers are? >> Well, I think what you said earlier is right. Cisco is an enabling company and Cisco is a special kind of company, frankly. I think a different kind of company than what you see out there in the world. We're a company that has created orders of magnitude more value than we've captured. And we've captured a lot but when you think about some companies don't do that. Some companies create, almost capture the same amount of volume that they create or they keep almost all of it for themselves. And there's some notable current examples, but I won't name names, where they're really capturing almost all the value that they're creating. Cisco's a different kind of company. We're creating a platform for society, frankly, to be able to exist on this planet in a meaningful way in the future and it reminds me, the way that Cisco is, it reminds me of a great line that's been going around recently which is, "A society grows great when men plant "trees whose shade they know they will never sit in." And that's how I think about the next generation infrastructure. This is going to take a long time to get out there. And we are creating that future for our next generation, but doesn't mean that we have to wait. We need to get started now. There's urgency. >> Rowan, one of the observations that we made yesterday, Stu and I were talking about it when we were walking in this morning is, we usually talk about competition but not this year. It's almost as if this point in history, it's not about competition being names of other companies; the competition is being on the right side of history. >> Right. >> And so you bring up this point, right this is really clear, but the question is architecturally, there's some decisions that companies, and companies are trying to face this, your customers are trying to figure out I want to be on the right side of history because that future is coming. What in your mind's eye is that architecture, obviously software, billion connected devices, I get that, but specifically, what is the history line going to look like? What line, where should people be on, what side of history do you see unfolding that customers can go to for safe harbor to put the 20 year plan together for their business? >> You know I think right now we're at a moment where customers do have to make choices but the choice is pretty clear to everyone. It isn't like there's a lot of questions. We know that the network needs to be reinvented. We've built the products and they're here now. So it's really about, do you start now? And in my view, it's sort of a matter of life or death. Except for many of these companies, waiting is not an option. So, I think that the dividing line on history will be did you get started? Did you transform your business at that time? If you didn't, it's unlikely that your company will be around for very long. And so that will sort of define the future in my mind. It's who got started early. Who said, "Okay, now is the time "we got to get onto this stuff," >> And in 10BASE networking, in context, great message, love that. That's certainly an architecture that's data driven. But not a lot of data driven constructs in the Keynotes, probably in the sessions there are, but what's the role of data? Obviously we had your Chief Privacy Officer Michelle Dennedy on earlier, she was awesome, data is now the asset that will probably value businesses so you have on the app side we had the collab team over, it's a platform, not just a tool, a set of tools that's throwing off data. This data is the instrumenting valuation for companies. How are you looking at this and how does Cisco evolve to skate to where the puck will be? Cause it's still early but developing really fast on the data front. >> I think that academics today and a lot of Cisco thought leaders would agree with this, are looking at a next-generation networking principle called Information-Centric Networks, or data oriented networking architectures. And it's the idea that current networking architectures are based on the N10 principle, which are systems-based. System A connects to system B and they can send bits. Well, the next generation networks not going to be system-based, it's going to be information-based, which means I don't ask for the Microsoft.com URL and then get the IP address and connect to a system. I find out, I want to see, show me the product list for Microsoft and the network serves me that up. And Microsoft publishes it and says, I have that information. So when someone asks for it, I say I have it and I publish it. So the network abstracts to a higher level that is at the data layer, not at the connectivity layer and that is what I think is going to happen over time. Is you're going to see this continuing abstraction up the stack of all this infrastructure where it gets easier and easier and easier for developers to interact with the infrastructure. >> So here's a philosophical question for you. Network theory, we all know how packets move around, folks may or may not care, if they don't are in that business. >> Rowan: We care. >> Well I mean someone in the business might not care how OSPF routing protocol works but I mean it's a network theory. Social networking and IoT are connected devices, they're nodes on a network. How do you take that DNA of being competent in network DNA to applications that are inherently more graph databases? More network-oriented where attention, reputation, intent, context, it's always been like a search paradigm, not a networking-moving packet paradise. So, I guess my question is, how do you connect those two worlds, how does Cisco do that? Cause you do dominate the network, network theory, network graphs. >> Yeah, I think that, you said it's a philosophical question so I can give you a philosophical answer. You know, we live in a world today where we don't actually really access the internet. We access it through companies that have put a business model on top of it. You go to Google or any other search engine, that's the case. So they've essentially layered this data-oriented layer on top of the network already. But you're paying for it. And you're paying a price because if you search and you search and I search, we're going to get three different answers. I mean this whole idea of filter bubbles and what's going on with social networks today is a true phenomenon. And the internet was never really meant to be that way. So I think there's an opportunity for us to reimagine that. And some of the basic, sort of, principles of the network can be reconsidered. Now, obviously, we've got the short-term things we need to do over the next few years like have companies deploy our new gear and buy our stuff and everything else. But we are thinking about these next generations, I'd say pretty keenly and, you know, I think that the infrastructure of the future, the way that I think about it, does provide a much higher level of abstraction to the network than what we have today. >> They're making it programmable, you mean. Making it resilient. >> Yeah, as a developer, I shouldn't have to worry about standing up a server. I should be able to write some code and publish some data and subscribe to data and that's it. >> Rowan, I loved actually the open of your Keynote. You talked about it's a new era and a new infrastructure. We've seen Cisco change the dynamic; the applications, some of the acquisitions you made, the push much deeper into software. What are some of the biggest challenges you face there 'cause I think we agree, if Cisco is alive and thriving in 2015, we don't think of it as infrastructure networking company. So, what's the biggest challenge for the company to move that way, up the stack. >> Well, I think the biggest challenge is how quickly we moved. I think that we have to constantly be challenging ourselves to move faster. We know, I think we have a pretty good sense for where the future is going and what we'd like to create. The question is how quickly can we and our customers move. And we have to make it easier for our customers. So advance services plays a big part in that. That's why we have such a big investment there and why we're so over-rotating onto staffing that for the network intuitive. The collaboration business is going through the same transformation, IoT in the same way. So really, we're racing to keep up with our customers as much as they're racing to keep up with us. And that's the biggest opportunity and challenge, I think, for the company right now. Is can we move fast enough. And if we do, a $40 stock price will look like, you know, again, quaint. >> So developers are going to be a key role. Obviously a developer-focused, developer.Cisco.com. You guys had that around for a long, long time. You guys, when vertically-integrated Cisco works great, Cisco on Cisco, as you go out and have more APIs and things like Uber Nettes with cloud-native open up more non-Cisco. One trend we're seeing here at Cisco Live is a lot of developers that aren't necessarily a hardcore network guys are coming into the Cisco fold. That's going to be more of the trend going forward. How do you view and what does Cisco need to do to capture that mind share and convert them into valuable participants in the community building on top of Cisco, because integration with non-Cisco related things, whether it's open source and/or other systems be imbedding into the sales force and what not. That has to be the new normal for you guys. What's your view on that and how do you drive that forward? >> I think companies of the future, next generation companies, there's not going to be a distinction between tech companies and non-tech companies. Every company will be a tech company and you won't have sort of the difference between the application and your business. The application is your business. So the app is your business and you're a tech company and that's that. And all companies will be that way, essentially. Powered by software. In that kind of a world, it's developers that are key to delivering on your company's mission. And so I think developers will continue to accelerate. We see the DevNet zone grows here every year. It's phenomenal, it's bigger than ever this year. And the examples in the programmability that we've been adding to the network, to the collaboration portfolio, every time I come here, it blows my mind. And so I think that's certainly a vision of the future, when you come and take a look at what's going on here. You can see that the developer is the key for those businesses of the future and we're going to service them. I mean, that is our mission is to get very, very focused on servicing developers with the platforms that we're building. >> If you had to extract out and describe to a college buddy or customer or friend, they asked you, "Rowan, what's the big wave "that you're riding for the next 20 years?" These waves are coming. We're seeing a lot of examples of crypto and blockchain on one end, really active, you certainly got cloud as a wave, data AI as a wave. Is it all one big wave? I mean waves of innovation come once a generation this size. We've said on theCUBE, we think it's the biggest wave we've seen in a long, long time. I mean right now, it's a combination of all those things. Your thoughts of the wave, how would you describe that to someone. >> I think the biggest and most meaningful thing to us is the connectivity of everything. I think that's probably the big one. Data comes along with that, all the other parts of it come along with it. But, if you think about the history of where we've been, for the last 30 years the internet was largely here and here. That's where it is. >> Like that remote. (laughing) >> And it's not in your lights and it's not in your cameras and it's not in the desk and it's not in your chair, but it will be. That to me is the biggest transformation. It's going to take a long time. You know, I think we've been talking about this transformation for a long time but as we get to that level of connectivity, as we get to that level of pervasiveness of the network, that's the biggest transformation to me is that the network goes from here to everywhere. >> And the common threads to your point is data, cloud, no-no, data, network-- >> Yep, cloud, security-- >> And software. >> Yeah, I mean look-- >> Things that'll never change. There will always be data, there will always be the network. >> Yep, and there will always be compute of some sort or another. We just think that if you look at our portfolio, we are really well positioned to create that next generation infrastructure. We've got the products now in many, across the boards. And we're thinking about, when you think about data as one of the most interesting things I think about, one of the most important transitions for the company is around data. It's about pivoting our focus from moving packets to addressing data. And what we want to be ultimately for in enterprise is a central nervous system and the real-time platform for data. We're not going to be the database. We're not going to be the analytics company. We're going to be that real-time source of information. You could think about it as a nervous system for a business. >> You're taking your network DNA and expanding it. Not trying to land grab new trends. >> No I think there's plenty of work for us to do. >> Rowan, a final question, what's the vibe here in Barcelona? Obviously, great Keynote. Stu and I both really enjoyed, love the vision. And then the meaty part of the intent that came after was great. What's going on, your conversations in the hallway, customers, dinners, what's the vibe like here in Europe for Cisco this year? >> Well, it's a thrilling vibe, especially down here on the show floor and right here at the epicenter of that which is the DevNet, sort of workshops and all the things that are going on, they're packed. So I think if you're going to come down, get down here soon because they are just absolutely filled up and so, that's one thing. I think a tremendous amount of optimism for the company is what I'm picking up as I talk to customers. People that have been coming up to me have been just very excited about Cisco's future and very excited about our vision and very excited about what we're doing and what we are doing together. I think the idea that Cisco is a different kind of company. We're the kind of company that is an enabler for our customers to do great things. And that, to me, is a very noble pursuit. >> Alright, Rowan Trollope, SVP and general manager applications Cisco, headlining Cisco Live 2018 here in Europe. This is theCUBE's live coverage from the DevNet zone here in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live CUBE coverage after this short break. Thanks for watching.

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

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, It's The Cube. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and The Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to The Cube, here in Orlando, Florida for our live coverage of Cisco Live 2018, North America. This is the big show, we were at Cisco Live in Europe recently, now this is the big show that Cisco, they bring out all the heavy hitters, the CEO on stage, just had the keynote. I'm here for the next 3 days with Stu Miniman, my co-host on The Cube, as usual, but also, you know, we keep on analysts as well as, among other things. Stu, great to see you, great to be in Orlando in the summer. It's kinda hot and sticky outside, but cool in here. Cisco, with the massive show here, huge in size, our first Cisco Live. >> Yeah, well John, last time you and I traveled for an event together, it was Cisco Live Barcelona, so you know, yes, first time I've been to a Cisco Live US since 2009, which was before The Cube, before I joined the team here. It's massive, John, I mean the amount of people here. The Orlando convention center, not exactly my favorite, just 'cause it's sprawling, but you need a facility of this size, and it's even overflowing, to get somewhere between 25 and 30,000 people here, you know, there's so much that we're gonna dig into in the next few days. >> So, let's just run down the keynote from the CEO, from Cisco, laid out an impressive set of content. One, the light show to kick it off, I'd probably say it was one of the best I've seen. The music was perfectly timed with the light show. It got a lot of props from the crowd, but really laid out the future of Cisco by looking back at the past, and all the accomplishments that Cisco has had, and the laid out the new network, and we'll cover that in depth, and then also a surprise guest partner on stage, Diane Greene, the CEO of Google Cloud. Clearly, Cisco talking multi-cloud, they talked about this new network where it protects everything, you know, use predictive, all kinds of technologies. How do you make cloud work without disrupting operations was the theme. Interestingly here, Diane Greene from Google Cloud kinda talked about, 'cause she's really kind of a CTO / CEO type, really talking about the tech feats, speeds and feeds, and then obviously Devnet content towards the end, where Devnet is the developer program, and Devnet created the cloud native, really growing in size. Over a half a million registered developers and growing, points to the success of the Devnet program that brings on-premise and cloud native together. Devnet proper, Devnet create was the cloud native. That's the big news, and other industry news today. Cohesity announced a 250 million dollar funding round, series D oversubscribed, Cisco investments, one of the investors, along with HPE as well, and Sequoia Capital, etc. etc., shows that the market is heating up for cloud scale, and I bring up Cohesity too because we're gonna have the CMO on tomorrow, but this kind of points to the whole theme of Chuck Robbins' keynote, and I want to get your analysis. Cloud scale, and the threats, on the security side has changed the game. Now we've covered the perimeters dead for years. This is now a call to action for all the engineers, and the CNEs, and all the people in the Cisco Engineering and customer community, like look at, the old way's over, the new way has to be established, it has to be scalable, it has to be cloud-supporting. What's your analysis? >> Yeah, so first I wanted to step back for a second, because my compare / contrast of the last time we were at Cisco Live in Barcelona, Rowan Trollope really talked a lot about the future. He said 2050's right around the corner. The future of Cisco is as a software company. Chuck Robbins on the other hand, looked actually backwards for a little bit. He said let's talk about what we have done for the last 10, 20 and 30 years together. Really calling out the community. What we've always talked about. You know, there's the army of CCIEs. Right past us here, they've got a timeline talking about 25 years of CCIEs, and the tens of thousands that are certified, that their whole careers, John, is about networking. And then, we kind of merged in a little bit, what do we talk about, you know, what is the new network, a term we've heard a bunch. The case that Cisco makes is that in this new world, you know, cloud, software, applications, they have an important piece to play, and we really think they do. Networking, obviously critically important. Security, top of mind, happening at the board level, and Cisco, they highlighted a lot of the acquisitions they've made, talked about kind of this new army. You pointed out rightly, the developer area, which we're here in the Devnet zone, is really the hot topic. Over 500,000 developers registered on the platform that they have here. That's big news. We've looked at so many of the big companies, oh, you know, developers, developers, developers, it's a hot topic, it's something they wanna do, but they don't have a lot of success in bringing them onboard. Susie Wee and the Devnet team's doing a really good job moving that forward, happen, you know, a really ground-swell of activity to get people involved, you know, happening all behind us here. >> And you know, Cisco obviously, Chuck Robbins also pointed out that they've been looking, doing a lot of work over the past 12 months, trying to be modernized, getting this new way established. A lot of press, a lot of analysts like to throw darts at these big enterprise companies that are transforming. We've seen some critical analysis on Cisco. We've seen critical analysis on VMware in the past. If you go back five years, and you look at, say VMware, and say Cisco, you know, these guys are out of touch. This is some of the pundits were saying things like that. If you look at what Cisco's doing, this is now my opinion, I wanna get your reaction to, is that Cisco has essentially pulled off a VMware-like move, and that is that VMware has successfully looked at their core competence and said, you know what, we don't want to do vCloud Air, we understand out customers, they're operations guys, they're going to the cloud, they kind of shut that down, and re-pivot the vCloud Air, do the deal with Amazon Web Services, they'll probably do other deals with Azure and other clouds. VMware's earnings are booming. Their software-defined data center bet, paying off. So, those architectural things that don't look immediate, are reaping rewards for say, VMware. I see Cisco in the same boat. You're seeing what they've done, they're trying to fix that collaboration piece, which you know, there's a little bad experiences, but the core business, the security threats, running networks, networks having policy, and with Kubernetes, and Istio, Diane Greene's point, that kind of brings a critical architectural component Stu, that really could propel Cisco. What's your reaction that? Do you think that's on, spot on? Do you think it's BS, what's your thoughts? >> So, John, VMware and Cisco, both failed at cloud. Let's put it out there. vCloud Air failed. VMware went through a couple of iterations, now their partnership with Amazon has reinvigorated them, and absolutely VMware also partnering, you know, big time with Google Cloud. Everybody that has an enterprise player is trying to, you know, partner with Google Cloud. Cisco has a long history of good partnerships. But, from a cloud standpoint, you know, we talked to them for a few years about, you know, the inter-cloud, they're doing this whole thing, it was muddy, people didn't understand it, and you know, it is dead. So, Cisco re-focusing on partnerships. Google, good one to start with, absolutely. You know, Diane Greene, I think salivating up on stage, seeing 25,000, you know, enterprise customers here that she wants to use her cloud. The quick poll of the audience said, oh you know, maybe about 20% of them were using Kubernetes. John, you were just at the Kubernetes show in Copenhagen, tends to still be the early adopters out there, it's not something that is, you know, everybody is doing it, but Istio, Kubernetes, you know, Cisco has a place there, they can ride that wave, partnerships, good to see them with Google, they absolutely are with AWS also, you and I did interviews with AppDynamics and some of the other Cisco folks at Reinvent in the past, and you know, Microsoft is one that's gonna play across all those environments too. >> Well, Stu, >> You know, lots of things to do in the cloud. >> Let's unpack that, because let's kind of extract a signal there, because what the issue is, is that the Cisco ecosystem lags early adopters, because they're too busy running networks, and anyone who runs networks, knows this is mission critical stuff. Operations for, again the security threats are there, but if you look at moving up the stack, which always been Cisco's goal. How do they, how can we move up the stack? I mean, there's been an internal, generational shift, that's always been inside Cisco. When to move up the stack, how to move up the stack. I see clear visibility with Istio and Kubernetes, and Istio and containers, as the Cisco guys to bring all the goodness of networking, policy, you know quality of service, these kinds of things, security, up to the app layer with Kubernetes. I think that that's lagging, mainly because the early adopters gonna set the table, but a natural progression for Cisco customers to move there, now, Google Cloud is interesting right, because Diane Greene, talking about containers and Kubernetes, they have Istio, that's their project, and there's also, you know, CUBE flow, amongst other things, but if you look at Amazon, they have a Kubernetes engine, just started shipping, that was announced I think last week, or the week before. Diane Greene's main pitch to the audience was this: you gotta go to the cloud without disrupting your operations, but yet being disruptive with new technologies. Her premise is, she says "Keep doing what you're doing "while introducing new mind-blowing things." I think, and I love that little slang, it's kind of a silicon valley vibe to it, mind-blowing things means, machine learning, AI, things that Cisco wants to introduce as services. Okay, to the cloud, to help Cisco customers move to the next level. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, John, I think you're absolutely right. Cisco, you know, really moving beyond just the network, absolutely, they're going up the stack. What I would say is, when we dealt with virtualization, John, it took us almost about 10 years to fix storage and networking, and storage got fixed a little bit before networking. This whole container and cloud native space, networking is up there, solving the issues a little bit faster than it did back in the VM days. Diane, you know really understands this piece too, and Cisco, in many ways, felt that they stumbled a little bit. They could have bought VMware back in the day, and they didn't, of course EMC picked that one up. So, when containers came around, Cisco knew that there was a new wave coming, they're ready, they're going after it, and they're trying to position themselves, to you know, be strategic in that next era. >> You to talked a lot of practitioners, so I just want to get your thoughts and reactions to you know, how Cisco's positioned vis a vis a big trend coming that we talked about in Barcelona at Cisco Live in Europe, which was this concept of network operations, what Devops did for cloud by making an abstraction layer, by making infrastructure as code, make the cloud work. You're seeing network as code, where with Istio and containers kind of as a North star, you're seeing that path, you're seeing Cisco well positioned, but again, Cisco customers are dealing with a lot of things. Some stats from the keynote, I'll just say a few. 50% of all traffic is encrypted. 70% of all bad actor traffic is encrypted. So, 30% is unencrypted, still tons. 20 billion threats are being blocked a day. That's 228 threats per second over the network. Massive scale. So, Cisco, it's not like they're sitting around, twiddling their thumbs saying, hey, let's be cloud native, I mean they got real issues, they're running networks, they're trying to create a re-invention of the network. So, you've got the software-defined data center, you got the notion of security, this kind of scale. How is Cisco positioned vis a vis some of those dynamics, with the path towards some of that goodness around Kubernetes, containers, and service meshes like Istio? >> Yeah, and John, that's one of the things. Some re-training of the workforce, because network is really about operators for the most part. They architect things, they operate things, but how many of them are really the developers? Well, 500,000 are registered and on this platform, you know, how many of them are moving to them, that new environment, and how many are new people entering the workforce. So, we are seeing a major transition. Major workforce transition here. Cisco is addressing it, you know, I love when, I'm sure you saw, when you walk in past registration, there's this giant bookstore, and this is still the type of audience that, you know, they're super excited to get all of these books, they're gonna train, they're gonna learn. I saw lots of people talking about coming to the show, as to what they're gonna get certified on, they like to meet the authors, they like to get involved, and that's something that this community's been really good at, sharing of information, learning information, and if they do that, they should be ready to be able to take advantage of some of these new trends. >> The other thing that I want to get your thoughts on, is Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, kind of said the old way, which is essentially network architecture as we know it, with the perimeter and whatnot, firewalls, is essentially dead. He didn't say that, I'm saying that, but implying from him saying, this is how we did it in the old way, and here's the new way, here's the modern era, here's what networks should look like, and obviously they have a lot of stuff on their product, portfolio as well as their roadmap to address that, okay, check. So let's talk about the role of the Cisco network engineer, the customer. In the old way, Stu, the network guys ran the show. They were the top talent. They had to lock down, do a lot of branch office, run all the major packets through the networks. This was critical path, this was, they were the aces. They were the creme de la creme. So now, in the face of that kinda going away, you have automation. Certainly, their jobs aren't gonna go away, because like you said, I mean, there's a lot to do in the cloud. How do network engineers, in your opinion, I know you talked to a lot of practitioners, become that, stay as that tier one resource, as Devops now is mainstream, as programmable networks become more of the norm with the Devnet, Devnet Create, with the multi-cloud, what does that network engineer become? What's their persona in the future, re-inventing the network, what's your view on that? >> Yeah, by the way, I loved when Chuck Robbins put up and he said here's the old ways, like, well really for most people, this is kinda the way of today, and this transition is going to be a little bit painful, John. You know, how do we get to this new environment? How do we keep moving forward? You know, absolutely, John, you know, the traditional firewall, you know, we can no longer build the moat. Security needs to be everyone's job. A great line I love that I've seen in the last year, is security is not a product, it is a practice, because it needs to be something that happens, you know, from the application side, all the way down to the people that are doing the hardware. So, I've talked to a number of customers, John. I was at a great little regional event in Boston last week, and the CIO said, you know, two years ago, I reported to the CFO, now I report to the CEO, because the role in companies that are doing it right, you know, lots of ways you can organize things, but the IT is not a cost center, we know that it needs to be tightly tied to the business, and if it's not working on things that drive the business forward, allow us to leverage data, allow us to take advantage of some of these new things, you know, agility, all of these things. I'm just gonna, you know, get rid of IT, and go find some way to be able to get it from somewhere else. >> Well, this is a dialog we want to keep going on, so you can follow us on Twitter, we're gonna continue to talk about what is that role of that network engineer in the new world, so they become tier one. Diane Greene had a great quote, and she said when pressed by the CEO of Cisco, to kind of summarize kind of Kubernetes, all the stuff, what is means for the audience, she said "Huge productivity gains and the best way to run "applications in a very consistent scalable way." So, you could say in the old days, network guys moved packets around, said I'm done, everything's secure, I'm gonna go to lunch, I got my beeper, now my cell phone. Now it's not moving packets, it's moving applications. So, you're seeing the movement up the stack is happening now, that's my kind of sense. Do you agree? Is that something that you see as where this is going? >> John, absolutely, you know networking doesn't go away, it becomes even more important. You know, I go back, John, even think about the XSPs back in the 90s, the reason that many of those models failed, it was like, oh a network ends in security, some of the biggest challenges we have in mobility and cloud, it's network and security, so does Cisco and all of these network engineers, they're gonna have jobs, they might be going to some new places, they absolutely need to learn some new skills, but networking security, you know, front and center for many of the ecosystems that we look at, and a good reason why we're here. >> And the other thing, I think Cisco's got another feather in their cap potentially with the new model is, the role of what security plays in the architecture. Certainly it's a practiced feature of everything, but if you look at the opportunities at the network layer, and at the firmware layer, at the chip layer, we're gonna be at Google Next this summer for The Cube live broadcast there. You know, I'm expecting to see security getting pushed down way in the stack, becoming native in the flow, and using that with policy, with Kubernetes, it's gonna be interesting. Security's still an open book, certainly an opportunity for Cisco. >> It's an opportunity for everyone right now, John, we still haven't solved that one. >> Okay, this is The Cube coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. We got three days of exclusive, wall to wall coverage. Got some great interviews, we're gonna hear from the CMO for Cohesity tomorrow on the heels of their huge news that's gonna put a whole new level of scale and storage and you know, converge infrastructure devices together, and how that all plays. Of course we got a great line up from developers, Devnet folks, Susie Wee, and a bunch of top executives with Cisco and their customers here in The Cube. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more with live coverage. Stay with us, here in Orlando, Florida, after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois It's theCUBE covering VeeamOn 2018 Brought to you by Veeam. >> Dave: Welcome back to VeeamOn 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the Noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is our second year at VeeamOn, #VeeamOn. Alan Stern is here. He's the technical solutions architect at Cisco. Alan, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Alan: Great to be here. It's a real honor and privilege, so I'm excited. >> It's a great show. It's smallish. It's not as big as Cisco Live which will be at the next month but it's clean, it's focused. Let's start with your role at Cisco as a solutions architect. What's your focus? >> So my focus is really on three areas of technology. Data protection being one of them, software defined storage or object storage, and then the Hadoop ecosystem. And I work with our sales teams to help them understand how the technology is relevant to Cisco as a solutions partner, and also work with the partners to help them understand how Cisco-- the benefit of working with Cisco is advantageous to all of us in order to help our customers come to solutions that benefit their enterprise. So your job as a catalyst and a technical expert-- so you identify workloads, use cases, and figure out how can we take Cisco products and services and point them there and add the most value for customers. That's really your job. >> To some degree, yeah, I mean in a lot of these solutions, this is an area that our executive team has said, "Hey this is something we can go help our customers with" and then it's handed down to my team and my job is then to make it happen. Along with a lot of other people. >> So let's look at these. Data protection is obviously relevant at VeeamOn. What role does Cisco play in the data protection matrix? >> So Cisco provides an optimal platform for great partners like Veeam to land these backups. It's critical, it's funny we often talk about backup, and what we should be talking about is restore. Cause nobody backs up just for the sake of backing up. But how do I restore quickly, and having that backup on premise on an optimized platform where Cisco has done all of the integration work to make sure everything is going to work is critical to the customer's success. Because as we know maintenance windows and downtime are a thing of the past. They don't exist anymore. We live in an always-on enterprise and that's really where folks like Veeam are focused. >> For you younger people out there, we used to talk about planned downtime which is just-- what? What is that? Why would anybody plan for downtime? It's ridiculous. >> Stu: Alan, what if we can unpack that a little. I think back and the data center group, you and Cisco launched UCS, the memory that it had was really geared for virtualization and I could see why Veeam and Cisco would work well together because some unique architecture that's there. This is a few years ago now that UCS has been on the market, What's the differentiation and maybe bring us inside some of the engineering work that happened between Cisco and Veeam in some of these spaces. >> So we take our engineers and lock them in with Veeam engineers into a lab and they go in and deploy the solution, they turn all the various nerd knobs to get the platform optimized. Primarily we talk about our S3260 which in a 4U space holds about 672 terabytes of storage and they optimize it and then publish a document that goes with it. We call them Cisco-validated designs. And these designs allow the customer to deploy the solution without having to go through the hit-or-miss of "what happens when I turn "this nerd knob or that nerd knob, "alter this network configuration or that one" and to get the best performance in the shortest possible time. >> Those CVDs are critical, but field knows them, they trust them, can you speak a bit to -- the presence that you have having Veeam in your pricebook, what that means, to kind of take that out to the broad Cisco ecosystem. Yeah, and it's more than just having it on the pricelist. It's the integrated support, so that the customer knows that if there's a problem they're not going to end up in a finger-pointing solution of Cisco saying "Call Veeam" or Veeam saying "Call Cisco." They have a solution and we're in lockstep so that there aren't going to be the problems. The CVD insures that problems are kept to a minimum. Cisco has fantastic support, Veeam has great support. They were talking this morning about the net promoter score being 73 which is unbelievably good. So that in the event that there is a problem, they know they're going to get to resolution incredibly quickly and they're going to get their environment restored as quickly as possible. >> So when I think about the three areas of your focus, data protection, object storage, and Hadoop ecosystem, there's definitely intersection amongst those. We talked a little bit about data protection. The object store piece, the whole software defined, is a trend that's taking off, we were talking earlier about some of the trade-offs of software defined. Bill Philbin was saying, "Well if I go out "and put it together myself when there's "a problem, I've got to fix it myself." So there's a trade-off there. I don't know if you watch Silicon Valley, Stu but the box. Sometimes it's nice to have an appliance. What are you seeing in terms of the trends toward software defined-- What's driving that? Is it choice, is it flexibility? What are the trade-offs? >> It's a couple of things. The biggest thing that's driving it is just the explosion of data. Data that's born in the cloud-- It's probably pretty good to store with one of the cloud providers. But data that's born in your data center or that is extremely proprietary and sensitive; customers are increasingly looking to say "You know what, I want to keep that onsite." and that's in addition to the regulatory issues that we're going to see with GDPR and others. So they want to keep it on site, but they like the idea of the ease of use of cloud and the nature of object storage and the cost-- the cost model for object storage is great. I take a X86 based server like UCS and I overlay a storage software that's going to give me that resiliency through erasure coding or replication. And now I've got a cost model that looks a lot like the cloud, but it's on premise forming. So that also allows me, I'm putting archival data there, I can store it cheaply and bring it back quickly. Because the one challenge with the cloud is my connectivity to my cloud provider is finite. >> Just a quick follow-up on that, I know Scality's a partner or there are other options for optic storage. >> Sure, both Scality and Swiftstack are on our global pricelist like Veeam. We also work with some other folks like IBM cloud object store, Cohesity, which sort of fits in between space, as well as, we're doing some initial work with Cloudy. >> Think about the hadoop ecosystem. That brings in new challenges, I mean A lot of Hadoop is basically software defined file system. And it's also in a distributed-- The idea of bringing five megabytes of computing to a petabyte of data. So it's leave the data where it is. So that brings new challenges with regard to architectures, protecting that data, talk about that a little bit. >> The issue with Hadoop is data has gravity. Moving lots of data around is really inefficient. That's where MapReduce was born. The data is already there. I don't have to move it across the network to process it. Data protection was sort of an afterthought. You do have replication of data, but that was really for locality, not so much for data protection. >> Or recovery to your earlier. >> But even with all of that the network is still critical. Without sounding like an advertisement for Cisco, we're really the only server provider that thought about the network as we're building the servers and as we're designing the entire ecosystem. Nobody else can do that. Nobody has that expertise. And a number of hardware features that we have in the products give us that advantage like the Cisco virtual interface card. >> That's a true point, you managed your heritage so of course that's where you started. So what advantage does that give you and one of the things we talked about in theCUBE a lot is, Flash changed everything. We used to just use spinning disks to persist and we certainly didn't it for performance. Did unnatural acts to try to get performance going. So, in many respects, Flash exposed some of the challenges with network performance. So how has that affected the market, technology, and Cisco's business? >> We're in this period of shift on Flash. Because if you think about it, at the end of the day, the Flash is still sitting on a PCI bus, it's probably ISCSI with a SATA interface. >> You got the horrible storage stack >> We move the bottleneck away from the disk drive itself, now to the bus. Now we're going to solve a lot of that with NBME and then it will come to the network. But the network's already ahead of that. We're looking at-- We have 10 gig, 40 gig, we're going to see 100 gig ethernet. So we're in pretty good shape in order to survive and really flourish as the storage improves the performance. We know with compute, the bottlenecks just move. You know, I think this morning you said Whack-a-Mole. >> Thinking about the next progression in the Whack-a-Mole, what is the next bottleneck? Is it the latency to the cloud, is it-- I mean if it's not the network, because it sounds like you're prepared for NVMe. Is it getting outside the data center? Is the next bottleneck? >> I think that's always going to be the bottleneck I use analogies like roads. We think about a roadway inside my network it's sort of the superhighway but then once I go off, I'm on a connector road. And gigabit ethernet, multi-gigabit, some folks will have fiber in the metropolitan area, but at some point they're going to hit that bottleneck. And so it becomes increasingly important to manage the data properly so that you're not moving the data around unnecessarily. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the cloud here. at the Veeam show we're talking about beyond just the data center virtualization. Talking about a multi-cloud world. I had the opportunity to go to Cisco Live Barcelona, interviewed Rowan Trollope, he talked heavily about Cisco's software strategy, living in that multi-cloud world, maybe help connect the dots for us as to how Cisco and Veeam go beyond the data center and where Cisco lives beyond that. >> So beyond the data center, we really believe the multi-cloud world is where it's going to happen. Whether the cloud is on-prem, off-prem, multiple providers, software, and servers, all of those things and both Cisco and Veeam are committed to giving that consistent performance, availability, security. Veeam, obviously, is an expert at the data management, data availability. Cisco, we're going to provide some application availability and performance through apt dynamics, we have our security portfolio in order to protect the data in the cloud and then the virtualized networking features that are there to again insure that the network policy is consistent whether you're on prem in Cloud A, Cloud B, or the Cloud yet to be developed. >> So we'll come back backup, which is the first of the three that we talked about. What's Cisco's point of view, your point of view, on how that's evolving from one -- think about Veeam started out as a virtualization specialist generally but specifically for Veeamware. Now we've got messaging around the digital economy, multi-cloud, hyperavailability, etc. What does that mean from a customer's standpoint? How is it evolving? >> Well, it's evolving in ways we couldn't have imagined. Everything is connected now, and that data -- that's the value. The data that the customer has is their crown jewels. What Veeam has done really well is yeah they start off as a small virtualization player, but as they've seen the market grow and evolve, they've made adaptations to really be able to expand and stay with their customers as their needs have morphed and changed. And in many ways, similar to Cisco. We didn't start in the server space, we saw an opportunity to do something that nobody else was doing, to make sure the network was robust and well-built and the system was well managed, and that's when we entered the space. So I think it's two companies that understand consistency is critical and availability is critical. And we both evolved with our customers as the markets and demands of the business had changed. >> Last question: What are some of the biggest challenges you're working on with customers that get you excited, that you say, "Alright I'm really going to "attack this one" Give me some color on that. >> I think the biggest challenge we're seeing today is a lot of customers are-- their infrastructure because of budgets, hasn't been able to evolve fast enough and they have legacy platforms and legacy software on those platforms in terms of availability that they've got to make the migration to. So helping them determine which platform is going to be best, which platform is going to let them scale the way they need, and then which software package is going to give them all the tools and features that they need. That's exciting because you're making sure that that company is going to be around tomorrow. >> Well that's a great point. And we've been talking all day Stu, about some of the research that we've done at WikiBon the day before, quantified in a Fortune1000, they leave between one and a half and 2 billion dollars over a three to four year period on the table because of poorly architected, or non-modern infrastructure and poorly architected availability, and backup and recovery procedures. It's a hard problem because you can't just snap your fingers and modernize and the CFO's going "How we going to pay for this" We've got this risk, this threat, We're sort of losing soft dollars, but at the end of the day they actually come down they do affect the bottom line. Do you agree that-- I said last question I lied. Do you agree that CXOs are becoming aware of this problem and ideally will start to fund it? >> Absolutely, because we talked earlier about the days of planned downtime are gone. Let a CXO have a minute of downtime and look at the amount of lost revenue that he sees and suddenly you've got his/her attention. >> Great point. Alan we've got to run. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE >> My pleasure. Great to meet you both. >> Thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE live from VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. We'll be right back.

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. Day two. We're wrapping up the show here at Cisco Live 2018, in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain. The past two days we've been here. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, talking to the most important people at Cisco, the top executives, some developers, and really kind of getting the lay of the land. It's the first time theCUBE has been at Cisco Live in its existence, so it's great to be here. Stu, Cisco Live, a lot of smart people. So it's great to have theCUBE. The Cube fits beautifully with Cisco Live because you've got people sharing, you have great, smart networking guys, but they are also doing applications. This is really an awesome opportunity because this is like the perfect storm for Cisco. This is an opportuity to galvanize their base, grow them into the new talent to move forward in this cloud edge world, where the network needs to be more intelligent. This is your wheelhouse. You have been covering this for a long time. >> So, John, yeah, I was looking forward to this. It's been years since I've attended Cisco Live in person. There is a term we haven't talked about a lot this week, but I think it fits. It's the digital transformation. And Cisco is in the midst of this transformation. I said in our open on day one, my barometer was going to be, look how is Cisco doing becoming a software company? Of course, things like IOS have been in the guts of what they did from networking, but being here in the DevNet Zone. DevNet, Susie Lee's team, really helping to drive some of that transformation. We had a great conversation with Rowan talking about the future. Talking about apps. Talking about so many of the different things that Cisco is doing to not just be boxes and ports. Hardware still an important piece. >> Yep. >> I'm actually concerned that maybe they have a little bit of that hardware holding them back a tiny bit because Cisco has skills there. They have lots of expertise. It might be mostly software, but even when they talk about things like collaboration there is hardware underneath a lot of that. >> Stu, Rowan Trollope, who is the SVP, general manager of the applications team, is the rising star. He is being promoted, and watch. This is a signal from Cisco. They recognize it. So, we heard from Andy Jassy at AWS re:Invent, there is the old guard meaning, they are talking about Oracle, and then the new guard, trying to obviously position themselves as the new guard to carry customers into the future. Rowan Trollope, on his keynote yesterday, who the big story cause the CEO wasn't here. He was the lead dog. So he's getting promoted. He was telling about the future. So the question I have for you is, as an analyst, is Cisco an old guard, or are they a new guard? Or, are they moving to be a new guard? What is your opinion? >> Yeah, too soon to say. Cisco was one of the four horsemen of the internet era. Absolutely, they should have a place going forward. But look, they're not one of the big public cloud providors. They don't sell a lot to the hyper-scale players. But, they have a very strong position in a lot of places. Still dominant in traditional networking. Do very well in collaboration. Have a lot of software pieces. They have made a number of acquisitions. The telecompany we had tracked before doing well inside of Cisco. AppD, lot of buzzwords going on. We got to learn a bunch about Spark this week, John. Heck, even little tidbits I got. There is these two colored globes sitting behind you. It's like, oh, it's Alexa apps. And there's been people doing developer labs this entire week. So Cisco, part of helping to educate and do that transformation. Other companies, like Pivotal, is a partner. Lots of partnerships. And not just the traditional infrastructure companies, but we heard about what they are doing with Google, with Apple, and others. So, I'm not ready to anoint Cisco as a winner in the new world. But, if multi-cloud, which I'd love to get your take on, What you think with the multi-cloud strategy is. But, Cisco at least has a right to be at the table. They've got strong customer relationships. Strong in the enterprise. Strong in service providers. >> But if Oracle is an old guard, then why isn't Cisco? I mean, Oracle is plumbing. They have these database deals. They're not going anywhere soon. So, you can make an argument that Oracle is not going to be displaced anytime soon, cause they have the massive deals. But a lot of people will say, and we even said, that Oracle's relevance is waning with new database growth happening outside the proprietary database. So, is Cisco relevant? >> Yeah, John. It's a good question. So for one piece, if you say okay how are they doing on the transition to becoming recurring revenue rather than boxes, they still have quite a ways to go. They are not far enough along that journey. But, my measuring stick was how much are they a software company? How much are they an infrastructure company? They're kind of straddling the line. They are moving up the stack. More than some of the other initiatives in the past. It's taken hold. Thousands of people, so I give them good marks, John. What's your take? >> I mean, I don't know. I think, here's my take on Cisco. Cisco knows the networking. You can't, like I was saying with Oracle, they're not going anywhere. No one is going to rip out Cisco and replace it. There's nothing else to replace it with. I mean, there is no other competition, really. The competition to Oracle, I mean Cisco, is not being on the right side of history. So to me, I think Cisco should be worried about one thing, making the bet wrong on architecture. So, they own the network. The other thing that people don't know about Cisco, that is a competitive advantage is, they know the edge of the network. They have been doing edge computing since it existed. So, okay sending it out to IOT is not a big deal, in my opinion. I think that is going to be an easy get for Cisco. Extending it to wireless, they have that with their deal with Jasper. That's interesting. That's going to be a game changer. But that's not going to be their problem. Wireless, human, cars, that's the new edge. That's just an extension for Cisco. That is a major advantage. So competitively speaking, I think that is a real point that they are going to really nail home that a lot of people don't understand. The second thing is that their DevNet program is showing that they're upgrading and advancing their capabilities up the stack and bringing along with them their entire developer consistencies, which were essentially network engineers. So, they were once the rock stars, those network engineers, of any enterprise. You go into any enterprise you say, the network engineers, they ran the show. Now, the threat is coming from alpha perspective from developers. So now you have this kind of dynamic going on Stu, where the network engineers need to move up the stack to meet the new developers, and that is where the rubbing is going on, right. That's where the action is. That's what DevNet's doing. They're doing a masterful job, in my opinion. They are not over driving, not overplaying their hand. They are in the cloud native rule with DevNet Create. So I think their best move is to just continue to march down that path, but they got to own the IOT edge. Without the IOT edge, Cisco could crumble. >> Yeah, so a couple comments on that, John. One, IOT, Cisco started messaging IOT really early, and they've gone through a couple of iterations, so that what they're talking about IOT wasn't what they were talking about a few years ago. I like their story much better today. Absolutely, both from a wireless standpoint, they have got the hardware gear like Meraki, they talked on stage. From the software standpoint, like Jasper. One of the areas we got feedback from the community, John, they are talking about containers and Kubernetes, sure. They're not involved with serverless yet. And that is a blindness. Is it something that the big public cloud's are going to do there? >> Well I have an opinion on that. >> They're, I'm sorry? >> I have an opinion on that. >> Okay. >> Cisco is running billion dollar partnerships. They're doing billions of dollars in revenue. So I think you can't really judge them there by their participation in these open source projects yet. I think they've got to bring something to the party quickly. I think it's too early to tell, I would agree with you on that point. On this piece, they've got to go to open source. And they've got to figure out a way to do it in a way that is not distracting from the core mission. If I am Cisco, if I'm advising the CEO, I'm like, march with the network as the value, maximize the software play, and don't blow off open source. They cannot blow off open source. Are they brilliant at open source right now? Outside of Lew Tucker, who do we see? >> Look, no. I mean, from a network standpoint, Cisco has been involved across lots of projects, not just open stack containers. We've talked about what they are doing with Kubernetes and Istio. >> Give them a grade, open source, give them a grade. A, B, C, or D, or F? >> You know, I tell you at least a strong B. >> Okay, that's decent. >> Yeah, I mean look, they are not monetizing open source. They're not rallying around the flag. They are doing great with developers, which John, I guess we say, is it contributing for contributing sake or how does it fit in the business model? We did a couple of interviews here where it said, no open source, we're not negative on it. They're not pushing against public cloud. They're not against these things. It just doesn't fit as much into their environment. >> I think the multi-cloud thing, well getting back to you're question about containers. So containers are being commoditized. Red Hat just bought Core OS. Docker's Docker. Docker's got a business model challenge. We've reported on that, Stu. And we're doing a feature report on it now. And so what are they going to do? But still, container is a goodness. People like containers. Is it super complicated? Not really. Is Kubernetes strategic and important? Yes, that's obvious. So the service mesh is interesting to me. And I think the net devops positioning that they announced here, Cisco is bringing this devops culture to the networking world. They are kind of creating a new devops ethos at a networking layer. I think that's going to be a really, really big deal. And that is either going to be a go big or go home situation. It is either going to work like a charm, or it's going to fail miserably. So, what do you think? I mean the smell, it lines up with Istio, it lines up with Service Mesh, programmable infrastructures, managing micro services. I mean, it kind of hangs together, Stu. What do you think? >> Yeah, I mean, John, it goes along with the whole trend we have been seeing. The people that were managing the network can't be managing devices, or even groups of devices. Intent based networking is one of the big items coming into here. It's how do I let the machine learning, the programmability help me in this environment because it is only going to get more complicated. The edge you talked about is critical. IOT keeps growing. And it's not something that people alone can do, it needs to be people plus machines. And I've seen nice maturation of how Cisco does this. Cisco, to be critical on Cisco for the last decade, is thy have thrived in complexity. And I think they are trying to get over that some and shift their model to more of a softer model. >> Well, Stu, I think you nailed that this. So here's my take. Software model allows them to scale. With machine learning, they can do what Facebook and Google has done. So if you go to Google, for instance, how they manage their data center, they have site reliability engineers. They have changed the IT model to scale the number of machines that they have. The number of devices that are coming on the network cannot be physically managed by people. So this means machine learning and software has to automate. That is Cisco's opportuity. I'm not seeing it clearly right now, but if that's what they're talking about, that to me will be the tell sign. If Cisco can create a site reliability engine, like what Google did for networks, that's a game changer. Alright Stu, final thoughts. Let's go through, let's riff on what we saw here. Obviously Barcelona great city. The weather's been phenomenal. It's been really great. Good food, good tapas. But Cisco, good vibe. Cube in the DevNet Zone, it's been really interesting to watch. People love the labs. It's very chill and relaxed, but very active. The keynote looking forward, not looking back. Notable point, the CEO wasn't here. So that to me-- >> It's the end of the quarter and he was just at Davos, and there is a bunch there. He didn't come last year either. >> John: Okay. >> But Chuck will be at the Orlando show. Hoping we'll have him on theCUBE when we go there. We're going to be at the Orlando show. We've got theCUBE at the DevNet Create show again. And John, chill I think was the right word. And part of me is wondering, is it because we are here in Barcelona and it is just a relaxed atmosphere of a city. I've really enjoyed it this week. Or, network people, it used to be a little bit uptight. I mean, it's the risk and fear are things that kind of ruled in networking before. And people seemed a little bit more chill here. >> Pros and cons, Stu. Or observations that were good and not so good? Observations to me were, on the good side, was a lot of activity in the DevNet Zone. A lot of energy in the hallway, and in Barcelona wise. There was a lot of European flavor. The signal I thought was good was the keynote was packed. You and I thought it might be empty, right. But people strolled in. They packed every seat. The other area is that you can just tell people were interested in the new direction. The critical analysis to me would be, I didn't hear enough data driven. I want to see more data driven, but I didn't want to hear AI is changing the world. I want to see real, practical examples of data-driven impact to data center and I wanted to see more meat on the bone on multicloud. Because I didn't really see much there, I just heard about it. It was almost like a, "we're going there," not a lot of data driven, not a lot of multicloud. Outside of that, I thought it was really, really a great conference. >> And John, we had some phenomenal guests here. So on the data driven piece, Michelle Dennedy, the Chief Privacy Officer, really good piece and she said, oh, you guys are missing it if you didn't hear the data-driven. And she drove home in the interview with us how Cisco is involved there. So, John, there is a lot going on. Cisco is a big company. Big show. There is a lot we are not going to be able to get. Reaz Rehan, got the IOT piece, seeing some new players. Really helping to shift along this transition. Love Susie Lee's discussion about the four year transformation that we are talking. And Rowan, strong executive, good bench at Cisco. Stock has been up, like most of the tech stocks the last few months. >> I mean, we forgot to mention that, good point, Stu. New sheriff in town on IOT, that was a great interview. Again, Susie's at DevNet's hit a home run here. She's got a great group she's developing. Awesome stuff. >> So last thing, John. If Chuck Robbins gave you a call and said, Hey John, I've got that 10, 20, 30 billion dollars that I might be able to play with. Any final advice for him? >> I would really sure up the collab stuff. I think there is a distraction there from the sense of that I get why its developing. But if you use WebEx or all these tools, you're biased. You don't understand, it's the tools you use. You're just going to use it. I think that is a great data. And I think that the collab apps, if you look at it not as a software play, but as an IOT edge device, data-driven device. That's a good play. So I like the direction. I would throw a lot of dough at the collab and make that an IOT edge feature. Cause they can cross connect great data from WebEx to Spark. And I think Spark feels like an app. I want to see, it's not an app. It's a platform. >> Look, it's a messy space. Who leads in those spaces tends to be a lot more the consumer companies that did this. Cisco killed most of their consumer stuff. Then they did, after they had Flip in the set top boxes. So very different Cisco. What assets do they have? >> But to answer your question, Stu, what I would say, I would say Chuck, own the edge. This is a strategic imperative. I would throw the kitchen sink at owning the edge of the network. That means from the core to the edge, and I'd push that edge all the way to the wearables. All the way to the implants in your brain in the future. Own it end to end. Lock that down. Make it dynamic. Make it programmable. That is a holy grail moment and to me, lock it down. And everything will fall into place. You'll have cloud traction. You'll have app traction. Everything will happen. >> And they don't need to be the owner of the public cloud to be successful in what you said, John. So good strategy, I like that. >> Alright, theCUBE, with all the strategy for the CEO, Chuck Robbins, who's watching. Chuck, good to see you. Thanks for having us at Cisco Live. Stu, great analysis. I want to thank all the guests, thank the crew here. Tony Day and the team, and Brendan and Brian, great job. And all the people back home at theCUBE network and theCUBE network operating center in Palo Alto and Boston. This is live coverage. This is our wrap-up from Barcelona, Spain. Cube is calling it a day here at Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our live coverage from theCUBE exclusive, two days with Cisco's inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host, Peter Burris, who's the general manager of Wikibon.com, and head of research for SiliconANGLE Media. We're talking with Susie Wee, who is the vice president and CTO of Cisco's DevNet, the creator of DevNet, the developer program that was started as grassroots, now a full-blown Cisco developer program. Now starting another foray into the cloud-native open-source community with this new event, DevNet Create. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, John. >> Thanks for having us. We love going to the inaugural events because they're always the first, and you know, being bloggers, and media, you got to be first. First news, first comments. >> Susie: Always first. >> Always first, and we're the only media here, so thank you. >> Susie: Thank you. >> So tell us about the event (Susie chuckles). You're the host and the creator, with your team. >> Susie: Yes. >> How did this come together, why DevNet Create? You have DevNet, this event is going extremely well, tell us. >> Awesome, so, yeah, so we have DevNet, we've had DevNet for about three years. It was actually exactly three years ago that we had our first DevNet Zone, a developer conference at Cisco Live, three years ago. And there, we felt like we pretty squarely hit... We've had successes there, we've had a pretty strong handle on our infrastructure audience, but what we see is that there's this huge transition, transformation going on in the industry, with IoT and cloud, that changes the definition of how applications meet infrastructure. And so this whole thing with, you know, applications, what is an application? What is the infrastructure? The infrastructure is now programmable, how can apps interact? It opens up a whole new world, and so what we did was we created DevNet Create as a standalone developer conference focused on IoT and cloud to focus on that transformation. >> And a lot of industry trends kind of going on, and moves you're making, it's the company, or you, Cisco is making, AppDynamics, big acquisition, kind of speaks to that, but also, there's always a natural progression for Cisco to have moving up the stack with software, but IoT gives you guys a unique opportunity with the network concept. So, making it network programmable, infrastructure as code, as some say in the DevOps world, is the ethos. >> Absolutely. >> How do you guys see yourselves engaging with the community, and what are some of the plans, and what's some of the feedback you're getting here at the event? >> So what we've done here at the event is that, you know, as you've seen from the channel is that, our content is 90% from the community, maybe 10% from Cisco, 90% from the community, because we believe it is all about the ecosystem. It's about how applications meet the infrastructure, it's the systems people are building together. And there's a lot of movement in developing these technologies. We don't know the final form of how an IoT app... Like, who's going to build the app, who's going to build the users, who's going to run the service, who's going to run the infrastructure? It's all still evolving, and we think that the community needs to come together to solve this to make the most of the opportunity. And so that's what, really, this is all about. And then, we think it actually involves learning the languages, making sure that the app folks know the language of the infrastructure folks. They don't have to become experts in it, but just knowing the language. Understand what part's programmable, what part's not, what benefit can you derive from the infrastructure. And then, by really having knowledge of what you can get across, and creating a forum for people to get together to have this conversation, we can make those breakthroughs. >> So just a clarification, you said that 90% of the sessions are non-Cisco, or from the community, and only 10% from Cisco? >> Susie: That's right. >> Is that by design? >> That is absolutely by design. So, when we have the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live, that's all about all of Cisco's products, platforms, APIs, bringing in the community to come and learn about those, but DevNet Create was really, squarely for IoT and app developers, IoT app developers, cloud developers, people working on DevOps, to look at that intersection. So we didn't go into all the gory details of networking, like we very much like to do, but we were really trying to focus on, "What's the value to application developers, "and what are the opportunities?" >> Well, it's interesting because, Susie, we're in the midst, as you said, of a pretty significant transformation, and there's a lot of turbulence, not only in business and how business conceives of digital technology, and the role it's going to play, the developer world, cloud-this, cloud-that, different suppliers, but one of the anchor points is the network, even though the network itself is changing, >> It is. >> in the midst of a transformation, but it's a step function. So, you go from, on the wireless, go outside, 1G to 3G, to 5G, et cetera, that kind of thing, but how is the developer going to inform that next step function in the network, the next big transformation in the network, and to what degree is this kind of a session going to really catalyze that kind of a change? >> Absolutely. So, what happens is, you're right, it's something that we all know, all app developers know, and actually, every person in the world knows, the network is important. The network provides connectivity, the network is what provides Internet, data, and everything there. That's critical to apps, but the thing that's been heard about it is it's not programmable. Like, you kind of get that thing configured, it's working now, you leave it. Don't touch it. >> It's still wires. In the minds of a lot of people, (Susie laughs) it's still wires, right? >> It is, it's wires, or even if it's wireless, once you can get it configured, you leave it. You're not playing with it again, it's too, kind of, dangerous or fragile to change it. >> Because of the sensitivity to operational... >> Because of the sensitivity to operations. The big change that's happening is the network is becoming programmable. The network has APIs, and then, we have things like automation and controller-based networking coming into play, so you don't actually configure it by going one network device at a time, you feed these into a controller, and then, now you're actually doing network-wide commands. That takes out the human error, it actually makes it easy to configure and reconfigure. And when you have that ability to provision resources, to kind of reset configurations, when you can do that quickly through APIs, you suddenly have a tool that you never had before. So let me give you an example. So let's say that you're in a building, you have your badging systems, your automated elevators, you have your surveillance cameras, you want to put out a new security system with surveillance cameras. You don't want to put that on the same network segment as your vending machines. You have a different level of security required. Could put in a work order to say... >> Unless you're really worried about who's stealing from the vending machines. (all laugh) >> So what you can do, now that it's programmable, is use infrastructure as code, is basically say, "Boom, give me a new network segment, "let me drop these new devices onto it, "let the programmable network automatically create "a separate network segment that has "all of these devices together." Then you can start to use group-based policy to now set, you know, the rules that you want, for how those cameras are accessed, who they're accessible by, what kind of data can come in and out of it. You can actually do that with infrastructure as code. That was not a knob that app developers had before. So they don't need to become networking experts, but now they have these knobs that they can use to give you that next level of security, to give you that next level of programmability, and to do it at the speed that an app developer needs. >> So I was talking to Steve Post-y earlier this morning, and he's from Redhead, he's a lead developer, he's not a network guy, he's self-proclaimed, "Hey, I'm not a networking person, I care about apps," and he's a developer, and he brought up something interesting I want to get your thoughts on. I think you're onto something really big with your vision, which is why we're so pumped about it, and he brought up an example of ecosystem's edges, and margins of the edge of these, that when they come together, creates innovation opportunities. And he used the example of data science meets cloud. And what he was using in particular was the example of most data people in the old days were data jocks, they did data, they did things, and they weren't really computer scientists, but as those two communities came together, the computer scientist saying, "Hey, I don't know about data," and the data guy's like, "Hey, you know about algorithms," "I know about algorithms," so innovation happened when that came together. What you're doing here, if I got this right, is you're saying, "Hey, DevNet's doing great," from a Cisco perspective, "but now this whole new creative innovation world "in the cloud is happening in real time. "Bring 'em together, "so best of Cisco knowledge to the guys who don't want to be (chuckles) "experts in that can share information." Is that kind of where this is going? >> Yeah, that's exactly where it's going, and same example, earlier in my career, I was working on sending video over networks, and then you had the networking people doing networking, you had the video people doing video compression, but then video networking, or streaming media, kind of, oh, you can put, you know, your knowledge of the compression and the network all together, so that kind of emerged as a field. The same thing, so, so far, the applications, and the infrastructure, and IT departments have been completely separate. You would just do the best you can, it was the job of IT to provide it, but now, suddenly there's an opportunity to bring these together. And it's, again, it's because the infrastructure's becoming programmable, and now it has knobs and can work quickly. So, yes, this is kind of new ground. And things could continue the way they are, right? And it's okay, we're getting by, but you just won't be realizing the potential of the real kind of... >> Well, open-source has clearly demonstrated that the collective intelligence of communities can really move fast, and share, and it's now tier one, so you're seeing companies go public, MuleSoft, Cloudera, and the list goes on and on. So now you have the dynamic of open-source, so I got to ask you the question, as you go out with DevNet Create, as this creation, the builders that are out there building apps are going to have programmable networks, how do you see this next leg of the journey? Because you have the foray now with DevNet Create, looks good, really well done, what's next? >> What's next is going on and making the real instances that show the application and infrastructure synergy. So let me just give you a really simple example of something that we're doing, which is that Apple and Cisco have had a partnership, and this partnership is coming together in that we have iOS developers who are writing mobile apps. So you have your mobile apps people are writing, we have iOS 10, your app developers are writing these apps. But everybody knows you run into a situation where your app gets congested on the network. Let's say that we're here in Westfield Mall, and they want to put out an AR/VR app, and you want that traffic to work, right? 'Cause if the mall wants to offer an AR/VR service, it takes a lot of bandwidth to get that data through, but through this partnership, what we have is an ability we have to use an iOS 10 SDK to, basically, business optimize your app so that it can run well on a Cisco infrastructure. So basically, it's just saying, "Hey, this is important, "put it in the highest QoS (John laughs) level setting, "and make your AR/VR work." So it's just having these real instances where these work together. >> I mean, I used to be a plumber back in my day when I used to work at HP, and I know how hard it is, and so I'm going to bring this up, because networks used to be stable and fragile/brittle, and then that would determine what you could do on top of it. But there are things like DNS, we hear about DNS, we hear about configuration management, setting ports, and doing this, to your point, I want dynamic provisioning or policy at any given moment, yet the network's got to be ready to do that. >> You don't want to submit a work order for that. (laughs) >> You don't want to have to say, "Hey, can you provision port, whatever, "I need to send a bunch of bandwidth." This is what we're talking about when we say programmable infrastructure, just letting the apps interface with network APIs, right? >> Absolutely, and I think that, you heard earlier, that with CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, just announced CNI, so that what they're doing is now offering an ability to take your kind of container orchestration and take into consideration what's going on in the network, right? So if this link is more congested than that, then make sure that you're doing your orchestration in the right ways, that the network is informing the cloud layer, that the cloud platform's informing the network, so that's going to be huge. >> But do you think, I'm curious, Susie, do you think that we're going to see a time when we start bringing conventions at layer 7 in the network, so we start to parse layer 7 down a little bit, so developers can think in terms of some of those higher-level services that previously have been presentation? Are we likely to see that kind of a thing? As the pain of the network starts to go away, and an explicit knowledge of layer 1-6 become a lot less important, are we going to see a natural expansion at layer 7, and think about distributed data, distributed applications, distributed services, more coherence to how that happens on an industry-wide basis? What do you think? >> Yeah, so let's see, I don't know if I have a view on which layers go away, or which layers compress... >> But the knowledge, the focal point of those? >> But the knowledge, absolutely. So it comes into play, and what happens is, like, what is the infrastructure? In the Internet of things, things are a part of your infrastructure. That's just different. As you're going to microservices, applications aren't applications, they're being written as microservices, and then once you put those microservices in containers, they can move around. So you actually have a pretty different paradigm for thinking about the architecture of applications, of how they're orchestrated, what resources they sit on, and how you provision, so you get a very new paradigm for that. And then the key is... >> But they're inherently networked? >> That's right, that's right. It's all about connectivity, it's all about, you know, they don't do anything without the network. And we're pushing the boundaries of the network. >> These aren't function calls over memory like we used to think about things, these things are inherently networked. We know we have network SOAs, and service levels, and whatnot... >> Susie: There is. >> It sounds like we have... I was wondering, here, at this conference, are developers starting to talk about, "Geez, I would like to look at Kubernetes "as a lower-level feature in layer 7," >> Susie: They are. (laughs) >> "where there's a consistent approach to thinking about "how that orchestration layer is going to work, "and how containers work above that, "because I don't have to worry about session anymore, I don't have to worry about transmission." >> Susie: Absolutely. >> That goes away, so give me a little bit more visibility into some of that higher-level stuff, where, really, the connectivity issues are becoming more obvious. >> Absolutely, and an interesting example is that, you know, we actually talked about AppDynamics in the keynote, and so, with AppDynamics, what kind of information can you get from these bits of code that are running in different places? And it comes into where we have the Royal Bank of Scotland, who's saying, "What's my busiest bank branch "where people are doing mobile banking in the country?" And they're like, "Well, how do I answer that question?" And then you see that, oh, someone has their mobile phone, they take an app, then you actually break it down to how is that request, that API, how is that being, kind of, operated throughout your network. And when you take a look, you say, "Okay, well, this called this "piece of code that's running here. "This piece of code used this API to talk to this other service, to talk to this other," you can map that out, get back the calls of, "Hey, this is how many times this API has been called, "this is how many times this service has been called, "this is the ones that are talking to who," then they came up with the answer, saying that our busiest bank branch is the 9 a.m. Paddington Train Station. >> And that's a great example, because now you gain visibility >> Exactly >> into where the dependencies are, which even if you don't explicitly render it that way, starts to build a picture of what the layers of function might look like based on the dependencies and the sharing of the underlying services. >> That's right, and that's where you're saying, like, "What? The infrastructure just gave me business value (John laughs) "in a very direct way. "How did that happen?" >> John: That's a huge opportunity for Cisco. >> So it's a big... >> Well, let's get in the studio and let's break down the Kubernetes and the containers, 'cause Docker's here, a lot of other folks are here. We've had, also, Abby Kearns, the executive director of Cloud Foundry. We've had the executive director from the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, Dan was here, a lot of folks here in the industry kind of validating >> Yeah, Craig was here. >> your support. Sun used to have an expression, the network is the computer, but now, maybe Chuck Robbins should go for network is the app, or the app is the network, (Susie laughs) I mean, that's what's happening here. The interplay between the two is happening big time. >> It is happening here, yeah. Just every element, every piece of code, what we saw is that this year, developers will write 111 billion lines of code. You think about that, every piece of... >> Peter: That we know about. (chuckles) >> That we know about, there's probably more. (chuckles) and all of that, you're right, these are broken up into pieces that are inherently networked, right? They have data, it's all about data and information that they're sharing to give interesting experiences. So this is absolutely a new paradigm. >> Well, congratulations on your success. What a great journey, I know it's been a short time, but I noticed after our in-studio interview, when you came in to share with us, the show, as a preview, Chuck Robbins retweeted one of the tweets. >> Susie: He did. >> And so I got to ask you, internally at Cisco, I know you put this together kind of as a entrepreneurial inside the company, and had support for that, what is the conversation you have with Chuck and the executive team about this effort? Because they got to see a clear line of sight that the value of the network is creating business value. What are some of the internal conversations, can you give us a little bit of color without giving away all the trade secrets? >> Yeah, well, internally, we're getting huge support. Chuck Robbins checks in on this, he actually has been checking in saying, "How's it going?" Rowan Trollope sending, "Hey, how's it going? "I heard it's going great." >> Did he text you today? >> Chuck did a couple days ago. >> John: Okay. (chuckles) >> And then Rowan, today, so, yeah, so we have a lot of conversation. >> Rowan's a CUBE alumni, Chuck's got to get on theCUBE, (Susie laughs) Rowan's been on before. >> Yeah, so they're all kind of checking in on it. We have the IoT World Forum going on in parallel, in London, so, otherwise, they would be here as well. But they understand... >> John: There's a general excitement? This is not a rogue event? >> There's huge excitement. >> This is not, like, a rogue event? >> It's not, it's not, and what happens is... They also understand that we're talking about bringing in the ecosystem. It's not just a Cisco conversation, it is a community... >> Yeah, you're doing it right, you're not trying to take over the sandbox. You're coming in with respect and actually putting out content, and learning. >> Putting out content, and really, it's all about letting people interact and create this new area. It's breaking new ground, it's facilitating a conversation. I mean, where apps meet infrastructure, it's controversial as well. Some people should say, "They should never meet. "Why would they ever meet?" (Susie and John laugh) >> So, we do a lot of shows, I was telling Peter that, you know, we were at the first Hadoop Summit, second Hadoop World, with Cloudera, when they were a small startup, Docker's first event, CubeCon's first event, we do a lot of firsts, and I got to tell you, the energy here feels a lot like those events, where it's just so obvious that (chuckles) "Okay, finally, programmable infrastructure." >> Well, I'll be honest, I'm relieved, because, you know, we were taking a bet. So, you know, when I was bouncing this idea off of you, we were talking about it, it was a risk. So the question is, will it appeal to the app developers, will it appeal to the cloud developers, will it appeal overall? And I'm very relieved and happy to see that the vibe is very positive. >> Very positive. >> So people are very receptive to these ideas. >> Well, you know community, give more than you take has always been a great philosophy. >> I'm always a little paranoid and (John laughs) nervous but I'm very pleased, 'cause people seem to be really happy. There's a lot of action. >> There are a lot of PCs with Docker stickers on them here. (John laughs) >> There are. (laughs) There are, yes, yes. We have the true cloud, IoT, we have the hardcore developers here, and they seem to be very engaged and really embracing... >> Well, we've always been covering DevOps, again, from the beginning, and cloud-native is, to me, it's just a semantic word for DevOps. It's happening, it's going mainstream, and great to see Cisco, and congratulations on all your work, and thanks for including theCUBE in your inaugural event. >> Susie: Thank you. >> Susie Wee, Vice President and CTO at Cisco's DevNet. We're here for the inaugural event, DevNet Create, with the community, two great communities coming together. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, stay tuned for more coverage from our exclusive DevNet Create coverage, stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director of strategy.