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

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Net App and The Cube's ecosystem partnership. >> Welcome back, we're here live at The Cube here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman have been co-hosts all week here for three days live coverage. Day one and I'm winding down. Great keynotes, CEO of Cisco laying out the next generation network and it's not just the old networking, it's a whole nother thing. Our next guest is Salman Asadullah, who is the CTO and VP in Engineering at Netnology.io. Like technology, Netnology.io, former Cisco fellow been twenty- >> Distinguished engineer. >> Distinguished engineer, sorry, fellow engineer, well you look distinguished today. So how many years have you been at Cisco? >> 22 years. >> 22 years, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> So I got to ask you, before I get into the company, which we were talking before we came on camera, you doing really, I think you're on the front end of a big wave we see, certainly in The Cube, but you've been at Cisco 20 years and I've been working with Cisco since the beginning of time, 1993, in some capacity or another in the industry and I've had friends that have sold companies to Cisco. There's always been a debate within Cisco's engineering organization as to how to move up the stack. One team, yes no. So there's been but now it's time. Can you add some color and reaction to that because I think that's kind of where it is now. So all those conversations, even go back 15 years ago, where in the stack should we go? What's the right time? How about some of the history of Cisco and now they're moving up the stack. >> Yeah so I think first of all just to start with, our company name is Netnology.io but our tagline is full stack system integrator because we call ourselves a full stack system integrator because we know end networking, we know Cisco but we know how to move up in the stack as well. With the APIs and the STKs and what not. So the thing what is happened when you kind of look into this from Cisco's perspective, and I was there for 22 years, I am what I am because of Cisco, like when people say in Cisco when they work in Cisco I am Cisco but I still say I am Cisco because all of our business, 70% of our business is around Cisco. But the thing is when people are in Cisco, from Cisco's perspective when they say okay we are a software company and all of that good stuff, they look at the software from a networking perspective but the world, the industry when they say software, they are kind of talking about up in the stack from the application perspective. This is what you see even in Cisco they are sort of trying to pivot and all of the requisitions which are happening is around that. That they are acquiring companies which are basically up in the stack. There are more application based companies and also they are building organically some stuff in there as well. >> What's interesting is that the trend is their friend right now because they are getting to have their cake and eat it too. They are going to have best of both worlds. The networking is becoming more and more important with something to find and then you've got Kubernetes which Google Cloud is out there on the stage today. You've got Kubernetes and containers and Service Mesh is coming on that all look like networking. It's got words like policy, QOS, I mean this is networking world moving it up the stack. What does that mean for a customer? Is that the path in your mind? >> Yeah and I'm a big believer of that. I'm a big believer of that even before leaving Cisco for last five years of Cisco, I was basically working around all of these SDN, NFE, APIs and making sure in organizations I was leading or I was part of that how do I enable our engineering force to do some of that, to gain those capabilities. This is what we are trying to mimic on a much smaller scale in our company. That the way we sort of call it we are a bunch of hybrid engineers. The people who are CCIs but they can also code as well. This is our sort of a focus because just like what you said John, five years ago or three years ago when people talked about this stuff it was only about if you are a data center, cloud these things matter. But now, if you really see all Cisco's solutions are around APIs, around STKs, around SDN and NFE concepts. So let's say if you look into Cisco enterprise solution like SDA or SDVAN it's all around that. If you look into collaboration, Spark, Intropo it's all around that. So the point is that for any network, for any engineer or any organization to get to the next level they have to go through this evolution. >> And that's scaling too then. The network's got to scale and the new software environment. >> You bet. >> So there has been a big debate in the networking world, Salman, for many years, okay I ran networks, wait I have to be a coder. Maybe there's not that skillset. Will my solution providers and my software providers and the platforms I build on take care of some of that or is the traditional role of the network dead? You're saying your company's got a hybrid role but what percentage of people that are the CCIEs and the network admins today, how many of them need to be coding, developing, working with APIs and everything in the future? >> Yeah I think the way I sort of look at it that there's some push back. There is some push back but mainly more in the younger generation. They get it, they get it because if I give you an example of our company, we have 15 to 20 people company, the last two hires we had these were fresh grads, computer science grads and what I asked them to do, first six months go get your CCNA so then they start to understand some of the basics of the networking so they can work with our senior CCI engineers who know how to write 50 lines of five tone script but they can work with the coders to get bigger things developed. >> That's the new strategy from millennials. Throw them in CIE training, get them up to speed. Okay I got to ask you the question, because I want Netnology, the company that you're the co-founder of, is small but you're doing a unique thing. You're taking and SIE approach, obviously Cisco DNA is in your blood, you in the Cisco family if you will, but you still got to work with other platforms like Amazon and what not, as you guys go out there is a trend towards automation and we're seeing that professional services, whether they are from global SIs, the trend is towards accelerating down the cycle of deployment, faster, faster, faster, it's almost like the old days was eight months to roll out an SAP deployment, now that's eight weeks, now is it going to be eight minutes. This is the trend, it requires automation, what is your vision on how this is going to pan out going forward because this is the beginning of a new kind of Cloud scale at a service level. What's your vision? >> So if you really see from the compute world guys they were already doing that stuff for the longest time and they always asked us, the networking people, how come if my CAPEX is 30% but my OPPEX is 70% when it comes to the networking because we were lacking all of those capabilities. And the reason was that all the vendors they had these closed systems but now with this whole trend of SDN, NFE, people want to have more control. Cisco, and a lot of the vendors, they have all opened up their APIs and given the SD case so now you have the capability to go and take this talk to the compute guys. Say you are ahead of the game but we are catching up as well. By using all of these different tools what we are using in our deployments day in and day out. So if I give you an example, recently we did a project for a customer which was a multi-vendor fabric, VXLAN fabric, for data center, and we automated that whole deployment using Ansible Tower. So the thing is that if you would have done that manually, my God it would have taken a long time but now you can do it in minutes. >> Sal, talk about the Devnet explosion, because obviously we've reported all day today it came out in the keynote, over half a million developers are on Devnet, Susie Wee who's heading up Devnet and now Devnet Create which is the Cloud version of Devnet. Those two worlds are coming together and you're seeing network guys, even old school folks, adopting Cloud Navis. A natural migration and the younger guys are going and get networking as you pointed out. Devnet's been popular, you're seeing some great demos here. You can get a free Meraki Switch if you can code a little bit, take it home with you and play with it. A lot of tools, a lot of APIs as you're talking about, this is the new software development environment. What are you guys doing with Devnet? Can you share some insight into some of the things that you're doing that's relevant? Things that you're kicking the tires on? What's up? >> So first of all, to start with, we do a lot of work with Cisco Devnet and we are so humbled and honored by that because we get to learn while we are working on a lot of cool stuff. Then we can go sell that to our customers. Just to kind of tell you tomorrow, Susie Wee is announcing Devnet's cord exchange you might have heard about. So we are among those few partners who have contributed to that cord exchange. So we have put our code for everybody go get it, play with it, like we couple of use cases we have shared on that cord exchange, free for everybody. Think about you have Cisco VNFs running on AWFs how would you use cisco Cloud Center to model and deploy that service on AWFs? Using the APIs and then in the back end we have done scripting using Python and Shell and Ansible. These sort of things. And also we have a booth over here at the Devnet zone partner village and we are demonstrating some of these demos over there as well. >> That's really the standard now, people are getting the scale up in multiple clouds then deploying. That seems to be the big trend, automation there. >> Oh yeah, because as I said, the way we are partnered with Cisco we are also partnering with AWS and GCP so we have close to 35 certifications in our team including 13 CCIs. >> You're a veteran at Cisco, obviously to work at Cisco that long it's very entrepreneurial inside so it's always kind of been there. It's still a big company even when you were there but not you're an entrepreneur. What's it like on the other side? >> Oh my god, I'm living someone's dream. I'm blessed to be afford to do this. It's an awesome time for us. Of course it's a little stressful. >> Heavy lift there huh? It's not easy right? >> Me being in the silicon valley and I wanted to kind of do this but I tell you I recently Cisco included me in the Cisco designated VIP, which is a very selected group of people and worldwide, so I'm one of those people and I wrote a blog about that and I said something in there that although I have left Cisco but I don't feel like I've left Cisco because I'm still you know- >> Extended family. >> Yeah extended family. >> So what's up for the company, what's next? What's you're mission? Are you hiring? What are you working on? Share some insight into what's next for you guys? What's on your road map? >> So it's the growing pains. It's the growing pains, we are growing, our work is expanding. We are basically hiring some good talent. But more exciting something that we are also building a platform. So hopefully in the next six months we are going to be releasing something around that as well. Because again, think about we are recently named as a top 10 SDN providers by Enterprise Networking Magazine, so we are focusing on three Cisco SDN solutions. SDI in data center, SDA in branch and campus, and SDVAN on the VAN side. Now think about that you have segmentation in all of these solutions. How you can simplify this whole thing. How you can map these different perimeters between these three different solutions. So we are working on some cool ideas and some product as well so that's something really exciting for us. >> Are you guys self funded? >> Until now we are all privately funded. >> Sal, I'll put the hard question to you. As a startup, congratulations by the way, we know all about startups, we started a startup ourselves, it's growing pains but it's fun. It's hard work but it's a whole different joy. What problem are you solving? When you look at hiring an engineer what's the tough problem that you guys are trying to tackle? If you could boil it down into, the full stack great mission, what's the hard problem that you guys are trying to solve? >> So we just want to further simplify the Cisco story. As a matter of fact, in some of these SDN NFE based environments, that's our goal. How we can further simplify it. We are small enough that we can tackle some of these things. >> So tackle the complexity, that's where your mission is? >> Yes. >> Salman, thanks for coming on The Cube. Great to meet you, great to have you here. Thanks for sharing your insight here on The Cube with us live here- >> Very good, I appreciate the opportunity. >> Yeah let's follow up, love what you do. I think the future is going to be changing the game on how professional services are built, deployed and leveraged. Certainly code sharing. Collaboration is the new competitive behavior. You don't have to beat the other guy to win, you can work together. This is the new normal. This is what's going on at Cisco Live. Here in The Cube we're bringing you all the content. Stay with us, we'll see you tomorrow for day two of coverage. Thanks for watching.