>>Ply from Barcelona, Spain pits the cube covering Cisco live 2020 Ratu by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back live to Cisco live in 2020 in Barcelona. We're in Europe, Barcelona. I'm John Ferrara, Dave Alante. We've got a great guest here and the whole theme of the show is not about the infrastructure is about the applications and the applications being powered by an infrastructure powered by Cisco. We've got a great guest, senior vice president, general manager, team collaboration, Shri Travaasa of Cisco. You run all the big products, WebEx on steroids, new announcements. You had a really killer announcements, the pack booth. We'll get into that. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming. Thank you for having me. What's the quick news? You're on stage giving the keynote quickly share the news. We can get into it. So we are obviously >>coming out with a set of updates to our great portfolio. We reach out to about 300 million users across the enterprise today who use us for all the way from meetings to team collaboration to calling to powering meeting rooms. So in a sense, what we have as a products that, uh, is either in the meeting room or on the desktop or on a mobile phone. So any one of those methods and mechanisms. And in the past couple of years we've seen massive adoption of video, uh, whether it'd be on the mobile phone, whether it be in your desktop or in a meeting room itself. >>So video is the key. You had an announcement with Mike, uh, Microsoft teams explain that because don't they? Don't they compete with you? >>Yes, we, we, so the best way to describe it as is it's compatibility and competition. So it's competitive to compete, um, for the sake of our end users. So end user choice pretty much drives, uh, the types of integrations we do these days. You can't leave it to an it organization to do that integration. You've got to make sure these products work. So we integrate quite a bit with our competitors, spar, Slack, Microsoft teams, zoom. We do integrate with all of those guys. And the Microsoft teams integration, um, is prefaced on providing the best real time media experience into the Microsoft ecosystem. So if a customer is using office three 65 for document collaboration and chooses us for real time collaboration, they get >>the best experience comes from. So this has been a sleepy space for awhile and then all of a sudden you've mentioned Slack, zoom comes out, big IPOs, high valuations, Microsoft kind of transitioning and gets, it's based to to teams. There's a lot of excitement all of a sudden. And I was thinking in the last year out, geez, I wonder if Cisco is asleep at the wheel, but today you had all these announcements, so obviously not asleep at the wheel. Describe what you see going on in the space and what excites you from a standpoint of what you've just announced. So I think >>over the past two years, rightfully so, there's been a ton of movement in this space and I think it's driven by, it's, it's important to talk about why it's driven by globalization of the workforce. So that globalization of the workforce has, has, has, has gotten caught steam in the past few years and you pretty much see folks being employed across the globe. Whoever has the skill gets employed in a sentence. And what we see within the confines of WebEx is an increase in user engagement. So the same user is using WebEx a lot more and we wonder why we're seeing basically cross time zone meetings go up and team collaboration as we know it is no longer across the table. It's actually across time zones, across geographies, across language boundaries. So you're seeing that happen and the power of team collaboration is not just bringing people together, it's the data in heading to within the conversation becomes the new currency. >>It's the new frontier. And you can do a whole bunch of analytics on that. You can provide information on that. You can basically bring what I would call uninterrupted work streams in the myths, which is, you know, how do you take a conversation, take a part of a set of action items out of it and basically take it all the way so that there's automation, there's least amount of transmission loss and transmission loss in a sense. So that's, that's what's causing, um, this, this industry to wake up because it's a productivity gain in knowledge worker population. >>I don't know why it's off the charts on these systems, you know, low denominator and it's so easy to justify. I mean to me this is the biggest way that people are kind of talking about, but not really specifically addressing it. And to me, I always like to look at the startup world because the startup world is ultimately the Canary in the coal mine. Cody cloud native was before cloud hit, the startups were in there wipe clean sheet of paper, all cloud. Now that's mainstream. I had a conversation with Mitchell, the founder of Hashi Corp and we were talking about the concept of virtual first. And his startup was all virtual. They didn't have an office, they could afford one, but their teams were remote. This is the new dynamic that works. And so I believe that this is going to be an enterprise requirement because this has been validated. >>You seeing people work virtually, development teams, marketing to any team, they're remote, they're at home. So this is a trend. This is real. And designing a product for virtual first versus saying, Oh, if your virtual uses Proctor was designed for this, this is really where it's coming to in my opinion. How are you guys addressing that? Because in that video is not easy. Totally not. You guys been doing video Cisco for a lot them. I know from the cable companies to make a deep packet inspection and managing packets, QoS and mean policy basis, the perfect storm for making video work better. So explain the whole virtual first and the video. Start by sharing a small little secret. I run this business and yet I'm a remote worker. Cisco's based in San, I live in Seattle. >>I live in a small town called mamasan. I'm, I'm a perfect example of who we are. It's all the. So without a doubt, what has also spurred this is the bandwidth to trust the globe, not just in the U S uh, I find that, you know, parts of Asia have very good connectivity. If you go into Korea, Singapore, it's just fantastic, right? If you go into the Western Europe, Scandinavian countries, it's just fabulous. So I think the, the fact of the matter is you, the act of working together across the table and the act of these collaboration tools bringing people together need to be the same. That's pretty much where we are all headed. We're all trying to achieve that Nirvana, making sure there's no dissonance when you bring people across video that's key. That requires not only the ability to see and hear people, but to be able to whiteboard, to be able to have a very rich and immersive conversation on biblical creation so that, you know, using like stickies on a whiteboard for example, how well can you do it? >>So those are the types of things that we are headed towards. Uh, and I w I would pretty much say you guys said it in your question. You have to design for a remote worker for a virtual work environment, which basically is all about optimizing for team collaboration and optimizing for information that's consistent across different communication types. Whether you pick up the phone, whether you are on a meeting in a persistent chat, all that transcription should look and feel the same. This is the convergence really of networking and software because software is where the action is, but the network controls the routes. So, you know, give you an example, we were doing a live broadcast in our studio in Palo Alto had Ken Jennings on from jeopardy and it was, I was so excited. It was a good interview. We had multiple guests on about AI and you know, and he was kind of our celebrity guests and he had terrible bandwidth with his house. >>I don't know, maybe his kids were playing games on it or he was downloading some Netflix, who knows, but he had a horrible visual. We couldn't control that. This is where the network optimization comes in. What are you guys doing there? You guys run the networks, you guys have access to some of the routes and looking for, you know, best route, best quality. So I think without a doubt, you know, the, your lowest common denominator leg in your network kind of decides the quality per se. Uh, but we, we continue to do things like a compression of bits on the wire so that you need the smallest amount of pipe. But at the end of the day for high Raz video, you still need a decent amount of bandwidth. And what ends up happening is it's not just bandwidth, it's uh, you know, understanding what kind of packet loss profile you have on that network. >>So what we are doing across nearly nearly every vendor today is figuring out how we can optimize for these Laci networks. So if you're talking to any collaboration engineer, um, the first interview question will inadvertently be, tell me your experience on Laci networks. What have you done, how many patents do you have? You know, that's kind of the, the discussion per se. So I think without a doubt the advent of 5g and its expansion will lead to Ken Jennings potentially having a much better experience. Right. Can you auto scale, not auto scale, but auto detect? Yes. That cause that's something that could be automated. And we, we automatically, we call it graceful degradation. So we start with aspiring for the 10 ADP. Then we'll bring it down to seven 2360 and no video. And that happens automatically and we let the end user know you're having a network blip and hence, uh, we have, we are degrading it or today's product. Yes. >>So years ago when you, there's video conferencing, you just have to show 15 minutes beforehand just to make sure everybody get on. Okay. So simplicity is another big adoption theme, whether it's one push phone calling or call me or whatever it is. At the same time, you've got to add functionality. You've had a transcription, you've had a translation, you've got the split screen. And when I stand up, the camera follows me. So are those counterpoints simplicity and functionality, how do you integrate those together? >>I think the, the, all of this is done in the quest to simplicity, right? Um, one of the key things we've done across the Cisco WebEx portfolio, we've been known as the stodgy characters. Um, you know guys who don't move fast, which is exactly the opposite, to be honest with you. We worked on making sure we get rid of, I'm going to use the word here, nerd knobs in the product optimized for the simple in a meeting, there are three things that matter. Three big use cases, scheduling, joining in, meeting quality. Those are the only three things matter. The rest doesn't matter, right? So if you look at our devices, if you look at everything, we have this consistent green button that shows up everywhere. Whether you bring up outlook, whether you bring up an iPhone calendar, whether you bring up a desktop in one of our devices, all of those things will have this consistent green bar. We don't, we never want the end user to miss it. See it hit it. It'll show up at the right time. Basically shows up between six minutes and the 40 minute Mark before the meeting. >>And by that in meeting quality, you mean the experience overall, how hard it is to share something or >>actually can you see that person? Can you hear that person, you know, things of that sort of, right. You know, how do you avoid echos in a meeting? Like, what if I turn on both audio multiple times in a particular echo, right. As I mentioned in our last interview, Sri about um, uh, the previous guests around, they want API APIs cause it was like API APIs. It's kind of a trend towards a thin, I won't say thin client cause that's some kind of an old, old word. But um, more efficient source code on the client side, not bloated >>software in the sense of having all these bells and whistles. I mean, I mean at some point you're going to use, right? It could be an advanced version. Maybe you have a tiered thing, but at the base set, how do you create software in this modern error so that you can have really fast software managing front end with the powerful backend. You think about, Hey Siri, you know, there's the front end, there's a back end. So you starting to see this kind of decoupling. How do you guys look at that as it changed the development thesis? Is that something that you guys are thinking about? What's your take on all that? >>Yeah, without a doubt. Right? So we, we, we constantly optimize media is a very different workload than for example, a commanding tool. Right? Yeah. Uh, and I don't mean to trivialize city or any other assistant media is hard when you're doing video. The app needs to have some intelligence to be able to disintegrate audio and video streams and content sharing, right? So these apps tend to have a bigger footprint on the desktop, on the mobile phone than other traditional apps. So there is a constant quest for that additional bit of optimization to reduce, you know, substantially reduce the juice you use out of the laptop. Uh, and with laptops becoming more and more powerful, mobile phones becoming more and more, more powerful, we are only able to bring more, more into that big tree. >>Yes. And the rich media is only getting more and more robust with video. Look at the gaming world. My kids got their rig set up, multiple monitors. I mean, it's a lifestyle experience, consumption of video. It's all, it put more pressure on you guys. It's hard. We know we do it. How, what's the, in your mind, what's your guiding principle for future innovation? Whether you're hiring, designing around video, what do you guys chasing that Nirvana? What is it? Is it the software, the hardware? It's a chips. >>I think it's a combination of them, right? If you look at Cisco, our inherent differentiation is we know, we know how to do software. We know a thing or two about networks. I mean no hardware. How do you bring these three together and there's a four to dimension, I'm going to call it quad. And it's security. You can't ignore security. You know, it's, it's something that you have to intrinsically think about. It's not a check by check box after you don't want somebody peeping Toms in their meeting. For example, everybody is simply >>back in the cams. Jeff Bezos has got hacked on video on his WhatsApp embedded malware. So are all kinds of weird things that come through. You don't know. >>I think it's, it's the amalgamation of all of these things. How do you maximize every single element of the pipe? Um, so we are working with, for example, our own DNA center methods and mechanisms by which we're saying based on our workload, how do we optimize the next look for our workload. When we find an issue within let's say WebEx, how do we automatically self heal the network? That is basically where we are headed. So we want to make sure we are constantly stack up and down the stairs, down the stack. And the other, you know you've talked about simplicity of use case. I'll give you an example. What we're doing with our devices now as it has face recognition, we don't store any, any images in the cloud. So as soon as you walk into a meeting room, we've got an IOT sensor that it recognizes your face. >>It says, Hey, let me pull up your meetings. It starts to track who all have joined your meeting. And then let's assume you forget to join the meeting. It wakes up and it says, would you like to join the meeting? Two of two of your colleagues have joined so you don't even have to hit the button. It is germaphobe friendly. So you don't have to touch. It binds you in basic automation. So that level of automation is coming in. So you're talking about the future. The future is about simplicity. That spans generations. So you're pretty much worn the human to come back and for the tech to fade away in the back of them. If you don't want them to be reliant on this app that you have to learn, right, it should be discernible, relatable, easy to use. >>Works like the movies in history. You're a rock star. I'm great to have you. In fact, now we know you live in Seattle. We're going to have you in our studio remotely and we're gonna make sure that bandwidth and that video is of highest quality., the SVP, senior vice president, general manager of the collaboration group of Cisco. Big part of the future of Cisco. This group is going to be really driving some of those network benefits. The applications are big part of the focus, changing the business models, business outcomes. This is the conversation is the cube coverage from Barcelona. We'll be right back after this short break.

(electronic music) - Welcome to theCube Insights. A podcast that is typically taken from Siliconangle media's theCube interviews, where we share the best of our teams insights from all events we go to and from time to time we want to be able to extract some of our learnings when we're back at the ranch. Joining me for this segment is co-founder, co-CEO, benevolent dictator of a community, my boss, Dave Vellante. - Hey Stu. - Dave. Good to see you dressed down. - Yeah, well. Podcast, right? We got toys, props and no tie. - Yeah, I love seeing this ... we were just talking, John Furrier, who we could really make a claim to say we wouldn't have the state of podcasting today, definitely in tech, if it wasn't for what John had done back in the day with PodTech and it's one of those things, we've talked about podcasts for years but I'd gotten feedback from the community that said, "Wow, you guys have grown and go to so many shows that we want to listen to you guys as to: what was interesting at this show, what did you guys take out of it, what cool people did you interview?" We said, "Well, of course all over youtube, our website thecube.net but it made a lot of sense to put them in podcast form because podcasts have had a great renaissance over the last couple of years. - Yeah, and it's pretty straight forward, as Stu, for us to do this because virtually every show we do, even if it's a sponsor show, we do our own independent analysis upfront and at the tail end, a lot of our people in our community said, "We listen to that, to get the low down on the show and get your unfiltered opinion." And so, why not? - Yeah, Dave. Great point. I love, from when I first came on board, you always said, "Stu, speak your mind. Say what the community; what are the users saying? What does everybody talk about?" As I always say, if there is an elephant in the room we want to put it on the table and take a bite out it. And even, yes, we get sponsored by the companies to be there. We're fully transparent as to who pays us. But from the first Cube event, at the end of the day, where after keynote, we're gonna tell you exactly what we think and we're always welcome for debate. For people to come back, push on what we're saying and help bring us more data because at the end of the day, data and what's actually happening in the world will help shape our opinions and help us move in the direction where we think things should go. - I think the other thing is too, is a lot of folks ask us to come in and talk to them about what we've learned over the past year, the past six months. This is a great way for us to just hit the podcast and just go through, and this is what I do, just go through some of the shows that I wasn't able to attend and see what the other hosts were saying. So, how do you find these things? - Yeah, so first of all, great. theCube insights is the branding we have on it. We're on iTunes, We're on Spotify, We're on Google Play, Buzzsprout's what we use to be able to get it out there. It's an RSS on wikibon.com. I will embed them every once in a while or link to them. We plan to put them out, on average, it's once a week. We wanna have that regular cadence Typically on Thursday from a show that we've been out the spring season is really busy, so we've often been doing two a week at this point, but regular cadence, just podcasts are often a little tough to Google for so if you go into your favorite player and look at thecube insights and if you can't find it just hit you, me, somebody on the team up. - So you just searched thecube insights in one of those players? - Yeah absolutely, I've been sitting with a lot of people and right now it's been word of mouth, this is the first time we're actually really explaining what we're doing but thecube one word, insights is the second word I found it real quick in iTunes I find it in Google Play, Spotify is great for that and or your favorite podcast player Let us know if we're not there. - So maybe talk about some of the things we're seeing. - Yeah absolutely - The last few months. - So, right when we're here, what are our key learning? So for the last year or two Dave, I've really been helping look at the companies that are in this space, How are they dealing with multi cloud? And the refinement I've had in 2018 right now is that multi cloud or hybrid cloud seems to be, where everyone's Landing up and part of it is that everything in IT is heterogeneous but when I talk about a software company, really, where is their strength? are they an infrastructure company that really is trying to modernize what's happening in the data center are they born with cloud are they helping there? or are they really a software that can live in SAAS, in private cloud and public cloud? I kinda picture a company and where's their center of gravity? Do they lean very heavily towards private cloud, and they say public cloud it's too expensive and it's hard and You're gonna lose your job over it or are they somebody that's in the public cloud saying: there's nothing that should live in the data center and you should be a 100% public cloud, go adopt severless and it's great and the reality is that customers use a lot of these tools, lots of SAAS, multiple public Cloud for what they're doing and absolutely their stuff that's living in the data center And will continue for a long time. what do you see in it Dave? - My sort of takeaway in the last several months, half a year, a year is we used to talk about cloud big data, mobile and social as the forward drivers. I feel like it's kinda been there done that, That's getting a little bit long in the tooth and I think there's like the 3DS now, it's digital transformation, it's data first, is sort of the second D and disruption is the 3rd D And I think if you check on one of the podcast we did on scene digital, with David Michella. I think he did a really of laying out how the industry is changing there's a whole new set of words coming in, we're moving beyond that cloud big data, social mobile era into an era that's really defined by this matrix that he talks about. So check that out I won't go into it in detail here but at the top of that matrix is machine intelligence or what people call AI. And it's powering virtually everything and it's been embedded in all types of different applications and you clearly see that to the extent that organizations are able to Leverage the services, those digital services in that matrix, which are all about data, they're driving change. So it's digital transformation actually is real, data first really means You gotta put data at the core of your enterprise and if you look at the top five companies in terms of market cap the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Microsofts Etc. Those top five companies are really data first. But People sometimes call data-driven, and then disruption everywhere, one of my favorite disruptions scenarios is of course crypto and blockchain And of course I have my book "The Enigma war" which is all about crypto, cryptography and we're seeing just massive Innovation going on as a result of both blockchain and crypto economics, so we've been really excited to cover, I think we've done eight or nine shows this year on crypto and blockchain. - Yeah it's an interesting one Dave because absolutely when you mention cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, there's still a lot of people in the room that look at you, Come on, there's crazy folks and it's money, it's speculation and it's ridiculous. What does that have to do with technology? But we've been covering for a couple of years now, the hyper ledger and some of these underlying pieces. You and I both watch Silicon Valley and I thought they actually did a really good job this year talking about the new distributed internet and how we're gonna build these things and that's really underneath one of the things that these technologies are building towards. - Well the internet was originally conceived as this decentralized network and well it physically is a decentralized network, it's owned essentially controlled by an oligopoly of behemoths and so what I've learned about cryptocurrency is that internet was built on protocols that were funded by the government and university collaboration so for instance SMTP Gmail's built on SMTP (mumbles) TCPIP, DNS Etc. Are all protocols that were funded essentially by the government, Linux itself came out of universities early developers didn't get paid for developing the technologies there and what happened after the big giants co-opted those protocols and basically now run the internet, development in those protocol stopped. Well Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these other protocols that are been developed around tokens, are driving innovation and building out really a new decentralized internet. So there's tons of innovation and funding going on, that I think people overlook the mainstream media talks all about fraud and these ICO's that are BS Etc. And there's certainly a lot of that it's the Wild West right now. But there's really a lot of high quality innovation going on, hard to tell what's gonna last and what's gonna fizzle but I guarantee there's some tech that's being developed that will stay the course. - Yeah I love....I believe you've read the Nick Carr book "The Shallows", Dave. He really talked about when we built the internet, there's two things one is like a push information, And that easy but building community and being able to share is really tough. I actually saw at an innovation conference I went to, the guy that created the pop-up ad like comes and he apologizes greatly, he said "I did a horrible horrible thing to the internet". - Yeah he did - Because I helped make it easier to have ads be how we monetize things, and the idea around the internet originally was how do I do micropayments? how do I really incent people to share? and that's one of the things we're looking at. - Ad base business models have an inherent incentive for large organizations that are centralized to basically co-opt our data and do onerous things with them And that's clearly what's happened. users wanna take back control of their data and so you're seeing this, they call it a Matrix. Silicon Valley I think you're right did a good job of laying that out, the show was actually sometimes half amazingly accurate and so a lot of development going on there. Anywhere you see a centralized, so called trusted third-party where they're a gatekeeper and they're adjudicating essentially. That's where crypto and token economics is really attacking, it's the confluence of software engineering, Cryptography and game theory. This is the other beautiful thing about crypto is that there is alignment of incentives between the investor, the entrepreneur, the customer and the product community. and so right now everybody is winning, maybe it's a bubble but usually when these bubbles burst something lives on, i got some beautiful tulips in my front yard. - Yeah so I love getting Insight into the things that you've been thinking of, John Furrier, the team, Peter Borus, our whole analyst team. Let's bring it back to thecube for a second Dave, we've done a ton of interviews I'm almost up to 200 views this year we did 1600 as a team last year. I'll mention two because one, I was absolutely giddy and you helped me get this interview, Walter isaacson at The Dell Show, One of my favorite authors I'm working through his DaVinci book right now which is amazing he talks about how a humanities and technology, the Marrying of that. Of course a lot of people read the Steve Jobs interview, I love the Einstein book that he did, the innovators. But if you listen to the Michael Dell interview that I did and then the Walter isaacson I think he might be working on a biography of Michael Dell, which i've talk to a lot of people, and they're like i'd love to read that. He's brilliant, amazing guy I can't tell you how many people have stopped me and said I listened to that Michael Dell interview. The other one, Customers. Love talking about customers especially people that they're chewing glass, they're breaking down new barriers. Key Toms and I interviewed It was Vijay Luthra from Northern trust. Kissed a chicago guy And he's like "this is one of the oldest and most conservative financial institutions out there". And they're actually gonna be on the stage at DockerCon talking about containers they're playing with severless technology, how the financial institutions get involved in the data economy, Leverage this kind of environment while still maintaining security so it was one that I really enjoyed. How about...... what's jumped out of you in all your years? - (Mumbles) reminds me of the quote (mumbles) software is eating the world, well data is eating software so every company is.... it reminds me of the NASDAQ interview that I did Recently and all we talked about, we didn't talk about their IT, we talked about how they're pointing their technology to help other exchanges get launched around the world and so it's a classic case of procurer of technology now becoming a seller of technology, and we've seen that everywhere. I think what's gonna be interesting Stu is AI, I think that more AI is gonna be bought, than built by these companies and that's how they will close the gap, I don't think the average everyday global 2000 company is gonna be an AI innovator in terms of what they develop, I think how they apply it is where the Innovation is gonna be. - Yeah Dave we had this discussion when it was (mumbles) It was the practitioners that will Leverage this will make a whole lot more money than the people that made it. - We're certainly seeing that. - Yeah I saw.....I said like Linux became pervasive, it took RedHat a long time to become a billion dollar company, because the open stack go along way there. Any final thoughts you wanna go on Dave? - Well so yeah, check out thecube.net, check out thecube insights, find that on whatever your favorite podcast player is, we're gonna be all over the place thecube.net will tell you where we're gonna be obviously, siliconangle.com, wikibon.com for all the research. - Alright and be sure to hit us up on Twitter if you have questions. He's D Villante on twitter, Angus stu S-T-U, Furrier is @Furrier, Peter Borus is PL Borus on twitter, Our whole team. wikibon.com for the research, siliconangle.com for the news and of course thecube.net for all the video. - And @ TheCube - And @TheCube of course on Twitter for our main feed And we're also up on Instagram now, so check out thecube signal on one word, give you a little bit of behind the scenes fun our phenomenal production team help to bring the buzz and the energy for all the things we do so for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for listening to this special episode of thecube insights. 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