(upbeat music) >> In 2009, Cisco made a major announcement in the form of UCS. It was designed to attack the IT labor problem. Cisco recognized that, data center professionals were struggling to be agile and provide the types of infrastructure services that lines of business were demanding for the modern applications of that day. The value proposition was all about, simplifying infrastructure deployment and management and by combining networking compute and storage with virtualization and a management layer, Cisco changed the game for running applications on premises and the era of converged infrastructure was born. Now fast forward a dozen years, and a lot has changed. The cloud has gone mainstream, forcing new requirements on organizations to bridge their on-prem environments to public clouds and manage workloads across clouds. Now to address this challenge, Cisco earlier this month, announced a series of offerings, that meaningfully expands its original vision, to support the more demanding requirements of today's dev sec ops teams. In particular Cisco, with this announcement is enabling customers to deploy a full stack cloud-like operating model that leverages modern platforms such as Kubernetes, new integrations and advanced tooling to bring automation, visibility and better security for both hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Now the underpinning of this solution, is a new UCS architecture called the X series. Cisco claims this new system gives customers a trusted platform for the next decade to support their hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Gents, great to see you, welcome. >> Hey, thank you. Good to be here. >> Thanks for having a us Dave. I appreciate. >> My pleasure. Looking forward to this. So look, we've seen the X series announcement and it looks to be quite a new approach. What are the critical aspects of the X series that you want people to understand? Maybe James, and you can take that. >> Sure I think that, you know, overall, there is a lot of change coming in the marketplace, right? We're seeing we're looking at and we're seeing from a technology standpoint, a significant amount of change. Look at CPU's and GPU's, the power draw alone is becoming, you know, it basically at the trajectory, it is, it may be untenable for some, you know, of the current configurations that people are consuming, right? So some of these current architectures just can't deal with that, right? Or at least they can't deal with what's coming in the future. We're also seeing the relevance of other types of architectures like maybe arm to start to become something that our customers want to take advantage of, right? Or maybe want to see how that scale fits into their environment on a totally different level. At the same time, the fabrics are really evolving at lightning speed here, right? So we're seeing PCI express, we've gone from gen three to gen four, gen five is coming in the very near future. We're layering on top of that, things like CXL to take that, that fabric to the next level for capabilities and be able to do things that we couldn't do before. To connect things together, we couldn't do before. Beyond that, we probably are just a few years away from even more exciting developments in the fabric space around some of the high performance low latency fabrics that are that are again on the drawing board today just around the corner. Take that and you, you look at the kind of the evolution of the the admin, right? So we're seeing the admin developer emerge. No longer is this just a guy who's sitting in front of a dashboard and managing systems, keeping them up and down, we're now seeing a whole class of developers that are also administrators, right? So all of this together is starting to push us well beyond what human scale really can manage, what human scale can consume. So, there's a lot of change coming and I think that we're taking a look at that and realizing that something like X series has to be able to deal with that change and the challenges that it brings, but also and do so in a simple manner that we can allow automation orchestration and some of these new capabilities to enhance what our customers can do, not to drown them in technology. >> You know, that taught, that's kind of interesting what James was saying about beyond human scale. I mean, I think my little narrative upfront, it was sort of, hey, we recognize as an IT labor problem. We're going to address that. And it really wasn't about massive scale back then, it is now. We really what we've learned from the cloud guys, right? >> Definitely. I mean, people are moving from pets to cattle to now with containers, they're saying that it's mosquitoes, right? Cause they're so ephemeral, they come and go and on a single host, you could have, you know, hundreds if not thousands of containers. And so the application environment has influenced the infrastructure design and really changed the role of the infrastructure operator to one that necessitates automation, necessitates operations at scale, even on prem everyone's trying to operate in that cloud like model and they're trying to bridge, the big challenge I see is, they're trying to bridge their existing environment big monolithic applications they've got on-prem with those data lakes that they built around them over the past decade, but they're also trying to follow their developers as they go out into the public cloud and innovate there. That's really where the nexus of all the application innovation is. So the IT teams who are already strapped for resources it's not like their budgets are going up every year, are now taking on a new front out in the cloud while they're still trying to maintain the systems that they've built with on-prem. That's the challenge. >> Yeah that's really the hard part and where some of the innovation here is, is anybody that lives in an old house knows that connecting old to new is very challenging much more challenging than building from scratch. But James I wonder if we'd come back to the to the architecture of the X series and what's really unique about it and what's in it for your customers? >> Yes, absolutely. So we're, when were looking at at kind of redesigning this thing from the ground up, we recognized that, you know from a timing standpoint, we're sitting at a place with the development of future fabrics and some of these other technologies that we finally have the opportunity to hit the timing perfectly to start to do composability right. So we've heard a lot of noise, you know in the market for the last several years about composability and how that's going to be the salvation or change the game here. But at the end of the day, the technology hasn't been there in those offerings, right? So we're sitting at the edge of some of the development of those technologies that are going to allow us to do that. And what we've done with X series, is we've taken a construct that we call the UCS X fabric, which is the ability to consume these technologies today as like a effectively a chassis fabric that can allow us to connect resources together within the chassis and future external to the chassis. But it also allows us to take advantage of the change in fabric that's coming. So as fabrics evolve, as we see new technologies like CXL and the PCI express gen five and beyond, come into play here and eventually physical technologies like Silicon Photonix, those are constructs that are going to allow our customers to do some amazing things and we have the construct to be able to consume those. Our goal here is like, to effectively look out at these disruptive technologies on the horizon and make sure that they're not disrupting our customers that we give our customers the ability to disrupt their competitors and to disrupt their markets, but by consuming those technologies in an easy way. >> You know, you didn't use the term future-proof. And I usually don't like that phrase because a lot of times people go that's future-proof and I'm like, well, what's future proof? Well, it's really fast. Well, okay. And in two years, it's going to be, you know really slow compared to everything else. But what you, what you just laid out is an architecture that's really taking advantage of some of these new capabilities that are driving latency down. So that's so, thank you for that. Now, Todd I get how the X series is going to enable customers you know, today I just mentioned the future but how does it play into Cisco's hybrid cloud vision? >> Well I mean, our customers aren't looking for, you know, point solutions or bolt on layers of software to manage across the hybrid cloud landscape. That's the fundamental challenge and so what we're doing with intersite, if you really think about all the systems that we have in our portfolio, like X series, really it's just extensions of our inner site platform. And there we're bridging the gaps between fundamental infrastructure prem, with all of those services that you need to optimize workloads and infrastructure, both in that on-prem environment but also out in the public cloud and even moving up the stack now into serverless. So we know that customers again are trying to bolt together a cohesive environment that allows them to manage those existing workloads on prem but also support the innovation going on out in the cloud and to do that, you have to have services to manage Kubernetes. You need hooks into modern tool chains like a Hashi corks Terraform, we did that a few months back and we recently brought in something we call our service mesh manager that came out of an acquisition of a Bonzai cloud. So what we're doing is, we're kind of spanning that entire spectrum from physical infrastructure, to the workload and that could be extracted in any number of ways either in containers or containers around VMs or bare metal running applications run on bare metal or just virtual machine applications encapsulation. So, you got all these different modalities that customers are going to run applications in and it's our intent to create a platform here that supports all of them, both on their on-prem environment and also all the resources they're managing out in the cloud. So that's a big deal for us. You know, one thing I want to go back to the X series for a second, something James mentioned, right? Is you know as we see subsystems in computing, start to decompose and break apart, you know, we have intersite as the mechanism to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and that's really, I think composability and district's options bar, but that's okay. But so I'll read it together. And like James said, you know be able to take on whatever fabrics, low latency fabrics, ultra low latency fabrics we need in coming years to sew these systems together, we're kind of breaking a barrier that didn't, that wasn't, you know people have trouble breaking through in the past, right? And that's this idea of true infrastructure as code or true software defined infrastructure. Cause now we're talking about being able to apply policy and automation, to the actual construct of a server. How do you build that thing to the needs of the workload? And so if you talk to an SRE or a developer today and you say infrastructure, they're thinking of Kubernetes cluster, but ultimately we want to push that boundary or that frontier between the world software to find it abstracted as far down in the infrastructure, as we can. And with intersite and X fabric and X series, we're taking it all the way down to the individual drive or CPU or ultimately breaking memory apart and sewing that back together. So it's kind of exciting time for us, cause really, pushing that frontier of what is software defined further and further down into the infrastructure and that just gives people a lot more flexibility in what they build. >> So I want to play something back to you and see if it resonates. Essentially, I look at what you just said is you're building a layer across my on-prem, whatever public cloud across clouds at the conventionally, you know, get to the edge, but let's hold off on that, let's park that for now. But that layer obstructs the underlying technical complexity and allows that infrastructure to be, you said programmable, infrastructure is code essentially. So that's one of my other questions, it's like, how programmable is this infrastructure, you know, today and in the future? But is that idea of an abstraction layer kind of how you're thinking about hybrid and multi-cloud? >> It is in terms of the infrastructure that customers are going to run on prem right in the public cloud the cloud providers are already abstracting that for them. And so what we want to do is bring that same type of public cloud experience to managing infrastructure on prem. So being able to have pools of resources that you allocate out to workloads, shifted as things change. So it's absolutely a cloud-like approach to on-prem infrastructure and you know, one of the things I like to say is, you know, friends don't let friends, build their own private cloud platforms from scratch, right? We're productizing this, we're bringing it as a cohesive system that customers don't need to engineer on their own. They can focus on their operations and James actually, he's a pilot, and one of the things he observed about Intersight a couple of years ago was, this idea of Intersight as a co-pilot and kind of, you know, adding a person to your team almost when you have intersite in your data center, because some very, what feels like rudimentary things are incredibly impactful day-to-day for our customers. So we have recommendation engines. If it, if like, you know, maybe it says some interplay between bios and firmware and operating system and we know that there's an issue there rather than letting customers stumble upon that on their own we're going to flag it, show them the correction, go implement it for them. So that it starts to feel a lot more like what they're accustomed to in a public cloud setting where the system has some intelligence baked in, the system is kind of covering them and watching their back and acting like a co-pilot day-to-day operations. >> Okay, so I get that, you know, the cloud guys will abstract the complexity you guys are focused on prem, but is it, so my question then is multi-cloud across clouds because we have some cloud providers, you know you're partners with Google they do some things with Antho, so I know Microsoft with Ark, but even near-term. Should we think about Cisco as playing that role of my, across cloud, you know, partner if you will? >> Absolutely. You know, cloud agnosticism is core to our approach because we know that, you know if you dial the clock way back to the early odds, right? When cloud first started emerging it was kind of an efficiency play. And you had folks like Nicholas Carr, right? The author that they put out the big switch, kind of envisioning a world where there'd be this ultimate consolidation to maybe one or two or three cloud platforms worldwide. But what we're seeing, you know we had data sovereignty kind of emerge over the past decade but even the past year or two, it's now becoming issues of actual cloud sovereignty. So you have governments in Australia and in India and in Europe actually asserting control over the cloud providers and services that can be used by their public sector organizations and so that's just leading to actually cloud fragmentation. It's not nearly as monolithic of future as we thought it would be. It's a lot of clouds and so as customers want to move around geographically or if they want to go harvest innovation that maybe Google is really good at something like machine vision, or they want to use AWS or Azure for different applications that they're going to go build. We're seeing customers really being put in a place where they're going to deal with multiple cloud providers and the data supports that. So it's definitely our approach especially on the networking technology side to make it very easy for our customers to go out and connect these different clouds and not have to repeat the integration process every time they want to go, you know, start using another public cloud provider. So that's absolutely our strategies to be very agnostic and build everything in mind for customers they're going to be using in multiple providers. >> Thank you for that touch. So James, I want to come back and talk a little bit about sort of your competitive posture here. I mean, you guys, when you made the announcement, I inferred that you were feeling like you were in a pretty good position relative to the competition that you were putting forth, not just you know, core infrastructure in hardware and software but also all these other components around it that we talked about, observability extending out to the, you know, beyond the four walls of my data center, et cetera. But talk a little bit about why you think this gives you such competitive advantage in the marketplace. >> Well I mean, I think first of all, back to where Todd was going as well, is that, you know if you think about trying to be, to work in this hybrid cloud world, that we're clearly living in, the idea of burrowing features and functions as far down the stack as possible, doesn't make a lot of sense, right? So intersite is a great example. We want to manage and we want to orchestrate across clouds, right? So how are we going to have our management and infrastructure services buried into the chassis, down at the very lowest level, that doesn't make sense. So we elevated our, you know, our operating model to the cloud, right? And that's how we manage across clouds from the cloud. So, building a system and really we've done this from the ground up with X series, building a system that is able to take advantage of all these two technologies. And you mentioned, you know, how being future proof was probably you know, a derogatory term almost and I agree with you completely. I think we're future ready. Like, we're ready to embrace it because we're not trying to say that nothing is going to change beyond what we've already thought of, we're saying, bring it on. We're saying, bring on that change because we're ready for it. We've we can accommodate change. We, we're not saying that the technology we have today is to going to ride us for 10 years, we're saying,, we're ready for the next 10 years of change. Bring it. We can do that in a simple way. That is, you know, I think, you know going to give us the versatility and the simplicity to allow the technology to go beyond human scale without having to you know drown our customers in administrative duties, right? So that co-pilot that Todd mentioned is going to be able to take on a lot more of the work, just like an airplane where you know, the pilot has functionality that he has to absolutely be part of and those are the our developers, right? We want those admin developers to develop, to build things and to do things and not get bogged down in the minutiae that exists. So I think competitively, you know, our architecture top to bottom, you know, all the way up the stack, all the way to the bottom is unique and it is focused on not just the rear view mirror but what's coming in the future. >> So my takeaway there is that, okay, I get it. The new technologies will come along but this architecture is the architecture for the decade. You're not going to have to redo the architecture in a few years. That's really the key point here. Todd, I'll give you last word might just taking some notes here and takeaways that I heard, I heard upfront. Chip diversity really take advantage of all the innovations that are coming out. You're ready for that. You're kind of blurring the lines between blade and rack, giving some optionality there. Scale is a big theme. I mean, the cloud has brought that in and, you know people want to scale, they don't want to be, you know provisioning lawns all day and they won't be able to scale if that's what their job is. Developer friendly, particularly as it relates to infrastructure as code. And you've got a roadmap. So Todd, that's my summary. I'll give you the last word. >> No, it's really good. I mean, you hit it, right. We're thinking about this holistic operating environment that our customers are building for hybrid cloud and we're pre-engineering that environment for them. So our Intersight platform, all of our systems that connect to that, are really built to tackle that hybrid environment from end to end, and with systems like X series, we're giving them a more simple, efficient landing spot for their workloads on prem but crucially it's fully integrated with this hybrid cloud platform so as they have workloads on prem and workloads in the cloud, it's kind of a transparent environment between those two, between those two, two worlds there. So bringing it together so that our customers don't have to build it themselves. >> Excellent. Well, gents thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the details of this announcement. Congratulations, I know how much work and thought goes into these things, really looking forward to its progress and adoption in the marketplace. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for time. >> And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Man: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2020 (upbeat music) brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBEs live coverage of Cisco live 2020 here in Barcelona. It's our second full day of coverage. We're actually doing about three and a little bit more days of coverage I'm Stu Miniman my co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante, John Furrier is also in the house. A lot of interesting announcements at Cisco. We've been watching for the three years we've been at Cisco Live. Really Cisco getting much deeper into the software space. Of course we're here in the DevNet Zone where we're watching the changing workforce go even more towards developers. Hardware and software, living together nicely and to help us dig into that topic, we'll welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Todd Brannon, who is the Senior Director of Computing with Cisco. Todd, thanks so much for joining us. >> It's a pleasure to be here -- >> Dave: Good to see you man. >> Pleasure All right, so let's tee up what I was just talking about there. You know, there are certain companies that think about Cisco in the boxes and ports, we know the future is more software is eating the world developers of course are the new kingmakers. >> That's right. And Cisco has been moving on that journey, so bring us inside a little bit the announcements that you've been working on and where your team's seeing where customers are going. >> It's all about the application. So the AppDynamics team, they did some surveys. They found that the average consumers, 7,000 people worldwide, they surveyed them, average consumers using 34 apps a day or 34 digital experiences and so if you think about applications and infrastructure, we've always talked about applications infrastructure, right People don't buy a server to use as a coat warmer. It's always going to be running some sort of workload. But I think in the past, there wasn't as visceral connection between what the operations and infrastructure teams were running. If it was CRM or ERP, it wasn't as visceral connections you have today when it say the hotels interface to their customers in terms of booking or getting that early checkout, right? So the application experience has become much more personal, much more visceral and really incredibly critical to the business. And so that puts enormous pressure on the infrastructure teams that are a big part of making sure that application experience is a good one, right? Response time or is the app even available? So for us it's how do we start to begin to bring that infrastructure operations team into the fight with the teams that are thinking about applications, which oftentimes when using different tool sets or sort of some operational silos though. So this announcement is all about trying to break down some of those silos all in service of that application experience. >> Right, and of course AppDynamics was a large bet by Cisco. We've seen them in a lot of a Cloud environment, very much tied to the application. One of the announcements this week is taking Cisco Intersight which first time I ran across it was in things like UCS in other Cisco gear there. Help us understand how those are going together now and how should we be thinking about Intersight today in 2020? >> We should definitely be thinking about it differently cause you're right. Here to fore, Intersight has been focused on our computing infrastructure, HyperFlex UCS and, you know, when we started with UCS, we took management out of devices, we moved it into the network fabric and then three years ago with Intersight, we moved our management control plane into the Cloud. So think of Muraki but for computing and but it was always around Cisco and our infrastructure. Now we're taking two really big steps. One is we're integrating a product that we've had called our Workload Optimizer into Intersight. And that Workload Optimizer software has always been inherently a heterogeneous approach. So databases, Cloud management platforms, all the Hypervisors, Operating System, storage partnerships. We've been able to do telemetry and interdependency mapping with that in a heterogeneous way for some time. So now it breaks Intersight out of being more of a Cisco focus to really the reality which is a heterogeneous Data Center environment. Second thing is that, now we've done a data integration with AppD, and so the beauty of that is AppD best-in-class and understanding the interdependencies, those complex web of interdependencies at the application tier. Our Workload Optimizer best in class to understanding infrastructure interdependencies. And now we correlate those and you get a top to bottom view. Again, they kind of get you to where you can see what's an application, how's it performing from a business context with AppD but been able to connect it all the way down into your Cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Make that correlation and ensure that your infrastructure is doing the right things for the app. >> So the application portfolio has evolved dramatically over (laughs) the last 20 years, right? >> Yep. It used to be, you know, and it still is the crown jewels of the organization, but you'd have a mission critical App that's insurance company would have a claims app and then it'd be a zillion other applications around it, but the claims and the sales apps were really the key and whatever happened in the other apps, okay, fine. Now you have developers, you have Shadow IT came in and just do saying everybody's a software company and you had this explosion of apps that are all sucking resources from the network. So the traffic has changed (laughs) and that just brings massive complexity. So wonder if you could talk about how that trend has affected network traffic. >> You hit it, it's the interdependency. So, you know, it's been estimated that the typical enterprise application until very recently needed to talk to four to eight other enterprise applications to function properly. We're seeing that number jumped to 20 in a very near future. And it's because applications to your point are becoming much more modular, right? The development environment in the Cloud where all the innovation is occurring is inherently distributed Microservices, Serverless or functions-based in many cases. So all of the things that conspire together to create that experience, like an insurance claim on your phone, all of those interdependent components, it's become much more distributed, much more complex. And the key thing is underneath each of those components is going to sometimes be different infrastructure managed by different teams with different tooling. And so it's become almost impossible for it teams to correlate all that and manage it. Especially as it becomes, you know, higher velocity. >> Right, it got to. Yeah, Todd, I would like you to put a point on that, cause you've talked about applications are becoming much more distributed. I want to hear what you're hearing from customers. Cause sometimes it's like, "Well, I think of this application as either one thing", or this collection of things that I put one place or another. We're starting to see some customers that well, I start tears things apart and therefore it becomes developed hybrid in nature and people often complain it is, "It's hybrid, it's moldy", it's all this other things. Well, it's a real difference between "I had something in my Data Center and a piece of it is in a Public Cloud", versus, "Oh, Hey, I'm just going to throw a thing in whatever Public Cloud I want to use today or tomorrow". >> I think that's an incredibly important distinction. So multi-Cloud is the notion of, "Hey, I want to be able to consume innovation from different Cloud providers. But a hybrid application is really this idea of Public Cloud or Microservice connecting back to monolith on-prem side and I think it's still very, very rare that people are building applications that tie together multiple Public Cloud services to your point but it's very much more common for people to be saying, "Hey, I've gone out and built something innovative, a new customer experience out in the Public Cloud, but now I have to connect it". Data gravity is real, right? And GDPR here in Europe, right? So there are very real reasons why applications and data are staying on-prem, but they need to connect it out to this Cloud innovation. And that's what this announcement was all about. How do we give people a tool set? Because if you think about it, you're going to have infrastructure powering these pieces in the Cloud, and on-prem, how do you monitor that? How do you ensure that you're not over provisioning or under provisioning? It's a very complex problem. >> Well, it's critical because the Cloud brings scale. You know it used to be, "Okay, we're going to deploy a website. Hey the websites, it's important, it's slow, let's figure it out." Now you have these dozens and hundreds of applications coming in, many if not, most of which are customer facing. So if there's a problem, it's really escalated and the Cloud helps scale that problem, you know, massively. So Todd, help us understand sort of ... in the keynote yesterday there was a sort of the circular diagram of the visualization, the insight and the action. So give us a little sort of insight as to how this works. >> Coupled together. >> What's the secret sauce underneath it? >> So the secret sauce is correlating data, right? So telemetry data is something that we've always collected in the context of either infrastructure or applications. So with AppDynamics, we have a platform that based in the industry, it going out and figuring out all the independencies between an application and all of those services that are there. And then we have all of the similar things on the infrastructure side. And so what we've done here is correlate those data sets. So we're using the API as a feed data between AppDynamics and Cisco Intersight, which is the infrastructure side of the equation. And we create a data Lake now that we can then be able to apply analytics to. And so we can start to think about the Data Center as a demand supply equation and how do I want to match up my applications with the business context intact from AppD to what I'm doing with my infrastructure and provisioning that, so it's really a story of collecting all the telemetry, integrating it, stitching it together, and then applying the analytics to help our operators because it's gone beyond human scale, keeping track of the needs of all these VMs and especially when you get to containers. So it's first about stitching together the data, then applying the analytics for insight and then taking action. So it's automation informed by insight. But first you have to have visibility of everything. So that's the loop. >> It's interesting you talk about demand supply. Again, it used to be you'd manage demand, IT demand with an IT Project Management System and now you've got this infrastructure that is, you know, being sucking apps or sucking resources out of it and you can't just manage it manually. You've got to have the data which you've got and you've got to have some level of automation to be able to remediate things. So how does that fit in to the product and sort of the roadmap? >> So our optimizer product has, you know, you're going to give your credentials for all of the different tooling in your Data Center and you're going to bring it all together for the analytics and then be able to take action in a similar fashion from a central position. So what you see in Intersight Optimizer, it's really powerful as a recommendation engine. So it's going to tell you straight up, "Hey, you've got an ... you have an application and it's going to look at historical data". So over the past, whatever, 30 days, this VM over on AWS, 95% of the time has been running at less than 70% utilization of its assigned resources, so guess what? You should go from instance size three to Instance Size two, and we can even tell the operator, "Here's how much money that's going to save you every month" Do you want to do this, yes or no?" Bum. >> Boom Off you go and you kind of stand up the new instance. Similarly on the on-prem site, this VM has been consuming, you know, more than 95% of its allocated memory. You know, 80% of the time over the past month you should give it some more memory. And because we have optimized our controlling vCenter or you know, the micro, we can go off and make that change. So it's really the analytics to decide what is the right action to take. Then giving the operator the go button to go instantiate it and that's, that's incredibly powerful. >> And it's the same experience for my on-prem workloads, my Amazon, my Azure, and my Alibaba, whatever workloads I'm going to run in the future? >> Correct, and that's essential because of the hybrid dynamic. You know, the innovation is going to go on out in the Cloud, but you got to tie it the backend. So we have to be able to manage both of these at the same time. >> So people might be asking that aren't as you know, into this world as, "Well, why can't I just ... isn't Amazon going to do that for me? Isn't Azure going to do that for me? Or you know, the IBM Cloud, whatever, right? Can you explain, sort of help people understand the differences in the way in which each of these environments, including on-prem handles this type of of activity? >> I think what we're seeing is a maturation of the on-prem side of the equation. So the Cloud-like operating model consuming resources, That model ... Clouds and operating model, it's not a place, right? Everyone's been throwing that around for a few years, but it's very true. And so now on-prem, you know, OpenStack was hard, right? For folks, you know, we know that it just was difficult for people to get to the Private Cloud Nirvana that they wanted to. So with things like Intersight, we're basically starting to deliver, you know, enterprise-ready hardened systems. We're not calling it a Private Cloud, but effectively that's what it is especially when we talk tomorrow about HXAP and what we're doing on the container side, that's ultimately what we're delivering is a Cloud-like experience for the operator. So we're, you know, as a company we're focused on ... we've been focused for 10 years on "How do we create a better operating model in the Data Center". But now we're competing on experience just like our customers are with their App. So we have a mobile app for Intersight, right? And we're focused now on the experience for the operator and bringing that Cloud-like experience on-prem. That's really the ... >> Todd, I'd like you to dig into the organizational impact here a little bit. First of all, from your partners selling these solutions into the customer as well as from a customer standpoint. Because I kind of hear individualized a little bit. Well, you know, AppD is very much an application-centric focus as opposed to Intersight is more of the infrastructure piece of it and those worlds haven't necessarily communicated or you know, there's some gaps. >> They have been the victims of silos on a technology basis and then that does manifest in the organization, right? And we used to see this when we started with Blades back in the early aughts, right? Is it the network? Is the networking team that assign off on this Blade chassis? Well, they can't manage the switching, we're not going to let the server guys manage that, right? So we've kind of seen technology kind of reveal very dysfunctional (laughs) organizational constructs and I think we're trying to help the same dynamic here, but between the folks that are concerned about the application how it relates to the business and looking at the application performance and the teams that manage infrastructure, they haven't had common tooling. And this provides common data sets, a single source of truth so that when something goes wrong, everyone's aware of the same set of conditions. They can see, they can correlate it. We're correlating these two data sets from the app side and the infrastructure side. And it helps the teams work together because you're right, I mean, you've got app teams that look at the world as a you can think of it as a horizontal application topology. But underneath every one of those points on the graph, there's an infrastructure component, maybe different teams. So, and they're looking at the world as stacks. So you've got the infrastructure folks looking up the app folks looking down and unless you've got these worlds correlated, that's what the war-rooms and the finger pointing, it must be the network, who knows. You know, so we're really trying to help teams come together cause ultimately in a business, they're all working for somebody that cares about the whole edge ladder. >> So for from a selling motion, is it that person that they report up to that will drive that? >> It's both. or you find -- >> Well, what we're doing is, you know, we have our infrastructure operations teams, the folks that we work with there now we can bring them a tool set that says, "Here's how we can help you be directly relevant to the business in real time. Here's how to hug your application team and make them happy. He is right, so it's a story of relevance and in a real time way". and then for the application team, it's a story of, "Hey, here's a tool set that ensures the thing that you care about most, which is your precious baby, your application is going to get all the care and feeding it needs from the infrastructure on-prem and the Cloud. And so our AppD team is talking to those application-centric monitoring and operations teams and our, you know, all the folks that work in our Data Center Organization are talking to the infrastructure buyers, but we're now selling them a common tool set. You know, one team kind of coming bottom up the other common top down. >> And it's heterogeneous, I don't need, I don't have to have Cisco gear >> Correct to make this work. And it's a SaaS model -- >> It is SaaS, yes pretty sure. And it's a 2020 availability, right? >> Yes. The calender 2020? >> First half. Yeah. First half. Great. >> Yep All right, Todd, want to give you the final word as we look through 2020 what should be customers be looking for in this space? >> I think they should be thinking about how can they impact the top line and the bottom line, so as an IT organization And on the top line, it's going to be these new application experiences. That's where the companies are innovating, right? To drive revenue, new experiences. And then on the bottom line is, "How do we get rid of over provisioning? How do we operate in a more efficient way?" And to do that, you need analytics, right? I haven't said AIOps, but I'll throw it out in the close, right? But you need analytics to really understand "How do I optimize the environment, reduced my cost of computing and help out with a bottom line." So that's, that's the rest of the year. >> Todd Brannon, really appreciate the conversation. Thanks so much for all the updates. Look forward to talking to you again soon. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> All right, for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with much more wall to wall coverage here from Cisco live 2020 in Barcelona. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's the Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Kicking off 2018 here in Europe is Cisco's annual event. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of the Cube, with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon. Our next guest is Todd Brannon, who's the marketing director at Cisco, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> You guys announced HyperFlex before the show. >> We did. >> And a lot of cloud happening here in the keynote. Seeing IOT, well security number one obviously. Security, that's always going to be number one, but the other themes are obviously IOT and multi-cloud. >> Todd: Multi-cloud. >> Huge conversations, both developing rapidly in kind of it's own way. >> Well that's crucial for us 'cause we talk about HyperFlex 3.0, a lot of cool features that we're building into that, but the scope for us is much, much broader because of the multi-cloud piece. That's reality for our customers. They've told us very, very clearly, I'm going to use multiple public clouds, but I'm also going to have to get my on-prem side of it. So we tell 'em, absolutely, good multi-cloud starts at home with platforms like, with HyperFlex, and that's exactly the way we've brought it together. So we talk about a kind of a very modest aspiration with this is we want to help customers power any application, on any cloud, on any scale. >> Well take a minute before we get started, help us with some questions. What is HyperFlex 3.0 for the folks watching? What is it? >> So we introduced HyperFlex as our hyper converged platform built on UCS. We acquired a company called Springpath. They brought in a purpose-built, log-structured file system for the cluster and we combined these things together to create HyperFlex. So it's really unique in the sense that, well let me back up, I'd say a lot people ignore how crucial a file system and a network are to a clustered system. It kind of goes without saying, but a lot of the focus has been on, okay what's the individual node in that stack look like, but we look at it much more at the cluster level. And so, our uniqueness is that we've engineered all of this thing together. So we brought that out in 2016, last year really we focused on performance, 40 gig, all-flash, open up the network pipes and then this year is really about our multi-cloud integration and then additional features that we're bringing in to support more workloads, Hyper-V support, containers. So 3.0 is really just filling in a lot of features that we need to really make this a ideal platform for multi-cloud. >> Todd, we've tracked UCS since the early days. UCS really created and led the whole converged infrastructure ten. >> When we heard about CI though, it's really about simplification. It's infrastructure, it's that next step. Hyper converged, a lot of the things you were talking about there, it's about cloud and the underlying platform, and while CI can be used for that, seems like a different discussion. Can you give us a little bit compare/contrast as to what you see? >> Absolutely. Well, I mean, the conversion infrastructures, you know, we started that way back in the day with Vblock and VCE, and then FlexPod, VersaStack, FlashStack, there's lots of different storage partnerships that we have we can bring customers. And private cloud has been a big workload for those infrastructure components. You know, it's really just a storage question of how you want to address that component, but it all revolves around the operating model. So our mission is, look, we've got a huge install basic customers are used to acquiring and deploying pre-engineered chunks of infrastructure like a Vxblock or a FlexPod, what have you, we need to continue to serve them, while they also evaluate where hyper convergence might fit in the equation as well, and how do we offer those both up with a common set of policy and management, with UCS management, with Intersight. So we think that these are going to coexist for quite some time and customers are going to have to decide how they want to use those different types of infrastructure, but ultimately, it's just about the workload. >> Cisco and it's storage partners have billions of reasons why they're going to keep selling CI's for a while. >> Certainly, yep. >> Help connect the dots though. You talked about that operating model in the keynote this morning, big focus on multi-cloud, >> Todd: Certainly. >> And things like, we talked to AppD at AWS re:Invent, how does the public cloud mesh with these other solutions. >> So, one of the things that we're announcing here at the show is the cloud, our Cisco container platform. That's an example of how we're going to work with Google to create an integrated stack, focused initially around Kubernetes, and we have HyperFlex as an infrastructure component under that, and that's, for people that are really accelerating their application development or maybe they're modernizing older workloads with containers, we're going to provide that element. But the true multi-cloud functionality is what we do with things like CloudCenter. So that was our CliQr acquisition, allows us to profile workloads, take 'em out to the cloud, multiple public clouds. So for us, when we talk about HyperFlex as a platform for multi-cloud it's those integrations with CloudCenter, but then also AppD, which is hugely important because like we were talking about earlier, you've got applications now that are distributed across on-prem and multiple public clouds potentially. So maybe you got a front end out in the public cloud, customer data or business logic on-prem, how do you keep track of the performance of that collection of functions and systems that are running independently and you have to do that with something like AppD. So we have a lot of the software components to help customers really get their multi-cloud going. >> So bringing it back to HyperFlex, my understanding, not just virtual environment anymore, you're also doing containers and that tied into that multi-cloud piece. >> So, a couple important things with this 3.0 release. We're bringing for Hyper-V, for customers who want to do different hypervisors, and then we developed a persistent storage plug-in into the file system for those stateful workloads that are going to be in containers. So again, with Kubernetes, as developers want to go out and do pod requests, basically self-service volumes on the HyperFlex storage environment, that's huge. And so we've opened it up to two more classes of workloads right there. >> I mean, what aren't you doing? Got these centralized apps. Is there going to be a Cisco coin in the future? (laughs) >> I think -- >> There's a rumor going around. >> So yeah, I can't speak to our cryptocurrency strategy. That's out of my domain. >> Probably coming, these centralized apps, again, on the horizon, another future thing you guys are positioned for. In all seriousness though, I want to put a plug in for Stu's Wikibon team. They came out with a true private cloud report recently last year, really kind of the only ones looking at it this way, but it really is interesting. I want to get your comment to this because we go to 100 of events a year, last year was over 100, I think, 30, and what we've observed is the same thing that's happening here. DevNet's got a lot of attraction. You've got DevNet Create, more of an open-source, cloud native focus. >> Todd: Sure. >> You're seeing the enterprises getting their act done at home, inside the premise. >> Todd: That's right. >> So it's not so much they're moving to cloud. Yeah, some stuff's going in the cloud, but they're kind of cleaning up the house first, going cloud ops on premise. >> That's right. >> And then, as a preparation to all the spend and all the intention is really on the private cloud, what they call true private cloud. Do you see the same thing? >> Absolutely. >> And is that a stepping stone to the cloud? >> Absolutely, and that's exactly, that's informed everything we've done here in this latest, this past year really, of development around HyperFlex is our IT customers telling us, look I've got the developer as my new constituent. As much as I need to maintain shrink wrapped apps or legacy workloads for the core business, the developer is really my customer now and I have to provide infrastructure on-prem that behaves like the cloud in terms of infrastructure as code and being able to do things like we're doing with this Kubernetes environment, where the developers can withdraw the resources they need, turn 'em back in and the IT team can get out of the way. That's hugely important. >> I think we're observing on our opening this morning when we were commenting on the keynote and some of the trends here is that Cisco is moving up the stack pretty rapidly over the years, this year more than ever, you can start to see a clear line of sight that it's not just network plumbing, although that's pretty critical. But with Kubernetes and the growth, you mentioned Google, it's pretty interesting, a renaissance is going on in the software world, certainly with open-source, you have app developers, which are like just classic building software apps, then you got engineering, software engineering. So I use that that term software engineering as a throwback to the age when I graduated with my CS degree, that was what you called yourself when you got a job. You were a software engineer. You have network engineers, so you're seeing a line of under the hood engineering with software and networks and whatnot. And then, above Kubernetes you're seeing, just hey I just want a program, just give me some functions. >> Absolutely, and it's the IT generalist that are emerging as the heroes here that have to understand, okay, how do I build that on-prem platform, how do I have the capability to get my developers out to the public cloud, as in when they need to and it makes sense, or potentially bring things back. And you're right, and then on the development side they don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of that. So to the degree we can enable our IT customer to provide that service, but also simplify that for them is essential. >> Talk about your posture to those two different personas because you guys just provide the network in the old days and app developers programmed on them. They get some storage or perusing some storage. Now you got to lean in towards the network engineers, which are now software engineers under the hood, and then you got to lean in to the app developers and enable them to be successful. How are you attacking those, not attacking, how are you servicing and leaning into those groups. >> We brought the storage and computing experts into the fold with UCS, nine years ago, but now when you look at our acquisition of AppD, that's where we really start to take care of the application owner, be it the developer or the business owner for the application and allowing them to kind of see across on-prem, out in the public cloud, how do I ensure that I'm going to stay out of trouble, and if something goes wrong I know exactly where in that constellation of services the problem resides. So AppD is critical in that sense because -- >> So they fill a big hole. >> Absolutely, because that's how we can, all this comes together to power our workload, power business service. Applications are the heart of new business. >> Todd, what about from a training perspective? Cisco Live's always been a show where people get their certifications, they build their careers on this stuff. It's changing so fast. How are you keeping, the training tracks, and giving that career help to all the people that do this for a living. >> We're adding the pillars for all the things we're talking about, the multi-cloud software portfolio, new infrastructure components, like HyperFlex. Those are all being built into our training regimen and also our training partners, so they can take that out and scale it for us. >> All right, so you went and just connected the dots on what I was finishing up for network engineers, software engineers, under the hood, app developers, AppD, you guys have a good solid footing there, good approach. Multi-cloud, is that the Kubernetes? Is that the secret sauce to multi-cloud in your opinion? And/or how do you guys look at multi-cloud and how do you talk to your customers about it? >> Well we talk about, the data is pretty clear, customers want to be able to use multiple public clouds and they want to be able to evaluate them. So I think the center of our strategy, we have our multi-cloud portfolio, how we organize all these things. The cloud consume pillar of that is really comprised of AppD, which we talked about, but also CloudCenter. And so CloudCenter is a tool that allows our customers basically profile an application and then go understand what's it going to cost me and what are the different attributes of these public cloud services, and which one matches up the best. So I'd say that's the center of the strategy. Obviously, particularly around containers, but more workloads in the future, Kubernetes becomes a much bigger -- >> So orchestration is pretty key. >> Yeah, orchestration's essential and it's not just in a pure software context, but how do we hook down into infrastructure. So we've already built this programmable infrastructure, so how do we expose those knobs and dials to orchestration engines so that we're not just virtualizing, but we're actually optimizing the infrastructure they need. >> That's the beautiful thing about service and function-based software. Okay, so now I've heard about this dCloud. What is dCloud? >> So dCloud's basically a demo environment that our engineering team can use and our partners can use to demo software. So, for example, we launched our cloud management platform for UCS and HyperFlex last fall, we call it Intersight. So software like that, you know software becomes central to our strategy, dCloud becomes the way that we show that. >> Customers can come in and play on that and partners? >> Partners and our sales teams can take customers through it. >> But not customers. >> I don't believe there's an end user entrance to that yet. >> So it's like a sandbox for the cloud. >> But I could be wrong. I'm not a dCloub expert. >> So for the folks watching, what's different this year at Cisco Live in Europe from other shows? Is there anything that stands out to you around this year? >> Definitely the multi-cloud theme and we're hearing that from customers. They don't, there's always been the question of what type of infrastructure should I provision for different workloads, but it's really moved that past that to here's the workload spectrum I need to support. What are the tools you're going to give me for that on-prem? How can you help me get to the cloud? And I think the other thing, more narrowly speaking, hyper convergence is really turning the corner in terms of adoption. So when we first, we weren't the first ones to arrive at the hyper convergence party in the industry by any means, but we brought the keg. So when we showed up the party kind of got started. We think we brought the complete answer and now we're seeing as more and more workloads can go onto a HCI platform, the adoption's starting to, and we're seeing large organizations bring it on, both in the core and out at the edge. So those are a couple big changes -- >> Todd, any bold predictions? Will Cisco be number three in HCI by the end of 2018? >> Todd: Yes, 'cause we already are. >> Okay. (laughs) >> We already are. So, today it's a three horse race right now. So it's Dell, Nutanix, Cisco in the latest IDC numbers. So I think by the end, I'd like to see number two within a type of a timeframe. I'll give you number two within six quarters, how about that? >> And Stu wants to know what are you going to do with all that cash that you bring over from, to the US? (laughs) >> John: What are you going to buy? >> Your patriotion, yeah. >> I heard Chuck talking about investing in employees so I hope to get some of that, or no. No guys, I think Chuck's already kind of laid it out. We got our investors, we've got potential things we can do, bringing in new technology, so he's really laid that out. >> Todd, final question for you at the end of the segment. >> Sure. >> As the personnel change, excitedly, the infrastructure of the cloud and the evolution of the renaissance that's coming with software, DevNet, DevNet Create, doing some great stuff as an indicator of what's coming, >> Sure. >> How is the roll of the network, your target customer, who's been loyal Cisco net MVP all these years and you got storage guys, interdisciplinary has been a big thing, what skill sets do you see evolving for that Cisco hero out there? What the trend that you can talk to? >> It's the ability to automate. It's the ability to take advantage of some of the technologies we're bringing in terms of assurance. It's how do you bring all of that insight that resides in the network, in the telemetry and that data, how do you bring that out and use it in a way that can help the business. I think for our core audience, for those folks you talk about, it's how do I become much more adept at bringing these pieces together in an automated way, but then how do take advantage of some of the things that are available to me now in terms of bringing the power of analytics, AI, into an IT context and take advantage of those things for all the different things you can imagine, security, assurance, et cetera. >> So the big thing then, just to summarize, if I hear you correctly, the difference this year is that you got AppD, and you got end to end DevOps. >> I think it's our multi-cloud story has really jelled over the past year, and now we're bring it in to the context of on-prem infrastructure in addition to the public cloud side of it, so I think that's the, that's big news from data center side. >> Todd Brannon who's the marketing director at Cisco here inside the Cube. We are in Barcelona, live coverage, two days, wall to wall. I'm John Furrier for Stu Miniman. More live coverage at the Cube after this short break. (synthesizer beat)