(music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCube. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in Barcelona. It's theCubes coverage day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier With Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante. Dave in this segment. Our next guest is Gordon Thompson, Vice President, Global Enterprise Network from Cisco Worldwide. Run a lot of countries here in Cisco. Knows the territory. Knows the lay of the land in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia. Now global. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. Glad to be with you. >> You're on stage in the keynote. You say we're here in Barcelona. Lot of action in Europe. Europe's different than North America, but you start to see them leading the trends on how to handle these complex environments like highly regulated compliance. GDPR, we've been hearing about that. Security, cyber security. So a lot of trends in Europe are actually leading in some areas. That's impacting the network. Your thoughts on this show so far. How's it going? >> Yeah. I think, there's a fundamental phenomenal opportunity for our customer base and for Cisco at the moment in terms of where technology is going. It's mostly being driven by software innovation in the business. For many, many years we built world class hardware and a software operating system that did one thing. It provided connectivity. But it did one thing. Reliable, secure, performance based connectivity but it did one thing. The opportunity now, going back to your question is we're developing software that doesn't do one thing. It's software that does multiple different things. On top of that hardware that therefore helps solve some of the challenges around compliance and all of these sorts of things, but at the same time start to provide much deeper insight and analytics into what's going on in your environment and that then starts to let you say, hey, there's information here in the network that I've never been exposed to before, that I'm now exposed to and I can start to do something meaningful with that data. That's the opportunity, I think, for our customers is how they monetize that. How they use that information. Providing that information on a real time basis is going to be the critical thing. We see lots, it's a very competitive environment Amir, we see lots of business in Amir looking to see how they can use technology to drive differentiation for them in the market and they're beginning to realize that data is the key to being able to do that and they're now seeing how much data they've got on their network that if they can get exposure to they can start to use in a meaningful way. Really exciting. It's very innovative here. We're seeing customers starting to realize how important the network is. >> In your keynote, you made a bunch of people uncomfortable saying you have to change. >> Yeah. >> And then admitted I don't like it when people tell me I have to change, but you need to change. What do they have to change? >> They have to think about truly how they're architecting and designing their networks. As I said earlier, on Ciscos an organization's been phenomenally successful but we've really done one thing in 30 years, provide reliable, secure, connectivity. And over the last four years our innovation strategy has changed to say we're not just going to deliver connectivity, we're going to look at how we can deliver automation on top of the network. We're going to look at how we deliver security embedded in the network. We're going to look at how we take real time analytical insights off of the network. When you think differently about how you use a network you'll then start to think differently about the value the network can bring. I was making that comment 'cause I was wanting customers to think about the network no longer just being something that's going to deliver connectivity. It's something that will absolutely drive business transformation for them if they approach it with that thought process in mind. It was really a challenge to get people to think slightly differently. >> Yeah. Wake up a little bit and say, okay, what's going on here? And I want to get your thoughts on the trend because the tail winds, I think that Cisco's feeling right now is, in every major inflection point there's always complexity and abstraction layers of software always take away the complexities. Software check, big time trend. But cloud scale and horizontal scale now with the Enterprise, HyperFlex out to the edge, ACI Anywhere, so you start to see Cisco as one large scalable network with complexities that's being managed by software across domains. This seems to be a beautiful formula for what customers want which is secure networks. Do you see it that way? Is that a major wave you're riding? Is that what customers are saying? Because I think you're getting at something that's important which is I'm moving packets around, moving data around but I got to put my solution out in front of customers. The applications. How they access and engage. These are big picture items, but what's your thoughts on this? >> Okay. It's interesting, right. 'cause what we've created is, so we've created this software overlay network in various different areas. We've created a fabric. In the data center we've created an ACI fabric. In the Branch and the Campus we've created what we call software defined access fabric. And in the ONE we've created this software defined ONE fabric with our WHIPTAIL acquisition. Also with Meraki. The interesting thing is people have created these software fabrics to drive southbound automation onto the network to save money. To move more quickly. What we are saying to our customers is actually the value isn't just about driving southbound automation onto each of these fabrics, it's about how you take information from each of these fabrics, connect that information together holistically and then start to provide more value around behavioral analytics. To secure your environment more. Et cetera, et cetera. You're going to see individual fabrics, but then what Dave Goeckeler was talking about was how he connects these fabrics or domains together. Connecting them together is going to help us secure the environment even more effectively. It's also going to help us analyze what's going on more effectively as well. This is really the sweet spot, I think, for us to work more closely with our customers. >> Talk about security because I think this is a great point. I think if you guys can, well you have the fabrics now, product portfolio has broadened. It's filled in, but security still is hot. It's still number one. You guys are embedding that foundational into the network and lifting the data up to create insight. What are some of the actionable things that you're seeing enabled from, one the fabrics coming together and talk about the dynamic of security specifically because if you don't fix the security paradigm at the network level, it's a house of cards. Everything crashes. That's my opinion. Your thoughts. Do you agree with that? >> I hope that nothing crashes at entity, but the key thing, I think is, we like to say we put security in the network, whereas we looked at all of the other networking vendors applying security on top of the network. >> What's the difference? Explain the difference. >> In our own, one word each with two letters in them but a massive difference in terms of what they do. Ultimately the network can provide us with loads of contextual information around what's happening in the environment. It's about how you use that information in a real time basis to help make better security decisions. It's really taking the value of networking devices and passing that information from a network switch or a wireless controller to a security policy control capability is really where we start to see value come together. And it sees things that are important to us. For example, I met with a sales leader recently in a very large pharmaceutical company in Europe, and their problem was their salespeople were handing in their resignation but they were doing it the day after they'd taken all the intellectual property out of the company. They had gone and taken all of the customer data base. They'd put it on a stick. They put it in their pocket. And they went away. It happens every day. The challenge is the network should be able to see a behavioral change. If that was you or me we normally perform the same activities on the network every day. We don't really change what we do, but the minute we start to go to old servers to download information that we haven't downloaded in years, you know, that's a behavioral change. And the network should be able to identify that, pass that information to the network administrator and deal with it so we can stop that sort of data leakage from our organization. These are the sorts of things that I think are exciting. >> And Cisco's unique because of the scope of your portfolio or the technology? >> Well, a bit of both. Cisco's unique because of the scope of the technology, but it's also about the amount of information we take off the network. You know, people talked about in this software overlay world the network becoming, hardware becoming commoditized. Oh, Cisco, your hardwire is going to be commoditized. We'll move to white box. The reality is it's the power of our hardware, our ASIC Design that allows us to pull all of this information off the network. People are beginning to realize how important data is now. And now they're beginning to see actually hardware's really important. Although it's the software that does all the sexy stuff, hardware's really important. We're beginning to see customers recognize two things, the breadth of the portfolio, as we mentioned earlier on, but also the power of the hardware to allow the software to do everything it does. >> Gordon, I know you got to go. Thanks for coming on. One final question while you're here 'cause I know you have a unique perspective. Want to get it real quick. Quick soundbite here. Global is now a big part of everyone's plan. Global economy. You have good experience globally with Cisco and also here in Amir, how should companies think about global networking? What's your insight into how people should start thinking about global architectures, global clouds, global networks? Your thoughts. >> I think every organization is looking to build out these capabilities. There's absolutely no doubt they are, but I think the way to approach it nowadays with all of the software capabilities we have, is to build bit by bit, right? To build your networks in different islands and then look to how you join those islands together. I think, ultimately, that's how most organizations are looking to move forward. From our point of view, I think, we'll look to connect those islands or fabrics together with the power of data. Ultimately, I think, we've always said data is the new oil, but I think, truly in the networking industry now, data is the new oil and it's truly how organizations will differentiate themselves in the future. >> Gordon, thank you for spending the time on the Cube. I know you got to hard stop. Appreciate it. >> No problem. >> Thank you for your precious time. It's the Cube live coverage from Barcelona. I'm John Furrier with Dave Elante. More live coverage. Stay with us after this short break. (techno music)