>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante we are on day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019. Welcoming a couple of guests to theCube. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure, Nathan welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks, thanks very much. >> Lisa: And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Sutliff, director of systems engineering and the America's data center, welcome to the Cube Tom. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: It's howdy you all. >> Howdy you all, okay. Thank you, it took the wicked smart guy from Boston to figure that out. >> A local. >> All right, so you all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure, you guys have been partners now since, Nathan we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco, Pure partnership evolution, better together? What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? >> Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment and think about Charlie Giancarlo from Cisco we've got a lot of just common, cross pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level, Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well, we had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco intersight, so we are first and only to have storage integration of the Cisco intersight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console, so a lot of simplicity, just single SaaS interface for managing everything. >> Tom why Pure, why first with them? >> Well you know Nathan he articulated it well, we can look at the executive level, we talked about Charlie, but even, you know all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churn them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done, our customers see that and it's really helped drive our goal to market together it's really a very strong strategy. >> So there's a CVD around this is that right? >> Yeah there's many there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially we might do one or two things well, we do a lot of things well I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVD's but more than that. >> So this really started in the field if I understand correctly is that right? [Nathan] - Yes. >> So I always look for these deals and say is it a Barney deal, you know Barney deal I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on then you say okay it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what, hey we should you know a customer wants us to work together and then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources and what does that look like? >> I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective we fill in a lot of each others gaps so that's really where it started was having the success in the field and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVD's, the intersight integration, et cetera. >> So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI for audience members who it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? >> I say it's another better together story, for example we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape we have Cisco hyper flex the HX managing the database portion, we have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the Hanna portion, and really it all comes down to single console which is intersight. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. >> So from a customer conversation perspective let's go back to you know we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment. Going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, FEEdi, and there's FlashStack like 31 flavors of FlashStack right. What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI when you guys come into play? Obviously FlashStack being I mentioned a number of flavors of that have been around for awhile, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? >> You know there's a clear delineation between a hyper convergence, our HX platform, a hyper flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStacks. If you look at a FlashStack it's an all in one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's you know scalable, something that's a highly dense tier one application. Latency obviously plays into this you know, I'd say it's a little less with the hyper flex platform and hyper convergence, much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play it does many of the similar same things but you know we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space so. But it's really about scalability, ease of use, some of them are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise. But we can sell them across anywhere whether it be public sector, commercial, mid market, smaller customers. But they each have use cases that they fit in very well. >> This morning in the key notes we heard a lot about API's, I want to get into Multi Cloud in a second but before I do we talk a lot about infrastructures code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet I've often said on theCUBE that they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructures code, how does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on the roadmap? >> Nathan: So from DevNet can you take that one? >> Well I can say yes it is a play, if you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually working with our API's, API's that we work with separate with other vendors too that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago and it was really built off of that development effort so that's critical for us going forward here there's a lot that we're doing I know we're going to talk about intersight and some other things where that was a key element of it. >> Yeah so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. >> And Cisco DevNet. >> And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember, you had many many booths, very specialized, then you have CCIE's learning python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, edge comes in. Anything you'd add Nathan to sort of programmability? >> So I think just from day one from Pure Storage just having our restful API interface, having code.purestorage.com we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy for to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly, and honestly evidence of that is in intersight itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that restful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI Ops of Pure One and bring it into intersight, be able to get intersight to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. >> What do we need to know about intersight? Add some color there, what is it, how's it work, what's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? >> So if I look at, going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper converge, it's often really a story of simplicity right? Customers want something simple for the data center, they know they can get it out in the Cloud but they can't always run their workloads out in the external Cloud. So simplicity is for intersight, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it, to get really specific imagine a VMware administrator is able to in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console so doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles, gets that Cloud like experience and that's what intersight delivers. So you get that simplicity whether its converged or hyper converged with intersight. >> Whether it's in the Cloud, it's the Edge, it's the Branch, Hybrid Cloud, instead of having to manage it I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage, compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console world wide no matter where they sit. >> So I want to talk about Multi Cloud if we can. So if I look at the players in Multi Cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, you partner with all of those pretty much I think. AWS is not on the list but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the Multi Cloud scene but they're not going after Multi Cloud, Cisco was a relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a Cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate, you've got companies that don't have a Cloud like Cisco that want to participate, where does Pure fit in to that Multi Cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? >> Well I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and Multi Cloud is the same approach to Multi Cloud and that is I'd call it open Multi Cloud. As opposed to having, forcing a single type of hyper visor on one side or a single Cloud, external Cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app, anywhere? How do we appear and provide the data fabric having the most efficient amenity of fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads, and we do that now with Pure Flash right on premises, Cloud block store out in the Cloud, our ability to Cloud snap to Azure, to AWS, and that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI anywhere really that compeletes the any workload anywhere story, and keeping it open so it's not just one hyper visor or one Cloud provider on the other side. >> So you be the data plane in that equation, with the management of that data plane, and Cisco is the overall management framework the control plane I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well, and we're part of essentially the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really upleveling for example EBS to an enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before, now we have something that whether you're on hardware on premises or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. >> So let's look at this in the real world in a customer environment, talk to me about whatever kind of whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you, what are the business benefits that, we'll use delta Airlines as an example, what would they get out of this if they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers? What's that you know TCO, ROI, what are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? >> So I'd say they get essentially a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic gap, the sync would take days, the SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice. You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application and I know it could run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere, and it's the same story essentially now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep essentially the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it consistent no matter where it is, freeze that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. >> So internal operations can be dialed way up which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects, and the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of this stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. >> Exactly, yeah you can manage if you look at ACI you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric again wherever it may be, and there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application you look at the robustness of that on the network and the network here us absolutely critical, none of this is going to run I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the Cloud, it could be in the Branch, you still want the same level of performance the SLA, the five nines and that's where the network comes in that's what's critical. >> Well and the security piece as well. >> Absolutely. >> You guys are largely coming at the Multi Cloud from of course the network strength that you have but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Talk about security and it's importance and so on. >> Well I think the security I mean one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make realtime decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally obviously you have firewall and you try to keep everything out but a lot of what will happen a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. So this is able to look at all of the flows, at every single packet the flow of the application and the information to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power a lot of storage and a lot of capacity but you know that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play, our security team is actually out selling that in addition to the data center teams. >> So is Wallingford Yankee's country or Red Sox country? >> Oh it's right on the border so I've got my in laws Yankee's, my parents Redsox, so it's very difficult at home. >> You're a Pat's fan of course, did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? >> Tom: No not at all. >> Oh you felt good? >> Maybe 19 and O this year we'll see. >> And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? >> I try to be it's hard. >> Well you know this company is Warrior's so we can talk NBA too. >> You bet! >> There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now. Not so much for our team but. (laughter) >> Lisa: You never know! >> You never know. >> I had to try to be Switzerland too cause I was the West Coaster with the East Coaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom last question for you, whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today as we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has we talked about that, that Cisco has as well, what are some of the things that as a partner as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there, what is Ciscos reaction to that news? >> Well the thing with Pure and it preceded this conference but you know I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas, it's just the innovation which is pretty incredible. You know you kind of have the big four products here but primarily with the Flash arrays the CI platforms, the Flash blades, what's going on with Pure one, that's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi Cloud. We talked about the validated designs, this is really going to lead us to almost like it's kind of funny when you have an innovative partner you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing work at them or what have you. It's like now we really innovated again, 12, 15 months later we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. >> Alright well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE today we appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of this Cisco Pure partnership, thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE ya'll from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Male Voiceover: Live, from San Diego, California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live US 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are day one of our coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. We're going to be here for three days of coverage but a great day so far and we're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni Kent Christensen the Practice Director from Insight with the Cloud & Data Center at Transformation Group. Kent, welcome back! >> Thank you. It's been a little while. >> It has been a little while. So give our audience a little overview of Insight your partnership with Cisco and some of the history of how you got to Insight. >> Yeah so you remember us as Data Link we were a smaller company than we are now. Focusing on Cloud and data center transformation. We've talked at Dell events, CFC events things like that. But we were a Cisco partner for about 10 years and recently we were acquired and we did what the name sounds like, Cloud and data center transformation. We've talked about Cloud on the channel and all these other things. Insight acquired us. Insight has kind of four major service solution sets if you would. Some people look at them as a supply chain company and it's a great, large supply chain company. Microsoft's largest global partner. Some people understand it for the device and use the devices that's called Connective Workforce. Each of these are pretty big businesses you know, compared to where we are. What was Data Link is now what's called Cloud and Data Center Transformation. So we're helping people with the journey to the Cloud and the Hybrid Cloud and all that other stuff. And Cisco is right dead center in the middle of that and then the fourth one is really exciting. It's called Data and Digital Innovation and that's a couple of companies. Blue Metal, Cardinal etc. Again, a thousand people. Microsoft ILT and AI partner of the year. So all of that is a pretty large channel organization if you would. >> That's great stuff Kent. We love to talk to the channel as the folks in Wall Street do. It like you know, we do a channel check. Okay, You know, Cisco's got a few areas that have you know, stronger growth in the market over all. Security's doing well, a few other spaces on that are you know growing faster over all than the market and helping >> Kent: Absolutely >> grow where Cisco's going, so give us the reality. What's happening with your customers? What's driving you know the most growth in your business and you know, where is Cisco kind of leading the pack? >> So we're doing really well with Cisco and I don't know if it's because we're helping clients build solutions that truly lead to business outcomes. We're not order takers. So we're actually moving up we're now Cisco's fourth largest partner. We're growing well high single digits growth which is pretty phenomenal on such a big number. We're talking a billion dollars now in growing that level and there's a number of reasons. You know, some of it is there's a lot of great technology we can get into some of those. We see the economy as being pretty good not bad yet. You know everybody's worried about what might happen. You mentioned security, we can get into a little bit of that. That's driving a lot of network refresh and stuff like that. You know and a little bit of intra-company you know that word getting our stuff together so this large company with 15000 customers acquires a company with 2000 customers and now we're getting introduced into the 15000 with less friction. So that's helping us and that's helping our Cisco Business. >> Lisa: See here we are at Cisco Live. The thirtieth time that they had done a customer partner event. The network has not only changed dramatically since their first event in '89 which was called Networkers I believe. >> KENT: Yeah. >> But networking technology has also massively changed you mentioned security. And now in this multi-cloud world no longer can you just put a firewall around a data center right? Obviously that doesn't work. We have this core Cloud edge very amorphous environments. Proliferation of mobile, of mobile data traversing the networks. Talk to us about when you're talking with customers who need to transform their data centers where do you start from a networking conversation perspective? Where automation comes in, where security comes in? >> You know, a lot of the Cloud native transformation tends to be the edge of the network. You know conversion, infrastructure, stuff like that that's on the edge. The network security guys which I'm not, you know, I work with them very closely but we almost separate ourselves out from a data center networking and security. But security's end to end to your point, right? I've got software to find access. I've got mobile access points. I've got you know, Tetration. I've got all of these products that are helping people that in the past they were just patching holes in the dyke. You know, hey this happened let's put this software product in. This happened, let's put this in. We actually built a security practice like the last 3 or 4 years ago, it's growing. You know the number of people that are, whether it's regulation, compliance, you know. "I got some real problem. I think I've got a problem and I don't know what it is." Our ability to come back and sit down and say let's evaluate what your situation is. So I was talking to the networking guys and said wow. Enterprise networking's up, way up. What's driving that, the need to transform or is that, you know what is it? And they're like a lot of times it's something along security that's making them step back and re-evaluate and then sometimes that translates into an entire network refresh. >> Stu: So Kent you mentioned Cisco Tetration and that's one I've heard a number of times having some growth. What else, what are some of the you know hot products out there in your customer base? >> ISE, Software to Find, SD Wan, SD Access. >> Stu: Yeah, so one of the things I just want to understand Cisco actually has a few solutions in some of those areas. Any specific products that you call out or you know or that'd be mentioned? >> Kent: In the enterprise networking I wouldn't go through each and every individual one. I think, this is my view as the laymen right? 'Cause I'm the data center guy and here's the security guy and here's the networking guy. I think when Cisco started acquiring all these security companies 3 years ago and you know watched it and it looked like a patchwork quilt and said this stuff doesn't fit together? Now it fits together that story is really solid. And so we've got clients that had the luxury of either saying I'm going to do a refresh because I don't want to keep plugging holes and maybe my technology was ready for it anyway. And there's a lot of reasons to refresh right? My technology's due. Digital transformation, I need to get my network ready for IoT etc. But I keep hearing security over and over right? I've got compliance and regulations and all of this other stuff. >> Yeah but in your core space the data center world and any products that are kind of leading the charge right now? >> You know one of the things that's happening in data center from a Cisco perspective 'cause they're babies right? Ten years old in data center. They didn't really have data center before that. And we were there at the beginning and that's really how CDCT built our data center practice so you know when you talk multi-cloud at the end of the day even if I'm Cloud first I'm going to end up with some of these mission-critical workloads. They might be boring but they're running the company. They're not the innovative Dev-Ops, IoT, AI thing that seems cool. They're running the company and that's still a converged or a hyper-converged play. And some of those you know there's a lot of opportunities we've been talking about all day with the Cisco BU's. Some of those are ready for refresh right so there's a great opportunity to just to go in and say okay what's next? You know, we've added you know the latest server technology. We've added all these things in the server technology. Obviously all flash and the storage technologies and all of that so that's huge. And then you know Cisco continues to innovate in data center solutions with things like HyperFlex which we've talked a little bit about. And it started off a little slow because again just like they were in servers why are they here? Why are they in hyper-converge? So I get it. And now that product is fully improved and improved and improved and we're seeing tremendous growth there and I think the luxury they have on a data center solution is that some of the other guys have to do a or. "Hey, I'm the leading hyper-converge technology but it's me or everybody else." Right? And then Cisco's an end that I can connect those things together. >> So let's talk about some customer examples you can feel free to anonymize these. I'm seeing a smile on your face. When you come into an organization whether it's a 100 year old bank or it's a born of the Cloud or maybe a smaller more nimble organization that needs to undergo transformation data center transformation. What is the conversation like with respect to helping them take all of these disparate presumably disparate solutions? Whether they're 10-15 different security solutions. How does Insight come in and help them I don't want to say integrate but almost plug these things in together to extract value and help them make sure that what they're implementing from a technology perspective is necessary and also an accelerator of their business? >> Yeah, there's a lot there. So we have this... A year ago everybody wanted to talk about Cloud and then you had the security guys but now you have a lot of change agents with transformation in their title right? And so we have this belief. You're not going to digitally transform. Now there are people that are born digital but companies that were buying Cisco 10 years ago need to go through a digital transformation and you can't go through a digital transformation until you have a data center transformation or an IT transformation. So we've done studies. What slows people down? What makes these fail? Legacy stuff, security concerns I mean these are the top 3 things right. Budget. I was just running the company. And so we start there. Where do you want to get to? And then most of it is let's understand what you have. What your objectives are as an organization. "I want to get to this. I want to get to that." Well before we start talking about technologies. It's very, it's very services oriented. I can't just go in there and throw you a bomb and say this is going to fix your problem 'cause everybody's different. So it is very custom and very services oriented. >> Lisa: But you're saying... >> Stu: I was just going to say it's a pattern I've seen quite a bit for the last couple of years. Step 1 is modernize the platform and then step 2 you can worry about your data and application story on top of that in that multi-cloud world that you live in. >> And step 1 admit you have a problem. >> Yeah. >> (Lisa laughs) >> So we actually did a study you know we do this and we're like. Why does everybody keep stalling why have we been stuck in this nobody's refreshing things and stuff like that? Well there's a lot of new technology they don't get it. But you know do you want to digitally transform? Understand what you need to do. But we ask questions like rate your IT infrastructure just rate it B-minus. Across a lot of large companies that was the grade they gave themselves. So there's a lot of opportunity to say: Okay where do you want to be and where do we start? >> Yeah, 90 percent of people think they are above average drivers. So... >> Drivers? But they think they have a B-Minus in IT infrastructure and it's like Do you consider that a problem? >> Yeah. >> So once you as we wrap here in the next minute or so. Once you get them to admit yeah there's problems here that Insight and other partners come in and improve. Data center transformation, modernizing that infrastructure but it's got to be concurrent with starting to modernize and transform other areas right? >> Absolutely. So you know there's so many places you could start. Sometimes you just go and say well what's your appetite? Every once in a while you get somebody who's ready to go through an entire transformational process. You know 20 million dollars or more of whatever and we get those opportunities those are awesome. Now we get to start back and figure out where you want to be and how to get there most efficiently. A lot of people have to pick and choose. You know, what's your concern right now? And so we'll help them figure that out and again it could be security it could be you know how many people... We have over a thousand enterprise customers running Sequel 2008. That's a problem right? Because that's end of support within a year. That's a problem that's an opportunity. You know so they are still trying to figure out these things. And then a picture of where I want to get to. Which we've kind of always said and that's where that Digital Innovation Group they've got all these AI projects and as we sit here and talk about those things that are kind of born in the Cloud but they're coming towards the infrastructure. It was easy to get a GPU in the Cloud but I'm going to have to start... And so we have actually have all the latest Cisco technology and storage technology of AI stuff in our labs and stuff like that so there's a lot going on. Our CEO would say "It's a really exciting time to be in this business." >> It sounds like it! I wish we had more time to start digging through that but you'll have to come back Kent. >> Okay. >> Alright thanks for joining us. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> With Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live. Day 1 of our coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> From Washington D.C. it's theCUBE. Covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019 here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest off the keynote stage this morning Bailey Szeto who is the Vice President of Customer and Seller Experience IT at Cisco. Thanks for coming and joining us. >> My pleasure. >> All right so Bailey, I've actually, you know I've watched, and partnered, and worked with Cisco my entire career but you actually changed my view of something about Cisco in your keynote this morning. And that's, you know, you said that 99% of Cisco's 50 billion dollars plus is transacted online so I should be thinking of you more as like Amazon.com you know, than as, you know the networking giant I've know my entire career. >> Well You know it's certainly true that most of our revenue comes through our online presence but it's perhaps in a different manner than what you're thinking right? So obviously we do do some business direct and we might have some stragglers selling, buying something with a credit card, but that's not the bulk of our business. The bulk of our business is through primarily partners, resellers and when I say online I meant B to B transactions. >> No no. I totally understand Bailey and what I love is you're in Cisco IT. >> That's right. >> And therefore we're not going to talk about a lot of the networking pieces. We're going to talk about what runs Cisco's business and you have the pieces and you know client success and support and all those run, and even, I didn't even realize the employee engagement all runs through you know Cisco.com >> That's right. >> And I love you did a nice little video. Gave all of those that have been in the industry. You kind of go through and look at the history of like oh okay there's the HTML stuff I used to code. >> That's right, that's right. >> Back in the 90s through all of the updates and yeah we definitely-- >> I was just expecting the little triangle with the guy like shoveling dirt under construction. You know the shovel right? >> Yeah the 404 not found. >> That's right, that's right. >> I know if I go to Cisco.com/go/product name that usually was a short cut to get me to some of the things I care about but for those people who weren't here for the key note or who might not know as much give us a little bit about you know your purview and kind of the scale and scope of what you do. >> Yeah so at Cisco I'm in Cisco IT. But I'm responsible for supporting all of the revenue generation portions of the company. So that's specifically marketing and what they do, sales and what sales does. Cisco services is a very big part of our company so I support the services organization. And most recently Cisco's been on a journey to really kind of move from a once and done hardware sales motion to a full reoccurring revenue type of stream. So we've stood up the whole customer success motion. And so I run the IT portions of that as well. And last but not least you heard me mention that 85% of our revenue actually comes through our partners. So I support all the systems that are partners interact with as well. >> Yeah it's interesting so we've done theCUBE at Cisco Live the last two years. >> Sure. >> And there's a observation I made a year ago when I started going to that show. And it was you know, if I'm a networking person but this applies to you know most people in IT, I used to manage stuff I could touch and go, I understand where it is and how I touch it and everything. Now a lot of what I have to deal with is outside of my purview and therefore I need to get into that environment kind of pair that with you know companies like yourself that are inquisitive. And so you have lots of change going on and lots of things that are in your environment there so we know change is the only constant in our industry. >> Without a doubt. >> So maybe give us a little bit of those dynamics and how that impact what's happening in your world. >> Yeah so I mean we talked a bit about my responsibilities and one of this is Cisco.com It's probably one of the more important platforms that I'm responsible for from an IT perspective. But I also mentioned that Cisco's a very, we grow through acquisitions a lot. It's one of our basic business strategies. And so every time we buy a company it's a big rush to kind of take that acquired company and integrate their online presence into Cisco.com right? So once a company is acquired we don't want people to think of it as a separate company both from a kind of marketing perspective but more importantly we're actually integrating that product into our Cisco ecosystem as well. So just having to move all that technology into Cisco.com is certainly a big job. But I think you are maybe asking this from a different perspective as well which is to say okay you know new technology is being introduced all the time and while it makes sense from a company portfolio perspective I think as a former IT person you're going to agree with me it makes our jobs a little bit more difficult. It's both a blessing and a curse right? From the perspective it's a blessing in that we get this great new technology to incorporate and use in our running of the business but it also adds a lot of complexity and so it's pretty important that we have both the systems and processes to be able to manage all that complexity in our infrastructure really. >> All right so infrastructure monitoring. >> Yes. >> Something you spent a lot of time talking about. I guess I'll set it up when I talked to my friends in the networking space these days or a lot of it, the joke is if you say single pane of glass they are going to spell it P-A-I-N because we understand that there's not one tool to rule them all. >> Right. >> Yes that I might have a primary piece but in the virtualization world I had to plug in to V Center and you know Cisco has you know you laid out a broad portfolio of various tools up and down and across the stack from you know security down to physical and upper layer and plus all the acquisitions. So can you lay out a little bit as to you know where ScienceLogic fits and there's a number of Cisco's tooling that that integrates in with. >> Yeah so when I talked about our journey with ScienceLogic you know Cisco of course has a number of tool and capabilities to take care of the pieces that we are known for. For example Application Dynamics is a great company that we bought and provides great insight into application health. But obviously in a network perspective right we have Cloud Management software, security software that type of thing and so I think what we realized in Cisco IT what my team realized is that it really isn't about a single system to rule them all it's about trying to find multiple platforms that can work together and really share data so as to drive richer insights. And so I think maybe the industry has been on a bit of a wrong path think it's you know it's not Lord of The Rings, one ring to rule them all or whatever right? It's about being able to use multiple applications but having the right data insides move around as needed so that depending on your lens or your role in IT whether you're a network guy or an application guy that you're going to use the tool that's more most natural to yourself but pulling in the right amount of data from those other parts to be able to get the right insight. >> Yeah I saw your closing slide mirrored the theme we've seen at the show of superheroes. So the super power everybody needs in IT today is how do I leverage my data and we understand that it probably takes more like the Avengers to be able to put those together because data is everywhere. >> Yeah the funny thing is that that wasn't actually a set theme. I think we must all have Avengers on our mind because everyone independently came up with the super hero concept. >> Yeah no spoilers on End Game either way though. >> That's right, that's right. >> Excellent so you know can you just bring us inside of some of that ScienceLogic journey? My understanding you're probably the largest enterprised employment of it so you know we always love to talk about scale and what that means and how it's been in your viewpoint. >> Yeah you know we actually before ScienceLogic we actually had our own system that Cisco IT wrote right and so you know as IT professionals we always think we can do it better than anyone else but we've reached a point where just so much technology and so much complexity came to the market that we really wanted to find a solution that would really kind of enable us to grow into the future with all the things that are happening right whether you're talking about Virtualization with Containers or you know Cloud native applications or Multicloud, these are all technology trends that have made our jobs in IT incredibly complex. And so we started to look for what could we replace our home grown monitoring platform with and ultimately we decided that ScienceLogic was the best fit for us. And since we've deployed it we as with most things we tend to stretch the scale especially with our vendors and so I think we are the largest ScienceLogic enterprise customer at this point. But we are seeing incredible benefits in terms of being able to connect ScienceLogic's Infrastructure Monitoring with our own Application Dynamics and really marry the two for those insightful bits that we get from both. >> All right so one of the big themed discussion here is that journey toward AI Ops. >> Yes. >> While we speak actually I've got a team in Mountainview that is at the DevNet Create Show which Cisco helped organize. >> Sure. >> We're doing two days of interviews there and DevSecOps is probably one of the key topics their going to be talking about. In your keynote this morning I heard IT Ops in a discussion there so bring us inside a little bit organizationally you know what you're seeing you know your viewpoint on these various trends that are you know helping to modernize you know transform operations. >> Yeah I think from a operations organization standpoint you're going to see the applications team and the infrastructure team work even closer together. Maybe one of the things that didn't really make super clear in my keynote this morning is I actually work on kind of the app side of the house right? I'm the direct interface to the business. And as such I actually don't interface with ScienceLogic directly but I'm a strong partner with my infrastructure team who are I think they are all sitting over there that do run ScienceLogic right and so in today's world you really can't just say oh this is infa problem they are going to deal with it. Because of that really big mix of well is it an infrastructure problem, is it an application health problem? And a lot of times it's both. And so organizationally it might be two separate organizations but the need to work together is you know even greater today than ever before. >> You're preaching to the choir. I mean when we launched Virtualization and then later when Containers came around there was the nirvana that oh I'm going to have some unit of infrastructure where the application people just don't need to worry about it. >> Right. >> You know serverless from it's name seems to imply that but we understand that eventually you know there's networking, there's storage, there's compute all underneath these kind of things. >> That's right. >> It's just repackaging so you know the applications important you know I'm long time infrastructure guy. >> That's right >> But, the number one rule is the reason we are here is to run that application and make sure your data you know gets where it needs to be otherwise you know we're not here just to power things. >> That's right. And I just realized I probably would get in trouble if I said it's actually the application, infrastructure, and of course the network all has to work together. >> Yeah well that's a given. Can you just we talked a little bit about App Dynamics you know when I think about Cisco you know broad portfolio, you know the SD-WAN, the ACI how do some of those fit into this discussion are there tie ins with what ScienceLogic is doing? >> It absolutely does. So as I talked about it when we talked about that collection of super heroes it's not a single super hero it's not a duo either it's really a big team. It's The Avengers right? And so when you think about Cisco's portfolio we have a lot of additional components needed to provide that modern operating IT operating platform right? So we talked about a lot about Application Dynamics we talked about ScienceLogic but what Cisco brings to the mix is things like ACI, Tetration, Policy Enforcement, Multicloud Management. So all those things again have to work together like The Avengers do to provide that modern platform. >> Yeah you mentioned multicloud and I know in your keynote you talked about AWS and GCP. >> That's right. >> How's Cloud changing things in your world? >> It absolutely is again it's I'll go back to the it's both a blessing and a curse right? The blessing is enormous capability that we get from the Cloud, enormous flexibility. As and example using Cisco.com as an example we host a lot of you know a lot of public information about our products and websites and data sheets and that type of thing on Cisco.com. And then a couple years ago we decided we're going to refresh the engagement of Cisco.com We wanted to make it much more personalized. We wanted to incorporate video. Those are all great things but the moment you try to throw video and guess what? Native video whether it be in English or French or Chinese or Japanese depending on where you are well that put an enormous strain on our infrastructure and if you had to travel if the packets had to travel from Japan to the United States to our data center that would slow things down. So we took advantage of Public Cloud to really kind of push out the content to the edges so that we could get localized content as close to the customer as possible. That's the great thing about it. But again the management of that increasing complexity right so both a blessing and a curse. AWS, GCP, we are using for doing a lot of video streaming work. And so again great capabilities from that platform as well. >> All right so we saw this week a lot of announcements of some of the integrations Service Now and App Dynamics were two of the ones that highlighted that I think impacted you. Anything from the announcements that is particularly excited you and I guess final on that is there anything roadmap wise that you know you'd be looking directionally for this phase to evolve towards? >> Yeah I think I was excited to see in fact that's one of the main reasons why we chose ScienceLogic in the first place was the quality and the amount of integrations that they have right? And so we're also a big Service Now customer and we see the benefits of automatically open cases in Service Now when ScienceLogic detects an issue as an example right? And I would say going forward we'll be looking to either have out of the box or if needed you know Cisco IT will build something even more integrations with the Cisco products. We already have App Dynamics but as I mentioned we have a lot of other components that are critical to the network and so we'll be looking for tighter integration and all this to drive really drive data together so that we can get to what I think what most people at this conference are hoping to achieve which is really driving towards automation and AI Ops right? So that's really the desire for I think for everyone attending this conference. It's certainly our desire in Cisco IT. And you know I'm looking forward to working with ScienceLogic to building out that roadmap. >> You know so I guess final question for you you talked about that automation, where are you when it comes to we look at you know things like machine learning and automation which if you listen to the analyst that spoke this morning is like you want to make sure you separate those things. >> That's right. >> We understand you know any of us that have done process and operations is you know you can automate a really bad process and it's not a good thing. >> That's right, that's right. >> So where are you on that journey? What do you see? You know what are the barriers that keep us from kind of the nirvana where you know oh geez I can actually just seal off the data center and let everything run? >> Right I think it's funny you mentioned Cisco Live so actually I present on a topic of AI at Cisco Live as well. So what this other speaker talked about really hit home with me understanding what is AI really. Because I think there's a general perception in the press that it's like this magical fairy dust you can just sprinkle on everything and it like makes everything perfect right? AI is really good at pattern recognition but you still need to put some check points and really have human beings kind of check the work of AI right? And so you know we actually have seen data center outages not Cisco but in the press when AI runs amok right? And so I think the first step of automation that's a given. We want to do that but that involves a lot of human beings kind of looking at the data and deciding okay these sequence of events can be cured by this set of automation. AI Ops is a something that's a whole different thing if you followed the definition of AI to say okay let the computer do it all on its own. I don't think we're there yet. I think we have a ways to go. And I certainly wouldn't trust want to trust our you know multi billion dollar business to AI Ops at this point in time. >> Well Bailey there's an event we did a couple years ago with a couple professors from MIT that are really forward looking on this and they say it's racing with the machines because people plus machines will always do better >> Yes. >> Than people alone or machines alone and hopefully that keeps some of us that are a little bit worried about the Skynets of the world taking over from getting a little bit too paranoid all of a sudden. >> I totally agree with that statement. In fact the quote that jumps in my head is "Better together". And I'll close with ScienceLogic App Dynamics better together. People AI better together. >> All right well Bailey since you ended on a perfect quote there thank you so much for joining and I hope to see you at Cisco Live San Diego. >> Fantastic, my pleasure. >> All right and thank you so much for watching theCUBE as always, I'm Stu Miniman here at ScienceLogic 2019 in Washington D.C. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, here in Las Vegas, for VMworld 2018, with Day Three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, two sets. Our ninth year of covering VMworld, we're going to have like 96 interviews, a lot of content happening, lot of updates from the entrepreneurs, from the executives, and also the partnerships. In this segment we're going to be talking Cisco and Veeam. We got Stefan Renner who's the technical director of Global Alliances for Veeam, and Chris O'Brien, Technical Marketing Director at Cisco. Programmable networks, easy-to-use backup restore, disaster recovery, all those great stuff. >> You guys just get here from Omnia? (laughing) >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> It's a good party. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for havin' us. >> Do we look like that? (laughing) >> I feel like that. (laughing) >> You know, you guys have been very successful on the Veeam side. We had Peter McKay, the co-CEO on yesterday. Cisco has been very active and relevant in programmable DevOps, or DevNetOps, as it has been called in there. So the need to make things programmable and easy, are a nice combination. You guys have a partnership. How is the Cisco/Veeam partnership going, how did it start? Take a minute to explain, how it all came together, and what's the current situation of the partnership? Well, I think from a Cisco perspective, the partnership is going great, fantastic. They were Partner of the Year. What we're hearing from our customers is they want us to solve some of their problems around how do they scale and manage their data, right? I'm from the UCS Business Unit. We see an opportunity for us to bring UCS was built on programmability, right? We have the APIs, we have those capabilities. We started out with Veeam a few, I guess 18 months ago, maybe two years ago, really focusing on some solutions around our HyperPlex platform, and we released a number of validated designs. When we do these validated designs, it's not just Cisco doing the work. We're in the labs together, we're developing the solutions. >> With Veeam. >> With Veeam. All the engineering efforts, and then obviously, as you go through and you grow that solution, you really see an opportunity where you can enhance the solution. So things like automation, we want to bring that to the table, certainly, with our partner. >> And what's your contribution on this? Obviously, Veeam's role in the solution. Are you guys doing joint validations, or joint engineering? Talk about the integration piece with Cisco, why it's important. >> If you look back, maybe it's two years, right? I took on Veeam actually three years ago, three-and-a-half years ago, and when actually, we really started to kick off the thing with Cisco. So it's a bit more than two years, I would say it's three years, right? But in these days, a couple of years back, it's more about finding a right data protection platform, where we can host Veeam on. Meaning a backup server, right? And these days, it was more about back and recovery. Well, today we talk about hyper-availability. It's not only about backing up stuff or recovering stuff, it's about providing the whole platform, the whole orchestration layer for data availability. Back in these times, three years ago, it was about finding an s3260 or a c240 server of Cisco, which fits exactly the needs we need for Veeam to run on it, right? But over the last, now, 24 months, since Cisco really started HyperFlex and going into hyperconvergency, we partner with them to make sure we have the right data protection for this kind of solution. That's what you just talked about, talking about integrations. We really invested a lot of time and efforts on both fights, it's not only Veeam development, it's also trying to see Cisco develop, to integrate into HyperFlex, to make sure we can provide the right data protection for the customer needs are. >> So talk about the high availability, I just want to talk about that for a second, 'cause I think this really highlights one, the relationship, and the desire in the market for realtime data, whether it's for developers, or for applications, to integrate. High availability is about having data available and integrating into whatever that would be, whether it's a mishmash of application development, and routing across networks. This is a huge deal, this is not like a punchline. High availability used to be, oh, we have a data center where it's fault tolerant. There's a whole another new level that that's going to. Can you just talk what that means, because backing it up and making it available means something different now. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that. >> I do agree, because again, looking back, it was really about backing up and recovering stuff. If I look back couple of years, customers were looking for a solution, that are able to pull the VM out of the v-stream data center, make sure it's stored somewhere, and they can't get it back once it's deleted, right? >> Check. >> But now, if you look at Vmworld, right, we have it at Vmworld, it's all about automation, it's about APIs being true. I can integrate this data protection platform in my centralized management interfaces, making sure I have an orchestration layer on top of it, so it's not only about backing up and recovery anymore, it's about the whole stack from end-to-end, right? Getting data from A to Z, maybe get it offsite to an S3 storage for longterm retention. So, we really went from an on-premise, very small kind of solution stack to a big solution stack, going from a VM into the cloud, and overlaying that stuff. >> Stefan, I want you to comment on this, and of course I want to get your take as well. Talk about the time aspect of it, because you mentioned, okay, I can get it back, okay, got to get the data back. When you talk about making data available, the time series or the timeframe, is critical, in some cases, latency, nanoseconds, milliseconds. This is the new normal; you guys got to make that happen. Talk about that dynamic, are customers really doing that, obviously that want it, but what are some of the examples? >> No, they are, they are. In terms of speed, like in data protection and availability, if I talk about speed I really talk about SLAs, and the RTOs, and the RPOs, so how often do I backup, how often do I have a recovery point, that's what you just talked about, and how fast can I get a data application back once it's gone, or once it's deleted, or once it's discovered an issue in the data center. Again, over the last couple of years, that really involved because in the early days customers said, you know, I want to have that, but it's luxury, right, I don't want to pay for it, it's too expensive, I can't afford that. But looking in these days, and today, even at the conference, you talk to customers that say, I need it, it's critical, I cannot live a second without my data. So this kind of RTOs requirements, they really went down from, maybe a day, which was usual ten years back, to like five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, right now. That's maybe the maximum you can really afford as a customer, and that's where the integration part comes in, and all the stuff we do with Cisco, because with integration we can actually make sure that we can cover that, and get data back in ten minutes. >> So we're really talking about a whole new way of delivering infrastructure. If I go back to the early days of UCS and conversion infrastructure, yeah, we can support a thousand VMs, and they're like, how are you going to back a thousand VMs up? And they're like, uhhhhh, well, let's see, we're workin' on that. Today, you got your take in this platform approach, it's a fundamental part of cloud, developer, DevOps, and so I wonder if you can talk about, you know, when we were at Cisco Live, the DevNet area was one of the most exciting parts of the show. And if you think about traditional enterprise companies, really, not many, I think even one, has really done a good job with developers, it's Cisco. So where do developers play, is this a platform play, really, for cloud and hybrid infrastructure? I wonder if you can talk about that, the role of developers, and how you're approaching this mindset. >> Yeah, I think from our perspective, there's no downtime window, there's no scheduled windows of downtime, right? >> It's not allowed. >> We don't have that anymore. The way that we look at our infrastructure, we certainly want it to be robust, to address latencies, issues and concerns, and what we're doing with Veeam is really tweaking that infrastructure to make that data available when it's called on, so you can consume it as a developer, as a part of the DevOps team. All of our infrastructure, as you guys probably know, are all open systems, all policy-based models. So with these APIs being available, it allows developers to consume more, if they need to scale-out these infrastructures quickly, we can do it. We're certainly playing in the DevNet space, it's growing, we have our own separate conferences. >> The network becomes more and more important, every day, I mean, at a whole 'nother level. Talk about program ability, you got to be ready for anything Veeam wants to do with you, or whatever the customer wants with respect to high availability. >> Yeah. >> And as the definition changes, you got to be enabling that. >> Totally available if you can get to it through the network. (John laughing) And we certainly carry that all the way through the UCS fabric. >> Talk about Veeam strategy, because I think there's general perception that, oh, Veeam does backup for small- and medium-sized business, that's Veeam. And we had Peter McKay on yesterday, he said, "A third of our business is SMB, a third is commercial, a third is enterprise," number one. Number two is, you guys are getting into the orchestration and management for data availability. Can you talk about the extension of Veeam, in that regard? >> I want to actually grab on your number, because we talked about, oh, we got a thousand VMs, that needs to be backed up and recover. That was a couple of years back, Today, we talk more about ten thousand VMs. Customers actually here at the booth, I talked to customer that talked about ten thousand to twenty thousand VMs that needs to be available. Now I would call a customer that hosts ten thousand VMs no longer an SMB customer, right? That's more of the enterprise, and you're right, and I guess Peter McKay said the same. I didn't actually watch the video, so hopefully, I'm inline with him, but it's really he's, for sure, going into the enterprise, making sure the products actually fit the enterprise's needs. Talking about the orchestration piece, I mentioned before, Veeam Availability Orchestrator we recently announced and released, that's certainly a step into the enterprise market because an SMB customer, even a mid-range customer, they will not invest in an orchestration layer that provides the full capabilities of fade-over secondary data centers, and all that stuff. That's certainly an enterprise play, and that's also where the company's heading to, making sure we have the right fit for the still SMB customers, and mid-range customers, because I think they are still important to the business, right? I'm not saying they're unimportant. But also having the right products, and the scale. And I think scale is actually something we going to talk about anyway, in this conversation. The right scale, to even cover that customer, ten thousand VMs, twenty-thousand VMs, they are approaching us. >> I think the other big trend that we see, and I wonder if you guys could comment, is, again, data protection, backup, used to be an afterthought, and it also used to be kind of a one-size-fits-all. So that'd mean, almost by definition, you're either under-protected or over-protected, spending too much, or too little. Today you're offering much more granularity, and the like; it's a fundamental component of the platform that you're developing, and it's extending beyond just backup. Call it data protection, there's a security component, there's a DevOps and cloud piece, there's a management piece. Maybe you guys could give us your perspectives on those trends. >> Yeah, so short comment on that one, actually, in each and every one of my sessions I speak here, I always say, once you consider to replace your storage system, or your v-stream wired man, or you consider to use HCI, make sure you include data protection immediately, on Day One of your project, because, you're completely right, the last year or so, even still now, a lot of customers I'm going to, they tell me, oh, I replaced all my infrastructure last 6 months, 8 months, and now I want the data protection. Then I get in and I say, yeah, unfortunately, what you did on your infrastructure is completely wrong for the expectations and the requirements you have in data protection. So that's exactly what to talk about, you need to bring together those projects and make sure you bring them under one hood, and talk about this from Day One. Otherwise, you might get in to a wrong direction. >> Yeah, that whole-house view of the world. >> I think, from a Cisco perspective, we really look at, we're unifying the data, we have what your intentions are, your intentions are production apps, your intentions are data protection. I think through ACI we can certainly create the application profiles to make that happen. We carry through our fabric with the UCS system, so for us, we see ourselves as flexible enough to deliver all these options, obviously there's some improvements that we can bring, you know we were talkin' earlier. But that's part of the road map, and part of the way we want to go with Veeams. >> I think one of the things I'm impressed with Cisco about, and looking at the analysis, is that the network guys have always had the keys to the kingdom. You go back to IT, you go back twenty years, if you were a network guy, you ran the show. And you had storage guys came in, they became that same kind of tier, but the network was running everything, everything was sacred. Couldn't let the network go down. It ran offices, it ran branches. And then, when the cloud came, the network now with Cloud Native, and some of the stuff going on up at the stack, makes networking skills, people who think like a networking guy, really valuable, because the data needs to be networked. So, the data's now at the application, that's where the security is, so as you guys have your Veeam, you have needs, you're moving data around, you need more in Cisco, you're going to be better for him, so this is a nice dynamic. >> We're trying to instrument it so we understand what their needs are. If you look at AppDynamics, if you look at Tetration, all these things give us more and more visibility to make the right decisions, and hopefully those will all be automated down the road so we can move as fast as the business wants to. >> Well, and I think of things, you know people talk about air gaps for ransomware, but you need more than air gaps, you need analytics that identify anomalous behavior, and the corpus of backup data has all the data there, and if you can figure out how to analyze it, you're going to have a leg up. >> As you said, that's actually a good point because ransomware, and all that stuff, like Tetration, your project to analyze the network traffic and making sure-- I actually get informed, or I take an action, once I identify ransomware attacks, that's something that we can partner up with, because it would literally mean if Cisco identifies an attack, right, they can trigger automatically a backup or a snapshot backup of the data to make sure we actually have a backup right before the attack happens. So you can see a chain of activities and potential new products, or go to marketplace in the next couple of months and years. >> A lot of opportunities. >> Because there is a lot of stuff, and a lot of potential behind those technologies. >> And there's clear visibility from a customer standpoint, that we would report here on theCUBE, that's lookin' at nanosecs and things of that nature, where at the application, whether it's a V-map, or other things. Security and data has to be centric around the app, it decouples from the network so that you're not bumping into each other, you're helping each other, you're more effective. You help them, you guys help each other. This is the new stack model, this is the way it's going. >> I would say that's all what alliances is about, right? (laughing) It's why we have alliance business, right, because no one, neither Cisco nor us, we couldn't do it on our own, we always need a partner to do that. >> Guys, thanks for comin' and sharing the partnership news. I really think, and Alan Cohen, our CUBE guest this week, said, partnerships used to be a tennis match, now it's like soccer, a lot of things going on, multiple players, certainly you know that, Cisco's been doin' a lot of that for a while. Great stuff, thanks for coming on. Final question for you guys, big takeaways from VMworld 2018 this year. Comment, what's your thoughts, third day now, lookin' back, what's the theme here, what's the big story that people need to know about? >> Just from my experience, I've had a lot of conversations around security, and bringing it to our solution, more embedded within. I'm part of the Validated Design Program, and they're asking, at least the conversations that I've had on the floor here, has really been about showcasing some of the other aspects of Cisco, what we can bring from a security perspective to protect the data. I'm certainly bringing that home. >> Awesome. >> And what are you seeing? I just can continue what he said, because the most conversations I had is around scalability and still the data growth. We've been talking about that the last couple of years, but the more data you have, and the more VMs you have, the more challenging it is to protect it. It's all about scalability and making sure you can really cover and fulfill your needs. >> Well, congratulations on your success at Veeam, the numbers don't lie. You guys are doing very well. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations on Cisco, you guys have a clear line of sight on what you guys want to do with the network. >> Thanks. >> It's great to see, thanks for comin' on. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. CUBE coverage here, live, in Las Vegas. From VMworld 2018, it's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us, more Day Three coverage after this short break. (techno music)

(techno music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partner. >> Okay, welcome back everyone it's theCUBE live here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018 I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost Stu Miniman. So our third day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, the big story here is the transformation, the power of the network, it's becoming computable, it's a great, great story. Our next guest is Guru Chahal, who is the Vice President of Product, AVI Networks. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you, John. Thanks for having me John and Stuart. It's a pleasure being here again. >> So we just talking before the camera came on about STO cause Stu wants to go there right away, but we've got to hold off on that, but service meshes is certainly going to be a great thing with Kubernetes and containers but the story here is the changing nature and power of the network. Suzzy, who you came on with DevNet, was talking about the success of DevNet has been a combination of great timing, of open-source, hitting the network but making the network programmable, opening up new innovations. This is a really big thing, I want to get your reaction to this because Europe tied into this trend big time. What does that mean for people that are watching this? They're trying to grok the new way. What is this intent-based network? What's this programmable network? Is it the iPhone, kind of moment where for networks, where new apps are coming that we've never seen before? Or is it something different? What's your take? >> That's such a great example John, so just a fundamental transformation that iPhone had on how we think about telephony in general, we're at that sort of moment in the network. And the reason for that, frankly, is how we deploy applications, how we design applications, and where we deploy applications has fundamentally changed. You know 20 years ago, you had one choice to deploy an application and it was that server, right over there, in your data center. And today you can do it as a container, or bare-metal server, a virtual machine, on-prem or one of hundreds of data centers, public cloud data centers all over the world. And then architecturally, everything is moving from these monoliths to microservices, or much more tiny and more manageable components, and what that does to the network is fundamentally different from what's been going on in the network for the past couple of decades. It elevates the position of the network from just connectivity, to something that is fundamental to how these services talk to each other unlike 100 things that live inside a box and talk to each other, now you have 100 things on the network talking to each other. So think about what that does to you from a availability strategy perspective, from a security strategy perspective, from a surface area of security, from a monitoring perspective, I mean the reason why you see, I mean walk the show floor here, so much innovation in the network and the reason for that is instead of an enterprise running 1000 applications, within the next few years each enterprise is going to be running 100,000 applications and their budget is not going up 100 times so you need innovation, you need automation and that's where the intent-based movement comes in. >> So new opportunities are going to be created, new wealth creation, more innovation. What are you guys doing? Take a minute to explain why you guys are here with your company? What are you contributing, what's your role in the ecosystem, what's your product differentiations? What's the story? >> Yeah, great, so we play in the application services space. If you think about the network traditionally people have thought about it as connectivity, which is layer two, layer three, and then network services are the services that the network offers to an application, that's load balancing, it's application security, SSL offload, it's web application firewall and so on. So services that are tied to the application that's basically what our company is about. So we have a fabric-based platform, software only, the fabric can be instantiated on bare-metal appliances, or containers, or virtual machines, all centrally managed, and it's intent-based which means it's policy-driven. So you go to a single place you say, "please I need load balancing capabilities "for this application, I need SSL "and I need to turn on my web application firewall." And no matter where the application is, in Azure, in AWS or on-prem, or a mainframe, the fabric is able to instantiate that service automatically infront without the operator having to worry about where is it, what do I need to do, do I have enough capacity, none of that. >> Guru, in Chuck Robbins' keynote on Monday you talked about kind of the old way, this kind of bespoke, it was silos, it was like, well, oh, you know we have the wiring guys over here doing the physical layer two, layer three, four through seven is over there. Today it's software, up and down the stack, you know, changes a lot, maybe talk a little bit about that dynamic as to how applications, you know intent-based networking really is having, the application doesn't just use, but it's heavily involved with the network. >> So here's the single biggest thing that's driving this change, applications used to be secondary for IT in some sense, certainly infrastructure teams, and infrastructure was primal. And I had my ADCs and load balancers here and my routers and my switches and so on, and this is my infrastructure, now let's figure out how to fit the application on my infrastructure. And that world is gone. That's the old way. You can't hug your load balancers anymore that's (laughs) if you do that today, those days are, if not gone, they're almost nearing an end. And increasingly the infrastructure is going to live for applications. The center world is my need as a business to role out an application quickly, to understand how people are interacting with that application, to make changes to it in real time, and all of infrastructure is now wrapping itself around that notion. So intent-based networking, in our case, intent-based application services is all about how can I, in an automated way, quickly deploy load balancing, application security for applications, no matter where they are, how can I monitor the applications in real time. That's really what the movement is about. >> Well, that's a great point. I'd like to just add and get your thoughts on this, and react to another concept, to add to that is that you've got all that happening, okay, that's because of the cloud and great new tech but then you factor in that the programming models are changing too, so the perfect storm is everything that you've said, but now the expectation of the developer-- >> API. >> With open source-- >> Everything is in API. >> Has to be programmable and it's like the classic, let infrastructure take care of it's business but no one's got to do all this manual work. This is a huge dynamic and I think the DevNet story this year at Cisco Live really puts an exclamation point on the fact that this has got traction. We kind of know, we see open-source but from the networking world it's a whole new, essentially greenfield opportunity. You agree with that? >> Totally, I mean you know there's in most of our largest customers, and by the way we didn't talk about our solar business side, but just to give you a quick flavor for what our customer base looks like we primarily sell to Global 2000, three of the top five banks in the US are our customers, two of the top five banks in ME are our customers, 20% of the Fortune 50 are our customers, we've replaced traditional load balancing solutions and so on. And the primary reason, the number one reason is automation. And by automation, everybody talks about automation, but by automation what our customers mean is infrastructure as API. Simple things. I want to capture all the packets going to that application and I want to do that with a single REST API, I want to talk to an IP endpoint and say here's the REST API, give me all the traffic. Can you do that in your network today? Our customers can. >> What's the alternative, if they don't use APIs? >> Oh yeah, so you've got two choices, one you walk into your data center, turn on the SPAN port take all that traffic, take it to some sort of a monitoring fabric blah, blah, blah, three days later if you're lucky you get traffic. Second approach, call AWS tell them to turn on the SPAN port, and good luck with that. (laughs) So, you know increasingly you frankly don't have much of a choice, you need infrastructure to be-- >> Scale is also a tsunami of data coming in so one time is a massive problem, that's never going to happen, so people are going to give up-- >> Number of events, number of alerts, you know it's speed. Talk about the top three trends that are going on in our customer base, speed, speed, and speed. >> Okay, you've got some great clients. Why are they going with you, and how does someone engage with you guys? What do they do? Do they just call you up and say bring in some software, do I get a box, is it software, how do I configure it, how do they onboard? How do you guys engage with your customers? >> Right, so why do they buy us? Three quick reasons, one amazing automation fabric-approach central management. Two, amazing analytics to your point about great events, we want to help our customers address this deluge of events and things that are happening in the data center and provide great insight, so that's all built in to the product. And three, much more cost effective. I mean these traditional solutions, believe it or not, that have been around for 20 years, they're not just traditional, as in legacy, they're also extremely expensive. Our competitors sell load balancers at 84% gross margins. You know how many of my customers run their businesses at 84% gross margins? Zero. So how can you afford that, right? So those are three big reasons why they buy. How they get engaged with us is they typically have a public cloud project, they'll say alright, like Adobe, "they'll say alright, we need to go to Azure, "move the applications right away." Well that's easy for the CIO to say, in practice, that's a beast, right. So they need to get in there, they need to figure out how am I going to meet application SLAs on Azure, how am I going to do application availability, or security, or monitor these, and they could do a Google search or something and get that connected with us. Two, we're a Cisco partner, Cisco resells us, and Cisco is everywhere. So when people approach their trusted vendor, like Cisco, and say, "Cisco, "I've got this public cloud issue, "a network monitorization issue "and load balancing is a consistent thorn "in my neck, like, what do we do?" And Cisco goes, "oh we've got a great partner, "we resell their technology, I'd love "to help you understand more, and then "they pull us in, and we close." >> Yeah, that's a great point Guru, one of the things we've been talking to a lot of customers, is how do I manage and deal with my network when I don't own a lot of the pieces of the network. And that's the story we've been hearing. Cisco talking about multi-cloud. Up on stage, Chuck Robbins brought Diane Greene out and talked a lot about Kubernetes and STO, we know AVI Networks, I've seen your team at theCUBE con show, John was just at the Copenhagen show, I unfortunately missed that one, I'll be back at the Seattle show. Talk about what your team is doing with Kubernetes and STO, and how does Cisco fit in to that discussion? >> Yes, we love that space it's actually, I think at this point, after public cloud after Azure and AWS in particular, and GCP as well. So after public cloud, is the fastest growing part of our business today and what we've been shipping for over two years now, is an enterprise-class service mesh targeted at, not just Kubernetes, but Kubernetes, OpenShift, Mesos or Consisto, and the beautiful thing is our fabric is just a fabric it can, the same fabric in one corner of the data center could be serving a traditional bare-metal application and another corner of our data center is serving a containerized, a Kubernetes application and what we do there is, we provide both North-South load balancing capabilities, as well as, the East-West load balancing capabilities for that entire cluster. And to give you a sense for scale, our largest customers, we've got large banks and technology companies running us in production with Kubernetes, at the other, at the highest end we've got customers running eight to ten clusters of somewhere between 50 to 100 nodes each. So we're talking about 500 to 1,000 nodes running in both public cloud and on-prem of Kubernetes where we are providing the distributed load balancing capabilities. >> Well that's great. So if you've been doing service mesh for two years, that's pre STO? How does that relate to the STO project? >> Yes, it is, and in sometimes it's still pre STO right, cause I love STO, on slides (laughs) but the era of STO is 2019 and maybe 2020. So it's going to take some time we love it because here's what happens today, this is the problem for solution providers like us, what happens is, we're forced to integrate with Kubernetes, the Kubernetes master service. At some point customers are like, "alright, so you're integrated with Kubernetes, "and this person is integrated, "and this other piece of software integrated." What STO does is it very cleanly separates the network policy from Kubernetes to STO. So we have to integrate only with STO and we are doing that integration right now. So from our perspective these are northbound orchestration systems and policies systems, once STO solidifies, and I expect sometime next year, maybe the middle of next year, maybe late next year, and we're ready for production and then you can continue to use us within the system. >> Yeah Guru, I'm going to have to say you're the hipster service mesh company then, right? You were doing it before it was cool. (Guru, Stu and John laugh) >> Yes and then perhaps we can move-- >> Alright so I got-- >> on to something else >> We love the STO is a total geek conversation but this is super important, I want to get you thoughts on this, I do agree it's definitely got some work to do but there's, it's the number one open-source project within the CNCF, so clearly there's a ton of interest. And a lot of the alpha geeks are going there they see great, great value there. Containers, check. Containers are great. Kubernetes, check, on a good path. STO is interesting cause its service meshes is a concept that kind of ties networking with apps and you guys are in the middle of this. What does that mean for the network engineer out there or for the company, why should they pay attention to this service mesh concept or STO and the role of mircoservices? Clearly microservices makes sense if you're APIing everything you want to have more services developing. but what's going on under the hood? Why is STO getting so much traction in your opinion? >> It's a very simple reason John. So this was my world as a network engineer. I had a few of these applications I would look at them, they're like my little puppy, and I would configure my entire network to support these applications. The world of microservices, and really this new world that we live in, I don't have one of these, I have 100 of these per application, so I have 100,000 of these floating around. I can't do it without using policy. Policy is at the root of all this, intent-based networking, declarative policies, STO, declarative policies, our platform, declarative policies. So the entire world of networking is moving away from, let me go to one of my 50 switches and configure the CLI, to let me define a set of ten policies that we will then apply to 100,000 applications, cause frankly, there's only ten different things I want to do. I don't want to configure a 100,000 endpoints. I just want to do ten things, that's something I can do as a human and that's really what's at the root of this. So it's really intent-based networking sort of at different layers. >> So there's been conversation, we've been obviously talking about this on theCUBE since day one here about, we believe the network engineer, the Cisco customer, if you will, or people getting all of these certifications, they're going to be so much more powerful because there's been a conversation in other press and media around the death of the network engineer (Guru laughs) We should, look they're the mainframe guy-- >> Which iteration of that are we on? 'Cause I hear that every five years. >> They better learn how to code so they don't lose their job. When actually, the network is getting more and more powerful, so what you're talking about, we think connects and validates that the network engineer, the one doing Cyber Ops, data center, service provider, industrial IOT, CCNA, CCIEs, these guys are going to be a fish to water when they hear words like policy, dynamic provisioning these are-- >> Automation, APIs. >> These are concepts they're used to. What's your thoughts on that because this is a kind of a new emerging connect point that DevNet's kind of pointed with DevNet Create and DevNet proper, what are you're thoughts? >> Yeah, listen I have tremendous empathy for our customer base, I used to be a customer on the other side a couple of decades ago, and there's this sort of fashion in Silicon Valley to come up with new innovations and then say, "oh, all those people, they're going to be left behind "and my technology is going to be awesome." I don't subscribe to that, the hunger I see in networking teams to continually add value is unparalleled today. The hunger I see for automation, for learning REST API, STKs, Python, Ansible, interacting with DevNet is unparalleled. And in some sense if that wasn't there, why would you have intent-based networking, why would a vendor like Cisco, a vendor like AVI emerge? Why would we build these amazing things if there wasn't a hunger for this? So, I think the network is going to be extremely important and most of the networking teams today will make that transition. I'm not going to discount the fact that there will be some who will want to hug their load balancers for the next 10 years, and I have bad news for them, there was a time when you could ride it out for five or 10 years before the next tech showed up. Those days are gone, man. The new tech shows up today and then you're like, "no, not going to happen for about 12 or 18 months." And then boom! Everything just changes. >> So what's your advice to that, of those networking engineers out there, those folks do, and that are going to be the power players in this new configuration? What should they do? >> Engage. >> Engage, be the person in the organization that brings in a new technology, never in my entire career, two decades now, have I seen individuals in networking teams at banks, at technology companies, at retailers, at grocery store companies, at radiology centers, you know, go out there and ask questions is there a better load balancer, is there a better switching solution, is there a better X, Y, Z, is there a better way to monitor my apps, and then pull in that, play around with that, call the vendor. You know, traditionally it never used to happen. So I'm excited about it. >> Yeah, and it's awesome it's great. It's a great opportunity to be, the timing is perfect. Alright, final question, actually two questions. What's up for next for you guys at AVI Networks on the road map, what's coming next? And then you're take on the show, what's the vibe, what's it like for the folks who didn't make it to Orlando, what'd they miss? >> So our vision is double down on multi-cloud, it's so real, all our customers, all, almost a 100%, are both on-prem and in AWS or Azure and we're continuing to invest in making that easier through the introduction of several sort of initiatives on the platform including SAS, including increased investments in security. So that's on our vision side. Invest in our partnership with Cisco, as I said Cisco is a reseller and now an investor in our last round of funding, so we're pretty excited about that. And they're excited about being close to a company that frankly, is seeing the kind of traction we're seeing. So that's what we're doing over the next three to five years. Show floor, I've got to say 80% of it sounds like, give me your data and I will provide you insights. And that's trivializing that a little bit but I think it goes back to the point, John, you made earlier, where things are moving so fast, so much is changing that there's just an increased excitement around technologies which help you automate, which help you provide better insight, which help you just manage this. >> And then final question, one more, it just popped into my head, got to get out there. Programmability, obviously we believe it is happening, APIs are happening, microservices are right around the corner, you guys are first-generation service mesh and production. What are some of those new apps we're going to see? If the network programmable is first-generation, like an iPhone was for telephony, what kinds of network apps, app-networking apps, are we going to see in the new paradigm that DevNet's pioneering? >> So, actually two kind of apps I'm already seeing in my customer base right now. The first one is self-service and provisioning apps. So as soon as the network becomes programmable the first thing networking teams do, this is a little bit counter intuitive, remember the old world where networking teams were like, "my network, don't touch it." The first thing they're doing now is, they're saying "oh, it's programmable? "Let me build a sandbox for you quickly. "You do it, don't call me. "Don't call me. "Just do your thing, if you hit " the bounds of the sandbox, then "call me and we'll talk about it." So, self-service automation provisioning is the first kind of applications I'm seeing emerging. And the second one is monitoring. You know the age-old problem, I don't know what's going on. So people are building these amazing solutions, I mean our, I thought people would be logging into our CLI or UI and getting insights. No, they're taking my data, right now I counted about 15 upstream solutions from Tetration, to Splunk, to other SIMs, Datadog, AppDynamics, New Relic, they're exporting this wherever they can. And so those are the two classes. Self-service automation and monitoring. >> And this all is underpinning value for safe security monitoring and scripts is right around the corner. Anyway thanks for coming. Okay, AVI Networks' VP of Product here inside theCUBE day three, it's theCUBE coverage here. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman at Cisco Live in Orlando. Stay with us, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend on the ground at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, we're in the NetApp booth, and we are joined by a CUBE alumni, Brian Ferrar, Marketing Manager for SAP at Cisco, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you, it's great to be here. >> So you are a veteran, you've been at Cisco, you said, about four years. But you have been in the SAP community for a long time. This is, I think I was reading, the 25th time that they've done an event like this. Now, obviously, an event with north of 20,000 people, a million people, Bill McDermott said, engaging online. Wow, we're in the NetApp booth. Tell us, Brian, about this trifecta: NetApp, Cisco, SAP. >> Well sure, thank you very much, first of all. We appreciate the invitation to be here. We've been working with Cisco, Cisco's been working with NetApp and SAP on solutions for our customers together for about 10 years. And in that time, our joint solution for SAP, which we called a FlexPod, which combines Cisco UCS servers with NetApp storage, and of course then there's Cisco networking. That's become one of the most preferred platforms to run SAP HANA on. There was a recent IDC survey, in fact, end of last year, in which they went out, without any consultation with us vendors, and did an independent, true market research survey, with over 300 end users of HANA, and they asked, what was the best platform, what was the most preferred platform to run on. And by far, it was FlexPod, with Cisco and NetApp. And the favorite storage platform, by far NetApp. So we think we're doing a really good job for our customers, but there's always room for improvement, so we're ever innovating, and that, I think, is the secret to our success. Constant, repetitive innovation, making it better and better and better. >> So if we look at these digital transformation platforms of the future: SAP HANA, Leonardo, and then we think about the Cisco, NetApp value prop. How does those individual components play in that equation? >> Well a couple of ways I think, it's a great question. First of all, you gotta start with the very core of what you're concerned about. This is a risky situation. You're running your companies most valuable asset, your supply chain, on this stuff. And so you wanna make sure that the platform you're using is rigorously tested and even more rigorously secured. So one of the things we're known for, and we do this with NetApp, on the FlexPod platform, is our CVDs, Cisco Validated Designs, in which we pretest and precertify everything that you would have to do to implement your SAP solution on a FlexPod. And that's all documented. So if you follow the instructions, you're gonna get a foolproof installation. Then the second way, is we need to make operation and management of these environments simpler and easier. Everybody's looking to reduce cost, reduce resources, improve performance. So one of the ways we've really distinguished ourselves in this market, especially with NetApp, is something we call policy-based infrastructure. We have a product called ACI, Application. (laughs) ACI, what's ACI? It's Application Centric Infrastructure. And it allows us to automate the deployment and management of HANA on these solutions. In fact, one SAP executive saw this and coined the term, One Click Deployment. And I won't say it's just one click deployment, there is some tweaking, but that speaks to the simplicity of deploying it on a FlexPod. But more than that, then we apply that automation to the management and the ongoing orchestration of that environment. And so, for example, if you wanna keep security threats out of your environment, you can automate our Tetration solution on top of that platform that looks at incoming code, looks for patterns, and detects inappropriate activity before it has time to harm your system. Another way we do that was with a product we're unveiling here at SAPPHIRE, which is AppDynamics for SAP. AppDynamics is a fairly famous company around monitoring applications, and Cisco acquired them about a year ago, and we're unveiling their solution for SAP in our booth with number 550, in fact. And that allows you to look all the way down to the code level and see what's happening. >> So, let's pick that apart a little bit, that's pretty amazing. I'm familiar with AppDynamics, it was a born-in-the-cloud solution. So when you think about SAP, and you think about traditional applications built on SAP, you don't think about AppDynamics, you know. AppDynamics was this thing that could allow you to monitor and troubleshoot code across clouds. What's their play with SAP. >> It's hard to say, anymore that anybody's running SAP just on premise, or just in cloud. We live in a hybrid world, a lot of people call it the multi cloud world. And you have to have these management and monitoring tools work both on prem and in the cloud. Basically, they gotta follow your data. And that's the beauty of AppDynamics, is it works across all those multi cloud environments. And I think that's the big play for us with them. We're very concerned about security, coming from a network background, we're very aware of intrusion capabilities, the size of your attack surface, how cloud actually increases the size of your attack surface. So you need a tool like AppDynamics, and other tools that Cisco has, as I mentioned our Tetration tool, to really watch that code and that data going across your infrastructure. And also to keep an eye out for bad actors. It's unfortunately a dangerous world now. Just read the news and see all the companies that have had their brand essentially held hostage with ransomware, for example. >> So let's talk about support. I love the idea of being able to take the infrastructure, outsource the engineering of that to Cisco, FlexPod, Tetration, these validated designs that makes deployment simple. But support, when there's a problem with a query, that's supporting a digital transformation initiative, who do I call? Do I call NetApp, do I call SAP, do I call Cisco? >> It's a great question, it's a great question, 'cause nobody here, not just Cisco, but no vendor here at the show today, implements a solution just on their own, and every environment has multiple pieces in the solution. Cisco takes ownership of the support of all the components, even our partner components, of any solution we deploy. So it's one stop shopping for your support calls. Now if we find it escalates to a higher and higher level, we have direct connections to our partners, third level support escalation teams, and we bring them in, and we solve the problem, but we never let go of it. We don't hand it off, we maintain that incident. No finger pointing, and if you've ever had any personal issues at home on your laptop, and tried to get somebody to help, and you call one person and they point you to another, Yeah, it just doesn't happen. >> My better half just always blames it on the network. And I'm not a network guy anymore, so it's never my fault. (laughing) >> But speaking of needing to delight customers, one of the things that, thematically, was talked about this morning in Bill Mcdermott's keynote is enabling the intelligent enterprise and really being able to embed AI into the technologies to unite the humans with the machines. I loved how he talked about augmenting humanity, and what he talked about there was really. >> The Brave New World, huh? >> Right, and kind of, not calling out their competitors by name, but we all know who they are, and really saying that what SAP is now doing is connecting, synchronizing, the demand chain with the supply chain. So enabling the customers who don't care what's under the hood, right? To focus on their customers, to get this comprehensive customer view. >> I actually really liked that part of the keynote because that description characterizes Cisco ourselves as SAP's customer. So we eat our own dog food, to use the cliche, but you talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Last year at SAPPHIRE, we won the HANA innovation award, for the innovation that we did on HANA with AI and machine learning. And we implement that internally, not just for our customers, but internally for ourselves, we do all our sales forecasting, and supply chain management with HANA using AI and machine learning for better insights. And it has made a world of difference to our internal supply chain and IT teams. I mean it's funny because, 20 years ago, we would have called it magic, and it's not, it's innovation. In fact that's the theme of our booth here at SAPPHIRE this week, is it's not magic, it's innovation. We actually have a magician in the booth sawing people in half. You're welcome to come by. If you fit in the booth, you can be sawed in half. >> I might be in trouble here. >> You have to be rather small, but we'll show you how the trick is even done. And that's the thing with innovation, differentiating it from magical claims that other vendors might make. We show you under the covers, how it's done, and we share everything and document everything. And that's actually going back to those CVDs that are so valuable to our customers. >> So let's talk about one of the pillars of Cisco, which is security. As we look at where data's at, we're talking about Edge, the data center, and somewhere in between, >> Yeah, everywhere in between. >> Everywhere in between, security has to follow the data. How does Cisco with NetApp help administrators follow the data? >> Oh, that's another good question. I was in a presentation from an analyst recently, it said the world's data is now increasing, it's doubling every two years. The entire world's data is doubling every two years. So how do you keep track of that and how do you manage it? One of the ways we do it, and we do this with NetApp as well and the FlexPod, is we have security embedded in every aspect, so we talk about computing at the Edge, with IOT devices, you know? Smart cars is an example everyone understands. But there's supply chain IOT out there on the Edge as well. Tracking shipments and ballots, and widgets, and units. And we talk about computing at the fog, and trying to get computing as close to the transaction as possible, for low latency, high performance. But then for deep analytics, you're bringing that data back to the core. So you've got a lot of places where you could be attacked, as I mentioned earlier, that attack surface has now grown dramatically, it's no longer isolated within the four walls of your data center. So we embed security at every place along that chain. Coming from a network heritage, we have intelligent routers, often ruggedized, that we can put out there in the Edge, with security, to catch inappropriate activity happening, coming in from an IOT source for example, from a sensor. That is not what we were expecting and could potentially be an attack. And then we can analyze it before it ever gets into your valuable data center. And so we're putting that security at the Edge, in the fog, on the servers, in the data center, on the routers, on the network, you name it. We think there's no one solution. You have to have an all encompassing end to end solution, that literally surrounds you with that security bubble, and that's what we're doing. In fact, we, by the way, to put a plugin for Cisco, we just came out with our annual Cybersecurity Report, which is one of the most popular supports on cyber security trends every year in the industry. So Cisco puts that together, and obviously takes it very seriously. >> So you mentioned AppDynamics before, monitoring SAP apps, you just mentioned security. Put that in the context of this next generation data center. What does a customer, what can they expect working with Cisco, NetApp, and SAP, to evolve to a next gen data center. >> It's an interesting question, because the very nature of the data center is changing now. I mean, you know if I'm on the road and I'm processing end of year financial closes or end of quarter financial closes, am I a data center? If I'm processing IOT data on the Edge, and because it's so critical, for example, take oil and gas. They can measure that remote oil well in dollars per second, or tens of thousands of dollars per second of down time. And so you want the data coming in from that well. Pressure, temperature, potential downtime, coming in in time to fix it before it breaks, is that now a data center? So we're talking about, what does it mean? The definitions of compute, of data capture have all changed. The idea is you've gotta follow that data. And that's what we're looking at for the future, I think, is the data center is no longer an internal monolithic, controlled environment, that you can be very certain of. Now you've gotta follow that data and adapt your security to the type of processing you're doing, whether it's in the data center core or out there on the Edge. And I think that's what we're evolving to. Someday we'll all be data centers. >> So let's talk about that, all on the data center. Developers are now developing applications, containers, they practically have data centers on their laptop. Connect the dots for us, where Cisco plays in. >> This is actually one of the latest developments, I think, in the industry, is the emergence of something called containers. And we're the first vendor to work with SAP to implement our Cisco container platform, to provide their SAP data hub with containerized access. So now, that SAP data hub can become the nucleus of all incoming data and processing all big data for new insights, regardless of the source of that data or the application that data's running on. And that's what the beauty of containers is, is it encapsulates that application, so those rules come with that data, and so now you can, literally, connect everything to that central SAP data hub, and have complete, what did Bill Mcdermott call it, 360 degree visibility. And that's made possible by the ability to tap into not just new big data solutions that you have out there, but legacy big data solutions. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when there was such a thing called the data warehouse. And they were all proprietary and there were a whole bunch of them. And there are still our customers out there running not only the new stuff, but the legacy stuff, 'cause it works, they figured it out, and they don't wanna change it, it gives them good insights. So how do you take that legacy stuff now, and link it and combine it with all the new stuff coming out of, for example, your SAP supply chain, and the answer is the containers on top of that SAP data hub will do that for you. And that's really where we're taking it. There was a language, Esperanto, years and years ago, that was created in the '60s, '50s even. And I think the idea was it was gonna be a universal language that anybody could speak. So I don't speak Spanish, if they don't speak English, but we both speak Esperanto. And of course it never took off, because it was yet another language to learn. But the idea, the concept of having this in between piece that makes anything connect to anything is still a very intriguing idea for the human mind. And you can apply that to this data sphere, this global data sphere, and now, with something like a data hub tool and containers, that serve that encapsulation purpose, you can actually have a nucleus of big data and analytics in your company, that doesn't care where the data was originated from or what application it's running. It's still available to plug into your analysis, your planning. >> Well who knew, SAP, we heard Kubernetes, and AppDynamics in one interview at SAP SAPPHIRE, that's amazing. >> Mind blown? >> I get paid by the buzzword, you know. >> Wow! >> Yeah, I'm in marketing. >> So am I, I gotta tap into your expertise now. Brian, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE, and talking with Keith and me about what's new with Cisco, your partnership with SAP, and NetApp, and happy birthday. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Come to the party. I'm actually having Justin Timberlake perform this year. >> That's very nice of you. >> You're all invited. >> Well thank you, wow, I'm glad I could make it to your birthday party. >> You guys have a great day. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, thanks for watching.