>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live! We're in Barcelona, Dave Villante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. George Bentinck is here. He's a product manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki. >> Hi. >> Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> So, we were saying, Meraki's not just about wireless. It's all about cameras now. Tell us about your role. >> The Meraki camera is relatively new. It's one of the newer products. It came out just over two years ago and it's really embodying what we're about as a business unit at Cisco, which is about simplicity. It's about taking normally complex technology and sort of distilling it so customers can really use it. So what we did with the camera was we spoke to a lot of our customers, listened what they had to say, and they were fed up with the boxes. They don't want these servers, they don't want the recording solutions, they just want to get video. And so we built a camera which has everything inside it. All the video is stored in the camera using the latest solid state storage. And then we did all the analytics and the other sort of cool things people want to do with video in the camera as well. And yet to make it easy to use, it's all managed from the Meraki cloud. So that allows you to scale it from one camera to 100 cameras to 100,000 cameras and yet have nothing else other than the cameras and the management from the cloud. >> Well the way you describes it sounds so simple, but technically, it's a real challenge, what you've described. What were some of the technical challenges of you guys getting there? >> Well, there are sort of two components. There's the device piece and when we look at the device piece, we basically leverage the latest advances in the mobile phone industry. So if you look at the latest iPhones and Android phones, we've taken that high density, highly reliable storage and integrated it into the camera. And then we've also taken the really powerful silicone, so we have Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip in there and that performance allows us to do all the analytics in the camera. And so the second piece is the cloud, the scaling, and the management. And with video, it's lots of big data, which I'm guessing you guys are probably pretty familiar with. And trying to search that and know what's going on and managing its scale can be really painful. But we have a lot of experience with this. Meraki's cloud infrastructure manages millions of connected nodes with billions of connected devices and billions of pieces of associated metadata. This is just like video, so we can reuse a lot of the existing technology we've built in the cloud and now move it to this other field of video and make it much easier to find things. >> And when people talk about, y'know, the camera systems, IoT obviously comes into play and security's a big concern. Y'know, people are concerned about IP cameras off the shelf. Y'know, everybody knows the stories about the passwords where, y'know, they never changed out of the factory and they're the same passwords across the, and so, y'know, presumably, Cisco Meraki, trusted name, and there's a security component here as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics because, unfortunately, not many people ask about it. It's one of those, it's not an issue until it's an issue type of things and we put a lot of work in it. I mean, Cisco has security in its DNA. It's just like part of what we do. And so we did all of the things which I think every camera vendor and IoT vendor should be doing anyway. So that's things like encryption for everything and by default. So all the storage on the camera is encrypted. It's mandatory so you can't turn it off. And there's zero configuration, so when you turn it on, it won't record for a few minutes while it encrypts its storage volume and then you're good to go. We also manage all the certificates on the camera and we also have encrypted management for the camera with things like two-factor authentication and other authentication mechanisms on top of that as well. So it's sort of leaps and bounds ahead of where most of the decision makers are thinking in this space because they're physical security experts. They know about locks and doors and things like that. They're not digital security experts but the Cisco customer and our organization, we know this and so we have really taken that expertise and added it to the camera. >> Yeah, George, security goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the Cisco solutions. Is that the primary or only use case for the Meraki camera? Y'know, I could just see a lot of different uses for this kind of technology. >> It really is very varied and the primary purpose of it is a physical security camera. So being able to make sure that if there's an incident in your store, you have footage of maybe the shoplifting incident or whatever. But, because it's so easy to use, customers are using it for other things. And I think one of the things that's really exciting to me is when I look at the data. And if I look at the data, we know that about 1% of all the video we store is actually viewed by customers. 99% just sits there and does nothing. And so, as we look at how we can provide greater value to customers, it's about taking the advances in things such as machine learning for computer vision, sort of artificial intelligence, and allowing you to quantify things in that data. It allows you to, for example, determine how many people are there and where they go and things like that. And to maybe put it all into context, because one of my favorite examples is a Cisco case study in Australia, where they're using cameras at a connected farm as part of an IoT deployment, to understand sheep grazing behavior and so this camera watches the sheep all day. Now as a human, I don't want to watch the sheep all day, but the camera doesn't care. And so the farmer looks at eight images representing eight hours, which is a heat map of the animals' movement in the field, and they can know where they've been grazing, where they need to move them, where this might be overgrazed. And so the camera's not security at this point, it really is like a sensor for the enterprise. >> Yeah, it's interesting, actually I did a walk through the DevNet Zone and I saw a lot of areas where I think they're leveraging some of your technology. Everything from let's plug in some of the AI to be able to allow me to do some interesting visualizations. What we're doing, there's a magic mirror where you can ask it like an Alexa or Google, but it's Debbie, the robot here as to give you answers of how many people are in a different area here. A camera is no longer just a camera. It's now just an end node connected and there's so many technologies. How do you manage that as a product person where you have the direction, where you put the development? You can't support a million different customer use cases. You want to be able to scale that business. >> Absolutely, I think the North Star always has to be simplistic. If you can't go and deploy it, you can't use it. And so we see a lot of these cool science projects trapped in proof of concept. And they never go into production and the customers can't take advantage of it. So we want to provide incredibly simple, easy out-the-box technology, which allows people to use AI and machine learning, and then we're the experts in that, but we give you industry-standard APIs using REST or MQTT, to allow you to build business applications on it directly or integrate it into Cisco Kinetic, where you can do that using the MQTT interface. >> So, Stu, you reminded me so we're here in the DevNet Zone and right now there's a Meraki takeover. So what happens in the DevNet Zone is they'll pick a topic or a part of Cisco's business unit, right now, it's the Meraki, everyone's running around with Meraki takeover shirts, and everybody descends on the DevNet Zone. So a lot of really cool developer stuff going on here. George, I wanted to ask you about where the data flows. So the data lives at the edge, y'know, wherever you're taking the video. Does it stay there? Given that only 1% is watched, are you just leaving it there, not moving it back into the cloud? Are you sometimes moving it back into the cloud? What's the data flow look like? >> You can think of this interesting sort of mindset, which is let's have a camera where we don't ever want to show you video, we want to give you the answer because video is big, it's heavy. Let's give you the answer and if that answer means we give you video, we give you video. But if we can give you the answer through other forms of information, like a still image, or an aggregate of an image, or metadata from that, then we'll give you that instead. And that means customers can deploy this on cellular networks out in the middle of nowhere and with much fewer constraints than they had in the past. So it really depends but we try and make it as efficient as possible for the person deploying it so they don't have to have a 40G network connection to every camera to make the most of it. >> Yeah, so that would mean that most of it stays-- >> Most of it stays at the edge in the camera. >> Talk a little bit more about the analytics component. Is that sort of Meraki technology the came over with the acquisition? What has Cisco added to that? Maybe speak to that a little bit. >> So the camera is a relatively new product line within the last two and a half years and the Meraki acquisition was, I think we're only like five years or more now down that road, so this is definitely post-acquisition and part of the continued collaboration between various departments at Cisco. What it enables you to do is object detection, object classification, and object tracking. So it's I know there's a thing, I know what that thing is, and I know where that thing goes. And we do it for a high level object class today, which is people. Because if you look at most business problems, they can be broken down into understanding location, dwell times, and characteristics of people. And so if we give you the output of those algorithms as industry-standard APIs, you can build very customized business analytics or business logics. So let me give you a real world example. I have retail customers tell me that one of the common causes of fraud is an employee processing a refund when there's no customer. And so what if you could know there was no customer physically present in front of the electronic point of sale system where the refund is being processed? Well, the camera can tell you. And it's not a specialist analytics camera, it's a security camera you were going to buy anyway, which will also give this insight. And now you know if that refund has a customer at the other side of the till. >> Well, that's awesome. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What are some of the other ones that you foresee or your customers are pushing you towards? Paint a picture as to what you think this looks like in the future. >> It really is this camera as a sensor so one of the newer things we've added is the ability to have real-time updates of the lights' conditions from the camera, so you can get from the hardware-backed light sensor on the camera the lux levels. And what that means is now you have knowledge of people, where they are, where they go, knowledge of lights, and now you can start going okay, well maybe we adjust the lighting based on these parameters. And so we want to expose more and more data collection from this endpoint, which is the camera, to allow you to make either smarter business decisions or to move to the digital workplace and that's really what we're trying to do in the Meraki offices in San Francisco. >> And do you get to the point or does the client get to the point where they know not only that information you just described but who the person is? >> Yes and no. I think one of the things that I'm definitely advocating caution on is the face recognition technology has a lot of hype, has a lot of excitement, and I get asked about it regularly. And I do test state-of-the-art and a lot of this technology all the time. And I wear hats because I find them fun and entertaining but they're amazingly good at stopping most of these systems from working. And so you can actually get past some of the state-of-the-art face recognition systems with two simple things, a hat and a mobile phone. And you look at your phone as you walk along and they won't catch you. And when I speak to customers, they're expectation of the performance of this technology does not match the investment cost required. So I'm not saying it isn't useful to someone, it's just, for a lot of our customers, when they see what they would get in exchange for such a huge investment, it's not something they are interested in. >> Yeah, the ROI's just really not there today. >> Not today, but the technology's moving very fast so we'll see what the future brings. >> Yeah, great. Alright, George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was really, really interesting. Leave you the last word. Customer reactions to what you guys are showing at the event? Any kind of new information that you want to share? >> There are some that we'll talk about in the Whisper Suite, which I will leave unsaid, unfortunately. It's just knowing that you can use it so simply and that the analytics and the machine learning come as part of the product at no additional cost. Because this is pretty cutting-edge stuff. You see it in the newspapers, you see it in the headlines and to say I buy this one camera and I can be a coffee shop, a single owner, and I get the same technology as an international coffee organization is pretty compelling and that's what's getting people excited. >> Great and it combines the sensor at the edge and the cloud management so-- >> Best of both worlds. >> That's awesome, I love the solution. Thanks so much for sharing with us. >> Fantastic. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cisco Live! Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live! We're in Barcelona, Dave Villante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. George Bentinck is here. He's a product manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki. >> Hi. >> Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> So, we were saying, Meraki's not just about wireless. It's all about cameras now. Tell us about your role. >> The Meraki camera is relatively new. It's one of the newer products. It came out just over two years ago and it's really embodying what we're about as a business unit at Cisco, which is about simplicity. It's about taking normally complex technology and sort of distilling it so customers can really use it. So what we did with the camera was we spoke to a lot of our customers, listened what they had to say, and they were fed up with the boxes. They don't want these servers, they don't want the recording solutions, they just want to get video. And so we built a camera which has everything inside it. All the video is stored in the camera using the latest solid state storage. And then we did all the analytics and the other sort of cool things people want to do with video in the camera as well. And yet to make it easy to use, it's all managed from the Meraki cloud. So that allows you to scale it from one camera to 100 cameras to 100,000 cameras and yet have nothing else other than the cameras and the management from the cloud. >> Well the way you describes it sounds so simple, but technically, it's a real challenge, what you've described. What were some of the technical challenges of you guys getting there? >> Well, there are sort of two components. There's the device piece and when we look at the device piece, we basically leverage the latest advances in the mobile phone industry. So if you look at the latest iPhones and Android phones, we've taken that high density, highly reliable storage and integrated it into the camera. And then we've also taken the really powerful silicone, so we have Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-chip in there and that performance allows us to do all the analytics in the camera. And so the second piece is the cloud, the scaling, and the management. And with video, it's lots of big data, which I'm guessing you guys are probably pretty familiar with. And trying to search that and know what's going on and managing its scale can be really painful. But we have a lot of experience with this. Meraki's cloud infrastructure manages millions of connected nodes with billions of connected devices and billions of pieces of associated metadata. This is just like video, so we can reuse a lot of the existing technology we've built in the cloud and now move it to this other field of video and make it much easier to find things. >> And when people talk about, y'know, the camera systems, IoT obviously comes into play and security's a big concern. Y'know, people are concerned about IP cameras off the shelf. Y'know, everybody knows the stories about the passwords where, y'know, they never changed out of the factory and they're the same passwords across the, and so, y'know, presumably, Cisco Meraki, trusted name, and there's a security component here as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics because, unfortunately, not many people ask about it. It's one of those, it's not an issue until it's an issue type of things and we put a lot of work in it. I mean, Cisco has security in its DNA. It's just like part of what we do. And so we did all of the things which I think every camera vendor and IoT vendor should be doing anyway. So that's things like encryption for everything and by default. So all the storage on the camera is encrypted. It's mandatory so you can't turn it off. And there's zero configuration, so when you turn it on, it won't record for a few minutes while it encrypts its storage volume and then you're good to go. We also manage all the certificates on the camera and we also have encrypted management for the camera with things like two-factor authentication and other authentication mechanisms on top of that as well. So it's sort of leaps and bounds ahead of where most of the decision makers are thinking in this space because they're physical security experts. They know about locks and doors and things like that. They're not digital security experts but the Cisco customer and our organization, we know this and so we have really taken that expertise and added it to the camera. >> Yeah, George, security goes hand-in-hand with a lot of the Cisco solutions. Is that the primary or only use case for the Meraki camera? Y'know, I could just see a lot of different uses for this kind of technology. >> It really is very varied and the primary purpose of it is a physical security camera. So being able to make sure that if there's an incident in your store, you have footage of maybe the shoplifting incident or whatever. But, because it's so easy to use, customers are using it for other things. And I think one of the things that's really exciting to me is when I look at the data. And if I look at the data, we know that about 1% of all the video we store is actually viewed by customers. 99% just sits there and does nothing. And so, as we look at how we can provide greater value to customers, it's about taking the advances in things such as machine learning for computer vision, sort of artificial intelligence, and allowing you to quantify things in that data. It allows you to, for example, determine how many people are there and where they go and things like that. And to maybe put it all into context, because one of my favorite examples is a Cisco case study in Australia, where they're using cameras at a connected farm as part of an IoT deployment, to understand sheep grazing behavior and so this camera watches the sheep all day. Now as a human, I don't want to watch the sheep all day, but the camera doesn't care. And so the farmer looks at eight images representing eight hours, which is a heat map of the animals' movement in the field, and they can know where they've been grazing, where they need to move them, where this might be overgrazed. And so the camera's not security at this point, it really is like a sensor for the enterprise. >> Yeah, it's interesting, actually I did a walk through the DevNet Zone and I saw a lot of areas where I think they're leveraging some of your technology. Everything from let's plug in some of the AI to be able to allow me to do some interesting visualizations. What we're doing, there's a magic mirror where you can ask it like an Alexa or Google, but it's Debbie, the robot here as to give you answers of how many people are in a different area here. A camera is no longer just a camera. It's now just an end node connected and there's so many technologies. How do you manage that as a product person where you have the direction, where you put the development? You can't support a million different customer use cases. You want to be able to scale that business. >> Absolutely, I think the North Star always has to be simplistic. If you can't go and deploy it, you can't use it. And so we see a lot of these cool science projects trapped in proof of concept. And they never go into production and the customers can't take advantage of it. So we want to provide incredibly simple, easy out-the-box technology, which allows people to use AI and machine learning, and then we're the experts in that, but we give you industry-standard APIs using REST or MQTT, to allow you to build business applications on it directly or integrate it into Cisco Kinetic, where you can do that using the MQTT interface. >> So, Stu, you reminded me so we're here in the DevNet Zone and right now there's a Meraki takeover. So what happens in the DevNet Zone is they'll pick a topic or a part of Cisco's business unit, right now, it's the Meraki, everyone's running around with Meraki takeover shirts, and everybody descends on the DevNet Zone. So a lot of really cool developer stuff going on here. George, I wanted to ask you about where the data flows. So the data lives at the edge, y'know, wherever you're taking the video. Does it stay there? Given that only 1% is watched, are you just leaving it there, not moving it back into the cloud? Are you sometimes moving it back into the cloud? What's the data flow look like? >> You can think of this interesting sort of mindset, which is let's have a camera where we don't ever want to show you video, we want to give you the answer because video is big, it's heavy. Let's give you the answer and if that answer means we give you video, we give you video. But if we can give you the answer through other forms of information, like a still image, or an aggregate of an image, or metadata from that, then we'll give you that instead. And that means customers can deploy this on cellular networks out in the middle of nowhere and with much fewer constraints than they had in the past. So it really depends but we try and make it as efficient as possible for the person deploying it so they don't have to have a 40G network connection to every camera to make the most of it. >> Yeah, so that would mean that most of it stays-- >> Most of it stays at the edge in the camera. >> Talk a little bit more about the analytics component. Is that sort of Meraki technology the came over with the acquisition? What has Cisco added to that? Maybe speak to that a little bit. >> So the camera is a relatively new product line within the last two and a half years and the Meraki acquisition was, I think we're only like five years or more now down that road, so this is definitely post-acquisition and part of the continued collaboration between various departments at Cisco. What it enables you to do is object detection, object classification, and object tracking. So it's I know there's a thing, I know what that thing is, and I know where that thing goes. And we do it for a high level object class today, which is people. Because if you look at most business problems, they can be broken down into understanding location, dwell times, and characteristics of people. And so if we give you the output of those algorithms as industry-standard APIs, you can build very customized business analytics or business logics. So let me give you a real world example. I have retail customers tell me that one of the common causes of fraud is an employee processing a refund when there's no customer. And so what if you could know there was no customer physically present in front of the electronic point of sale system where the refund is being processed? Well, the camera can tell you. And it's not a specialist analytics camera, it's a security camera you were going to buy anyway, which will also give this insight. And now you know if that refund has a customer at the other side of the till. >> Well, that's awesome. Okay, so that's an interesting use case. What are some of the other ones that you foresee or your customers are pushing you towards? Paint a picture as to what you think this looks like in the future. >> It really is this camera as a sensor so one of the newer things we've added is the ability to have real-time updates of the lights' conditions from the camera, so you can get from the hardware-backed light sensor on the camera the lux levels. And what that means is now you have knowledge of people, where they are, where they go, knowledge of lights, and now you can start going okay, well maybe we adjust the lighting based on these parameters. And so we want to expose more and more data collection from this endpoint, which is the camera, to allow you to make either smarter business decisions or to move to the digital workplace and that's really what we're trying to do in the Meraki offices in San Francisco. >> And do you get to the point or does the client get to the point where they know not only that information you just described but who the person is? >> Yes and no. I think one of the things that I'm definitely advocating caution on is the face recognition technology has a lot of hype, has a lot of excitement, and I get asked about it regularly. And I do test state-of-the-art and a lot of this technology all the time. And I wear hats because I find them fun and entertaining but they're amazingly good at stopping most of these systems from working. And so you can actually get past some of the state-of-the-art face recognition systems with two simple things, a hat and a mobile phone. And you look at your phone as you walk along and they won't catch you. And when I speak to customers, they're expectation of the performance of this technology does not match the investment cost required. So I'm not saying it isn't useful to someone, it's just, for a lot of our customers, when they see what they would get in exchange for such a huge investment, it's not something they are interested in. >> Yeah, the ROI's just really not there today. >> Not today, but the technology's moving very fast so we'll see what the future brings. >> Yeah, great. Alright, George, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was really, really interesting. Leave you the last word. Customer reactions to what you guys are showing at the event? Any kind of new information that you want to share? >> There are some that we'll talk about in the Whisper Suite, which I will leave unsaid, unfortunately. It's just knowing that you can use it so simply and that the analytics and the machine learning come as part of the product at no additional cost. Because this is pretty cutting-edge stuff. You see it in the newspapers, you see it in the headlines and to say I buy this one camera and I can be a coffee shop, a single owner, and I get the same technology as an international coffee organization is pretty compelling and that's what's getting people excited. >> Great and it combines the sensor at the edge and the cloud management so-- >> Best of both worlds. >> That's awesome, I love the solution. Thanks so much for sharing with us. >> Fantastic. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cisco Live! Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techno music)