>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the que were in Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco definite create. We've been covering definite create for a number of years, I think since the very first show. And Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting Debs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and developing solutions and using brain power that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have our next guest. Ah, partner for someone is Brad Haas. He is the engineering director for Dev Ops at Presidio. Brad, great to see you. >>Hey, Jeff. Great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect, Francisco Definite partners. And he has been driving ah, whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's let's >>start >>with you, Chuck. Because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, you know, software defined networking has been talked about for a long time, and, you know, it's really seems to be maturing. And software to find everything right has been taking over, especially with with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability, custom ability in software and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is toe have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, Absolutely. So along this whole journey of definite, where we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of versus co platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners, and what we hear from our customers and our partners is they wanna our customers one away to be able to identify. Does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey. I'm trying to do do a new implementation. I wanna automate that. How can I find a partner? Thio, Get there. And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this definite journey with us for the last six years. They really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and given edge to my customers to show them that, Yes, I have these capabilities. I built a business practice. I have technology. I have technologists that really understand this capability, and they have the definite certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what are definite partner. Specialization is all about >>right, that's great. And, Brad, you're certainly one of those partners. And I want to get your perspective because partners are often times a little bit closer to the customer because you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on. We know what happened back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home on You can't goto work, so you know there's all the memes and social media about who you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation. The CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know what the answer is. Whatever you can share some information. So what happened then? And really, for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it. Six months plus and and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How is the customer? Attitudes kind of change now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment. And really, we need to put in place, um foundation to carry forward for a very long time. Potentially. >>Yeah, it was really quite interesting, actually. You know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests. Thio help with automation of provisioning our customers. And in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there, and I'd say it became or of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers. Thio. You know, new topology is where instead of the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly and waited. Have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and program ability building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers. Thio get up and running really fast on. But that is what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit, you know, Now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my office is in a different way, You know, for example, you know how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my e? My conference rooms are there, Uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information like, how many people are in the building at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that? You know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So? So the conversations really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before march. >>Now, I wonder with you, Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view. I mean, the network is amazing. It had had co vid struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly. Entertainment, Um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality. But for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if you know, kind of from your perspective, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, definite with with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space is good spaces. You could be giving this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation. And as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself. I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years this is you know, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore. But my day to day functions are are still the same, and it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry as faras kind of moving to that application type of economy as we go to micro services as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud. Those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this to this covitz situation, and I think it's helped to to justify the investments that that our customers have made. A swell is what our partners have been being able to do to deliver on that multi cloud capability to take those applications, get him closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable. Thio users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls, >>right, right, it's interesting. And Brad, you made a comment on another interview I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of applications. Now, being first class citizens was was what you said, and it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now? Really, it's the infrastructure, that response back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that APS first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that gives them the ability to react in the marketplace to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's a It's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push the cloud was really interesting In the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to you change our applications to be cloud first, you know, And then I think the terminology changed over time. I've, um, team or cloud native. So when we when we look at what Cloud has done over the past five years, with customers moving, you know, there their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center. But what it's really become is a place thio host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're no longer talking about you know, the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially what with the whole move to cloud native and micro services in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure. As code you're now able toe, bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application as infrastructure is code, the application in this the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are all are wrapped together and you've got changed control, version control. Um, and it's all automated, you know, it's it's a beautiful thing, and I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking. I think everybody was trying to figure it out, and they didn't really fully understand what that meant. Now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like, as it's as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's terror, former answerable, whatever that might be. Whatever method or tool that you're using Thio to bring it all together. It Z you know, it's really interesting. You know, I think I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than you know, when those early days of S d. N, we're out, you know, it was a positive controller. Is it the new version of S and M. P? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible, >>right? Right. But still, Chuckas, you said, right? There's still a lot of AP ice, and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off. The network that all have to fit, uh, have to fit together. You know, we cover pager duty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the problems are within a very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned the shopping cart or whatever the particular applications. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability. Super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of. And they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. So the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference? I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the Internet, the amount of people necessary to to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale. It's automation that makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisions provisioning. Now that we're in micro services, now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to to better to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we could very quickly spend something up to to take that load off where traditionally it was. Open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there. Let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution. Go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team. They just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability in a point that Brad Maeda's faras you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it, I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the A p, i s from the infrastructure and then the ability to tie that into other systems like an I p address management or a change control or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made in infrastructure changed and now I can automatically do that. Documentation up Dayton record. I know who did it. I know when they did it, and I know what they did. And I know what the test results were even five years ago. That was fantasy land. Now, today, that's just the new normal. That's just how we all operates. >>Right? Right, Right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud Multi Cloud, Public Cloud. You know, as I think you said, Brad, When Public Cloud first came out, there was kind of this this Russian to we're gonna throw everything in there than for for different reasons. People decided. Maybe that's not the best, the best solution. But really, it's horses for courses, right? And I think it's pretty interesting that that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're gonna put their workloads. And, oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right? It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my my initial Dev and an Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I wanna move it into my data center, and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something. I wanna flex capability. So from from your perspective and helping customers work through this because still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multi cloud, what is hybrid cloud? And, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through? You know, everybody talks about their journey. I think they're still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down past, trying to find new things. What works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. >>Yeah, no doubt is still early days. And you know, I e go back Thio being applications centric because, you know, being able thio understand that application. When you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like. When you when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service, while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service, and some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier. Those resource is wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure is code and automation. But you know, decide from provisioning. I think we focus a lot about provisioning when we talk about automation. We also have these amazing capabilities on on the side of operations to like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability Thio gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before or at least in the, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name. Like, maybe it was something from the Hobbit. Right now you've got things coming up in spinning, spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place in that thing. You used to know what that waas Now you have toe quickly. Figure out where it went, so the observe ability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention, attention to moving forward with. Regards, Thio when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers Or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that in a micro services you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, program ability in a p I s and, you know, yang models or tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many break things coming out of this, you know? And it's all like a data structure that that people who are going down this path and the definite path they're learning these data structures and be able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or a switch. Um, Amazon. You know, it doesn't matter. You're you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great, Chuck. I want to shift gears a little bit because there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about about, you know, definite really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as really more of a software software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you could put a little more color on that, Um, because clearly, as you said partners Air super important, it's your primary go to market and and Presidio's, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world. That's and you know, you said, there's some There's some, you know, nontraditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner, that suddenly you guys were playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yes, Jeff, that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with Devon, it's whether it be at one of the Cisco Live events in the Definite zone or the prior definite create events will have. We'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resale market. This what we're doing with the definite specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem share them with are extremely large, definite community so they can get access to those to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there. But they may come into into a scenario where it's working with their vertical or working with the technology piece that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint goto markets where so they could go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack that brings us to this business, outcomes of the customers are looking for a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it zits unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the Cisco definite shows you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers Museum, I think, the last couple of years. And in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. Hope maybe, maybe for next year's event. But thank you very much for for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. >>You have a happy to be here. All >>right, Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco. Definite live coverage on the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco, >>Everybody Jeffery here with the Q we're in our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco dev net create we've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here, >>Julie and joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners, and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and, you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey? I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the double net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>It's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time, potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning, our customers and the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there. And I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in, uh, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building in a, at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So, uh, for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities that we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that our customers have made, as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people a competitive advantage, that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is place to host >>Your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what, what do those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. >>It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it the new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that have to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look up >>The ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where, you know, traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability, in a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other >>Hybrid cloud, multi cloud >>Public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, cause still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there and you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those >>Are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. >>You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. You really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Check. I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been >>Talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This, what we're doing with the dev net specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into a con into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes of the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco DevNet shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. I hope maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here. All right. Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco dev net live coverage on the cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>Well, hi everybody, John Walls here on the cube. And thank you for joining us here for this cube conversation today. And we're talking about data. Of course, it's a blessing and the respect that it's become such a valuable asset. So many companies around the world, it's also a curse, obviously, because it is certainly can be vulnerable. It is under attack and Druva is all about protecting your data and preventing those attacks. And with us to talk about that a little bit more in depth as Jaspreet Singh, who is the founder and CEO at Druva and Steven Manley, who was the company's CTO. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us here on the queue. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>So Jaspreet, let me just begin with you. Let's, let's talk about the larger picture of data these days. And, and we read, it seems as though every day about some kind of invasion, you know, where some ransomware attack it's become all too commonplace. So if you wouldn't maybe just set the stage a little bit for the state of ransomware here in 2021. >>That's right. John, I think Lansing has now a new national security threat and at the scene, uh, all around us, this, uh, almost every single day, we hear about businesses getting hit with a, a new ransomware attack, uh, ransomware 1.0 was more a malware situation impacting our data. And as you know, the pandemic transformed the entire data landscape, like the application, the terror, the entire supply chain delivery model as to be more online, more connected, which, you know, for this mortar stores, this whole approach towards a malware coming in, we're also seeing ransomware 2.0, it is all about like insider techs or, or, or in general security misconfiguration, which could lead to data being exfiltrated or traded off in the market. So in general, as data is far more connected, far more expected to be online security techs from either malware or human oriented security issues are becoming more and more dominant threat to, to our, our entire data landscape. Right? >>Yeah. So, so Steven, if you would, I'd like you to just to follow up on this, this, uh, uh, will the landscape to take one of Jaspreet's terms here about what you're seeing in terms of, of kind of these evolving threats now, um, used to be probably, I don't know, five, six years ago, it was a very different, uh, set of problems and challenges and companies maybe weren't as laser focused as they are now. Um, maybe take us through that, that process, what has happened with regard to the client base that you see and you're working with in terms of their recognition and other steps that they need to take going forward as they modernize their operations? >>Yeah. You know, I th I think there's, there's two things we see from, uh, from sort of a technical perspective. The first one is in just pre-call that ransomware 1.0, ransomware 1.0, uh, is mainstream at this point, you know, so, so you, you can go out there and you don't have to be an expert hacker there's ransomware as a service. You know, your average, your average teenager can basically download a ransomware attack kit, uh, you know, get, get a pretty lightweight cloud account and attack school districts, hospitals, municipal organizations, whatever it is, you know, with what we would consider the traditional ransomware and, and that's become ubiquitous. And that's why we see all these reports of, there are multiple ransomware attacks every minute, you know, in the United States and around the world. So, so that's, that's, that's one part which is you're going to get hit. >>Now you'll probably get heading in with the more traditional ransomware, but, you know, like any industry, the ransomware people have evolved. And so it's as just breed said, they are constantly innovating. And so what we're seeing now from, uh, from sort of a marketplace standpoint is, you know, getting smarter about the ransomware attack. So, so laying low, longer, uh, you know, sort of corrupting or attacking data a little bit more slowly. So it's harder to detect specifically attacking backup infrastructure so that you won't be able to recover exfiltrating data. So that, so that now you can have sort of two types of threats, one that your data is encrypted, and the other is if you don't pay us, we're just going to post it on the internet. So, so you've got stage one, which is ubiquitous, and you've got to protect yourself against that because anyone can be attacked at any time. And then you've got stage two where it's getting smarter and that's where organizations then have to step up their game and say, I've got to keep my backup safer. Uh, I've got to be able to detect things a little bit more easily, and I need to start really understanding my data footprint. So I understand what can be exfiltrated and what that's going to mean to me as a business. >>So, Jess, um, to that point, that Steven was just talking about how the organizations need to get smarter in terms of your communications that you're having with the folks in the C-suite, um, is that point, is that you, if they readily identified today, I mean, are, do they get it, um, are the, is the communication going out to their stakeholders, are the business priorities being aligned appropriately? I mean, what, what are organizations and specifically on that executive level, what are they doing right now? Um, in terms of, of preparation in terms of protections that, that, uh, again, are so necessary, I would think. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think we do see customers truly making strides to solving the problem. There's not a one facet that, you know, one solution fits all problem either, right? So there's, there's, there's, there's a whole productive nature of preventing ransomware detection and response. There's a readiness aspect of it, but what happens when you do get here now that recovery element to it, how do I recover in time in shape from a attack like this, the customers are evolving. They're understanding at the same time, they actually deploying appropriate technologies to, to put all the three aspects of solving the solution. What does Stickney like any of the security challenge? This is, uh, you know, there's not a one application solve all problems. Typically the OLAP and controls built by a multiple group and multiple parties to make sure you're ready to response towards a tech like this. >>And just to jump in, because one of the things I find fascinating as we go through this, the customer conversations I have, I've I've been doing, you know, sort of data protection for a long time. We won't get into that, but, but most of my time I'd spent talking to, you know, VPs of it. Maybe I'd see a CIO. It's fascinating. Now we will have conversations with boards of directors because it becomes such a big issue. And the focus is, is, is so different, right? Because they understand that this isn't just like a usual backup and recovery, or even the traditional disaster recovery that you might do from a natural disaster or some sort of hardware outage. They're seeing that there are so many stages now to an orchestrator recovery. These customers we work with where it's, it's, it's not just about, I need a little bit to technology. They're really looking for how do I operationalize all of this? You know, because once you're up at the board of directors, this is no longer a which product is better than X, Y, or Z. It's a discussion about who can really insulate me from the risk, because these, these can be business sending events. If you're not careful, >>Right? I mean, you're ready. This is a great point. And actually, Steven, I hadn't really thought about these fiduciary responsibilities that boards have. And obviously we think about operations. We think about PNL, right? We think about all, but I hadn't really thought about how also data protection. And I want to talk about data resiliency, how those come into play, as well as those board decisions are made. So let's talk about resiliency. I want you guys to explain this concept to me. Um, so the, you know, what, what's the distinction between protection and resiliency because to me, they're, they're maybe not exactly synonymous, but they're kind of cousins in some respects. So a Jaspreet, if you will talk about resiliency and how you define that. >>Sure. So I just see what I mentioned, right? The prediction was more about how do I actually save guard my data to actually, you know, recover from an incident right there, didn't say residency is all about being ready to respond in time, right? The forward-leaning pusher of making sure, you know, am I ready to not just recover from a very, uh, you know, age, old problem of application failure or, or human errors, but also a cyber attack or a, you know, a true age incident or a cyber recovery or security incident, which I'm prepared to respond in a appropriate SLA across the board. Right. Uh, and resiliency also goes beyond, you know, just the nature of data itself, right? You're, you're talking about applications, environments ecosystem to truly understand that the enterprise operation needs it. Data needs to be holistic. We talked through how do I get my business online, faster. Right. And that's the two nature of differentiation between, uh, protection going towards resiliency. >>And then as obviously driving a lot of your product development. Right. And, and, and I know you've got the data resilience, resiliency, cloud, um, service that you're offering now. So Steven blitz blitz, let's dive into that a little bit. Um, what was the Genesis of that offering and, and what do you see as its primary advantages to your clients? >>Yeah, so, so I think, I think there's, there's really those, those tier two key words there it's resiliency and it's cloud. So just brief, kind of walked about how your resiliency is that step forward. It's that shift left, whatever term you want to use. To me, the best part about the cloud is, and like I said, I've been doing this for a long time and I've yet to meet a customer. Who's come to me and said, I really wish I could spend more money and more time on my data protection infrastructure. I love sticking together, multiple separate products. It's just a great use of my time. Right? Nobody says that what they really say is, could you just solve this problem for me? This is, this is hard capacity planning and patching and upgrades and tying together all the different components from up to seven different vendors. >>This is hard work. And I just need this to work. I need this to work seamlessly. And so we, we, we looked at that cloud part and we said, well, when you think of cloud, you think of something that's flexible. You think of something that's on demand. You think of something that does the job for you. And so, you know, when we talk about this data resiliency cloud, it's about, you know, moving onto your front foot, getting aggressive, being ready for what's coming, but having, you know, frankly, Druva do it for you as opposed to saying here's some technology, good luck. You know, Mr. And Mrs. Customer, you know, we've got this solved for you, it's our job to take care of it. >>And to add to it, you know, this entire resiliency question cannot be solved to a simple, a software is approach is a fundamental belief because the same network, the same principles of operation, the same people involved, you know, what, what those are involved around the primary application that the resiliency aspect has to be air gap appropriately, not just at the data level, but ID and operations limit as well. Right? So a notion of a cloud, almost a social distancing for your data, right? And you're in your ego to the enterprise that, Hey, if anything happens to my primary network application stack data, my second Bree cloud, my redundancy cloud is ready to respond inappropriate, define SNDs to recover my Buddhist business holistically as a combination of integrating with SecOps as a combination of truly integrating disaster recovery elements with cyber recovery elements, truly understanding application recovery from a backup and recovery point of view. So holistically understanding the notion of resiliency and simplifying it to the elements of public cloud. Yes, sir. >>How do you bend that for your clients? Because as you both pointed out, they have different needs, right? And they have, they have different obviously different that they're involved in different sectors of different operations with different priorities and all that. How is the data resiliency cloud, uh, providing them with the kind of flexibility and aid, the kind of adaptability that you need in order to conform it for what you need and not necessarily, you know, what someone else in another sector is, is all about. >>So, so for me, there's a couple of things that, that is great about, about being the data resiliency cloud. One is that we've got well over 3,500 customers, which means that no matter what segment you're looking in, you're not going to be alone, right? If you're, if you're healthcare, if you're finance, if you're a manufacturing, Druva, Druva understands, you know, what you, and many of, of your similar sort of companies look like, which enables us to work in a lot of ways and enables us to understand what trends are happening across your industry, whether it's, you know, ransomware attacks that are coming across, you know, say manufacturing space and how those look or what data growth looks like, or what type of applications are important in those industries. So it's, it's really useful for us to be able to say, we understand these different verticals because we've got such a broad customer base. >>I think the second thing that comes in then is every customer. I meet the number one question they asked me, and Amanda might not be the first one, but it's the one they want to ask. It's always, how am I doing compared to everybody else? And so it's really useful to, to be able to sit down and say, look in your industry. This is what we see as the standards right now. So this is where you fall. You're sort of maybe a stage two, everybody else's at stage three will help you move forward. You, our industry as a whole is actually ahead of many of the other industries, but this is what's coming next for it for others. And so it's really useful for those customers to understand where they sit in respect to, to sort of the broader marketplace. And so that's one of the values I think we bring is that we do have such a broad understanding of our customers because we are a service as opposed to just selling software. >>Yeah. And those customers too, um, as you've talked about, they're looking maybe at their, their, their competitive landscape and trying to decide, okay, are we keeping up with the Joneses, so to speak? Um, but all of you, all of us, we're all trying to, we're trying to keep up with the bad guys. And so in terms of that going forward, what does that challenge for you at Druva in terms of being anticipatory in terms of trying to recognize, uh, their trends and their movements and, and therefore we're thinking so that you can be that, that great, uh, protective mechanism, you can be that prophylactic measure that stands between a company and something bad from happening. >>So I I'll start. And then, uh, it's funny cause, uh, you know, just breed and I had just this morning, we were actually talking about some of the future of ransomware protection and one of the things that we are using a lot in driven, and I get every company says they're doing it is the use of AIML, especially in detecting, uh, sort of unusual trends. Um, but, but you know, but I think we're different than most because the AIML we use is again, across, you know, two and a half billion backups every year, right? Because we, we get, we get visibility across everybody. So it's not just isolated, but we're looking at things like, you know, unusual access patterns in the data and usual access patterns based on administrators, because like Jaspreet said, said at the beginning, one of the things we see the ransomware attackers doing is they're trying to get entire control of your environment because if I control your environment, if I control your phone system, your email, I can get control of your backup application and delete everything. >>So we're even doing things to sort of prevent, oh, you know, we were getting unusual administrative access patterns. Let's stop that. We're getting unusual recovery patterns. Maybe that's somebody trying to steal data out. Let's track that. So our use of AIML is across a much broader data set than anybody else. And it's looking at a lot more than just, you know, sort of data, data pattern changes took to a much broader set of things. And, and basically, again, it's, it's sort of a, a bi-weekly meeting we have where Jaspreet comes in with more ideas that basically for our, for, for our team to start to go, what else can we do? Because the landscape keeps changing. >>And on top of it, I think also if you think about data protection or even data storage was never designed from a security point of view, it was always designed from a point of view of recoverability of data tool. Application issues are basically not corruption, but security or the thinking help us also fundamentally understand how do we think about elements of zero trust all around the platform and how do you make sure to what Steven mentioned, if your IDP gets compromised, if you do have a bad actor, enter a data protection solution, make us, how do you still make sure levels of automatization immutability like multiple levels of control that it plays to make sure no bad actor take construct control and true recoverability resiliency is possible across a variety of scenarios and Trudy customer driven SLA. So both foundationally, uh, we've, we've truly built something which is now, uh, it's very deep in and focused on security. The same time as Steven mentioned to understanding of customer landscape really helps us understand bad actors thought more, better, and more faster than many of our, uh, in the industry competition. >>Well, the need is great. That's for sure. And gentlemen, I want to thank you for the time today to talk about, uh, what Druva is doing and wish you continued success down the road. Thanks to you both. >>Thank >>You. All right. We've been talking about data, keeping it safe, keeping your data safe. That's what Druva is all about. And I'm John Walls and you've been watching the cube.