(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay. We're here with Thomas Scheibe, who's the vice president of Product Management, aka VP of all things Data Center Networking, STN, cloud, you name it in that category. Welcome Thomas, good to see you again. >> Hey, same here. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay. Let's get right into observability. When you think about observability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring, problem resolution across the network, how does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >> Yeah. (scoffs) Yeah. Visibility as always is very, very important and it's quite frankly, it's not just, it's not just the networking team, it's actually the application team too, right? And as you pointed out, the the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the, the data center is wherever the data is, and I think we said this a couple years back. And really what happens the, the applications are going to be deployed in different locations, right? Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on-prem and they're built differently, right? They're built as micro servers, so they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need, as an operator as well as actually a user, a better visibility, "where are my pieces?", and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is, that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge why the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's, that's really the problem statement. What, what we're trying to go after with observability. >> Okay. Let's, let's double click on that. So, so a lot of customers tell me that you got to stare at log files until your eyes bleed, then you've got to bring in guys with lab coats who have PhDs to figure all this stuff out. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> So you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time, you have to simplify things. So how, how are you doing that? >> Correct. So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that is called ThousandEyes. And so what this does is basically (chuckles) as the name which I think is a fantastic, fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere and you can have a good correlation on links between if I run a from a site to a site, from a site to a cloud, from the cloud to cloud. And you basic can measure what is the performance of these links? And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of the ThousandEyes agent, right? Instead of just having a, an inversion machine of clouds we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices, right? We announced this was the Catalyst 9000. And we're extending this now to our 8000 Catalyst product line for the for the SD-WAN products, as well as to the data center products, in Nexus line. And so what you see is, is you know, a half a thing, you have ThousandEyes. You get a million insights and you get a billion dollar off improvements for how your applications run. And this is really the, the power of tying together the footprint of what a network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >> I see. So, okay. So as the cloud evolves, it expands, it connects, you're actually enabling ThousandEyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location but out to the network across clouds, et cetera. >> Thomas: Correct. >> Wherever the network is you're going to have a ThousandEyes sensor and you can bring this together and you can quite frankly pick, if you want to say, Hey I have my application in public cloud provider A domain one, and I have another one in domain two I can do monitor that link. I can also monitor, I have a user that has a campus location or a branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the, let's say, corporation's data center or headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just the, have visibility in saying, Hey, if there's a performance I know where the issue is. And then I obviously can use all the other tools that we have to address those. >> All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us that, you know, it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of ROI. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and DevOps to this world of hybrid and specifically, how is Cisco enabling IT organizations to move to a cloud operating model as that cloud definition expands? >> Yeah, no, that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observability. So it really, really what we're seeing, and this is going on for, I want to say couple of years now it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team, more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider, right? This is really around the networking team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model, right? Where this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public cloud is operating it like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for a while. So one of the examples um that we have, we're moving some of the control software assets that customers today can deploy on-prem to an instance that they can deploy in a, in a cloud provider and just basically instantiate things there and then just run it that way. Right? And so the latest example for this is what we have, our Identity Service Engine that is now unlimited availability, available on AWS and will become available mid this year, both on AWS and Azure, as a service. You can just go to Marketplace, you can load it there and now increase. You can start running your policy control in the cloud managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus, wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our Customers Network Operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically deploying their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >> Dave: So >> What's the scope of I, I hope I'm saying it right, ISE, right? I.S.E, I think it's um, you call it ISE. What's the scope of that? Like for instance, to an effect my, or even, you know address, simplify my security approach? >> Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is, a lot of people talking about is, how do I get to a Zero Trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure, again, whether this was only campus access as well as the data center and ISE helps you there. You can use it as a pawn to define your policies and then inter-connect from there, right. In this particular case, we would, instead of ISE in a cloud as a software, alone, you now can connect and say, Hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center or my campus going to the respective controller, whether it's DNA Center for campus or whether it's the, the ACI policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage ,in one place, "what is my policy", and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure. >> Yeah. Zero Trust. It was..Pre pandemic it was kind of a buzzword, now it's become a mandate. I, I wonder if we could talk about- >> Thomas: - Yes >> Yeah, right. I mean, so- >> Thomas: -Pretty much. >> I wondered if we could talk about cloud native apps. You got all these developers that are working inside organizations, they're maintaining legacy apps they're connecting their data to systems in the cloud. They're sharing that data. These developers, they're rapidly advancing their skillsets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud native, making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >> Yeah. So you were going to the talk we saw was the visibility. We talked about the operating model how our network operates actually want to use tools going forward. Now the next step to this is, it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools? Or how they interact with this tools? As well as quite frankly, as how let's say, a DevOps team, or application team or a cloud team also wants to take advantage of the programmability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right. Which has really two angles. So it's the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure, right? And so what we have done is we're A, putting in place the on-ramps between clouds, and then on top of it, we're exposing for all these tools APIs that can be used and leveraged by standard cloud tools or cloud-native tools, right? And one example or two examples we always have. And again, we're on this journey for a while, is both Ansible script capabilities that access from RedHat as well as Hashi Terraform capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure automation. And what, what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the app team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically instantiation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools, right. Whether this is ISE, what I just mentioned, whether this is our DCN controllers in the data center whether these are the controllers in the, in the campus for all of those, we have cloud-native interfaces. So operator or a DevOps team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives on the cloud or with everything how they built the application. >> Yeah, this is key. You can't even have the conversation of of Op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on-prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's, that's very important. Last question, Thomas, are customers actually using this? You made the announcement today. Are there, are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >> We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the path and using the Cisco High-performance Infrastructure both on the compute side, as well as on the Nexus side. One of the costumers, and this is like an interesting case, is Rakuten. Rakuten is a large telco provider, a mobile 5G operator in Japan and expanding, and as in different countries. And so people, some think, "Oh cloud" "You must be talking about the public cloud provider" "the big three or four". But if you look at it, there's a lot of the telco service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with Rakuten and help them build high performance data center infrastructure based on HANA Gig and actually for a gig to drive their deployment to its 5G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is where the whole the whole world, which frankly is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility together with the High-performance infrastructure becoming a reality on delivering actually, services. >> Yeah, some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, they're enormous but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds telcos that are either proximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper-scalers may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So, so that's a great case study. Thomas.Hey, great having you on. Thanks much for spending some time with us. >> Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in tech event coverage. (upbeat music)