I met with some CIOs yesterday from the state local government now that has been a super surprising market for me where I'm seeing them actually 2018 was a true change of the year for them massive workloads in the state Medicaid systems that are moving off of legacy systems on AWS justice and public safety systems moving off on AWS so that's where you're seeing news but you know what they shared with me yesterday and my theme as you saw today was removing barriers but they talked about acquisition barriers still that states still don't know how to buy cloud and they were asking for help can you help kind of educate and work with our acquisition officials so it's nice when they're asking us for help in areas that they see their own lockers Cyber Command cannot see today attacks on our country so they're left to try to go after the offense but all the offense has to do is hit over here they're looking at these sets of targets there you don't see the attacks so they wouldn't have seen the attack on Sony they don't see these devastating attacks they don't see the thefts so the real solution to what you bring up is make it visible make it so our nation can defend itself in cyber by seeing the attacks that are hitting us that should help us protect companies and sectors and help us share that information it has to be at speed so we talk about sharing but it's senseless for me to send you for air traffic control a letter that a plane is located at overhead you get it in the mail seven days later you think fighting blindfolded that's right I mean you can't do either and so what it gets you to is we have to create the new norm for visibility in cyberspace this does a whole host of things and you were good to bring out it's also fake news it's also deception it's all these other things that are going on we have to make that visible so what ground station is is it's a service that you can use like any other cloud service just pay for what you use on demand you can scale up you can scale down and we think that we're in the early stages of opening up innovations in this industry where an AWS announced a partnership in October 2016 and it really was the coming together of the best in the public cloud with the best of the private cloud for what we describe as the hybrid cloud opportunity in the past two and a half years coming up on three years pretty soon has been incredibly exciting we started off with some of the key industries that we fell for us public sectors are among our top three industries by financial services telco public sector healthcare manufacturing all the key industries technology we're looking for ways by which they could take their applique into the cloud without having to refactor Andry platform those applications that's a big deal because it's wasted work if you could lift and shift and then innovate and that's the value we brought to the public sector and some of our earliest customers were customers in the public sector like MIT schools about both of the regulated industries in the on-premise world were very strong in almost every civilian military the legislative branch the judicial branch the federal agencies all of them use us millions and millions of workloads the question really is how is they think about modernization and yet they get the best benefits of the public cloud while leveraging their VMware footprint at FINRA we have a very deliberate technology strategy and we constantly keep pace with technology in order to affect our business in the best possible way we always are looking for means to get more efficient and more effective and use our funding for the best possible business value so to that end we are completely in the cloud for a lot of our market regulation operations all the applications are in the cloud we in fact we were one of the early adopters of the cloud from that perspective all of our big data operations were fully operational in the cloud by 2016 itself that was itself a two-year project that we started in 2014 then from 2016 we have been working with machine language and recently over the past six months or so we've been working with neural networks so this was an opportunity for us to share what where we have been where we are coming from where we are going with the intent that whatever we do by way of principles can be adopted by any other enterprise we are looking to share our journey and to encourage others to adopt technology that's really I mean the problems that could be solved with technology now for good will I think will outweigh the technology for hill as Jay Carney calls it so right now when everyone's talking about Facebook and all this nonsense that happened with the elections I think is that's pretty visible that's painful for people to kind of deal with but then the reality is that never should have happened I think you're gonna see a resurgence of people that are going to solve problems and if you look at the software developer persona over the past 10 to 15 years it went from hire some developers build a product ship it market and make some money to developers being the front lines power players in software companies they're on the front lines they're making changes they're moving fast creating value I see that kind of paradigm hitting normal people where they can impact change like a developer would for an application in society I think you're gonna have younger people solving all kinds of crisis around whether it's hopefully crisis healthcare these problems will be solved at a-- will be a big catalyst a great example it would be when you think about all these siloed organizations within our community care you're unable to track any one one record and the record could be an individual or an organization so well what they're doing is they're moving all those disparate data silos into an opportunity to say let's do how many constituents do we have what type of services do they need how do we become proactive so when you take a look at someone who's moved into the community and their health record comes in what are the services that they need because right now they have to go find those services and if the county were to do things more proactively say hey these are the services that you need here's where you can actually go and get them and it's it's those individual personalized engagements that once you pull all that data together through all the different organizations from the beginning of a 911 for whatever reason through their health record to say this is the care that they need they these are the cares that they have and these are the services that they need and oh by the way they might be allergic to something or they might have missed a doctor's appointment let's go ensure that they're getting the health care there's one state that's actually even thinking about their senior care why don't we go put an Alexa in their house to remind them that these are the medications that you need you have a doctor's appointment at 2:00 o'clock do you want me to order a ride for you to get to your doctor's appointment on time that is proactive you walk around the expo floor here the booths are much smaller and I didn't understand that at first and then it quit for me if you want to sell services to government you don't buy a bigger booth you buy a congressperson and it turns out those are less expensive many technologies can be used for for good or for ill we we have a service at AWS a facial recognition service we're certainly not the only company that provides that service to customers thus far since Amazon recognition has been around we've had reports of thousands of positive uses - you know finding missing children breaking up human sex trafficking human trafficking rings assisting law enforcement in positive ways we haven't heard yet any cases of abuse by law enforcement but we certainly understand that that potential exists and we we encourage regulators and lawmakers to look closely at that we've put forth publicly guidelines that we think would be useful as they build a legislative or regulatory framework you

yeah I probably would use a sort of ever-changing I would say ever-expanding you know but you have to write because what we saw when we started off is roll around how to automate my datacenter how do I get a cloud experience in my data center what we see changing and okay Frank is driven by this whole app refactoring process that customers want to deploy apps maybe in the cloud maybe develop in the cloud and so they need an extension to the automated data center into the cloud and so really what you see from us is an expansion of that ACA concept you rangas point we actually really didn't change we just we're just extending it to container development platforms two different cloud environments what's the same area automate end-to-end network reach as well as the segmentation what is the right there right sorry security regime in this you know cloud era how is it evolving well I mean what we're doing is we're bringing tools like tetration which now runs on Prem and in the cloud things like stealthWatch which runs on from in the cloud and simply bringing them security frameworks that are very effective we're I think a very capable of well known security vendor but bringing them the capability to run the same capabilities in their on-prem environments and their data centers as well as in multiple public clouds and that just eliminates the seams that hackers could maybe get into it makes common policy Possible's they can define policy around an application once and have that apply across the vault environments which not only it's easier for them but it eliminates potential mistakes that they might make that might leave things open to a hacker so for us it's that simple bringing very effective common frameworks for security across all these cisco has embraced the idea of being a platform and not a siloed individual product line and so for a service provider like CenturyLink for us to be able to embrace that same philosophy of the platform of services what that means is that our engineering and field ops folks our Operations teams do all the hard work on the back end to make sure that we have established all of the right security the right network the reliability the global scalability of our specific platform of services and being that leader in telecommunications and then we're able to lay that cisco platform on top of it and what happens then from a product management level is once you've established that foundation it's really plug-and-play the customer calls and says I need calling I need meetings I need you know whatever it is they need and we build that solution and very quickly can put those components into play and get them to use the service right away so what we've done across the portfolio even in primary storage is made sure that we've done all sorts of things that help you against a ransomware a malware attack keep the data encrypted I think the key point and actually I think Silicon angle wrote about this is like some like 98% of all enterprises getting a broke it in two anyway so it's great that you've got security software on the edge with at the IBM or RSA or blue coat or checkpoint oh who cares who you buy the software from but when they're in there stealing and sometimes you know some accounts have told us they can track them down in a day but if you're a giant global fortune 500 datacenter look it may take you like a week so they can be stealing stuff right and left so we've done everything from we have right once technology right so it's immutable data you can't change it we've got encryption so if they steal it guess what they can't use it but the other thing we've done is real protection against ransomware now that's a great question in terms of modernization of infrastructure and there's some really interesting trends that I think are occurring and I think the one that's getting a lot of us is really edge computing and what we're finding is depending on the use case it can be an enterprise application where you're trying to get localization of your data it could be an IOT application where it's it's really critical for latency or bandwidth to keep compute and data close to the thing if you will or it could be mobile edge computing where you want to do thing like analytics and AI on a video stream before you tax the the bandwidth of the cellular infrastructure with that data stream so across the board I think edge is super exciting and you can't talk about edge with like I said talking about artificial intelligence another big trend whether it's running native running with an accelerator an FPGA I think we're seeing a myriad of use cases in that space but Security's in the end to your point right I've got software to find access I've got mobile access points I've got you know tetration I've got you know all of these products that are helping people that in the past they were just patching holes in the dike you know hey this happened let's put this software product here this happened let's put this in and we actually built the security practice like the last three or four years ago it's growing you know the number of people that are whether it's regulation compliance you know I got some real problem I think I've got a problem and I don't know what it is our ability to come back and sit down and say let's evaluate what your situation is so I was talking to the networking guys and so Wow enterprise networking it's up way up what's driving that the need to transform or is that you know what is it they're like a lot of times it's something are long security that's making them step back and reevaluate and then sometimes that transfer translates into an entire network refresh there are tools that people use and everybody's environments a little different so some might want to integrate in and use ansible terraform you know tools like that and so then you need code that will help integrate into that other people are using ServiceNow for tickets so if something happens integrate into that people are using different types of devices hopefully mostly Cisco but they may be other using others as well we can extend code that goes into that so it really helps to go in different areas and what's kind of cool is that our there's an amount of code that where people have the same problems you know and you know you start doing something everyone has to make the first few kind of same things in software let's get that into exchange and so let's share that there's places where partners are gonna want to differentiate keep that to yourselves like use that as your differentiated offer and then there's areas where people want to solve in communities of interest so we have we have someone who does networking and he wants to do automation he does it for power management in the utilities industry so he wants a community that will help write code that'll help for that area you know so people have different interests and you know we're hoping to help facilitate that because Cisco actually has a great community we have a great community that we've been building over the last 30 years there the network experts they're solving the real problems around the world they work for partners they work for customers and we're hoping that this will be a tool to get them to band together and contribute in a in a software kinda way they have the right reason to be afraid because so many automation was created a once user exactly was right and then you have the cost of traditional automation you have the complexity to create a network automation you guys realize that middle coordination you cannot have little automation only work on a portion of your needle you have to work on majority if not all of your needle right so that's became very complex just like a you wanna a self-driving car you can go buy a Tesla a new car you can drive on its own but if you wanna your 10 year order Toyota driving on its own richer feared that's a very complex well let's today Network automation how to deal with it you have to deal with multi vendor technology Marty years of technology so people spend a lot of money the return are very small they so they have a right to affair afraid of it but the challenge is there is what's alternative yeah I think that is one of the things that's very unique about the definite community is within the community we have technical stakeholders from small startups to really large partners or huge enterprises and when we're all here in the demo soon we're all engineers and we're all exchanging ideas kind of no matter what the scale so it becomes this great mixing of you know shared experiences and ideas and that is some of the most interesting conversations that I've actually heard this week is people talking about how maybe they're using one Cisco platform in these two very different environments and exchanging ideas about how they do that or maybe how they're using a Cisco platform with an open-source tool and then people finding value in thinking oh maybe I can do that in my environment so that part of the ecosystem and community is very interesting and then we're also helping partners find each other so we do a lot of work around you know here's a partner in the Cisco ecosystem who goes and installs Meraki networks right here's a software partner who builds mapping technology on top of indoor Wi-Fi networks and getting those two together because the software partner is not going to install the network and the network person may not write that application in that way and so bringing them together we've had a lot of really good information coming back from the community around kind of finding each other and being able to deliver those outcomes what are you guys doing Tom we'll start with you how are you guys working together to infuse and integrate security into the technologies and that from a customer's perspective those risks that dial down yeah so so we're in Cisco's integrating security across all of our product portfolio right and and that includes our data center portfolio all the way through our campus our when all those portfolios so we continue to look for opportunities to to integrate you know whether it's dual factor authentication or things like secure data center with a fire you know of highly scalable multi instance firewall in front of a data center things like that so we're we're definitely looking for areas and angles and opportunities for us to not only integrate it from a product standpoint but also ensure that we are talking that story with our customers so that they know they can they can leverage Cisco for the full architecture from a security standing on the storage of the data from an encryption perspective and as it gets moved or his mobile you know that that level of security and policy follows it you know wherever the data is secure of course enemy everybody always wants more performance they want lower cost security in many ways has begun to trump those other two attributes they've they've become table stakes security as well but security is really number one now ya talk about that talk about the major trends that you're seeing well of course of course security now is top of mine for everyone board level conversations executive level conversations all the time I think what ends up happening is in the past we would think about it as Network performance cost etc security as a tangent kind of side conversation now of course it's built into everything that we do [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to bright and sunny San Francisco. Gorgeous day here in the City on the Bay. Dave Vellante, John Walls. We continue our coverage here on theCUBE VMworld 2019 with Doc D'Errico from Infodant, CMO. Doc, good to see you again, sir! >> Infinidat. >> Oh Infinidat! Sorry, sorry, sorry. (Doc laughs) But, good to see you! >> I missed my opportunity but thanks, Dave, yeah, it's good to be back. >> John: You bet. Marc Creviere, who is principle systems engineer at US Signal. Good to see you again, Marc here. You were here just last year, right? >> Yeah, I'm an alumni now. >> We'll touch base on that in just a little bit. Doc, first off, let's just talk about the show from your perspective. What you're doing here, explain to our viewers at home what it's all about and what you find the vibe that's going on this year. What kind of sense do you get? >> The vibe is fantastic The sense is great. Coming back to San Francisco, I'm not sure what we were really expecting but it's a really good tempo, a lot of great people, lot of great feedback on our recent launch. A lot of people looking at what're we doing, especially with VMware and availability. Lots of new use cases for snapshot technologies which is fantastic. The 100% availability, it's great getting people come up to you who say "Hey, this is incredible. "You guys actually put some teeth behind your guarantees," "you know, you're not just promising "some future discounts or something. "In the VMworld environment where I've got my VMs, "I need that kind of guarantee, I need that support. "I need to know that my systems "are going to be there when I need them, "because that's my business," right? It's just an incredible vibe. >> And had your party last night? >> We had our party last night. And guess who was there? (laughs) >> I did stop by, it was a very cool venue. The San Francisco Mint, which is, it was kind of awesome. >> Yeah, it was a great, great environment. It was great having people like Dave there, and some of the other industry luminaries talk to our customers. >> I didn't get the tour of the Vault. >> Doc: I'll get you a picture. (laughing) >> So, Marc, I mentioned in the intro, we had you on last year. So, let's look back at the last 12 months for you. US Signal, and what's been going on with you, and what are you seeing here and kind of feeling here in terms of business? >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's been another great year at US Signal. We are planning on opening a new data center in the Detroit Metro area, coming up online Q1 of 2020, so that's exciting for us. Purpose built, wholly owned and operated by us, so that's great. It's going to add to our capabilities in that region. We've had a heavy focus on DR technologies, DR as a Service technologies in the past year. Seeing a lot of success, a lot of really good conversations with customers and developing their plans, and bringing our new capabilities to be able to service those needs. >> So, tell us more about the DR as a Service. I mean, that's obviously one of the early sort of cloud-use cases? >> Marc: Yeah. >> Add some color, what is it all about, how does it relate to some of the other DR solutions that are out there and what role do these guys play? >> Yeah, well we conducted a survey of a little over 100 of companies in our region, a little over 100 respondents, and three out of four respondents told us that their biggest concerns were either distributed denial of service or ransomware. Obviously, we've got these bad actors out there. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad actor, it could be something force of nature making data unavailable, right? It doesn't matter how great the equipment is if either a bad actor or nature takes it out for you. So, having that protection, we're able to have replication technology. We actually have three separate technologies that we use now. We enhanced our Zerto-based offering to include multi-cloud so we can now have customers replicate to either multiple cloud destinations, us being one of them, or they can replicate to one of their sites and us as a tertiary site, so that's new. They're able to bring their existing licensing. One thing that's exciting to me, near and dear to my heart, is drafts for VMware based on the vCloud availability platform. So, we're a big VM, vCloud shop, big consumer of VMware technologies, that's why we're out here, and that's really exciting to me because it uses built in VMware replication technologies. There's not a lot of learning curve, there's not a lot of extra components. Super simple to get up and running and get RPOs as low as 5 minutes, and it's easy, and it's relatively cheap on an OPX-type platform, where you're paying for storage and per VM and that's it. And then we've also spun up a replication for Veeam, Cloud replication for Veeam based on that ecosystem. So, we've got a lot of entry points, a lot of different ways that we can protect that data and bring it in and get a copy in our data center, so in the event that it becomes unavailable at the source, it's either managed or customer managed. We can get it up and running in a short time frame on our infrastructure. >> And Infinidat is the primary storage underneath all this? >> Marc: Yeah. >> So, explain more about... So, Doc, you and I have had these conversations. The state of the art, whatever, 15 years ago, was three-site data centers, very complex, extremely expensive. I'm interested in how we're attacking that problem today. You obviously, with multi cloud, it's multi-site, but how are we attacking the cost problem, the complexity problem, the "I can't test because I can fail over "but I'm afraid to fail back" problem? >> Well, you know, there's so many different ways to cover all of these. We're talking just about ransomware, you know, ransomware are immutable snaps, become an important play and we have Snap Rotator which will allow you to build a certain number of snaps and have them just rotate through so you're not just creating an infinite number, you're not wasting time and space. And, by the way, time and space, our snapshots are zero-overhead. There's zero performance penalty, unless you want to crash consistent copy, and there's really zero data overhead because it's only the incremental data that you write. So, by creating this, you can do it every couple seconds, and then create some immutable copies of that. You know, make them time out, so they can't be modified, 30 days, 60 days, whatever you decide administratively. So that's great. If you're looking for the DRaaS, the DR as a Service-type capabilities, whether it's single site or multi site, going to cloud service providers makes a lot of sense. 'Cause now, even if it's on premises to a cloud service provider, now you're not having to worry about that second set of infrastructure, you're not having to worry about the management of it, you're not having to worry about the systems integration of it, or even go CSP to CSP, right? Go from one data center within your favorite cloud service provider, hopefully US Signal, to another or any one of our great partners would be super, too. And then, of course, InfiniSync, where if you really want that longer distance capability, why bother with a bunker site? Why bother with all that complexity and that cost and overhead? Put in an InfiniSync appliance in with a VM, and you've got the recoverability. You can go asynchronous distances, and have a zero RPO. >> For way, way less. >> Oh, a fraction of the cost. It'll cost you less for the InfiniSync appliance than it'll cost you for the telecoms equipment that you need for a bunker site. >> If I don't want to build another data center... Go ahead. >> What I'm curious about; I heard a number yesterday in one of the interviews we had, about ransomware. The number kind of blew me away, and I thought about one out of every three companies will be a victim of, or at least a ransomware attack within the next two years, which means everyone, over the next six, if you extrapolate that out. Does that sound about right from what you're seeing? That the intrusions are reaching that kind of frequency? >> I'm surprised it's that low, but I'll let Marc try and answer that. >> We've done some events where we actually demo how easy it is, like, through a phishing attack, to get that in there. So, it's not just about having those protections in place, it's your user training; that's a huge area, training those users what to look for in those emails to avoid that sort of thing, but it's not perfect. People are imperfect. >> Dave: And yeah, you got to have both the protection on the front end, the training for the people, and those recovery options in the event it does get in. In our survey, the average monetary damage was over $150,000 per incident. And that means that some people got off a little lighter and some people paid a lot more, if that was the average. >> Should you pay the ransom? >> Uh, not if you've got a good plan in place that can test it. (laughs) >> But it is, it's a reasonable question. >> Huge quandary. Some are, some aren't, right? Atlanta says "no, we're going to pay a boatload "to protect against it, but we're not going to pay that," what was it, 55,000 or whatever it was? >> Let's negotiate. >> Yeah, I think I said last time I was here that until you've tested your plan, you don't really have one. You know, it rings just as true today. >> What's your business worth? I mean, it's a great question, really. What is your business worth to you? Your business is probably worth a lot more, and they probably throw these numbers out there, thinking "Well...", then becomes a no-brainer for you to pay, and that's the whole point. Because what is ransomware? It's malware that's recoverable, maybe. You're not even sure of that. >> Is it usually, is it operator error? Is it human error that allows that to work more often than not? Or, is it a mixture of technical chops, or just...? >> It's a mixture; you've got to know what vulnerabilities are out there on your infrastructure, you got to make sure you're staying up to date on patching those vulnerabilities, paying attention to any compliance practices, if you're a compliant organization. You know, HIPAA, PCI, our entire infrastructure footprint is actually HIPAA and PCI compliant at the levels that we control. So, it's a heavy lift. You got to stick with it. >> But just to kind of bring it full circle to the comment about the ransom and paying it, you know Marc said something really important, "Have a good plan." I would argue, have a good partner. If you don't have a CISO who's got the chops to be dealing with these types of problems, that's when you need a partner like US Signal to really step in and take you through what's involved in a realistic plan, something that's not going to break the bank, something that's really going to protect your business going forward, because these things are very real. >> One of the concerns I have in this topic is that things happen really fast these days. So, if there are problems, they replicate very, very quickly. How do you address that problem? Is it architecture, analytics, I'm sure process, maybe you could add some color to that. >> All of the above. Having those controls in place, those segregations, we've got, obviously, clear segregation between our management and customer data plans. And each of our customer data plans are separate from each other. It's secure multi-tenancy, not just multi-tenancy. So yeah, it's important to keep those delineations, user access, making sure that people only have access to what they need, and a lot of that, again, is covered by those compliance practices and paying close attention to what they have. There are reasons they have these guidelines and these rules and these audits. It's to help, in large part to protect against that. >> You mentioned before, Marc, you're a heavy VMware user, Infinidat, it's kind of the new kid on the block. People said "Oh, they'll never be--" >> Marc: Not for us. >> What's that? >> Not for us. >> Not for you, right, but for the storage industry. Doc and I have been in the storage industry a while. But, I'm curious as to what you want from a supplier like Infinidat, why you chose Infinidat? How're they doing with regard to VMware affinity, all those things people tend to talk about as important. >> Marc: All right, well-- >> What do you think is important? >> Well, in the Infinidat experience, the company experience, the support experience, it is the benchmark by which we judge all other vendors now. It's that good. The working with us whenever we need equipment, obviously they've got, the price per terabyte is hard to beat with the way they're able to leverage that technology. The responsiveness, if we've needed something in a hurry they've been able to get it to us in a hurry, It ties in extremely well with our infrastructure because we scale so quickly, right? Trends are very hard with us, because there's all these hockey sticks. It's going, going, going, we get a big order and it goes up really fast. I think the theme right now is scale to win? >> Yep. >> So that resonates with us because by having that in place and having that scale ready to go, we don't even need to anticipate those hockey sticks because it's already there. >> Great. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. Doc, Infinidat. (laughs) >> Thank you very much it's great to see you both again. >> John: Look forward to see you in 2020, right? >> I'll be back. >> Yeah, it's become an annual thing. >> Michael said we'll be celebrating our 20th year, so I'm looking forward to seeing-- >> And this is our 10th year here, so anniversaries all across the board. >> Congratulations. >> Congratulations. >> Have a good rest of the show, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Back with more VMworld 2019, we continue our coverage live here on theCUBE. We're at Moscone Center North in San Francisco. (upbeat electronic music)

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everybody watching the Cuban leader live tech coverage. We here covering the M I t CDO conference M I t CEO Day to wrapping up. Bob Parr is here. He's a partner in principle at KPMG, and he's joined by Streetcar Krishna, who is the managing director of data science. Aye, aye. And innovation at KPMG. Gents, welcome to the Cube. Thank >> thank you. Let's start with your >> roles. So, Bob, where do you focus >> my focus? Ah, within KPMG, we've got three main business lines audit tax, an advisory. And so I'm the advisory chief date officer. So I'm more focused on how we use data competitively in the market. More the offense side of our focus. So, you know, how do we make sure that our teams have the data they need to deliver value? Uh, much as possible working concert with the enterprise? CDO uh, who's more focused on our infrastructure, Our standards, security, privacy and those >> you've focused on making KPMG better A >> supposed exactly clients. OK, >> I also have a second hat, and I also serve financial service is si Dios as well. So Okay, so >> get her out of a dual role. I got sales guys in >> streetcar. What was your role? >> Yeah, You know, I focus a lot on data science, artificial intelligence and overall innovation s o my reaction. I actually represent a centre of >> excellence within KPMG that focuses on the I machine learning natural language processing. And I work with Bob's Division to actually advance the data site off the store because all the eye needs data. And without data, there's no algorithms, So we're focusing a lot on How do we use a I to make data Better think about their equality. Think about data lineage. Think about all of the problems that data has. How can we make it better using algorithms? And I focused a lot on that working with Bob, But no, it's it's customers and internal. I mean, you know, I were a horizontal within the form, So we help customers. We help internal, we focus a lot on the market. >> So, Bob, you mentioned used data offensively. So 10 12 years ago, it was data was a liability. You had to get rid of it. Keep it no longer than you had to, because you're gonna get soon. So email archives came in and obviously thinks flipped after the big data. But so what do you What are you seeing in terms of that shift from From the defense data to the offensive? >> Yeah, and it's it's really you know, when you think about it and let me define sort of offense versus defense. Who on the defense side, historically, that's where most of CEOs have played. That's risk regulatory reporting, privacy, um, even litigation support those types of activities today. Uh, and really, until about a year and 1/2 ago, we really saw most CEOs still really anchored in that I run a forum with a number of studios and financial service is, and every year we get them together and asked him the same set of questions. This was the first year where they said that you know what my primary focus now is. Growth. It's bringing efficiency is trying to generate value on the offensive side. It's not like the regulatory work's going away, certainly in the face of some of the pending privacy regulation. But you know, it's It's a sign that the volume of use cases as the investments in their digital transformations are starting to kick out, as well as the volumes of data that are available. The raw material that's available to them in terms of third party data in terms of the the just the general volumes that that exist that are streaming into the organization and the overall literacy in the business units are creating this, this massive demand. And so they're having to >> respond because of getting a handle on the data they're actually finding. Word is, they're categorizing it there, there, >> yeah, organizing that. That is still still a challenge. Um, I think it's better with when you have a very narrow scope of critical data elements going back to the structure data that we're talking it with the regulatory reporting when you start to get into the three offense, the generating value, getting the customer experience, you know, really exploring. You know that side of it. There's there's a ton of new muscle that has to be built new muscle in terms of data quality, new muscle in terms of um, really more scalable operating model. I think that's a big issue right now with Si Dios is, you know, we've got ah, we're used to that limited swath of CDs and they've got Stewardship Network. That's very labor intensive. A lot of manual processes still, um, and and they have some good basic technology, but it's a lot of its rules based. And when you do you think about those how that constraints going to scale when you have all of this demand. You know, when you look at the customer experience analytics that they want to do when you look at, you know, just a I applied to things like operations. The demand on the focus there is is is gonna start to create a fundamental shift >> this week are one of things that I >> have scene, and maybe it's just my small observation space. But I wonder, if you could comment Is that seems like many CBO's air not directly involved in the aye aye initiatives. Clearly, the chief digital officer is involved, but the CDO zehr kind of, you know, in the background still, you see that? >> That's a fantastic question, and I think this is where we're seeing some off the cutting it change that is happening in the industry. And when Barbara presenter idea that we can often civilly look at data, this is what it is that studios for a long time have become more reactive in their roles. And that is that is starting to come forefront now. So a lot of institutions were working with are asking What's the next generation Roll off a CDO and why are they in the background and why are they not in the foreground? And this is when you become more often they were proactive with data and the digital officers are obviously focused on, you know, the transformation that has to happen. But the studios are their backbone in order to make the transformation. Really. And if the CDO started, think about their data as an asset did as a product did us a service. The judicial officers are right there because those are the real, you know, like the data data they're living so CDO can really become from my back office to really become a business line. We've >> seen taking the reins in machine learning in machine learning projects and cos you work with. Who >> was driving that? Yeah. Great question. So we are seeing, like, you know, different. I would put them in buckets, right? There is no one mortal fits all. We're seeing different generations within the company's. Some off. The ones were just testing out the market. There's two keeping it in their technology space in their back office. Take idea and, you know, in in forward I d let me call them where they are starting to experiment with this. But you see, the mature organizations on the other end of the spectrum, they are integrating action, learning and a I right into the business line because they want to see ex souls having the technology right by their side so they can lead leverage. Aye, aye. And machine learning spot right for the business right there. And that is where we're seeing know some of the new models. Come on. >> I think the big shift from a CDO perspective is using a i to prep data for a That's that's fundamentally where you know, where the data science was distributed. Some of that data science has to come back and free the integration for equality for data prepping because you've got all this data third party and other from customer streaming into the organization. And you know, the work that you're doing around, um, anomaly detection is it transcends developing the rules, doing the profiling, doing the rules. You know, the very manual, the very labor intensive process you've got to get away from that >> is used in order for this to be scale goes and a I to figure out which out goes to apply t >> clean to prepare the data toe, see what algorithms we can use. So it's basically what we're calling a eye for data rather than just data leading into a I. So it's I mean, you know, you developed a technology for one off our clients and pretty large financial service. They were getting closer, like 1,000,000,000 data points every day. And there was no way manually, you could go through the same quality controls and all of those processes. So we automated it through algorithms, and these algorithms are learning the behavior of data as they flow into the organization, and they're able to proactively tell their problems are starting very much. And this is the new face that we see in in the industry, you cannot scale the traditional data governance using manual processes, we have to go to the next generation where a i natural language processing and think about on structure data, right? I mean, that is, like 90% off. The organization is unstructured data, and we have not talked about data quality. We have not talked about data governance. For a lot of these sources of information, now is the time. Hey, I can do it. >> And I think that raised a great question. If you look at unstructured and a lot of the data sources, as you start to take more of an offensive stance will be unstructured. And the data quality, what it means to apply data quality isn't the the profiling and the rules generation the way you would with standard data. So the teams, the skills that CEOs have in their organizations, have to change. You have to start to, and, you know, it's a great example where, you know, you guys were ingesting documents and there was handwriting all over the documents, you know, and >> yeah, you know, you're a great example, Bob. Like you no way would ask the client, like, you know, is this document gonna scanned into the system so my algorithm can run and they're like, Yeah, everything is good. I mean, the deal is there, but when you then start scanning it, you realize there's handwriting and the information is in the handwriting. So all the algorithms breakdown now >> tribal knowledge striving Exactly. >> Exactly. So that's what we're seeing. You know, if I if we talk about the digital transformation in data in the city organization, it is this idea dart. Nothing is left unseen. Some algorithm or some technology, has seen everything that is coming into. The organization has has has a para 500. So you can tell you where the problems are. And this is what algorithms do. This scale beautifully. >> So the data quality approaches are evolving, sort of changing. So rather than heavy, heavy emphasis on masking or duplication and things like that, you would traditionally think of participating the difficult not that that goes away. But it's got to evolve to use machine >> intelligence. Exactly what kind of >> skill sets people need thio achieve that Is it Is it the same people or do we need to retrain them or bring in new skills. >> Yeah, great question. And I can talk from the inspector off. Where is disrupting every industry now that we know, right? But we knew when you look at what skills are >> required, all of the eye, including natural language processing, machine learning, still require human in the loop. And >> that is the training that goes in there. And who do you who are the >> people who have that knowledge? It is the business analyst. It's the data analyst who are the knowledge betters the C suite and the studios. They are able to make decisions. But the day today is still with the data analyst. >> Those s Emmys. Those sm >> means So we have to obscure them to really start >> interacting with these new technologies where they are the leaders, rather than just waiting for answers to come through. And >> when that happens now being as a data scientist, my job is easy because they're Siamese, are there? I deploy the technology. They're semi's trained algorithms on a regular basis. Then it is a fully fungible model which is evolving with the business. And no longer am I spending time re architect ing my rules. And like my, you know, what are the masking capabilities I need to have? It is evolving us. >> Does that change the >> number one problem that you hear from data scientists, which is the 80% of the time >> spent on wrangling cleaning data 10 15 20% run into sm. He's being concerned that they're gonna be replaced by the machine. Their training. >> I actually see them being really enabled now where they're spending 80% of the time doing boring job off, looking at data. Now they're spending 90% of their time looking at the elements future creative in which requires human intelligence to say, Hey, this is different because off X, >> y and Z so let's let's go out. It sounds like a lot of what machine learning is being used for now in your domain is clean things up its plumbing. It's basic foundation work. So go out. Three years after all that work has been done and the data is clean. Where are your clients talking about going next with machine learning? Bob, did you want? >> I mean, it's a whole. It varies by by industry, obviously, but, um but it covers the gamut from, you know, and it's generally tied to what's driving their strategies. So if you look at a financial service is organization as an example today, you're gonna have, you know, really a I driving a lot of the behind the scenes on the customer experience. It's, you know, today with your credit card company. It's behind the scenes doing fraud detection. You know, that's that's going to continue. So it's take the critical functions that were more data. It makes better models that, you know, that that's just going to explode. And I think they're really you can look across all the functions, from finance to to marketing to operations. I mean, it's it's gonna be pervasive across, you know all of that. >> So if I may, I don't top award. While Bob was saying, I think what's gonna what What our clients are asking is, how can I exhilarate the decision making? Because at the end of the day on Lee, all our leaders are focused on making decisions, and all of this data science is leading up to their decision, and today you see like you know what you brought up, like 80% of the time is wasted in cleaning the data. So only 20% time was spent in riel experimentation and analytics. So your decision making time was reduced to 20% off the effort that I put in the pipeline. What if now I can make it 80% of the time? They're I put in the pipeline, better decisions are gonna come on the train. So when I go into a meeting and I'm saying like, Hey, can you show me what happened in this particular region or in this particular part of the country? Previously, it would have been like, Oh, can you come back in two weeks? I will have the data ready, and I will tell you the answer. But in two weeks, the business has ran away and the CDO know or the C Street doesn't require the same answer. But where we're headed as as the data quality improves, you can get to really time questions and decisions. >> So decision, sport, business, intelligence. Well, we're getting better. Isn't interesting to me. Six months to build a cube, we'd still still not good enough. Moving too fast. As the saying goes, data is plentiful. Insights aren't Yes, you know, in your view, well, machine intelligence. Finally, close that gap. Get us closer to real time decision >> making. It will eventually. But there's there's so much that we need to. Our industry needs to understand first, and it really ingrained. And, you know, today there is still a fundamental trust issues with a I you know, it's we've done a lot of work >> watch Black box or a part of >> it. Part of it. I think you know, the research we've done. And some of this is nine countries, 2400 senior executives. And we asked some, ah, a lot of questions around their data and trusted analytics, and 92% of them came back with. They have some fundamental trust issues with their data and their analytics and and they feel like there's reputational risk material reputational risk. This isn't getting one little number wrong on one of the >> reports about some more of an >> issue, you know, we also do a CEO study, and we've done this many years in a row going back to 2017. We started asked them okay, making a lot of companies their data driven right. When it comes to >> what they say they're doing well, They say they're day driven. That's the >> point. At the end of the day, they making strategic decisions where you have an insight that's not intuitive. Do you trust your gut? Go with the analytics back then. You know, 67% said they go with their gut, So okay, this is 2017. This industry's moving quickly. There's tons and tons of investment. Look at it. 2018 go down. No, went up 78%. So it's not aware this issue there is something We're fundamentally wrong and you hit it on. It's a part of its black box, and part of it's the date equality and part of its bias. And there's there's all of these things flowing around it. And so when we dug into that, we said, Well, okay, if that exists, how are we going to help organizations get their arms around this issue and start digging into that that trust issue and really it's the front part is, is exactly what we're talking about in terms of data quality, both structured more traditional approaches and unstructured, using the handwriting example in those types of techniques. But then you get into the models themselves, and it's, you know, the critical thing she had to worry about is, you know, lineage. So from an integrity perspective, where's the data coming from? Whether the sources for the change controls on some of that, they need to look at explain ability, gain at the black box part where you can you tell me the inferences decisions are those documented. And this is important for this me, the human in the loop to get confidence in the algorithm as well as you know, that executive group. So they understand there's a structure set of processes around >> Moneyball. Problem is actually pretty confined. It's pretty straightforward. Dono 32 teams are throwing minor leagues, but the data models pretty consistent through the problem with organizations is I didn't know data model is consistent with the organization you mentioned, Risk Bob. The >> other problem is organizational inertia. If they don't trust it, what is it? What is a P and l manage to do when he or she wants to preserve? Yeah, you know, their exit position. They attacked the data. You know, I don't believe that well, which which is >> a fundamental point, which is culture. Yes. I mean, you can you can have all the data, science and all the governance that you want. But if you don't work culture in parallel with all this, it's it's not gonna stick. And and that's, I think the lot of the leading organisations, they're starting to really dig into this. We hear a lot of it literacy. We hear a lot about, you know, top down support. What does that really mean? It means, you know, senior executives are placing bats around and linking demonstrably linking the data and the role of data days an asset into their strategies and then messaging it out and being specific around the types of investments that are going to reinforce that business strategy. So that's absolutely critical. And then literacy absolutely fundamental is well, because it's not just the executives and the data scientists that have to get this. It's the guy in ops that you're trying to get you. They need to understand, you know, not only tools, but it's less about the tools. But it's the techniques, so it's not. The approach is being used, are more transparent and and that you know they're starting to also understand, you know, the issues of privacy and data usage rights. That's that's also something that we can't leave it the curb. With all this >> innovation, it's also believing that there's an imperative. I mean, there's a lot of for all the talk about digital transformation hear it everywhere. Everybody's trying to get digital, right? But there's still a lot of complacency in the organization in the lines of business in operation to save. We're actually doing really well. You know, we're in financial service is health care really hasn't been disrupted. This is Oh, it's coming, it's coming. But there's still a lot of I'll be retired by then or hanging. Actually, it's >> also it's also the fact that, you know, like in the previous generation, like, you know, if I had to go to a shopping, I would go into a shop and if I wanted by an insurance product, I would call my insurance agent. But today the New world, it's just a top off my screen. I have to go from Amazon, so some other some other app, and this is really this is what is happening to all of our kind. Previously that they start their customers, pocketed them in different experience. Buckets. It's not anymore that's real in front of them. So if you don't get into their digital transformation, a customer is not going to discount you by saying, Oh, you're not Amazon. So I'm not going to expect that you're still on my phone and you're only two types of here, so you have to become really digital >> little surprises that you said you see the next. The next stage is being decision support rather than customer experience, because we hear that for CEOs, customer experience is top of mind right now. >> No natural profile. There are two differences, right? One is external facing is absolutely the customer internal facing. It's absolutely the decision making, because that's how they're separating. The internal were, says the external, and you know most of the meetings that we goto Customer insight is the first place where analytics is starting where data is being cleaned up. Their questions are being asked about. Can I master my customer records? Can I do a good master off my vendor list? That is where they start. But all of that leads to good decision making to support the customers. So it's like that external towards internal view well, back >> to the offense versus defense and the shift. I mean, it absolutely is on the offense side. So it is with the customer, and that's a more directly to the business strategy. So it's get That's the area that's getting the money, the support and people feel like it's they're making an impact with it there. When it's it's down here in some admin area, it's below the water line, and, you know, even though it's important and it flows up here, it doesn't get the VIN visibility. So >> that's great conversation. You coming on? You got to leave it there. Thank you for watching right back with our next guest, Dave Lot. Paul Gillen from M I t CDO I Q Right back. You're watching the Cube

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering MIT Chief data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to Cambridge, everybody. We're here at Tang building at MIT for the MIT CDOIQ Conference. This is the 13th annual MIT CDOIQ. It started as a information quality conference and grew through the big data era, the Chief Data Officer emerged and now it's sort of a combination of those roles. That governance role, the Chief Data Officer role. Critical for organizations for quality and data initiatives, leading digital transformations ans the like. I'm Dave Vallante with my cohost Paul Gillin, you're watching The Cube, the leader in tech coverage. Mark Chrisco is here, the deputy, sorry, Principle Deputy Director for Enterprise Information at the Department of Defense. Good to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, thank you for having me. >> So, Principle Deputy Director Enterprise Information, what do you do? >> I do data. I do acquisition data. I'm the person in charge of lining the acquisition data for the programs for the Under Secretary and the components so a strong partnership with the army, navy, and air force to enable the department and the services to execute their programs better, more efficiently, and be efficient in the data management. >> What is acquisition data? >> So acquisition data generally can be considered best in the shorthand of cost schedule performance data. When a program is born, you have to manage, you have to be sure it's resourced, you're reporting up to congress, you need to be sure you have insight into the programs. And finally, sometimes you have to make decisions on those programs. So, cost schedule performance is a good shorthand for it. >> So kind of the key metrics and performance metrics around those initiatives. And how much of that is how you present that data? The visualization of it. Is that part of your role or is that, sort of, another part of the organization you partner with, or? >> Well, if you think about it, the visualization can take many forms beyond that. So a good part of the role is finding the authoritative trusted source of that data, making sure it's accurate so we don't spend time disagreeing on different data sets on cost schedule performance. The major programs are tremendously complex and large and involve and awful lot of data in the a buildup to a point where you can look at that. It's just not about visualizing, it's about having governed authoritative data that is, frankly, trustworthy that you can can go operate in. >> What are some of the challenges of getting good quality data? >> Well, I think part of the challenge was having a common lexicon across the department and the services. And as I said, the partnership with the services had been key in helping define and creating a semantic data model for the department that we can use. So we can have agreement on what it would mean when we were using it and collecting it. The services have thrown all in and, in their perspective, have extended that data model down through their components to their programs so they can better manage the programs because the programs are executed at a service level, not at an OSD level. >> Can you make that real? I mean, is there an example you can give us of what you mean by a common semantic model? >> So for cost schedule, let's take a very simple one, program identification. Having a key number for that, having a long name, a short name, and having just the general description of that, were in various states amongst the systems. We've had decades where, however the system was configured, configured it the way they wanted to. It was largely not governed and then trying to bring those data sets together were just impossible to do. So even with just program identification. Since the majority of the programs and numbers are executed at a service level, we worked really hard to get the common words and meanings across all the programs. >> So it's a governance exercise the? >> Yeah. It is certainly a governance exercise. I think about it as not so much as, in the IT world or the data world will call it governance, it's leadership. Let's settle on some common semantics here that we can all live with and go forward and do that. Because clearly there's needs for other pieces of data that we may or may not have but establishing a core set of common meanings across the department has proven very valuable. >> What are some of the key data challenges that the DOD faces? And how is your role helping address them? >> Well in our case, and I'm certain there's a myriad of data choices across the department. In our place it was clarity in and the governance of this. Many of the pieces of data were required by statute, law, police, or regulation. We came out of eras where data was the piece of a report and not really considered data. And we had to lead our ways to beyond the report to saying, "No, we're really "talking about key data management." So we've been at this for a few years and working with the services, that has been a challenge. I think we're at the part where we've established the common semantics for the department to go forward with that. And one of the challenges that I think is the access and dissemination of knowing what you can share and when you can share it. Because Michael Candolim said earlier that the data in mosaic, sometimes you really need to worry about it from our perspective. Is too much publicly available or should we protect on behalf of the government? >> That's a challenge. Is the are challenge in terms of, I'm sure there is but I wonder if you can describe it or maybe talk about how you might have solved it, maybe it's not a big deal, but you got to serve the mission of the organization. >> Absolutely. >> That's, like, number one. But at the same time, you've got stakeholders and they're powerful politicians and they have needs and there's transparency requirements, there are laws. They're not always aligned, those two directives, are they? >> No, thank goodness I don't have to deal with misalignments of those. We try to speak in the truth of here's the data and the decisions across the organization of our reports still go to congress, they go to congress on an annual basis through the selected acquisition report. And, you know, we are better understanding what we need to protect and how to advice congress on what should be protected and why. I would not say that's an easy proposition. The demands for those data come from the GAO, come from congress, come from the Inspector General and having to navigate that requires good access and dissemination controls and knowing why. We've sponsored some research though the RAND organization to help us look and understand why you have got to protect it and what policies, rules, and regulations are. And all those reports have been public so we could be sure that people would understand what it is. We're coming out of an era where data was not considered as it is today where reports were easily stamped with a little rubber stamp but data now moves at the velocities of milliseconds not as the velocity of reports. So we really took a comprehensive look at that. How do you manage data in a world where it is data and it is on infrastructures like data models. >> So, the future of war. Everybody talks about cyber as the future of war. There's a lot of data associated with that. How does that change what you guys do? Or does it? >> Well, I think from an acquisition perspective, you would think, you know. In that discussion that you just presented us, we're micro in that. We're equipping and acquiring through acquisitions. What we've done is we make sure that our data is shareable, you know? Open I, API structures. Having our data models. Letting the war fighters have our data so they could better understand where information is here. Letting other communities to better help that. By us doing our jobs where we sit, we can contribute to their missions and we've aways been every sharing in that. >> Is technology evolving to the point where, let's assume you could dial back 10 or 15 years and you had the nirvana of data quality. We know how fast technology is changing but is it changing as an enabler to really leverage that quality of data in ways that you might not have even envision 10 or 15 years ago? >> I think technology is. I think a lot of this is not in tools, it's now in technique and management practices. I think many of us find ourselves rethinking of how to do this now that you have data, now that you have tools that you can get them. How can you adopt better and faster? That requires a cultural change to organization. In some cases it requires more advanced skills, in other cases it requires you to think differently about the problems. I always like to consider that we, at some point, thought about it as a process-driven organization. Step one to step two to step three. Now process is ubiquitous because data becomes ubiquitous and you could refactor your processes and decisions much more efficiently and effectively. >> What are some of the information quality problems you have to wrestle with? >> Well, in our case, by setting a definite semantic meaning, we kicked the quality problems to those who provide the authoritative data. And if they had a quality problem, we said, "Here's your data. "We're going to now use it." So it spurs, it changes the model of them ensuring the quality of those who own the data. And by working with the services, they've worked down through their data issues and have used us a bit as the foil for cleaning up their data errors that they have from different inputs. And I like to think about it as flipping the model of saying, "It's not my job to drive quality, "it's my job to drive clarity, "it's their job to drive the quality into the system." >> Let's talk about this event. So, you guys are long-time contributors to the event. Mark, have you been here since the beginning? Or close to it? >> Um... About halfway through I think. >> When the focus was primarily on information quality? >> Yes. >> Was it CDOIQ at the time or was it IQ? >> It was the very beginnings of CDOIQ. It was right before it became CDOIQ. >> Early part of this decade? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> It was Information Quality Symposium originally, is that was attracted you to it? >> Well, yes, I was interested in it because I think there were two things that drew my interest. One, a colleague had told me about it and we were just starting the data journey at that point. And it was talking about information quality and it was out of a business school in the MIT slenton side of the house. And coming from a business perspective, it was not just the providence of IT, I wanted to learn form others because I sit on the business side of the equation. Not a pure IT-ist or technology. And I came here to learn. I've never stopped learning through my entire journey here. >> What have you learned this week? >> Well, there's an awful lot I learned. I think it's been... This space is evolving so rapidly with the law, policy, and regulation. Establishing the CDOs, establishing the roles, getting hear from the CDOs, getting to hear from visions, hear from Michael Conlan and hear from others in the federal agencies. Having them up here and being able to collaborate and talk to them. Also hearing from the technology people, the people that're bringing solutions to the table. And then, I always say this is a bit like group therapy here because many of us have similar problems, we have different start and end points and learning from each other has proven to be very valuable. From the hallway conversations to hearing somebody and seeing how they thought about the products, seeing how commercial industry has implemented data management. And you have a lot of similarity of focus of people dealing with trying to bring data to bring value to the organizations and understanding their transformations, it's proven invaluable. >> Well, what did the appointment of the DOD's first CDO last year, what statement did that make to the organization? >> That data's important. Data are important. And having a CDO in that and, when Micheal came on board, we shared some lessons learned and we were thinking about how to do that, you know? As I said, I function in a, arguably a silo of the institution is the acquisition data. But we were copying CDO homework so it helped in my mind that we can go across to somebody else that would understand and could understand what we're trying to do and help us. And I think it becomes, the CDO community has always been very sharing and collaborative and I hold that true with Micheal today. >> It's kind of the ethos of this event. I mean, obviously you guys have been heavily involved. We've always been thrilled to cover this. I think we started in 2013 and we've seen it grow, it's kind of fire marshal full now. We got to get to a new facility, I understand. >> Fire marshal full. >> Next year. So that's congratulations to all the success. >> Yeah, I think it's important and we've now seen, you know, you hear it, you can read it in every newspaper, every channel out there, that data are important. And what's more important than the factor of governance and the factor of bringing safety and security to the nation? >> I do feel like a lot in, certainly in commercial world, I don't know if it applies in the government, but a lot of these AI projects are moving really fast. Especially in Silicon Valley, there's this move fast and break things mentality. And I think that's part of why you're seeing some of these big tech companies struggle right now because they're moving fast and they're breaking things without the governance injected and many CDOs are not heavily involved in some of these skunk works projects and it's almost like they're bolting on governance which has never been a great formula for success in areas like governance and compliance and security. You know, the philosophy of designing it in has tangible benefits. I wonder if you could comment on that? >> Yeah, I can talk about it as we think about it in our space and it may be limited. AI is a bit high on the hype curve as you might imagine right now, and the question would be is can it solve a problem that you have? Well, you just can't buy a piece of software or a methodology and have it solve a problem if you don't know what problem you're trying to solve and you wouldn't understand the answer when it gave it to you. And I think we have to raise our data intellectualism across the organization to better work with these products because they certainly represent utility but it's not like you give it with no fences on either side or you open up your aperture to find basic solution on this. How you move forward with it is your workforce has got to be in tune with that, you have to understand some of the data, at least the basics, and particularly with products when you get the machine learning AI deep learning, the models are going to be moving so fast that you have to intellectually understand them because you'll never be able to go all the way back and stubby pencil back to an answer. And if you don't have the skills and the math and the understanding of how these things are put together, it may not bring the value that they can bring to us. >> Mark, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to see you again and appreciate all the work you guys both do for the community. All right. And thank you for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube from MIT CDOIQ.

(upbeat music) >> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to MIT in Cambridge Massachusetts everybody you're watching the CUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we hear at the MIT CDOIQ. It's the MIT Chief Data Officer event the 13th annual event. The CUBE started covering this show in 2013. I'm Dave Vellante with Paul Gillin, my co-host, and Michael Conlin is here as the chief data officer of the Department of Defense, Michael welcome, thank you for coming on. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So the DoD is, I think it's the largest organization in the world, what does the chief data officer of the DoD do on a day to day basis? >> A range of things because we have a range of challenges at the Department of Defense. We are the single largest organization on the planet. We have the greatest scope and scale and complexity. We have the most dangerous competitors of anybody on the planet, it's not a trivial issue for us. So, I've a range of challenges. Challenges around, how do I lift the overall performance of the department using data effectively? How do I help executives make better decisions faster, using more recent, more common data? More common enterprise data is the expression we use. How do I help them become more sophisticated consumers of data and especially data analytics? And, how do we get to the point where, I can compare performance over here with performance over there, on a common basis? And compared to commercial benchmark? Which is now an expectation for us, and ask are we doing this as well as we should, right across the patch? Knowing, that all that data comes from multiple different places to start with. So we have to overcome all those differences and provide that department wide view. That's the essence of the role. And now with the recent passage of the Foundations for Evidenced-Based Policymaking Act, there are a number of additional expectations that go on top of that, but this is ultimately about improving affordability and performance of the department. >> So overall performance of the organization... >> Overall performance. >> ...as well, and maybe that comes from supporting various initiatives, and making sure you're driving performance on that basis as well. >> It does, but our litmus test is are we enabling the National Defense Strategy to succeed? Only reason to touch data is to enable the National Defense Strategy to be more successful than without it. And so we're always measuring ourselves against that. But it is, can we objectively say we're performing better? Can we objectively say that we are more affordable? In terms of the way we support the National Defense Strategy. >> I'm curious about your motivations for taking on this assignment because your background, as I see, is primarily in the private sector. A year ago you joined the US Department of Defense. A huge set of issues that you're tackling now, why'd you do it? >> So I am a capitalist, like most Americans, and I'm a serial entrepreneur. This was my first opportunity to serve government. And when I looked at it, knowing that I could directly support national defense, knowing that I could make a direct meaningful contribution, let me exercise that spirit of patriotism that many of us have, but we just not found ourselves an opportunity. When this opportunity came along I just couldn't say no to it. There's so much to be done and so much appetite for improvement that I just couldn't walk away for this. Now I've to tell you, when you start you take an oath of office to protect and defend the constitution. I don't know, it's maybe a paragraph or maybe it's two paragraphs. It felt like it took an hour to choke it out, because I was suddenly struck with all of this emotion. >> The gravity of what you were doing. >> Yeah, the gravity of what I'm doing. And that was just a reinforcement of the choice I'd already made, obviously right. But the chance to be the first chief data officer of the entire Department of Defense, just an enormous privilege. The chance to bring commercial sector best practices in and really lift the game of the department, again enormous privilege. There's so many people who could do this, probably better than me. The fact that I got the opportunity I just couldn't say no. Just too important, to many places I could see that we could make things better. I think anybody with a patriotic bone in their body would of jumped at the opportunity. >> That's awesome, I love that congratulations on getting that role and seemingly thrive in it. A big part of preserving that capitalist belief, defending the constitution and the American way, it sounds corny, but... >> It's real. >> I'm a patriot as well, is security. And security and data are intertwined. And just the whole future of warfare is dramatically changing. Can you talk about in a format like this, security, you're thinking on that, the department's thinking on that from a CDO's perspective? >> So as you know we have a number of swimlanes within the department and security is very clear swimlane, it's aligned under our chief information officer, but security is everybody's responsibility, of course. Now the longstanding criticism of security people is that they think they best way to secure anything is to permit nobody to touch it. The clear expectation for me as chief data officer is to make sure that information is shared to the right people as rapidly as possible. And, that's a different philosophy. Now I'm really lucky. Lieutenant General Denis Crall our principal cyber advisor, Dana Deasy our CIO, these people understand how important it is to get information in the right place at the right time, make it rapidly available and secure it every step along the way. We embrace the zero trust mantra. And because we embrace the zero trust mantra we're directly concerned with defending the data itself. And as long as we defend the data and the same mechanisms are the mechanisms we use to let people share it, suddenly the tension goes away. Suddenly we all have the same goal. Because the goal is not to prevent use of data, it's to enable use of data in a secure way. So the traditional tension that might be in that place doesn't exist in the department. Very productive, very professional level of collaboration with those folks in this space. Very sophisticated people. >> When we were talking before we went live you mentioned that the DoD has 10,000 plus operational systems... >> That's correct. >> A portfolio of that magnitude just overwhelming, I mean how did you know what to do first when you moved into this job, or did you have a clear mandate when you were hired? >> So I did have a clear mandate when I was hired and luckily that was spelled out. We knew what to do first because we sat down with actual leaders of the department and asked them what their goals were for improving the performance of the department. And everything starts from that conversation. You find those executives that what to improve performance, you understand what those goals are, and what data they need to manage that improvement. And you capture all the critical business questions they need answers to. From that point on they're bought in to everything that happens, right. Because they want those answers to those critical business questions. They have performance targets of their own, this is now aligned with. And so you have the support you need to go down the rest of the path of finding the data, standardizing it, et cetera. In order to deliver the answers to those questions. But it all starts which either the business mission leaders or the warfighting mission leaders who define the steps they're taking to implement the National Defense Strategy. Everything gets lined up against that, you get instant support and you know you're going after the right thing. This is not, an if you build it they will come. This is not, a driftnet the organization try to gather up all the data. This is spear fishing for specific answers to materially important questions, and everything we do is done on that basis. >> We hear Mark Ramsey this morning talk about the... He showed a picture of stove pipes and then he complicated that picture by showing multiple copies within each of those stove pipes, and says this is organizations that we've all lived in. >> That's my organization too. >> So talk about some of those data challenges at the DoD and how you're addressing those, specifically how you're enabling soldiers in the field to get the right data to the field when they need it. >> So what we'll be delicate when we talk about what we do for soldiers in the field. >> Understood, yeah. >> That tends to be sensitive. >> Understand why, sure. >> But all of those dynamics that Mark described in that presentation are present in every large cooperation I've ever served. And that includes the Department of Defense. That heterogeneity and sprawl of IT that what I would refer to, he showed us a hair ball of IT. Every large organization has a hair ball of IT. And data scattered all over the place. We took many of the same steps that he described in terms of organizing and presenting meaningful answers to questions, in almost exactly the same sequence. The challenge as you heard me use the statistics that our CIO's published digital monetization strategies, which calls out that we have roughly 10,000 operational systems. Well, every one of them is different. Every one's put in place by a different group of people at a different time, with a different set of requirements, and a different budget, and a different focus. You know organizational scope. We're just like he showed. We're trying to blend all that in to a common view. So we have to find what's the real authoritative piece of data, cause it's not all of those systems. It's only a subset of those systems. And you have to do all of the mapping and translations, to make the result add up. Otherwise you double count or you miss something. This is work in progress. This will always be a work in progress to any large organization. So I don't want to give you impression it's all sorted. Definitely not all sorted. But, the reality is we're trying to get to the point where people can see the data that's available and that's a requirement by the way under the Foundations Act that we have a data catalog, an authoritative data catalog so people can see it and they have the ability to then request access to that through automation. This is what's critical, you need to be able to request access and have it arbitraged on the basis of whether you should directly have access based on your role, your workflow, et cetera, but it should happen in real time. You don't want to wait weeks, or months, or however long for some paperwork to move around. So this all has to become highly automated. So, what's the data, who can access it under what policy, for what purpose? Our roles and responsibilities? Identity management? All this is a combined set of solutions that we have to put in place. I'm mostly worried about a subset of that. My colleagues in these other swimlanes are working to do the rest. Most people in the department have access to data they need in their space. That hasn't been a problem. The problem is you go from space to space, you have to learn a new set of systems and a new set of techniques for a new set of data formats which means you have to be retrained. That really limits our freedom of maneuver of human beings. In the ideal world you'd be able to move from any job in any part of the department to the same job in another part of the department with no retraining whatsoever. You'd be instantly able to make a contribution. That's what we're trying to get to. So that's a different kind of a challenge, right. How do we get that level of consistency in the user experience, a modern user experience. So that if I'm a real estate manager, or I'm a medical business manager, or I'm a clinical professional, or I'm whatever, I can go from this location in this part of the department to that location in that part and my experience is the same. It's completely modern, and it's completely consistent. No retraining. >> How much of that challenge pie is people, process and technology? How would you split that opportunity? >> Well everything starts for a process perspective. Because if you automate a bad process, you just make more mistakes in less time at greater costs. Obviously that's not the ideal. But the biggest single challenge is people. It's talent, it's culture. Both on the demand side and on the supply side. If fact a lot of what I talked about in my remarks, was the additional changes we need to put in place to bring people into a more modern approach to data, more modern consumption. And look, we have pockets of excellence. And they can hold their own against any team, any place on the planet. But they are pockets of excellence. And what we're trying to do is raise the entire organization's performance. So it's people, people, and people and then the other stuff. But the products, don't care about (laughs). >> We often here about... >> They're going to change in 12 to 18 months. I'm a technologist, I'm hands on. The products are going to change rapidly, I make no emotional commitment to products. But the people that's a different story. >> Well we know that in the commercial world we often hear that cultural resistance is what sabotages modernization efforts. The DoD is sort of the ultimate top-down organization. It is any easier to get buy-in because the culture is sort of command and control oriented? >> It's hard in the DoD, it's not easier in the DoD. Ultimately people respond to their performance incentives. That's the dirty secrets performance incentives, they work every time. So unless you restructure performance measures and incentives for people their behavior's never going to change. They need to see their personal future in the future you're prescribing. And if they don't see it, you're going to get resistance every time. They're going to do what they believe they're incented to do. Making those changes, cascading those performance measures down, has been difficult because much of the decision-making processes in the department have been based on slow-moving systems and slow-moving data. I mean think about it, our budget planning process was created by Robert McNamara, as the Secretary of Defense. It requires you to plan everything for five years. And it takes more than a year to plan a single year's worth of activities, it's slow-moving. And we have regulation, we have legislation, we're a law-abiding organization, we do what we have to do. All of those things slow things down. And there's a culture of expecting macro-level consensus building. Which means everybody feels they can say no. If everybody can say no, then change becomes peanut butter spread across an organization. When you peanut butter spread across something our size and scale, the layer's pretty thin. So we have the same problem that other organizations have. There is clearly a perception of top-down change and if the Secretary or the Deputy Secretary issue an instruction people will obey it. It just takes some time to work it's way down into all the detailed combinations and permutations. Cause you have to make sophisticated decisions now. How am I going to change for my performance measures for that group to that group? And that takes time and energy and thought. There's a natural sort of pipeline effect in this. So there's real tension I think in between this perception of top-down and people will obey the orders their given. But when you're trying to integrate those changes into a board set of policy and process and people, that takes time and energy. >> And as a result the leaders have to be circumspect about the orders they give because they want to see success. They want to make sure that what they say is actually implemented or it reflects poorly on the organization. >> I think that out leaders are absolutely concerned about accomplishing the outcomes that they set out. And I think that they are rightfully determined to get the change as rapidly as possible. I would not expect them to be circumspect. I would anticipate that they would be firm and clear in the direction that they set and they would set aggressive targets because you need aggressive targets to get aggressively changed outcomes. Now. >> But they would have to choose wisely, they can't just fire off orders and expect everything to be done. I would think that they got to really think about what they want to get done, and put all the wood behind the arrow as you... >> I think that they constantly balance all those considerations. I must say, I did not appreciate before I joined the department the extraordinary caliber of leadership we enjoy. We have people with real insight and experience, and high intellectual horsepower making the decisions in the department. We've been blessed with the continuing stream of them at all of the senior ranks. These people could go anywhere, or do anything that they wanted in the economy and they've chosen to be in the department. And they bring enormous intellectual firepower to bear on challenges. >> Well you mentioned the motivation at the top of the segment, that's largely pretty powerful. >> Yeah, oh absolutely. >> I want to ask you, we have to break, but the organizational structure, you talked about the CIO, actually the responsibility for security within the CIO. >> Sure. >> To whom do you report. What's the organization look like? >> So I report to the Chief Management Officer of the Department of Defense. So if you think about the order of precedents, there's the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense and third in order is the Chief Management Officer. I report to the Chief Management Officer. >> As does the CIO, is that right? >> As does the CIO, as does the CIO. And actually this is quite typical in large organizations, that you don't have the CDO and the CIO in the same space because the concerns are very different. They have to collaborate but very different concerns. We used to see CDOs reporting to CIOs that's fallen dramatically in terms of the frequency you see that. Cause we now recognize that's just a failure mode. So you don't want to go down that path. The number one most common reporting relationship is actually to a CEO, the chief executive officer, of an organization. It's all about, what executive is driving performance for the organization? That's the person the CDO should report to. And I'm blessed in that I do find myself reporting to the executive driving organizational improvement. For me, that's a critical thing. That would make the difference between whether I could succeed or whether I'm doomed to fail. >> COO would be common too in a commercial organization. >> Yeah, in certain commercial organizations, it's a COO. It just depends on the nature of the business and their maturity with data. But if you're in the... If data's the business, CDO will report to the CEO. There are other organizations where it'll be the COO or CFO, it just depends on the nature of that business. And in our case I'm quite fortunate. >> Well Michael, thank you for, not only the coming to the CUBE but the service you're providing to the country, we really appreciate your insights and... >> It's a pleasure meeting you. >> It's a pleasure meeting you. All right, keep it right there everybody we'll be right back with our next guest. You're watching the CUBE live from MIT CDOIQ, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our coverage of Cisco Live day three is in full effect. I am Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and we have a couple of guests joining us. We've got Mike Bundy, head of Cisco Strategic Alliances from, guess where? The jacket should give it away, Pure Storage. And Tom Koppelman, the VP of Architecture Sales America for Cisco, hi guys! >> Hi. >> Hi. >> How ya doing? >> Thanks for bringing more brightness to our set. >> Yeah I forgot my sunglasses. >> I know, we're in the buzzy, bright DevNet Zone. We've been here all week. Great event, massive event, my goodness. 28,000 folks or so, Mike let's start with you. Give us a status of the Pure-Cisco relationship, the evolution of that, where you guys are now. What is exciting? >> Sure, so the relationship, it's unbelievable in terms of the amount of synergies and energy we have together. In fact, Tom at Cisco was really involved in the early genesis of this relationship, prior to me joining the company. And, in the last couple years, we've probably doubled in terms of our go-to-market and sell to customers together. So, tremendous growth. Partnership brings a value to us because of the strong heritage that we have from a DevNet tie-in, in terms of all the automation that we have on the platform, so. It's just a tremendous, tremendous, great partnership. >> And Tom, Cisco has a massive partner ecosystem, a lot of choice. What is it about Pure Storage that is providing advantages to Cisco? Where it's helping customers really kind of bridge this gap between hyper-converged, multi-cloud hybrid, all that jazz? >> Right, so Pure was a first mover in terms of flash storage, right. We saw demand from our customers wanting that technology to improve their data center environments. And when we partnered up early, we were able to kind of capture that momentum, right. And, when I think about our go-to-market with Pure, which is really where I kind of focus, there's very little friction in that relationship, right. There's not competitive overlap. There's not things like that. It's technology that the customers want, that they ask for, and a good field go-to-market in leadership on both sides that are willing to invest and get engaged and move the relationship forward. >> So what else are you guys doing besides just the go-to-market partnership because I got a hold of this timeline of Cisco Validated Designs that Pure and Cisco have put out over the last five years, four years. >> Right. >> And there's like 13 milestones on there. So that's roughly three a year. Of course, it started with Pure's IPO. So that's when Cisco said, all right, these guys are real. Start working with them. And in the early days, of course, you started with FlashStack. That was the flagship product. And then VDI, everybody does VDI, analysts are like, yeah, yeah, everybody does VDI. But then it started really accelerating the cadence. So it's more than just go-to-market. What's beneath that go-to-market? >> Yeah, good question. >> You want to? >> You hit the highlights of the CVD's and whatnot. >> I would say that Pure, this is our number one partnership that we have from an alliance perspective. The investment is far exceeding other partnerships we have. So, the amount of product integration that we're doing is tremendous, as you see there. We've focused on ACI and multi data centers the last couple years. We've focusing on AI and machine learning, most recently. And beyond that, we just signed an agreement and have released resell of Cisco SAN switches in the marketplace. It's the resell agreement we've ever done as a company and it just further shows the commitment in resources that we're willing to put into making sure the partnership is successful and continues to grow and evolve. >> And on top of that the investment in Cisco Intersight, in integrating with Cisco Intersight, the management platform, which is very important to us, it just shows commitment of the partnership. >> Let's talk more about that. So, how does that work? What problems is that solving for customers? >> Well, Cisco Intersight is our cloud based management offering for compute and Pure has integrated their storage platform as part of that solution. So allowing customers, whether it's a converged solution, just raw compute, a hyper-converged solution, but allowing them to manage those pools and deliver that via a cloud solution. >> So Pure plugs into the Cisco API. Now you're part of that stack, essentially. So it's transparent to the customer. And, Cisco's management plane takes care of all that. >> That's exactly right, correct, yes. >> Its' a big deal for us because it was the first integration with Intersight from any storage partner that Cisco has, right. So first to market. We want to embrace hyper-convergence, which is a big important priority for Cisco, and also bridging that gap. So as we compete against single vendor stacks, we have the right solution that customers are looking for. And ultimately, that's why it's so important for us. >> Yeah, Pure is big on firsts. First to flash, you just mentioned another first, you were the first with NVMe, before that you were with the evergreen. I mean, you like being first. >> First orange sport coat. >> That's definitely first there. (laughing) >> Let's talk about customer value though. Obviously, that's what it's all about. As we look at, not just the tremendous amount of choice that customer have when it comes to technology partners, but also the amount of data that's being generated, that's growing astronomically. Yet, organizations are getting so little value out of that because they can't extract the insights. What are you guys doing together leveraging the superpowers of AI and machine learning to help customers in any industry search a really, not just monetize that data, but really accelerate their businesses. Tom you're smiling so let's start with you. >> Yeah, so we came out with an AI server, right, our ML 480, and we've integrated that. Pure has invested, we've both invested and done an integration between FlashBlade, and I'll let Mike talk a little about FlashBlade and the value proposition of FlashBlade, but integrated that with our AI server. And our AI server is an Nvidia powered server, so it essentially gives you scale of processing and capabilities to allow you capitalize on all that data so the customers can get the information they need out of that. If you want to take a second on FlashBlade. >> And you know, AI is the buzz. It's the hot two letter acronym in the industry these days. $13 billion infrastructure opportunity, et cetera, et cetera. So, what Pure is really focused on is, data is the new oil of commodities for customers and clients. What we've built is a platform called FlashBlade, an architecture called the Data Hub, that allows you to not have to copy data and move it around and create silos in data warehouses. So, you can much easier execute a data strategy with the Data Hub architecture, using FlashBlade. When you look at machine learning in terms of how you build a data pipeline so that you can then get to quicker results from a business application standpoint with AI. That's what we've built together with Cisco. We're uber, uber, super excited a number of customers already in the last couple months. >> So I'm going to push a little on that, AI server, AI storage, people don't associate storage and server guys with AI. But if I hear you correctly, there's a $13 billion opportunity for workloads. To manage workloads running on your servers and your storage. >> Correct. >> And so you're optimizing them for AI workloads. >> Absolutely, exactly right. >> So you're not necessarily inventing AI. You're providing infrastructure so that people can leverage AI, is that right? >> Yes. >> Yeah, and the same way that we've built APIs together to work with Intersight, we do that in a way that allows our customers to leverage Cafe, other applications that can help build that data pipeline. We build the platform from the infrastructure level, it makes the management easy and we partner with all of the applications at the top end, but also the middleware and that software prepackage layer that connects via APIs to us. So, it's easy, it's agile, it's manageable, it's a cloud-like experience for the customers, right. >> Easy, agile, all awesome but security. Absolutely critical today. What are you guys doing, Tom I'll start with you, how are you guys working together infuse and integrate security into the technology so that from a customer's perspective, those risks dial down. >> So, Cisco is integrating security across all of our product portfolio, right. And, that includes our data center portfolio, all the way through our campus, our WAN, all those portfolios. We continue to look for opportunities to integrate, whether it's dual-factor authentication or things like secure data center where the highly scalable, multi-instance firewall in front of a data center, things like that. So we're definitely looking for areas and angles and opportunities for us to, not only integrate it from a product standpoint, but also ensure that we are talking that story with our customers so that they know they can leverage Cisco for the full architecture from a security standpoint. >> And the same thing on the storage of the data from an encryption perspective, and as the data gets moved or is mobile, that level of security and policy follows it wherever the data is moved. >> So, what should we expect, what's next in the time? What's 14 going to look like? You don't have top give us specifics but are we going to see blockchain CVDs? What should observers think about the partnership going forward? What could we look forward to? >> Yeah, I mean, the adoption of Container capability is tremendous in our customers environment. Cisco has a cloud Container platform available today. We're integrating that into FlashStack in the very near future. Embracing the cloud. Disaster recovery and data protection it's very hot for customers. Improving that experience so that you have faster restoration times, you're able to look at multi-tier strategy that's very easy to manage from a storage perspective, leveraging S3 with Amazon, Azure, et cetera. So, that's a couple things that are on the short term building block together. >> Yeah, I was going to comment on certainly multi cloud and Containers, those would be two of the big ones that I'd hit on, right. And, in the event of multi cloud leveraging, converged and hyper-converged together to better solve a customer's problems. >> So I was going to ask you. So hyper-converged now becomes a bridge to the cloud if, in fact, that's where customers want to go. >> Yes, it can be. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, it can be, yes. >> Absolutely. >> Well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, sharing with us the momentum that the Pure-Cisco relationship has and what excites you for the future. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem. Barker's >> Welcome Back to San Diego. The Cube has been live here at Cisco Life for the last three days. Student a man with meat, Lisa Martin wrapping things up and we're pleased to welcome to the Cube for the first time James Slay me, the cofounder and had a product for Double James. Welcome to the Cube >> very much. >> All right, So, Deborah, before we get into who you guys are, why you started this company stew. Thought maybe this had to do with your love of dub. Step the name >> way do like that step. But it really wasn't the reason May my co founders were involved with telecommunications and the industry, and we thought the cloud was coming quite fast. And we thought, you know, we started an opportunity that as much as the telcos we're trying to move service. It's a cloud that was value weds they need to provide. And there wasn't really a quality solution for recording for uncle's. >> So came from dubbing tape to tape back in the day. For those here is can remember when we had >> the tapes the name came from. That's how I remember we came, came about The name is that we're thinking, you know, I like to set because it was dubbing and then, you know, double came out of that was available. >> So tell us our audience about call cloud based call recording tell us a little bit about that. But why? What was the impetus for you saying? You know what? There's a gap in the market. We gotta solve it. >> Yeah, So everything think traditional providers were all in on premise Catholics based servers licensing all that traditionally no software model with the transition to cloud for telephony. So unified communications or anything like that Theo ability to have a platform that could record content. Really, By switching it on where that was, we partnered with Toko. So I say, I say tacos and Australian Server that Carrie is also provided tell they want to hear about what they called connect to their network and then offer it at scale so they could switch on one user or actually switch on 100,000 users instantly. And we managed the back into that and they get to go to the service. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So Lisa and I were at the Enterprise Connect show this year, and one of the themes we got out of the week of doing that show is Well, there's always the cool new technologies were doing video, and you know, there's the E R. And you know, people use Chatbots Airways do their voices still critical. Yeah, So maybe talk about you know, your customer base and you know, the role that you're playing to help them. And, you know, still, that that voice is is such an important decent of how we communicate. Yeah, it's really interesting, >> Like way still. Look at that. The important things that I done via voice. If you've got an important customer, you know, discussion, we have you going to send him an email you're probably gonna have followed up with a phone call or initiate with a phone call on most of time. That daughter is is lost. So you know things we discuss and you don't get them back. And, you know, generally call recording. If you're looking at that, people think contact center and regulatory reasons like financial services and that's our bread and butter. But now we're seeing with exposed the more cloud based options. That is, this is a study talk to expand that used case across outside of that traditional reason and not just call recording, you know, eyes that you know, becoming more prevalent as well. >> So how are you guys infusing a I into what you're doing? And also with Sisko to not only be able to apply intelligence to the data that you're gathered from reported calls, but also Dustan, the way that also facilitates security and privacy? >> Yeah, so Security's calling way couldn't have a platform that's use it is connected. Tio, You know, 18 See's Network way got over 100 telco or carrying their ways connected globally at the moment. That's all across Europe, America, Canada and then Asia as well. And now you know, we've been chosen by Sisko for their broad cloud platform, which I recently acquired way. What we see is that because we can capture content at scale way, then can actually easily then produce transcriptions, sentiment tone from the best of the three providers around the world with my be asked. But, you know, we could use any other third party provider that customer might want to use. Use case. Then Khun B. Go towards a small business in my you know, I'll say it's more reasonable and I'll explain on enterprise in a small business, theirselves person might be speeding, made the main customer 1,000,000 customer brings up. It is not happy, and we're going to tell the boss or the team leader they could automate, literally as easy automation, saying notifications Conor, a team leader. You should call this customer back. Without that, they lose the potential of retaining that customer now that previously that's only really the large business or the only has the technology to do that, all the ability to actually get it to market with us and because we connected to the network or even on, you know easily on ah, call manager solution through Cisco, that's any size of business. Large business. We're seeing also a bank as an example there, looking to capture everything across their whole business, not just contact center and start looking for key words that I said it's a credit card or home loan, and they make sure that their agent or their employee is disclosing that product correctly to the customer to make sure they're compliant Now that they're not talking about that across the of the whole business, not just always example. 4,000 seats in a context enter but 40,000 across their whole business on any phone, they using the moment without a mobile cellular or a despondent. >> Okay, so bring us inside your customers. Is that you know you mentioned call centers? Is that the primary use case? Do you go into different verticals? You know what? What does your customer base look like? >> Way definitely go like a safe contact centers for sure on DH. That's it's it's been there for a long time. That requirement to record phone calls and do it well, uh, financial services knock. It's throughout throughout the world, in the U. S. As well in the Europe because of me fit and all those requirements compliant. But as said way are now expanding that use case because of a A and requirement access data. Also, our platform is an open, open platform if that makes sense, but everything we record or capture is encrypted. But it isn't a format that Thean customer can use a CZ that won't apply themselves. They're all looking at using a I. You know, there are other other data sources in the company because it's available. They can use it with other. Well, >> yeah, actually, I just wanted to poke it that because one of the challenges we have out there is there's a lot of data, but how do I actually extract value out of that? So is this now a way for your customers to really unlock something that historically you just you you might have kept it for compliance. Reason to work, you know, to review some kind of training. But it was a little bit tough to get in and leverage the information that was in >> there. Yeah, you know, cos today I really they're they're assessing, You know, anything in a written format today they already losing. I want to do that Previously has been really hard to do that with voice now, because we can capture again captured at scale there. Now I can look at it and say, Can we use the same tools? Were looking for everything else in our business. I looked down and saw that the voice >> so walk us through an example of where double is integrated into an organization. If we think of a bank and you mentioned, you know, use case is one of them piqued my interest about Okay, sentiment. If there is an issue that needs to be escalated and somebody in the organization needs to call a customer, what's been recorded is indicating that is never able to integrate with, like marketing automation serum tools that that data is then pulled in a map back to that account and how it's being managed. >> Yeah, correct. Good, really good question, probably explained that way are a global platform. So we deployed everywhere in the world. So Australia's I'm from a trailer again, but U S Canada, Singapore, Japan, London, Ireland and the UK way recording that in that country we store in the country. But it is a scale. Little platform is a service, which means that way run a product, eyes a p I to open a p I, whether we've integrated with their application or the customer then can say we never want to log into doubles applications. Were you present all the daughter and our own complications already? That's already practiced today. It's available today is in ample. If they wanted to use South forces a serum looking today. Look at the contacts. You can see all the holes, All the transcriptions directly in South Force. >> That's cool. So they get that visibility in a way that that works for them? >> Yeah. Yeah, not precious. We look at ourselves a platform first, and we provide applications. We know users. Did you call recording as they expect to use it, like with permission based access team management. But in reality, we're trying to make it fit in the way that you they'll write their own business and more insights. >> Alright. So, James, we're here at Cisco Live. So explain to us how you tie into what's going on here at the show. You know, we're here in the definite zone. Curious If you talked about being an open platform, Do you know I did in the development pieces here? Yeah, >> we've We've had some really good conversations in the last three days. It's interesting to see people talk about, you know, they come up and they start talking about cool recording and way Explain what we just discussed. Relations open and they can access via Pio, and they start thinking they can see their mind. Figure out how they could apply that their own business. We've always wave always work the Cisco Way Boys work with broad Soft, which they've now acquired, and they now make that part of the business. But you know where that's called Manager. Wait. Have now announced they're doing whether it's calling, you know, we're talking to customers about cool recording through double on whether it's calling now. So if businesses you know, having a plan, Teo moved there from the UN Prem to cloud that Cisco way, make a second unified solution for them and they could make a road map for that with him. So it's a really good conversation we're having here. >> So in the development of the go to market strategy, or so I already have an established Francisco. >> Now where do you have a stress ready? We're day of Ah, we're partners, Cisco. Already we've got over 100 carries who used this go in. Their networks were really connected to them. I'm already recording in capturing content on those networks were pretty tight with this guy for sure, but you look at the enterprise that its president, although cloud yet they're really moving to that. So if they want to have a core recording solution or a solution on for him, and they might want to move to cloud future in the future, we have that in the future. So I'm doing it now is probably maintain the same service right through. >> So can you give us an example, a customer success that is leveraging Debra with Cisco whether you, you, Khun Anonymous eyes it or if you can name it? Great. But I would love to see how it's really working in action to drug business results. >> Yeah, it's going Good question. I'm trying to be the best one to give you. At the moment, I could think of a customer of ours with, you know, in the UK they're spread it costs. I think around 100 locations they're currently recording with double and using transcription to transcribe their calls are looking for patterns across the whole business and the using Cisco for the late telephony on then, looking at that and I've actually found things that just decided to save money, they've been losing some money in certain locations, and they've used the transcription. Seem patents actually implemented changes to actually sell a say that >> Awesome. So in terms of the last three days of Sisqo live, some of the announcements that have come out Cisco has been on this transition here on the hardware company network here, back in the day to now introducing AP eyes across the product portfolio, which he'd been two years ago. They didn't have to this pivot towards a software focus for a company like double born in the cloud. What does that signify to you guys? >> Uh, so you see what a sight it was. >> Yeah, what does that signify to double >> wellit's great for us, and it's really important for us to make sure we're along into that. We've already have always been an A P I first company on, you know, accessing the contents. But it's a challenge may, sometimes for businesses to embrace that way, need to make sure that we're way we're looking at Cisco and understand how they want to use Ap eyes and aligning ourselves on DH. Hopefully push him along because we're doing it for a while, eh? So we released, you know five years ago. It was cloud based, and it's good for everyone. Started talking about a pee eyes and employing them. >> Awesome. Well, James Splint. Pleasure to have you on the Cube this afternoon with stew in me. Thanks for stopping Mind sharing what Debra's doing with Cisco and to really help transform enterprises from any industry. We appreciate your time, all right. And we can't close the queue. But Sisqo live in San Diego without saying this one thing, which we're all going to do together. You ready, guys? On my count. 321 Classy. San Diego for soon. Minuteman II. Lisa. Bart, you've been watching the Cube. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California. It's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're here in San Diego Convention Center for Cisco Live 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-hosts Dave volante. Lisa Martin's also been here for our three days, wall to wall coverage with about 28 to 30,000 here in attendance for the 30th anniversary of the user and partner show for Cisco. Happy to welcome to the program our first time guest, Jeff Scheaffer, who's Vice President of Product Management Strategy inside of Cisco. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, glad to be here. >> Alright, so Jeff DNA center, some of the environments that you have. There were some announcements on Monday, why don't we start there? Walk us through the updates to the product line. >> Thanks Stu. So we're really excited, right. >> So as you know, with Cisco, we're really building out the intent based network, in support of digital transformation for all of our customers. And one of the key aspects of the intent based network is that we have incredible programability in the network, all supported through the DNA see controller. And this week, we're really excited. We announced two new innovations in the controller. One was incorporating a new set of analytics and machine learning capabilities as part of our assurance package so that we can more quickly troubleshoot network issues. And the third is being able to connect together the multi dev environments. So how do we stitch together, the software defined access to the Software defined WAN, to the software defined data center so that we can lay digital services across the entire network. >> Stu: Yeah, it's a story we've been watching the last couple of years at Cisco is that this move to software in many ways as a unifying factor. >> Yes. >> Used to be I had all these product lines, and I need to learn the interfaces, as my friends that come to the show for many years, when you said single pane of glass, there's like, come on that's spelt P-A-I-N. Today's world, it's an API economy. And what's been really interesting to watch the last... Recently, a lot of times, it's that ml and AI underneath that spans and helps automate a lot of those pieces underneath the covers now. >> Yes, absolutely, it does. So the thing we're excited AI is a broad topic as you know. And underneath that umbrella we have built in new capabilities around the machine learning, the ability to do deep learning, as we look at anonymized data sets in the cloud on deduce patterns that people don't know yet. And then thirdly, we're looking at machine reasoning. So how do we take that the analytics to pinpoint or identify anomalies in the fabric of the network in these new IBM fabrics and then be able to couple that with a set of orchestrated automation so that we can we can emulate the behavior that a network engineer would normally do in order to troubleshoot and diagnose problems and so we're that much faster at identifying them, pinpointing the root cause and then actually being able to give recommendations if not automatically fixing it, the recommendations to resolve the issues. >> So the programability aspect, of course, we're here in the DevNet zone. So, can we dig into that a little bit? I mean I'm imagining by that, it allows me to provision, bandwidth performance, certain levels, all through API calls and it's through software. And I can set thresholds, I can talk more about what that does for me as a customer. >> Sure. So in general, within DNA center, we have a kind of very rich programability capability. It's very much an API first developed controller. So everything that we can do within the controller is a setup of published and curated API's. And those API's come in different categories. So we have API's that are around the automatic configuration and the provisioning of the network infrastructure. Very much, Dave as you're suggesting that you can run as a headless entity inside of a if somebody like a lot of service providers and partners are using this to offer a service to their end customers. And so they can automatically provision out the network and they can do that in support of new applications. We're really actually excited with that in our partnership with Red Hat, we just introduced a new set of answerable plugins as an example, to support a DevOps process by which software developers build new applications as part of that DevOps code pipeline. By using the answerable plugins, we can actually drive automation into the network to provision the networking in support of those apps. So a lot of capabilities there. >> So is the uniqueness of that you can actually do that or is the uniqueness that you're Cisco. >> I know. So to a large part of it... In terms of the way things have been done historically, and this is that most of the time, if you were to look at how do you configure a network, it was device by device and it was through command line interfaces. >> Right. >> And it's error prone, it's complex, it's cumbersome, it takes a lot of time. And so what we've done with the network controllers, is by moving above the top of the intent based network, we're actually able to automatically configure and provision either policy through policies, either QoS or segmentation for security and do that in a very automated way. And to be able to do it in a scalable way. So that is an amusing new kind of configuration mechanisms we're very proud of the work we're doing around NetComp and YANG Models and that's something that's very unique in the way we're approaching that in the market today. >> Yeah, Jeff, historically, one of the concerns was the network. It's tied to the application wasn't as tight there. It's like you talked about networking people, it's just the water that runs through the pipes that we watched with first with ACI now with intent based networking. We're getting closer and closer to that application, especially you talk about multi domain what's going on at ties right with the microservices architectures that are coming on there. So as the applications get more complicated, the network needs to be able to understand what's happening there and respond to what's needed and give back the services that they need. >> Yeah. So I think building on where you're taking that conversation, one of the really kind of key or anchor points of the whole idea around the multi domain integrations that we provided, when we bring together Software Defined access, the software defined when and the software defined data center. We're using the the rich API's that exists in all of our controllers, whether its DNA see for software defined access, whether it's vManaged for the software defined WAN, or whether it's ACI around the software defined data center. And we're integrating all three of these controllers so that they can do a couple of really important things for customers. So in the context of the application. So the very first thing is how do we provide for segmentation? So segmentation is about how do we provide access policy and drive that into the network so that the right users have access to the right applications and other people don't. And then being able to use the programability. If the user moves from say the campus to the branch, we can automatically have the policy follow the user. If the application moves from the data center to the cloud, We can have the policy automatically follow the application and that way we always ensure that the right people have access to the right applications at the right time. The other use case around the around the API's and the multi domain segmentation is that to the extent an application needs quality of service. We think about an 82% of the US we move forward in time or roughly 82% of the traffic on the internet is starting to become video on the networks and like an 8k video is 7.29 terabits per second. So how do you ensure that there's enough bandwidth and enough quality of service to ensure the latency of like virtual reality or augmented reality where latency matters. And so the other thing we're doing with policy is provisioning up the Qos, so that as you configure it in the data center, it's honored in the software defined WAN and it's honored it all the way to the end user in the software defined access. >> Stu you were saying earlier how traditional is like don't touch my network, right, okay. So Jeff, my question is if you look over the last 10 years, as you bring in the software design defined data center and infrastructure programmable and infrastructure, infrastructures code. How is that change? And is it changing the relationship between infrastructure pros and application developers and application development heads? >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So kind of comes from two different angles. So number one, from the extent that every software development organization becomes more and more of a DevOps organization and they want to be able to deliver value, the experience, the velocity around the applications to production, as they go through those code pipelines through the DevOps practices, they need to be able to automatically provision out test environments, they need to be able to automatically provision out the pre stage and then automatically promote the applications into production environments. And that's what why it's so important, for example, as we as we mentioned earlier about the answerable plugins that allow the configuration of the network in support of application DevOps teams. The second thing that we find with the network engineers themselves, to the extent we've defined everything as software defined. We have this rich set of digital services that we're starting to manage in these infrastructures and through the controller that programability, the controller, network engineers are having to evolve their capability. And so, you know, we're really excited that the show that Susie Wee, who leads our DevNet program introduced a whole new category of offerings in support of how you start to become both not only a network engineer, but also development aware through for example, the DevNet automation exchange, by making DevNet certifications available through Cisco certifications. And by hosting these curated communities, where we're able to contribute new applications that run on top of our controllers. We're able to contribute new integrations, new automation, logic, new AI, ml logic, everything that's possible. And by curating it, it means it's curated code, but then it's stored in very common repositories like GitHub. It's still really excited with everything she's doing. If Cisco is going to prime the pump with initially right with apps and code started-- >> We've been priming the pump. But we've actually over the last little bit, we've developed a number of partnerships. So we have over 25 partners that have built value added applications and integrations for example, DNA center, we have a number of partners that have actually taken DNA center and wrapped it with a new kind of a new service offering a solution offering to the network. I'll give you a great example. So one of our partner that Tall tale. So what they've done is they've taken DNA Center at the core and our ability to quickly provision wireless infrastructure. And they've wrapped it with a hook telling solution for Convention Center. So think about a convention center, you have a large space, multiple concurrent shows, every one of them setting up their own wireless network with their own SSID. And so the ability to set these up, tear these down, resolve problems quickly in these high density spaces. And they built out completely as a solution on top of the programability of DNA center and our IBM infrastructure. So it's a very exciting time. >> Alright, so Jeff, some new things announced but I also want you to touch on I believe, about a year ago, API and programability was launched. What lessons learned? What feedback from the customers? Give us the update. >> Yeah, so we launched the programability. And as we mentioned before, it's a kind of a very broad ecosystem of capability. Now, the first thing about, programability is really meant to do a couple of key things. One, and probably most important, is to enable all of our customers to be able to make sure that everything's fit for purpose. So how do we integrate into their existing enterprise ecosystems. And so we know we're API first, we have SDK sample apps, we have a bunch of out of the box integrations that use all these SDK for example, integrations with service now and others. And so that's new. The second thing that we're doing with all of the program abilities, we're using it to enable the community. So the challenges we all know, in technology spaces, is that the rate of innovation continues to expand. It's like innovation is on the sphere. You know, it's the surface area of the sphere. And as every year progresses, that surface area gets bigger. The rate of innovation gets bigger and the ability to keep up with that, exceeds the capacity of most organizations. So the best way to harness that is a community based approach. And if you don't have communities, if you don't have programability, if you don't take that strategic approach, it's very hard to stay current and relevant to the market of the future. So that's another big thing that we're really excited by is being able to track that community and then an ecosystem of partners in development. >> Great, Jeff, want to just give you the final word, a lot going on in your space, any final customer takeaways or things you want people to walk away from your team from Cisco Live 2019. >> Yeah, so the present thing that I'm most excited by is that as we look at the transformation of networks, from kind of the device centricity to how do we manage segmentation in these multi domain fabrics. And do that in support of ensuring quality of experience, so the bandwidth and the latency and support of the applications. Ensuring the segmentation and the secure, being able to minimize the attack surface on these new infrastructures by driving segmentation through the fabric. It really takes kind of a systems approach to this, which is how we bring the intent based network together with, for example, the new Cat9K family from Cisco and then bringing DNA centered the controller together. By bringing those two things together. We're really helping to change the entire architecture of the industry for the next 20 years. So very excited to be here. Thank you guys. >> Excellent. >> Dave: You are welcome. >> Well, Jeff Schafer, really appreciate all the updates. Congratulations on what's going there. For Dave volante, Dave, you have a final word to say. >> Well go Bruins is the only thing I can think about right now Stu. >> That's what I was expecting you to say. So Dave Volante I'm Stu Miniman. We back, getting towards the end of three days wall to wall coverage here from San Diego, for Cisco Live 2019. Thanks for watching the Cube (techy music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live, US, 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back we're here at the San Diego convention center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman we've had three days wall to wall coverage my co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house and I'm really excited to actually sit down one on one with one of the users at this user conference the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco with their users and partners over 28,000 so speaking for all of them right? We have Sebastien Morissette who's an IT architect specialist at Intact Financial Corporation come to us from beautiful Montreal Canada. >> Exactly. >> All right thank you so much for joining us so Sebastien first of all how many Cisco Lives have you been too? >> Honestly this is my first. >> Oh absolutely exciting for that, my first one I came too was actually 10 years ago I joked at the 20th anniversary they went back 20 years to have some 80's bands they had The Bangles and Devo on and now on the 30 year they moved 10 years forwards they have two great bands from the 90's Wheezer and Foo Fighters so your first time at Cisco Live give us your general impressions of the show. >> Well actually it's been very great I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well so I got some sessions in I did some work as well so it's amazing to see how these events unfold right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths how many technical sessions you can have so, I was very pleased I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intact so you know we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well so it's interesting right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love which is technology but at the same time spend some time together outside of work. >> That's awesome, we've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego hope you definitely get to see the sights before we geek out on some of the technology just give our audience a little bit about Intact and the insurance business but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. >> Okay well Intact is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions we've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010 and afterwards we were publicly traded now so we're Intact Financial Corp. Typically we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative which is kind of a new offering of you know modern IT services within Intact. >> Okay great and just to, your purview in the company and just the comment about the company is you know when you talk about those transformations you know MNA is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're doing that but tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people however you measure you know what, boxes or ports or whatever. >> Okay well you know typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America Intact through acquisition we actually bought OneBeacon Insurance last year, so typically we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines so typically whenever we're looking at different technologies we look at the skills sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to you know accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology so in some cases whatever we're looking at building up these new features like I was talking for data center 2.0 it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco which is why we are here today with the team. >> All right so Sebastien you talk about data center 2.0 and transformation there at the organizational level is it branded data center transformation does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? >> Yeah data center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years but it really is at the essence a digital transformation, what we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the Cloud so we're building an on-prem private Cloud offering with multi-sites so we have three sites in the scope right now and the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the Cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment when we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public Cloud our software engineering teams our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there so it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team so we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team and that we can share with them so they can actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VM's or stuff so trying to accelerate that. >> Awesome I love that 'cause sometimes you hear okay we're going to 2.0 it's basically a fancy refresh but we're going to keep things mostly the same when I hear DevOps I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that, I have to ask you without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private Cloud that's in your data center we understand some of the covenants and reasons what you have but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a Cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? >> I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president typically we were looking at how can we access the Cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go what I asked him to do is say you know trust me I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for Cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services so typically in the end we didn't overhaul anything that we had we built a brand new sandbox for Intact to be able to work with so we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move we've built a three site approach because when I was looking at kind of my capex expenditure if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity when you go to three sites it seems awkward but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements, so in the end you're actually spending 150% of your capacity, or your capex to buy the compute, so there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely it's very easy for us to see how it's a Cloud because we're not operating it the same way we're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch every process has been revised we haven't kept everything we had before so we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software engineering groups were asking us to do. >> All right that's exciting stuff there when you look at these multi-site deployments I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments, management, security and networking are absolutely critical, I hear oh okay I've got 50% in each oh my God what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two so luckily I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your rollout, we're obviously here at Cisco Live so give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially you know what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? >> All right well you know typically the way that our story started was kind of weird the first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ but actually rebuild our whole design to you know integrate ACI into the fabric and then when you start talking about firewalls or switches they tell you well with ACI you have contracts so it really started that way so we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure as our compute layer so typically think of it as Intact is building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that we have all the components so we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier which is running like you know VMware on site, on top of the HyperFlex and then we have the ACI since we had three sites we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites and in the end we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that and when we were looking at it early on it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker we were looking at finding a Cloud management platform, so we ended up using CloudCenter which is now CloudCenter Suite and in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using CloudCenter today we're taking it into the data center and out to the Cloud whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week he was saying you know what sometimes our clients buy it more for the Cloud first and I was like well we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite but it works as well, so typically where we stand today I have the three sites we're able to deploy with CloudCenter we've got multi-site on top of that and the idea it really is that, I spoke about training wheels earlier well we're taking them off right? In the next couple of weeks we're starting to look into negotiations with public Cloud providers trying to move towards the public Cloud and you know there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now you know they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS and now they have all the three major Cloud providers covered with ACI Anywhere so that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all, everywhere so to be honest I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back I think we're in our sweet spot right now. >> Yeah and you're right it's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers which is I have all of these public Cloud's and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the CloudCenter Suite is there so you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public Cloud or public Cloud you choose are you at the point there that do you know which public Cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? >> Well to be honest you know we're keeping our options open you know we have different providers that are offered, you know the major public one there's Amazon there's Google Cloud we're not closing any options it's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure that we get all the information back so I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating but in the end we're not limiting ourselves we just want to be able to scale. >> Right you're confident that the Cisco solution that you choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or need to make switches along the way? >> Yeah. >> Question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-Cloud one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skillsets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected but understanding how I manage each of those environments so do you feel CloudCenter Suite's going to help you through that? You know what do you see as you look out over your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for you know your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public Cloud? >> Actually I'm feeling really confident because you know especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and Kip have announced for the data center and for the Cloud piece we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different Cloud providers. So for me what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a Cloud we need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products you know Cisco's branding it the Anywhere right? They have the HX Anywhere the ACI Anywhere and typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skillsets and allow the people to use it one thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the Cloud First ACI right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the Cloud I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the Cloud you're going to be able to to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on prem or anywhere in other Clouds afterwards so I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to you know transparently migrate apps between sites. >> All right so Sebastien you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco you talk about the HX the ACI the CloudCenter Suite what advice do you give to your peers out there and they say you know I've used Cisco products for a long time Cisco makes great products but you know simplicity and management across the product lines was something that you know needed some work what does the Cisco of today look like you know what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? >> Well you know for us one of the things that was nice like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield so I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built so my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment there's nothing in Cloud native applications that is you know symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center, it's completely different ways of working we have one week sprints we patch everything as it comes out if an application goes into the environment it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every time we're at n or n-1 so, my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure, let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere right? So that's one of the things I would say, from what you said about Cisco and the integration you were right, we have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half, however I've noticed that these new software components like CloudShare and everything not necessarily the hardware part Cisco nails hardware like it works they've been doing it for years the thing is with these software teams they're very customer driven we have access to the engineers now I mean we've had meetings with the Canadian execs Roland Acra's team we were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US so, every company has challenges I would be lying if I told you that even at Intact we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together but I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. >> Well it's interesting Sebastian you bring that up because I look at you say okay, you've got a greenfield environment awesome, we can go do some new tech, well let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces you're like completely overhauling your environment how much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that or you know I look people, process and technology sounded like you were taking it all on at once, did that work well? Would you have if you looked back would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe you know gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of you know start brand new start fresh and get everything going? >> Well I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh however, it helped us get really good pace and work you know it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group so all of that was great learning experience the only thing I would say is you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach but where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get onboard. because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups here's a new area where you can play in but you know typically I'd say that it's been well received we have not had the need to build new skillsets because we're doing infrastructure as code so typically a lot of the stuff we're building we're making sure it's automated so that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy so lessons learned like you've asked me I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of Intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology it's fine for the time it took and everything it's fine, it's really people the change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts it's like if we were disrupting our own company right? So typically I'd say, that would be something that I would say to people manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. >> Well Sebastien I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation I want to just give you the final word sounds like you've got great access to Cisco really hope you're happy with what you've done final word is to you know your expectations coming into a show like this and you know what your take aways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego? >> Well outside from the amazing weather you mean or yeah? so you know typically I like the event I've been to other events before, like I said this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology so they're really present so I really liked how you know we were given the opportunity to do hands on labs and actually learn new technologies so typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. >> Well Sebastien Morissette congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. >> Thank you so much. >> All right we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall to wall coverage Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. 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(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California. It's theCUBE! Covering CISCO Live, US, 2019. Brought to you by CISCO and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE live at CISCO Live in San Diego, I'm Lisa Martin and I did a little switcharoo on you guys, I decided to upgrade my co-host! Susie Wee is my co-host, the SVP and CTO of DevNet. Susie it's great to have you here! >> Thank you it's great to be on this side of the table! >> It's exciting, I'm among CISCO royalty, and partner royalty. So to my right is Ramon Alvarez, the director of strategy and business development for Samsung, Ramon welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you! >> And one of our alumni, it's great to have you back as well Matt McPherson the wireless CTO from CISCO, Matt welcome back! >> Glad to be here! >> So we're on the DevNet zone. Susie the last three days have been electric to say the least. The energy, the interest, what you guys have built, you can feel it I mean I was telling you, from 9:30 this morning we started to have to yell into our microphones because there was so much interest I every session here. We've been talking a lot about WIFI6. >> Yep! >> The capabilities, the excitement, the opportunities that it brings. It's so exciting! >> It's so exciting! >> So we've had just all of the excitement around WIFI6, around 5G, we know that here at the DevNet zone we've been really pushing forward with our developers, the programmability of the network. But what we wanted to do here today is to bring you some of the making of WIFI6 and some of the making of 5G that happens and what's interesting is CISCO as a networking company, has been working very closely with Samsung as a overall networking company as a device manufacturer, and basically as we've been together to develop WIFI6 and 5G, Ramon and Matt have been working together as we created all of that technology and had some interesting releases. So we thought it would be great to just kind of share what's going on here. >> Awesome, super exciting. Matt let's start with you talk to us about this creation that you guys are doing, leveraging the power of WIFI6. >> Well you know WIFI6 it's really revolutionary compared to what we're sed to when it comes to WiFi. It's really broadening the market, this capability to do more deterministic type applications and services, we're really excited about it. Everybody that supplied WiFi has the positives and have had the struggles and as we go into this next generation we can actually make it easier as we add intelligence to the network. But of course when you make this type of transition, what happens? New technology, new standards, and so there's always these little rough edges in getting that new technology out. So what we did is we reached out to our good partners here in Samsung and we started this very early, you're hearing about WIFI6 now and you're hearing about some of the things that are happening in the industry now, but we started working way back, way back. And in fact it's kind of interesting, how do you get these new devices in peoples hands, so that you can test what WIFI6 can do in real environments, in a university environment, in a hospital environment, in an airport environment. So working with Samsung what we did is we actually had 170 covert devices, they were literally Galaxy S10's, and they were dressed up as a Galaxy S9, because it was before they released these devices they didn't want to let all their secrets out, and so what we did is we put these early on into these new work environments and we got to test, we got to do interoperability, we got to really iron out the spec so that when they released their Galaxy S10, and we released our AP's, guess what, it works. We don't put the customers through the initiation of a next generation of technology. So we're really excited to be working with Samsung and really collaborating on multiple different levels. >> So you said you've been working at this for a long time we met sort of talking about WIFI6 with you guys at DevNet create just six or seven weeks ago. Talk to us before we get into some of the meat with Ramon about some of those drivers that CISCO started seeing awhile ago in terms of the evolution of the network, and we think about some of the numbers that we're seeing for the massive amounts of mobile data, it's going to be transitioning off of cellular networks on to WiFi, talk to us about what you guys saw that vision awhile ago that lead to all those cool covert operations. >> Look a lot of people you say look WiFi works right? So why do we need a sixth generation of WiFi? But you know when we look at the trajectory of traffic it can be a little bit daunting. In 2023, CISCO's VNI index that shows these trends, we will transmit more mobile data in 2023, than every year before it combined. So this is what we're seeing this is what we have to deal with. So it's very important that we get together with these partners whether it be Intel at the chip set level, whether it would be Samsung at the device level because you know what, we can't just answer today, we have to answer the next three, five, seven years and WIFI6 is going to give us that platform. >> Alright Ramon tell us about some of the cool meat here that we really want to dig in to. >> So actually one of the things that you kind of touched up on but I would like to mention is that one of the reasons why WIFI6 is here is actually the congestion on networks. So when you go with your smartphone, you go to an event, sports venue, concert, etc, many many people are trying to connect to WiFi, the signal and actually the throughput degrades very, very quickly with the number of people who actually get into the network. So WIFI6 actually solves for that, so that's one of the top pain points that actually we have from our users, our consumer research. The second pain point we actually tried to solve with WIFI6 in our collaboration with CISCO, it's the battery life. So one of the top pain points again for smart phone users it's well my battery doesn't last for a full day, I take lots of pictures, I upload videos, etc, that's going to drain my battery. So actually WIFI6 is a mode where the devices can actually sleep and the AP's can sleep, and only wake up the device and transmit data when that channel is actually available. So that essentially for the user is actually longer battery life. There's more advantage but those are kind of the two key ones. >> There's more and actually if I can just ask both of you, as we were testing between our companies, what kinds of things were we learning and how is that going as we're developing it? >> Like we said it's a new specification, if you look really even at the ground level, all previous versions of WiFi were based on OFDM, this next generations on OFDMA. So that adds some new complexities, but also a lot more capability. Now what happens all the time when you have a new spec is people can read that spec in different ways. How we implement the spec may not be exactly how they implement the spec, and if we don't do that testing beforehand what happens is we discover that out at the customer when that phone call drops or that connection doesn't work like you would expect it to work, that AP to AP handoff doesn't work the way that you expect it to work. We found over 60 critical differences, it's hard to say bud right, but 60 critical differences in how we were interpreting the spec and how the device players were interpreting the spec, and we resolved that so the customer didn't have to go through it they just get good access. >> So it's been an amazing partnership as we were kind of working out all the kinks and I remember, nobody expects WIFI6 or WiFi to be different. Everyone's like it performs the way it does, can it be different, and then one of my guys went into the lab and he tried it and he came back, his eyes were this big. (gasp) It's fast! And he couldn't believe it and so we were able to do it, but that makes us be able to do a whole new set of applications so I think there's some new applications that we can jump into because WIFI6, it does enable new applications. >> In our case we are consumer companies, we sell devices to consumers so the number one application for us is well any kind of consumer application, social media, uploading videos, etc. So that's our established market but we also try to go into other B2B verticals, like public safety, like hospitality, financial, retail, etc. Where actually having that reliability on the network it's extremely important. So one of the reasons why hospitals, hotels, etc deploy their own WiFi network versus just using LTE or 5G is because they can actually control the user experience, they can actually control the throughput, they can control the availability, the coverts, etc. So WIFI6 actually enables that especially when there is a congested situation. >> And we've never had that deterministic control within WiFi before. >> That's right so that's kind of at the network level, and then in terms of more applications at a higher level, so I think that gets you very excited. So we actually have you know Samsung it's a device manufacturer, we have many many devices, smart phones is one of them, we have laptops, wearables, VR headsets, TV's, appliances, etc, they're all getting connected to WiFi. So one of the things that we have seen over the last few years is that the number of WiFi devices in a typical US household has increased from five per household to nine per household today, and it's going to be about 50 WiFi devices per household in 2022. >> 50? Five Zero? Whoa! Should I get my dog a smartphone? >> Your thermostat, door lock, cameras, all kinds of devices have a WiFi connection. In a home we need to be able to support that, but also in an enterprise. >> That's a shift in the industry to think of those things having WiFi connection. >> That's right sensors, motion sensors, open/close sensors, all kinds of humidity sensors, etc. They're all getting connected to WiFi so we need to be able to support that kind of growth. >> So that makes me think, sorry Susie, of security. We talked a lot within the last few days about the integration and the embedding of security to the CISCO suite, but when you're talking about whether it's data from my nest system, or a camera connected to my alarm system, data privacy it's blown up, every generation in the workforce today is aware of it. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you guys are doing to ensure that security's pegged in? >> There's so many places that you can implement security, and the fact of matter is in a good network you have to implement it in all those places, because you don't know where that breach or where it might be subject to somebody coming in and compromising your system. But one of the things that we're doing that I think really revolutionary, is this ability to pull analytics out of the network and actually baseline the behavior of that network. So we know what's normal, we know how devices communicate, we know how that light switch communicates or that light bulb, even these very simple things. And sometimes it's kind of scary you think what if someone were to hack into that really simple stack in a light bulb, how many light bulbs are in a building? And what if they actually went across those light bulbs and started basically spamming into the network? You wouldn't be able to get anything done. Well you can't just turn off all the light bulbs, we're going to disconnect all the light bulbs in the building from the network, you can't do that. So what Cisco is doing with this digital network architecture and what we call SDA or software defined access is the ability to segment and separate things out based on their function. So we can put all of that building management in one segment we can put your mission critical applications in another segment and in fact if somethings misbehaving, don't turn it off but segment it out so it can't in fact cause problems further in your network. I was talking about a light bulb, what if you're in a hospital and it's a heart monitor? >> Right or an MRI machine. >> And you don't want to turn that off, but you don't want ti do infect the rest of that hospital room or the rest of the hospital. So moving into a segment, isolate it, let the function go on, alarm the administrator so that they can address it and contain it. >> And this is exciting because what happens is if you think WIFI6, oh yeah it's an access point and it's what's in the client, and that's it. But actually now we're talking about using the capabilities of a whole network to ensure the security and things like that. Ramon you have an interesting new app that our viewers might want to see. >> Yeah actually I wanted to just continue this talk about security so sometimes we think about security and user experience as a trade off, and we don't like that. We want to maximize especially as a device manufacturer we want to improve and enhance always the user experience. So one of the things we're working on is open roaming, and I like kind of the motto that you guys had was well it's easy to use, but it's secure as well. So essentially open roaming it's a way for users WiFi to connect automatically to a WiFi network, without having to enter in a login and password information, and kind of sign in page, without going through that process. A user will get automatically authenticated, and of course we have to have some security so one thing we've done is using Samsung account in our devices as the authentication system for the user. >> And where are we doing it, right here! >> I'm actually connected through open roaming with my phone right now. >> So almost 50% of all attendees that came out to CISCO Live just automatically connected to the network. They didn't have to go through a portal, they didn't have to get out usernames and passwords, they didn't have to go to their connection manager and pick the right network, they're just connected, they're transmitting traffic, they're getting their emails. >> That happened to me this morning on another device I brought in. >> There you go, and that's a security thing because what you're doing with that is Samsung users have Samsung accounts when they provision their device they save their configuration is there, they save their preferences there, they provision it into a device it pushes it out and now you get this profile, this certificate that allows you to do these types of things, and with partners like Samsung guess what, they have a pretty big market. Go to Mobile World Congress last year, everyone with a Galaxy S9 just connected to the network. So this really broadens across the ecosystem it's changing the way we will experience networking. >> It's going to impact every persons live on every level, this is so exciting. So you guys have to come back cause we're out of time but this is, I feel like we're just getting started. But thank you guys so much. Susie thank you for being my awesome and steamed co-host. >> Thank you for giving me this opportunity to be a co-host. >> Awesome you guys, Ramon, Matt, thank you so much for your time we appreciate it. >> I'm going to hold you to bringing us back. >> Deal! Shake on it! Alright for my guest and for Susie Wee, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE live from CISCO Live San Diego, thanks for watching! (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCube, covering Cisco Live US 2019, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, day three of our coverage of Cisco Live. We're in the DevNet Zone, we've been here all week. Dave, this DevNet Zone is the place to be at Cisco Live. >> Well, first of all, it's so packed downstairs, not that it's not packed here, but there's a little space you can walk around in, number one, and number two, it's where all the action is from the learning standpoint and education. People are just eating it up, they're like sponges. >> They are eating it up. Speaking of learning, we are pleased to welcome Mike Adams, the VP and GM of Learning at Cisco. Mike, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here. >> We talked to Susie a number of times, she's actually coming on to guest host with me in an hour or so, and looking at the DevNet evolution in the last five years, 600,000 members in this community, which is mind-boggling how this is, I teased that it was like a field of dreams. >> (chuckles) >> Dave: Which also was 30 years ago. >> It is, yes. That's kind of scary isn't it? But also so is Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, I think those are two really good ways of looking at DevNet. If we look at some of the things that you guys have announced with respect to bringing software skills and software practices to network engineers, it's a big signal in Cisco's evolution. Talk to us about some of the things you guys have announced from the certification perspective and why that's a signal of changing winds. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's been exciting. Susie and I have been working together very closely for the last year in preparation for this. I'm not sure if I'm Bill or Ted in the combo. >> Lisa: Either one's pretty good. >> You're the one who started the excellent adventure. >> That's right. There's some really fundamental significant changes to the program. The most exciting, of course, is the launch of our DevNet branded software certification. It's one of a kind in the industry. There is not other company that has the mix of network engineering certifications and software certifications like Cisco does, certainly not at the scale that we do. We've certified over 1.7 million people since the program has launched over 25 years ago. You imagine the power of bringing together the community of developers with this community of network engineers that we've created. The sky's the limit. It's going to be amazing. That's the biggest announcement is the launch of the software certification, DevNet certification. We've made some other pretty important changes too, and all of these were based on the feedback that we got from customers and partners. One is you can now use continuing education credits to maintain your certification at any level. Rather than having to go back and retake the test every three years, now you can branch out and learn new things, like software as a continuing education credit to maintain that certification you have. We've also added flexibility into the program. In the past, you had to start at associate level and then go to professional and then go to expert. Today, if you feel like you're ready for professional, we invite you to start right there. If you feel like you're ready for that very rigorous CCIE Lab Exam, bring it on, we'll welcome you into it. We feel like that's going to give learners more of a choice in terms of how they process their learning and training and which certifications they want to pursue. Go on, I could go on. >> Let's keep goin'. You could essentially cut the line if you've had some field experience, and/or you just naturally have an affinity towards this. >> That's right. If you have developed depth of expertise and skill and experience, but you haven't started the certification program, why would I make you go back and take an entry level engineer exam just to work your way into the direction you wanted to go, rather we welcome you to come in and start working where you feel like you're ready. >> Can you explain more about the continuous certification, because if I infer correctly, it used to be every three years you got to re-up, kind of like an EMT has to get re-certified. That's not required anymore? You can traverse across the portfolio? >> I'll answer it very specifically. In today's program, the highest level, the CCIE, the expert level, that level can use continuing education credits to re-certify, to maintain their certification. We've extended that same principle to all the others, so today, if you had a CCNA, and you wanted to maintain that CCNA, you would have to go take that exam again. We think it's a lot more valuable, and it's interesting you would mention EMTs, there are lots of other verticals and professions, there's a lot of data and science behind this, that will say that there's more value in terms of extending and maintaining your skills by doing continuing education rather than studying for a test. >> Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. You're allowing the folks to have more control over their education. >> Mike: Exactly. >> Choose your own adventure kind of thing. >> Mike: That's right. >> Also, one of the things that sort of strikes me about what Cisco has done in this big pivot, software's becoming developer friendly, which for a large organization with a history and the girth that Cisco has is not easy to do. From a competitive advantage perspective, what are you hearing from customers, in terms of, are you seeing this as a dial-up on Cisco's competitive edge? >> Yes, absolutely. We took counsel from Gerri, our Head of Sales, she believes very strongly that the DevNet certification, in combination with our network certification program, gives us a real selling edge because it demonstrates the commitment we have to solving real world problems for our customers. We know our customers are anxious to take advantage of what software on top of the network creates for them. To take advantage of those APIs, to build applications and programs that let them maximize the use of their technology as they compete in their own marketplaces. We're absolutely hearing very positive things about how this differentiates Cisco. I'll just add one more point. Even though it looks like there's two tracks, there's a network engineering track and a software track, that's really not the case. It's one certification program. As an example, at the professional level, to earn that CCNP, you have to take a CORE exam, and then you take a concentration exam in the same technology vertical. Data Center, Enterprise, Collaboration, Security Service Bribe, or DevNet. Interestingly, in each of the first five that I mentioned, you'll take the CORE exam and then the concentration can be a DevNet concentration. So we're inviting people to begin to add that software skills into the traditional network certification track that they've had. >> I wonder if you could help us understand the philosophy of the programs. I've seen some education programs, it's like a Chinese menu. It's deep and wide. My sense is that a lot of companies, some companies, not a lot, have said, "Okay, we're really not relevant to the Cloud market, "Let's do some Cloud certifications," stamping it premature there. It seems like Cisco's strategy is to be very focused. Is that fair? Maybe you could add some comments to that. >> It's absolutely fair. We've been very thoughtful about how we have structured the program and what content we have put into it. We've been very mindful to focus on need-to-know information in the CORE exams, and then allowing the learner to choose concentrations for the nice-to-know, the things they want to round themselves out with. Around relevancy, we built the program with job-role specific skills in mind. As an example we've been talking about it this week. Dev Sec-Ops Engineer is an example. It would maybe get their CCNP in Enterprise, route switch, and then they could add on to that various DevNet concentration exams to earn them specialists that would mix that, whether it be WebEx or IOT, and then those combination of skills speak to a very specific job role, this Dev Sec-Ops Engineer, as an example. There are other ways you can mix and match the components to create the capability around skills for a job. >> I imagine as time goes on with these new certifications that you guys are going to be analyzing the different pathways that each person is taking to understand, maybe looking at some consistencies and maybe even offering some recommendation, recommended pathways. >> That's exactly right, because as those job roles evolve in the industry, we're constantly evaluating what skills are needed for those, making sure that we're bringing those to the market. I just can't say enough how important it is to DevNet certification is. Being able to have developers demonstrate their capabilities and skills through a certification is really powerful. >> What's the strategy with regard to partnering with universities, are you doing things along those line? >> I'm so glad you brought that up. There's another leader that Susie and I have been working with, Laura Quintana, she's runs Networking Academy. Networking Academy reaches out to higher education, and also to high schools, they also create networking academies in underserved areas around the globe. Laura and her team have been at this for a while. They have trained over 9.2 million people and have a goal to graduate another two million within the next year. The reason I mention that is that's the arm of Cisco that reaches into higher education and invites people in underserved areas into our industry by giving them those fundamentals. The primary certification that they graduate with is the CCNA, is that entry-level engineer, and now entry level software DevNet associate, those are the graduation that they'll focus on out of Networking Academy. We do a lot of that. >> How about the technology of learning. When you started this almost three decades ago, this is a massive scale of learning. How has the technology of learning evolved? >> Massively. Think about how you like to learn new things. Much of it is going to the web, or finding some digital format, and then doing it at your own pace. That's the other important thing here as well. We are massively transforming the way we are meeting our customers through digitized products. It's very important. Another one of the other big announcements this week was the move from Cisco's services to customer experience, you may have heard Maria Martinez on stage, day two. If you noticed there were four main pillars to the CX Strategy, one of them was learning, active learning. We know that by embedding learning and education into the digital products that we have and getting it to our customers just in time, and ideally by looking at telemetry coming back from how they're using our products, maybe I can predict what training you need before you know you even need it. That's where we're going. >> Very awesome. Last question for you, Mike. Cisco's a massive part of our Ecosystem, we've been talking with a lot of them this week, and at many events, what's to them, to your partners, what does the certification and this massive change signal to them in terms of Cisco's evolution? >> It absolutely signals where the company is going, our commitment to software, our commitment to continue to evolve and stay on the forefront of technology, giving them what they need to go serve their customers and make money in the meantime. Our partner ecosystem is so critical to this company. The software certification, as an example, is going to allow them to demonstrate to their customers, in a very quantifiable way, how many DevNet certified engineers they have. Some of these partners have over a thousand DevNet members already, but wouldn't it be great via certifications? It's a real differentiator for them. I'll mention one other thing. We have a group of very strong learning partners that we work with that extend our capability globally, that are able to take the content that we create and then form that to meet the needs of very specific customers. There's another aspect of partners that are critical to this transformation. >> So you talk about partners to your customers, to the engineers, when I was at IDG one of the most frequently read articles was the Annual Computer World Salary. >> Mike: (laughs) >> You know what, if everyone's going to publish salaries, I'm going to look and see where do I stand. That's part of it, getting more certifications, you're going to be worth more in the market. >> It is. We've got some really good data that says what an investment in professional or expert level certification should do for your W-2 at the end of the year, and we're very mindful of that. >> DevNet bringing the street-cred. Mike, it was great to have you in the program. I can only imagine how dynamic you and Susie are together. >> We have a lot of fun. >> I got to see that next time. Congrats on all the success. It's palpable. >> Thanks. >> Cool stuff. For Dave Velannte, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube Live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem. Barker's >> Welcome Back Here in the San Diego Convention Center. I'm student in my co host, David Dante, and you're watching the Cube, the leader in worldwide Tech coverage, and its Sisqo Live 2019 happening. Welcome back to the program. One of our Cuba, Lem's Russ Curie, who is the vice president Enterprise strategy at Net Scout. It's great to see you. Thanks for joining you guys. Thanks for having me. Alright, we always say, we got a bunch of Massachusetts guys that had to fly all the way across the country to talk to each other really well. So a couple hours for the beast hip, all everybody excited. But a lot of excitement here in the definite zone specifically and Sisqo live overall, 28,000 intended you've been to a lot of customer meetings, gives a little insight. What's been your take away from the show so >> far? I think that there's a lot of energy towards the multi cloud called Deployments in general Security. The whole introduction of Umbrella has got a lot of conversation started. It's amazing the amount of cos you see out there talking about just visibility in general, and that's being one of them as well. So it's been a lot of fun. >> Good show this year, Russ. I've been looking for this conversation. We heard from Chuck Robbins in the keynote. He said The network sees a lot of things, and Cisco says they're going to give customers that visibility. Of course, that ties in a lot, too. What Net scouted love, you know, give us. You know, your thoughts on Multi Cloud. How Cisco doing in the space? And how does Net Scout fit into that whole picture? >> Well, I think that one of things as Chuck talks about that, it's the cloud is the one thing, or the network is the one thing that's common for all. Coming along the devices right? I have. If I go into a different cloud, I have one set a performance metrics I might be able to gather about. You look at what device or an operating system. It's all different. But all the communications on the network T C P I. P is common. That really provides that thread that you're able to provide that level of visibility. So it really becomes one of those things that the network is a unique place to gain perspective on both the performance in the security that we're delivering to our customers. So can >> you just summarize the problem that Net Scout solves for our audience? Sure, I think that primarily it's one of these situations where I've been my own prime environment. It was pretty easy. I had access to everything. I could see what was going on. Quite readily. I started introduced visual ization and now traffic start to move much more East West and became a problem for folks. I think can Cisco recently said 85% of the traffic there seeing on the network is East West traffic, right? And then we moved to the cloud, and it's even more obvious gay that I can't see anything in new ways of network traffic. There typically live in clover and desert starting to address that, but really being able to gain that level of visibility so you can understand exactly what's happening just gaining that perspective. So let's explain it. >> I'm going to stay with the East West north seven metaphor. Why is it easier to get visibility in a column? >> Then? It is a row, I think, because in a column is everything exploding north and self. So you've got everything right there, and usually you have a place where you can look into it. But when you're flat, it starts to become really different you're looking at. But advice is talking to know the devices that don't necessarily have to traverse any part of the network it. Khun, stay within. Ah, hi provides, for example, so providing solutions lawyer game visibility into that environment is really important and the protocols that we use their change a bit so traditional tools don't necessarily fit well. So what's the general solution to >> solving that problem? And then I want to understand the Net Scouts secret sauce. But let's stop. Let's start of high level. How does the industry solved that problem? So the industry >> has been trying to solve that problem mostly by looking at the goodwill of third parties, looking at things like net blower, log events and aggregating that normalizing it. You've had solution sets that looked at network traffic, but it becomes very difficult for a lot of folks to make use of that network traffic, and what we've done is really provide the ability to look into that network. Traffic and gain gather from really anywhere it's deployed whether it's public loud, private cloud, our solution said, That's our secret sauce. Our solution. Second go anyway. >> So so add some color to that in terms of your able to inspect deeper through what just magic software you got. You got a pro you send in so >> well. Actually, we have a device. It's called a SNG, and in the virtual world we use something that we call be stream. In the physical world, we have some that we call in Finnish Stream N. G. And that leverage is a technology that we've developed, called Sai, which is adaptive service intelligence and well, also do is watch all that traffic and build meta data in real time so we can surface key indicators of performance and security events. Get that information up into a collection mechanism that doesn't have to normalize that data. It just looks at it as is way. Build it into a service Contact services context laws uses to see across a multi cloud environment in a single pane of glass. Okay, so one of >> the biggest challenges for customers is that they're changing these environment. It's what happens. Their applications, you know, applications used to be rather self contained. Even the bm They might have moved some, but now we're talking about, you know, micro services, architecture, multi cloud environment. There's there's a lot going on there, you know? What's the impact on that for your world, >> Right? That's been exactly it. Weigh three tier application was kind of pretty straight forward, even though at the point we started introducing, we thought that was a really tough stuff. Now what we're doing, as you say, it's doing micro services architectures, and I might take my presentation layer and put out in the cloud and the public cloud in particular. So I'm closer to the UN user and delivering better high performance capabilities to them lower lately, Auntie and the like and I take my application server and I split that up all over the place, and I might put some in public. Claude. I might put some in private club. I maintain some of it in the legacy. So all that interconnection, all that independency is really, really hard to get your hands around and that complexity. We looked at the street study that said 94% of the 600 respondents said that the the networks are as complex or more complex than they have been two years ago. >> Yeah, that's not surprising, unfortunately to hear that, but you know, when we talk to customers out there, it used to be, you know, the network is something You set it up. You turned all your knobs and then don't breathe on this thing because I've got a just where I want today. It can't be like that. You know, I I we know that it's very dynamic has changed. The message from Cisco has been We need to simplify things and, you know, obviously everybody wants that. But how do you make sure you ensure that application, performance and security, without having the poor admit, have to constantly, you know, be getting tickets in dealing with things >> I think are Solution really provides a common framework for visibility, and that's really what I think is really important. When you're starting to infer based upon different data sets, it becomes very difficult to put your finger on the problem and identified. That's really a problem. And it's trying to blend the organization. Let's sit this concept of the versatile list and trying to make sure that people are more capable in addressing problems in kind of a multi dimensional role that they have now in particular network and security. The organizations, they're trying to come together, God, they rely on different data sense, and that's where it kind of falls apart. If you have a common day to say, you're going to have a better perspective, Okay, >> I was just a front from that application standpoint. How much of this is just giving notification to invisibility? Intuit vs, you know? Is it giving recommendations or even taking actions along those lines? >> Yeah, I think it has. It has to give you recommendations and has to give you pinpoints. You really? You've got to be able to say there here's a problem. This is what you need to do to fix it right? I think what often when I'm talking to folks, I say it's about getting the right information to the right person at the right time to do the right thing If you're able to do that, you're going to be much more effective. Yes. OK, so you've got this early warning system, essentially, hopefully not a tulip. But that's what practitioners want. Tell me something. Tell me. Give me a a gap and tell me the action to take before something goes wrong. Ideally. And so you could do that. You could give them visibility on it, Kind of pinpoint it. And do you see the day, Russ, where you can use machine intelligence toe as Stuart suggesting start to maybe suggest remedial action or even take remedial action? Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are some things that you can really do and do quite well. Walking for security events, for example, is the primary one. We've always had the ideas in place in the early days, a lot of folks who are cautious because they wanted to have a negative impact on the business. But when we take a look at ex filtration and blocking outbound connections, if you know the bad actors and you know the bad addresses, you can stop that before it gets out of your network. So people aren't gonna have that X illustration of your information. >> All right. So, Russ, you've been meeting with a bunch of customers here at the show, What's top of mind for them And if some of the conversation I've been having this week, you know, security, you know, has been climbing that that list for many years now. But in your world, what are some of the top issues? >> Yeah, security, definitely. There's no question. I think it's one of those environments where you can almost never have enough. There is always hungry more and more and better and more accurate solutions. I I think I saw something recently. There was a top 125 security solutions that's like top 120 times really way. Doyle The Town 25 Exactly. And I think I D. C's taxonomy has 73 sub categories to the security. So security is, you know, more than a $500 word. You know, it might be a $5,000 word. It's crazy and same with club, right, because it's not like, you know, in fact, I was talking to someone recently, and it's with the club village Go. It's not a club village. A more This is everything we're doing is the cloud. So it's change in mindset. So it's It's interesting as a cloud universe. So what's next for Net Scout, you know, give us a little road map? What Khun observers expect coming from you guys more significant, pushing the security in particular. One of things we see is that our data set really has the ability to be leverage for both security and performance work. Load sport floats were integrating the products that we bought with the Harbour acquisition we bought over networks. And they have a highly curated threat intelligence feed that we're going to bring in and add to our infinite streams and have the ability to detect problems deep inside the network. You know, it's one of these things the bad actors kind of live off the land. They get in there and they know their way around slowly and methodically and drought dribble information. No. Well, the only way to catch that is like continually monitoring the network. So having that perspective so continuing to grow that out and provide again more of that, eh? I aml approach to understanding and be more predictive when we see things and be able to surf. It's that type of information. Security already used to be activists. And now it's become, you know, high crime even. Yeah, even, you know, nation states, right. And the job of ah of a security technology company is to raise the cost, lower the value right to the hacker, right to the infiltrator so that they go somewhere else. All right. Hey, make it really expensive for them. So either get through. But we ve what's like you get through, make it really hard for them to take stuff out. And that's really what you're doing. >> It was like you made sure to lock the front door now because it stopped them. But, you know, maybe I'll go somewhere else, right? It's a little bit >> different. Preventing you wanna minimize your risk, right? So if you're able to minimize the risk from performance and security problems, it's really all about understanding what you've got, what your assets are protecting them. And then when that someone's trying to look at them stopping it from happening, >> OK, last question I have for you, Russ, is being in this Cisco ecosystem out there. We're watching Cisco go through a transformation become more and more software company now, four years into the Chuckle Robin's era. So you know, how's that going in? What's it mean to partner Francisco today? >> It's going really well, and I think that we adopted a lot of way or adopted a lot of what the Sisko has done as well and really transform Nets go from what was primarily a hardware first company into a software first company. You know, it's kind of I was in a conference once and we were talking about software eating the world, right and but ultimately, its hardware. That's doing the chewing right. So I think it's one of those balancing acts. You know, it's Cisco's still of selling a ton of hardware, but it's a software solution sets so they deploy on their hardware. That makes it happen. And it's similar for us. You know, we're building out software solutions that really address the issues that people have building all these complex environments. All right, >> Russ Curie, congratulations on all the progress there and look forward to keeping up with how Netscape's moving forward in this multi cloud world. Thank you. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live, San Diego for David Dante Obst Amendment. Lisa Martin's also here. Thanks, as always, for watching the Cube.

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's The Cube! Covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Cisco Live, Day 3 from buzzy, sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman and Stu and I are pleased to welcome to the Cube Stephanie Wible, Senior Product Manager, hybrid networking and SD-WAN, from CenturyLink. Stephanie, welcome to the Cube! >> Thank you, I'm glad to be here. >> Yeah, so welcome to the buzzy dev nut zone. This place has been buzzing for three days now. >> It is definitely an active session over here today. >> It is, so let's talk about SD-WAN. We've heard a lot the last few days about the massive transformations to the network. Changing customer demands, changing customer needs, talk to us about the SD-WAN marketplace, overall. >> So we don't have a conversation with any of our customers these days that don't include some kind of a conversation about SD-WAN. Everybody is looking to transform their networks and their looking for the next best thing. They're also trying future-proof their networks. Some of the customer drivers that we see are folks looking to augment existing MPLS networks with lower cost access, making the best use of their assets, both from an equipment perspective as well as a network perspective. And then having that sort of centralized command and control capability that SD-WAN provides them. >> Alright, so Stephanie the SD-WAN space, while most customers are familiar with it, it's not a monolithic space. It's not like there's five products on the market and there all very similar. There's a few different areas and even Cisco has two primary products that your offering. Can you give us a little bit about the lay of the land as to what use cases there are for the various pieces? How do you decide which there are? Or I know I've talked to customers that have had multiple SD-WAN solutions. >> That's a good point. So, when we initially started looking at SD-WAN, we kind of did a RFI on about 15 or so different vendors. The market has compressed a little bit since then through acquisitions and mergers but we at CenturyLink, in particular, recognized that one size does not fit all for all customers. So we wanted to offer a choice of services for our customers and most of the vendors have very similar kind of capability but some have other features that some don't. For example, the Meraki one, we typically have our branch customers, our customers that have many homogenous kind of like sites that they want something simple and something easy and not something that has a lot of bells and whistles. That's a perfect fit for them. It's very easy to install and get it up and running. Where something like Viptela that has a lot more capability and a lot more customization available would be perfect for some of our larger customers. The Telepher, for example, is we have a large install base of customers already using Cisco gear, the ASR and the ISR, where that's very attractive to those folks where they can just lay the software on top of their existing assets without having to do a full network swap out. And then our other option is our Versa which was our initial launch which was in 2016. Again, that's a full-featured SD-WAN capability. So it kind of depends and we try to bring the customers and have that conversation. Understand what theirs drivers are so that we can help tailor them and select and help them select one of the options that we have. >> Yeah I have to imagine that most of the time you're really helping the customer down there. It's not, "Okay there's a catalog, choose which one." That's some of the reason we would go to a CenturyLink is so that you listen to them, understand that, and you've helped filter a lot of that for them and maybe get them down to some of the just what size they're buying. >> Yep, and its not just the vendors. The pure play vendors talk about we call it the tip of the iceberg. So they talk about the SD-WAN capability. Where CenturyLink can add a lot of value to that is we also provide hybrid WAN solution and PLS, we also do. That's the public, the private section. And we recently, with the introduction of our SD-WAN services, started offering public connectivity in broadband and WIFI. So we can offer the mix of access along with the overlay service. We can be the single button to push for that but we also have had extensive history in managed services. So we have done managed routers and managed iads for our voice or data. And then the other big portion of that is we are a global provider, so for those customers looking to expand they're already in our global network. We've got one of the largest global backbones in the world. >> So let's give our audience a view from a customer who is in the process of needing to upgrade their network being able to future-proof it, as you said a few minutes ago, be ready for WIFI sites. Say it's a bank with many different retail branches. What would be the ideal solution for them? Would it be something more like Viptela that, is that more customizable? That in one branch you might need a much smaller pipe than you do in a much larger branch? What goes through that for a customer that's going through that upgrade process to modernize their network? >> Yep, so we try to have our technical experts go in and sit down with the customer and kind of do a question and answer session and try to understand what their business drivers are, what solutions that they're trying to solve for, and provide guidance and expertise along that lines and try to suss out. We also have what we call a Transformation Workshop where we like to bring customers in and have a kind of in-depth conversation, one-on-one conversation, show them some of the demos of the services that we offer and try to suss out what their real requirements are. And then, again, we can offer solutions and say, "Hey, based on the footprint that you have, "based on the connectivity options that you want, "based on your time frame, based on your cost," all of those things are factors to where would direct a customer. >> So giving them sort of a prescriptive, customized pathway for that upgrade based on all the analysis about what they, what their current lay of their WAN looks like and where they want to get to. >> Exactly, exactly. >> So, Stephanie I knew you'd do those in-depth discussions with customers. One the great opportunities about a show like Cisco is you've got 28,000 people here coming by the booth, coming into to sessions, so you get to speed date on some of these things, but what are some of the top things that they're asking for? What are some of the pain points that your hearing from customers? Is SD-WAN one of the top things bringing them to you? Or what are some of those key conversations? >> SD-WAN is, that's been kind of the industry term and so everybody knows a little bit about it and the crazy part is a lot people coming in have really done their homework and know a lot about the differences between the different platforms. Security is at the top of everybody's mind and that is another really big driver that everybody wants to have a conversation about. Security, how can I get a security patches out to my endpoints faster and better and quicker? How do I integrate my security with an SD-WAN solution? And so we see those a lot. We have answers for those questions and we can help folks figure that out. >> So here we are at the 30th annual Cisco customer partner event. A lot of evolution in the last 30 years. A lot of work has been done by Cisco to transition from just a hardware network gear provider to hardware, now software. Challenging for large organizations with the history and the product depth and the networking expertise-- >> Absolutely. >> that a company like Cisco has. I want to get your opinion. You've been with CenturyLink for a long time. CenturyLink and Cisco also go way back. >> Stephanie: Yep >> What are some of the advantages is CenturyLink seeing by Cisco's transition to more of a software provider? >> Cisco's always been a great hardware provider partner for us and I hadn't worked in that space too much. However, the folks that we have been working with, both on the Meraki side and Viptela side, super responsive, super willing to help. They're always available. What questions can we answer? Can we get in? Is there training that we can provide? They've been great. Super partners to work with. >> In terms of the customer reaction though, is it giving you guys a leg up, an advantage, that there is more of a software lead approach of looking at an old legacy company that is much more modernized? If you think of how Cisco would compete with a born-in-the-cloud company, what is that kind of competitive advantage like for you guys? >> That's an interesting thing too. So where Cisco has traditionally been a hardware provider, a lot of our customers are very familiar. They're CCIE network certified. It's funny trying to get those folks over. Some are very, its usually the younger set that's willing to go the whole software designed route. So its a challenge. Some folks are very, very much old school and they want to stick with the hardware-based solutions and they don't want to move to the digital world. However, things, cloud computing and all the applications moving to the cloud is kind of forcing them there. So its kind of a slow cycle on some of those and then some of their smaller groups. And we, the early adopters were the ones that were, "Yeah, let's just jump in "and go directly the software route," so it's-- >> Yeah, Stephanie you bring up a great point. I used to give presentations and when you would talk about rollout of technology in the network world, we would measure it in a decade. >> Right, yeah. >> It was like, "Okay, here comes 10 gig and there's the standard "and here's the piece," and all the things like that. What are some of those drivers in your customers because are they moving? You know we found, in general, they are moving faster. Speed is one of the things that we talk about. That agility to be able to respond. So what are some of those drivers from your companies that your work with that's helping them refresh faster, look at new technologies, and be open to some change? >> I think it's just keeping up with the industry. Like you said, it used to take years to do things and now its changing on a monthly and a weekly basis. And people are, I think, they're a little bit scared. It's like if we don't do something, we're going to get left behind. And it, the industry, is kind of forcing people to make those changes. Cost driver is another one that we see and people having to hit their fiscal numbers and everything else like that. But network transformation is not a simple thing. It's not a quick go in, run something. It's something that requires a lot of planning, a lot of analysis, and you want to, what do the old carpenters say? You measure twice and cut once, right? You want to plan, you want to plan, you want to plan and then you implement. So it does take time and people are getting there. When we first start talking about SD-WAN there was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk and all a sudden then you start seeing, and it seems to be speeding up. People wanting to make decisions. We've had people that have had experiences and have shared experiences, and I think that has helped people make their decisions to actually go. >> What are some of the factors, like security, as an accelerator of a business that maybe might be on the slower side to migrate and start moving to a multi-cloud? Which a lot of businesses live in. Security also just the threat of being Uber-ized by a smaller company that isn't taking advantage-- >> They can move fast. >> Right, of whether it's network automation, SD-WAN, taking advantage of the expansion of 5G. What are some of those, how are some of the security and some of those other threats, are they catalysts that you guys are leveraging with customers to help them understand why the transition is imperative? >> I think they are. I think the iPhones and the laptop devices where you can click and have that immediate user experience, that's starting to build people's expectations that you can get things that quickly. And for the old legacy companies that aren't willing to get in there and to start thinking about doing that migration and change, they will get left behind. It's just where the industry is today. >> Great, Stephanie, why don't I give you the, give us the take-away from Cisco Live. You know, Cisco plus CenturyLink, what's that mean for customers? >> I'm sorry, I didn't catch all, I'm sorry. >> Cisco plus CenturyLink, the take-away for customers. >> Yeah, we're great partners. We've been partners for years. We continue to be partners. I think we bring a great marriage of the SD-WAN services and our hybrid network and all of our managed services together. Lots of years of experience and we love helping our customers, both of us. We want to delight and provide that great customer experience. >> Well. Stephanie, it's been a pleasure to have you on the Cube talking about all things SD-WAN, marketplace, the drivers, the opportunities, and the benefits. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much you guys. Have a great show. >> Thank you. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube Live from Cisco Live, San Diego. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California. It's theCUBE. covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego, everybody. You're watching Cisco Live 2019. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. Our third host, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Dave Malik is here. He's a fellow and Chief Architect at Cisco. David, good to see you. >> Oh, glad to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. First of all, congratulations on being a fellow. What does that mean, a Cisco Fellow? What do you got to go through to achieve that status? >> It's pretty arduous task. It's one of the most highest technical designations in Cisco, but we work across multiple architectures in technologies, as well as our partners, as well, to drive corporate-wide strategy. >> So you've been talking to customers here, you've been presenting. I think you said you gave three presentations here? Multi-cloud, blockchain, and some stuff on machine intelligence, ML. >> Yes. >> Let's hit those. Kind of summarize the overall themes, and then we'll maybe get into each, and then we got a zillion questions for you. >> Sure, excellent. So multi-cloud, I think one of the customers, we're clearly hearing from them is around, how do we get a universal policy model and connectivity model, and how do you orchestrate workloads seamlessly? And those are some of the challenges that we trying to address at this conference. On blockchain, a lot of buzz out there. We're not talking about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, it's really about leveraging blockchain from a networking perspective, or an identity and encryption, and providing a uniform ledger that everything is pervasive across infrastructure. And then ML, I think it's the heart of every conversation. How do we take pervasive analytics and bring it into the network so we can drive actionable insights into automation? >> So let's start with the third one. When you talk about ML, was your talk on machine learning? Did it spill into artificial intelligence? What's the difference to you from a technology perspective? >> Machine learning is really getting a lot of the data and looking at repetitive patterns in a very common fashion, and doing a massive correlation across multiple domains. So you may have some things happening in the branch, the data set, or a WAN in cloud, but the whole idea is how do you put them together to drive insight? And through artificial intelligence and algorithms, we can try to take those insights and automate them and push them back into the infrastructure or to the application layer. So now you're driving intelligence for not just consumers or devices, but also humans as well to drive insight. >> All right. So Dave, I wonder if you'd help connect with us what you were talking about there, and we'll get to the multicloud piece because I was at an Amazon show last week from Amazon, talking about how when they look at all the technologies that they use to get packages, their fulfillment centers, everything that they do as a business, ML and AI, they said, is underneath that, and AWS is what's driving that technology from that standpoint. Now, multicloud, AWS is a partner of yours. >> Yes. >> Can you give us how you work in multicloud and does ML and IA, is that a Cisco specific? Are you working with some of the standards out there to connect all those pieces? Help us look at some of the big picture of those items. >> So we believe we're agnostic, whether you connect to Amazon, Azure, Google, et cetera, we believe in a uniform policy model and connectivity model, which is very, very arduous today. So you shouldn't have to have a specific policy model, connectivity model, security model for that matter, for each provider. So we're normalizing that plane completely, which is awesome. Then, at a workload level, regardless of whether your workload is spun up or spun down, it should have the same security posture and visibility. We have certain customers that are running as single applications across multiple clouds, so your data is going to be obviously on-prem, you may be running analytics in TenserFlow, compute in EC2, and connecting to O365, that's one app. And where we're seeing the models go is are you leveraging technology such as this? Do you offer service mesh? How do we tie a lot of these micro-services together and then be able to layer workload orchestration on top? So regardless of where your workload sits, and one key point that we keep hearing from our customers is their ungovernance. How we provide cloud-based governance regardless of where their workload is, and that's something we're doing in a very large fashion with customers that have a multicloud strategy. >> So Stu, I think there's still some confusion around multicloud generally, and maybe Cisco's strategy. I wonder if we could maybe clear it up a little bit. >> Dave, it's that big elephant in the room, and I always feel like everybody describes multicloud from a different angle. >> So let's dig into this a little bit, and let's hear from Cisco's perspective. So you got, to my count, five companies really going after this space. You got Cisco, VMware, IBM Red Hat, Microsoft, and Google with Anthos. Probably all those guys are partners of yours. >> Yes. >> Okay, but you guys want to provide the bromide or the single pane of glass, okay. I'm hearing open and agnostic. That's a differentiator. Security, you're in a good position to make an argument that you're in a good position to make things secure. You got the network and so forth. High-performance network, and cost-effective. Everybody's going to make that argument relative to having multiple stovepipes, but that's part of your story as well. So the question. Why Cisco? What's the key differentiator and what gives you confidence that you can really help win in this marketplace? >> So our core competencies are our networking and security. Whether it's cloud-based security or on-prem security, it's uniform. From a security perspective, we have a universal architecture. Whether it's the endpoint, the edge, the cloud, they're all sharing information and intelligence. That's really important. Instead of having bespoke products, these products and solutions need to communicate with each other, so if someone's sick in one area, we're informing the other one. So threat intelligence and network intelligence is huge. Then more importantly, after working with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, we have on-prem solutions as well, so as customers are going on their multicloud journey, and eventually the workload will transition, you have the same management experience and security experience. So Anthos was a recent announcement, AWS as well, where you can run on-prem Kubernetes, and you can take the same workload and move it to AWS or GCP, but the management model and the control pane model, they are extremely similar and you don't have to learn anything new from a training perspective. >> Okay, but I used the term agnostic, oh, no. You did agnostic, I said open. But you don't care if it's Anthos or VMware, or OpenShift, you don't care. >> Don't care. >> And, architecturally, how is it that you can successfully not care? >> Because the underlying, fundamental principles is you can load any workload you want with this, bare metal, virtualized, or Kubernetes-based containers, they all need the same. For example, everyone needs bread and water. It's not different. So why should you be able to discriminate against a workload or OpenShare if they're using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, for example? The same model, all applications still need security, visibility, networking, and management, but they should not be different across all clouds, and that's traditionally what you're seeing from the other vendors in the market. They're very unique to their stovepipe, and we want to break down those stovepipes across the board, regardless of what app and what workload you have. >> Dave, talk a little bit about the automation that Cisco's delivering to help enable this because there's skill set challenges, just the scale of these environments are more than humans alone can take care of, so how does that automation, I know you're heavily involved in the CX beast of Cisco. How does that all tie together? >> So we're working on a lot of automation projects with our large enterprises and SPs, I mean, you see Rakuten being fairly prominent in the show, but more importantly, we understand not everyone's building a greenfield environment, not everything is purely public cloud. We have to deal with brownfield, we have to deal with third-party ecosystem partners, so you can't have a vertically tight single-vendor solution. So again, to your point, it's completely open. Then we have frameworks, meaning you have orchestrators that can talk down to the device through programmatic interfaces. That's why we see DevNet surrounding us, but then more importantly, we're looking at services that have workflows that could span on-prem, off-prem, third-party, it doesn't really matter. And we stitch a lot of those workloads southbound, but more importantly, northbound to security at ITSM Systems. So those frameworks are coming into life, whether you're a telecom cloud provider or you're a large enterprise. And they slowly fall into those workflows as they become more multi-domain. You saw David Goeckeler the other day, talking about SD-WAN, ECI, and campus wired and wireless. These domains are coming together and that's where we're driving a lot of the automation work. >> So automation is a linchpin to what business outcome? Ultimately, what are customers trying to achieve through automation? >> There's a couple of things. Mean time to value. So if you're a service provider, to your internal customers or external, time to value and speed and agility are key. The other ones are mean time to repair and mean time to detect. If I can shorten the time to detect and shorten time to react, then I can take proactive and preemptive action in situations that may happen. So time to value is really, really important. Cost is a play, obviously, 'cause when you have more and more machines doing your work, your OPEX will come down, but it's really not purely a cost play. Agility and speed are really driving automation to that scale as we're working with folks like Rakuten and others. >> What do you see, Dave, as the big challenges of achieving automation when customers, first of all, I was talking like, 10, 15 years ago people, they were afraid of automation. Some still are. But they I think understand as part of a digital transformation, they got to automate. So what are the challenges that they're having and how are you helping them solve them? >> So typically, what people have thought about automation has been more network-centric, but as we just discussed multicloud, automation is extending all the way to the public cloud, at the workload or at the functional level, if you're running in Lambda, for example. And then more importantly, traditionally, customers have been leveraging Python scripts and things of that nature, but the days of scripters are there, but they cannot scale. You need a model-driven framework, you need model-driven telemetry to get insight. So I think the learning curve of customers moving to a model-driven mindset is extremely important, and it's not just about the network alone, it's also about the application. So that's why we're driving a lot of our frameworks and education and training. And talent's a big gap that we're helping with with our training programs. >> Okay, so you're talking about insights. There's a lot of data. The saying goes, "data is plentiful, insights aren't." So how do you get from data to insights? Is that where the machine intelligence comes in? Maybe you can explain that. >> There's a combination. Machines can process much faster than humans can, but more importantly, somebody has to drive the 30 or 40 years of experience that Cisco has from our tech, our architects and CX, and our customers and the community that we're developing through DevNet. So taking trusted expertise from humans, from all that knowledge base, combining that with machine learning so we get the best of both worlds. 'Cause you need that experience. And that is driving insight so we can filter the signal from the noise, and then more importantly, how do you take that signal and then, in an automated fashion, push that down to an intent-based architecture across the board. >> Dave, can you take us inside a little bit of your touchpoints into customers? In the old days, it was a CCIE, his job, his title, it was equipment that he would touch, and today, talking about this multicloud and the automation, it's very dispersed as to who owns it, most of what I am managing is not something that's under their purview, so the touchpoints you have into the company and the relationship you have changed a lot in the last three, five years or so. >> Absolutely, 'cause the buying center's also changing, because folks are getting more and more centric around the line of business and want the outcome we want to drive for their clients. So the cloud architecture teams that are being built, they're more horizontal now. You'll have a security person, an application, networking, operations, for example, and what we're actually pioneering, a lot of the enterprises and SPs, is building the site reliability engineering teams, or SRE, which Google has obviously pioneered, and we're bringing those concepts and teams through a CX framework, through telecos, and some of their high-end enterprises initially, and you'll see more around that over the coming months. Our SRE jobs, if you go on LinkedIn, you'll probably see hundreds of them out there now. >> One of the other things we've been watching is Cisco has a very broad portfolio. This whole CX piece has to make sure that, from a customer's standpoint, no matter where the portfolio, whether core, edge, IOT, all these various devices, I should have a simplified experience today, which isn't necessarily, my words, Cisco's legacy. How do you make sure, is software a unifying factor inside the company? Give us a little bit about those dynamics inside. >> Absolutely, so we take a life cycle approach. It's not one and done. From the time there's a concept where you want to build out a blueprint, but there's no transformation journey, we have to make sure we walk the client through preparation, planning, design, architecture optimization, but then making sure they actually adopt, and get the true value. So we're working with our customers to make sure that they go around the entire life cycle, from end to end, from cradle to grave, and be able to constantly optimize. You're hearing the word continuous pretty much everywhere. It's kind of the fundamental of CICD, so we believe in a continuous life cycle approach that we're walking the customers end to end to make sure from the point of purchase to the point of decommissioning, making sure they're getting the most value out of the solutions they're getting from Cisco. >> All right Dave, we'll give you the last word on Cisco Live 2019. Thoughts? Takeaways? >> I think there's just amazing energy here, and there's a lot more to come. Come down to the CX booth and we'll have to show you some more gadgets and solutions where we're taking our forward customers. >> Great. David, thank you very much for coming to The Cube. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> All right, 28,000 people and The Cube bringing it to you live. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Lisa Martin is also in the house. We'll be right back from Cisco Live San Diego 2019, Day 3. You're watching The Cube.