>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCube. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to Cisco Live Barcelona 2020, kickin' off the new year. Of course, it's theCube's coverage of four days of Cube action. All day, I'm John Furrier, my host Stu Miniman, got two great guests, Thomas Scheibe, Vice President of Cisco and Yousuf Khan, Vice President Technical Marketing. All things data center and networking, these are the guys. Guys, good to see you again, welcome back. >> Thanks, always fun. >> Thank you very much. So, kicking off the show, I know there's some announcements coming so we're going to save the good stuff for tomorrow and Wednesday. But a lot of new things going on in data center and Cisco ecosystem. Give us the update. >> Yeah, again, thanks for having us on. So yeah, I mean there's actually a lot of good stuff on the data center side. Let me touch a couple of items. One we started two years ago, actually, was assurance. We're expanding our analytics portfolio, we're adding insights capability. So it's the assurance and network insights tool set. Very, very cool stuff. Really focused on the network operator. That was one of the messages we got, you guys need to help us here in these complex cloud environments. And so what we have is we built ACI extensions for our fabric controllers. Bolster NEXUS and ACI site. Same same. Pure software extension. And initial feedback from customers is very, very happy with what they see. So that's one piece. I don't know, Yousuf, you want to say a little bit on what we do with ecosystem partners? >> Thank you, yes we are very excited also to announce some of the new integrations that we have with our ecosystem partners. And for example AlgoSec and ACI integration. Terraform from HashiCorp and ACI integration. Continued expansion with our Splunk apps with the ecosystem. So these are some of the new things that we are working on. So that is excellent. And on top of it, Thomas, you can expand on it, but I think we are very happy that our 400 gig portfolio is shipping now, and we have customers in production on our 400 gig portfolio. So that is great news for us. >> Yeah, that's such a good point. >> You mentioned Splunk and Terraform, HashiCorp, you know, ecosystem partners. It's interesting, if you look at the performance of a lot of those companies, cloud is a tailwind for them. So, because the consumption is a service, the customers are all embracing it. But it's not just public cloud, the data center now is back. Can you guys just share your thoughts on your environment with your customers? Because the software is the key, get it as a subscription or consumable model. What are some of the trends with the consumer, I mean customers in the data center, because cloud and hybrid now is happening, and it's real growth. >> Oh, it's absolutely happening. So yeah, I mean, maybe a little bit of why this is happening, why we are having some of these integrations, you're absolutely right, cloud is happening, but really cloud means hybrid cloud or for some customers, multi-cloud hybrid because they're going to have two different cloud providers. But it's really hybrid cloud, so it's really distributed data center. And so the interesting piece happens, it's really two things that need to come together. There's this whole network automation analytics, which is, how do I get from my data center into a cloud and how do I treat this really like a utility. But that's the infrastructure. Then there's this front end, because what really drives this is the application refactoring. And this is where the application automation needs to come together with the infrastructure automation, and so that's one of the reasons why we have this integration with Terraform and the other one is like a Jenkins Pipeline tool. How do we actually take what the application was in the front end, and then seamlessly mix it into infrastructure, which is like a supernode, or infrastructure as a code thing. And that doesn't really matter whether that's in the cloud or on-prem, it has to work across. >> Automation is a huge thing. >> Yeah, and it's so nice to hear. Because Thomas, actually, when Cisco first came out with application-centric infrastructure, I kind of looked at it a little bit, I'm like, well, come on, how much are you actually tying to the application? Well, it was Cisco skating to where the puck was going. And I think the technology today and what you're talking about is closer to that application, and we have, we're here in the devNet zone, we're talking more about those pieces. Not just, oh, it's something that runs over the pipes and I've got buffers and traditional networking pieces. Would you say that's fair, that we're a little bit more application-centric today in 2020 than we might have been a couple of years ago? >> That's actually, that's a very good comment. I probably would spin it slightly different, because I'm the pragmatic guy. Yeah, do we want everything at the same time? Absolutely, right? But you do have to put some of the building blocks in place. And yes, application-centric really meant more we changed the configuration management scheme of infrastructure from thinking about network terms to using application terms. And that's really what application-centric means. It doesn't mean you change the application. It was more like, change the paradigm. How do you manage infrastructure to not just automate. Everybody does that. But actually have an abstraction layer that is meaningful to secure and apps people. And you're right, it takes time to get there. >> In the end, customers and users are looking to deploy applications faster, manage applications better. That's the whole purpose of building the data center, so that we can host the applications. So what we did is, we introduced constructs that can help you manage those applications better, deploy them faster, manage the life cycle of those applications faster, and that's why we introduced the concepts. And again, I mean, going back to your comment in terms of buffers and searches, we firmly believe that the plumbing which is the networking, has to be state of the art for us to abstract these things on top through software and exploit through software. So we have to have a best-in-class network and the searches and then we have to build the op section that we can exploit through the software means, right? >> And also, that highlights the partnerships that you mentioned. Companies like Splunk and HashiCorp, they're living in a multi-cloud environment. So, I shouldn't need to think about for some of them, oh, wait, is it hybrid cloud, public cloud A, or my data center, things like that. I'm going to have that common tooling and skill set across those environments. >> Right, because all the CIOs that we talk to, I mean, multi-cloud is a big part of their strategy. And they want to make sure that they have consistent security posture, whether it is on-prem, whether it is on multi-cloud, or like, consistent governance model across hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, that's a good point. I want to get your thoughts on that, because multi-cloud and hybrid we've both mentioned, it's interesting and what we were saying in our opening segment just earlier, multi-cloud is a business problem. It's what you have, it's a situation. Hybrid is technology, you're implementing new things for an operating model that hits core to what happens in your environment, whether it's software development, application awareness, network automation. So, they're two different things but they're kind of related, right? So you nail hybrid with public private or public on-premise, and then multi-cloud can be dealt with. This seems to be where you guys are fitting in, right? Because you can do the hybrid public, then you connect, just that's the outcome of the software. >> You're spot on, right. People use it and sometimes it means the same, and sometimes it's really not. And hybrid cloud is really around, how can I extend my data center to a public cloud infrastructure, right? And that's more of a technology discussion. What do I need to do to make that happen? Then there's the multi-cloud discussions really around how do I have consistent policy, because I want to get to a situation where I don't have to worry. And so I can deploy this, subscribers can deploy whenever I want to. And so you're right, they're two distinct things that need to happen. But I do, sorry, I do want to come back to your comment because I can take up the energy there. Users are common there, right? I mean for half these application developers that want to use tools like Terraform or Jenkins or... >> Yousuf: Ansible. >> Or Ansible or Splunk, all of them expect that they have an API. And they expect actually a network API. What they all prefer to have is something that makes sense from an application construct perspective. And so that's why we had to put something in place to make that work, right? Was it they weren't all there? That the application team could jump? Clearly not, but it's very clear if if I look, we are now, what? Six years into this? If I look back, I think it really jolted the market and I think it got everybody moving in that direction. >> Yeah and again, when we use the term application-centric infrastructure, the whole purpose is it is conducive to deploy applications faster and manage applications better. That's why, right? >> Wonder if you can dig in a little bit on the 400 gig? Tell us, you know, it's not just the next step function. We're trying to go more to the applications, you talk about these changes. So, what do people need to understand about 400 gig? You know, what's the same? What does this unlock for me? Does this tie in with all my WIFI 6 and 5G, and everything else that I'm doing? You know, where and when is this most important? >> Wow, let me take it maybe, on 400 gig. A, it is available and shipping. A little sneak preview, we're actually going to have a customer with us on Wednesday talk about what they do with 400 gig, in their European data center. It's a French customer. 400 gig is really an evolution. The way I look at it, right, I mean, we had 1 gig, 10 gig, 40, 100, 400, right? It's literally an evolution. And we're always looking back and saying, wow, do you really need that much bandwidth? Then later, you know, when you ask the question, you look like you missed it. Where is it deployed today? Service provider. No data arm, it's all in the service provider space. It's primarily what we call a large scale cloud provider. But also, the initial more tech DCs are looking at this. It's an evolution. How do we build 400 gig? The way we approach it is, this is not something special. Everything that we do today around ACI, everything we do around analytics has to work, right? Because customers are not building their own speeds. Customers are building around the operational model, and whatever they have has to work. Just because I've got my 4x speed, that has to work the same way. And so 400 gig for us, is really an extension on what we have. And you will see it. It plucks indirectly. So, can I build a 400 gig ACI fabric? Yes you can, if you want to. >> With all that horsepower, obviously the next logical question that comes to my mind is, okay, faster means more data, that means more potential fat-finger mistakes on configurating. But if you automate that away, you need AI, right? So, analytics and AI become interesting to that. How does that fit into the customer journey when they go, okay, I'm going faster. If I'm application-aware, is there an analytics angle on this? >> Ah, yes there is. >> No, you're absolutely right. I think based on the survey that we received, US corporations are spending billions of dollars due to the IT outages, right? And most of those outages are human errors, right? 43% of the IT corporations are spending 43% of their time in troubleshooting those outages. So I think it is very, very important, as the data centers are scaling, as the fabrics are getting automated, is that we grab them and provide them with the operation tools that can look smartly and proactively predict the network changes. They can assure that in turn the business intent has been translated into the network and proactively tell them what are the problems they might run into. And when they run into the problems, also intelligently explain to them what is the correlation of the events that they see on their log files and what is the root cause of the problem, right? >> Yeah, you've got a lot of data to work with there. And experience, right? That's where the predictive analytics-- >> Maybe let me expand it a little bit. So, I started off as saying we have this interesting extension and network insight which is precisely that, what Yousuf just elaborated on. It's really an engine that takes telemetry data and we're going actually one step further than everybody else that I know. Everybody talks telemetry, but they're talking about software telemetry, network state. We actually can marry that up with actual traffic data, in real time, and we can give you that correlation. And now I'm getting actually where you are kind of going to, is, I can actually tell you what's the root cause between why do I have a congestion, why do I have a problem and who is impacted, and who caused this? And I can actually predict the stuff. I can actually see this before it happens, and now help a customer. I can look at other customer experience and I do really more with machine learning. There's really an opportunity there. We're just scratching the surface, if you ask me. There's so much upside-- >> I mean, historically speaking, if you look at it, I mean, we had all the show commands in the world, which can tell you that what the (mumbles) looks like. What the CAM utilization is. But the co-relation, or the time-based co-relation was missing, in terms of when you're seeing some traffic degradation, you don't know whether it is dropped, dropped on what search, which type of traffic is getting affected. Now we have the ability to, using MLANI techniques to co-relate these events and give a meaningful picture back to the customer, so you can pinpoint that, look, my video traffic on search number five is getting affected because there is a drop in the output buffer, because my link is congested. >> And that only works if you have quality data. It's not so much volume. Volume, I mean, the faster you go, Facebook and these guys prove it, you can use machine learning. But if the data's good, then the outcomes are better on the predictive. >> You need to have the flow data. If you don't have it, there's nothing you can do. >> So, scale is something we talk a lot about in the network. When I walk through the show floor, I'm starting to see some of the small scale, because we're talking about edge computing, we talked about shrinking down some of the things we're doing. When I hear telemetry data and AI and everything, I'm like, oh, here's some big opportunities that we need to attack at the edge. So, what can you tell us about where your group is with some of the edge pieces? >> Well, interesting, actually I just came out of the service provider opening session, and I was there together with T-Systems, actually, on stage. It was a customer of ours, he's using actually an ACI fabric together with a (mumbles) environment, which is like a virtual infrastructure management on x86. And they're using that in a Taco Cloud environment. And clearly, as an interconnect for networking services and it's going to move, if you look at what they have in mind, moving into more edge services. And that's an SP example, that we have today deployed. But clearly, I think you're going to see this in enterprises. You see this pretty much in every customer base, right? Because what you do have is you have this trade off between do I want to get all my data back, centrally? Or do I want a computer on the edge? And what we have put in place was our ACI fabric. I can run this in a highly distributed and still scalable environment, managed centrally, with policy. So, not only is this actually where we think the world is going, we actually have customers doing this as we speak. >> Yeah, I think it's a tell sign too, and my final question for you guys is, and we've been saying this, I've been saying this in theCube with the team is, cloud helps everybody if hybrid kicks in, which we now have proven that hybrid cloud is a reality. That's what's going on, technically, operationally. If you believe that, then you go to the next level which is cloudification value. So I want to rattle off some keywords for you guys, and I want you to respond to 'em. So, cloudification of networking. Network as a service. WAN to cloud versus internal. SD WAN, simplification of the edge, BGP. Security in networking. Common policy. >> It's a lot of technology and gobbledegook. >> That all sounds complex, but it's got to be simplified. What's your reaction to that, cloudification? How does that kind of direction package itself out for the benefit of customers? Because there's a lot in there, right? SD WAN alone. >> There's a lot in there. >> Yeah, simplify it. >> My easy way I look at this is in the end, it's a business. It's that simple, right? And what's going on, you want to generate more revenue, more services, which is where the profit and the money comes from. And you have to scale, which means more service individually. More scale, how many customers you're going to deliver to, how fast you can roll this out. Without having your costs going up the same way. And that's really what it comes down to, at least in my book. And then you make your decisions what you're going to pick, right? How do I figure out how to develop an app faster? Maybe you're going to go to the cloud, to start cloud-first, to develop. And then you figure out, oh, I need to hit a certain scale, I'm going to start having it running and running here, My dev here, my production here, I need to connect it. But all of these things again coming down, how do we roll out services faster without my costs actually going up, but preferably staying flat or going down. >> So, business model. >> It's a business problem, that's what it is. >> Yeah, and I think from my perspective, it is about us building tools for the customer so that we can simplify the whole process for them, right? So that these multi-cloud can be treated as another site. Whether you are deploying it on-prem, whether you are deploying in AWS or Azure, these are different sites to you. And you don't have, as a user, have to worry about the nuances of AWS versus Azure versus IBM versus on-prem, you should be able to say this is my intent, deploy it in AWS, deploy it in on-prem, and be able to move the workloads accordingly. >> So, if I extract what you guys just said is, if the hybrid and cloud equation operationally solves itself, technically and with software and automation, all that stuff, the business issues, the app development, basically, the apps drive everything. >> Thomas: Absolutely. That's a good summary. >> That's the nirvana, I mean, are we going to hear some of that on the show this week? >> Absolutely. >> I think you're going to hear some of these pieces, actually. How we're tying together business intelligence with infrastructure intelligence. I think you're going to hear of some it. >> And the good trend for the data center businesses is that the edge can look like a data center too. >> The data center is everywhere the data is. That is our mantra, and so that means we're everywhere. >> Okay, thanks for coming on theCube, really appreciate your insights. Great to have you on, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. >> Thanks again. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. theCube kicking off, day one. Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona, Spain. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCube. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to Cisco Live Barcelona 2020, kickin' off the new year. Of course, it's theCube's coverage of four days of Cube action. All day, I'm John Furrier, my host Stu Miniman, got two great guests, Thomas Scheibe, Vice President of Cisco and Yousuf Khan, Vice President Technical Marketing. All things data center and networking, these are the guys. Guys, good to see you again, welcome back. >> Thanks, always fun. >> Thank you very much. So, kicking off the show, I know there's some announcements coming so we're going to save the good stuff for tomorrow and Wednesday. But a lot of new things going on in data center and Cisco ecosystem. Give us the update. >> Yeah, again, thanks for having us on. So yeah, I mean there's actually a lot of good stuff on the data center side. Let me touch a couple of items. One we started two years ago, actually, was assurance. We're expanding our analytics portfolio, we're adding insights capability. So it's the assurance and network insights tool set. Very, very cool stuff. Really focused on the network operator. That was one of the messages we got, you guys need to help us here in these complex cloud environments. And so what we have is we built ACI extensions for our fabric controllers. Bolster NEXUS and ACI site. Same same. Pure software extension. And initial feedback from customers is very, very happy with what they see. So that's one piece. I don't know, Yousuf, you want to say a little bit on what we do with ecosystem partners? >> Thank you, yes we are very excited also to announce some of the new integrations that we have with our ecosystem partners. And for example AlgoSec and ACI integration. Terraform from HashiCorp and ACI integration. Continued expansion with our Splunk apps with the ecosystem. So these are some of the new things that we are working on. So that is excellent. And on top of it, Thomas, you can expand on it, but I think we are very happy that our 400 gig portfolio is shipping now, and we have customers in production on our 400 gig portfolio. So that is great news for us. >> Yeah, that's such a good point. >> You mentioned Splunk and Terraform, HashiCorp, you know, ecosystem partners. It's interesting, if you look at the performance of a lot of those companies, cloud is a tailwind for them. So, because the consumption is a service, the customers are all embracing it. But it's not just public cloud, the data center now is back. Can you guys just share your thoughts on your environment with your customers? Because the software is the key, get it as a subscription or consumable model. What are some of the trends with the consumer, I mean customers in the data center, because cloud and hybrid now is happening, and it's real growth. >> Oh, it's absolutely happening. So yeah, I mean, maybe a little bit of why this is happening, why we are having some of these integrations, you're absolutely right, cloud is happening, but really cloud means hybrid cloud or for some customers, multi-cloud hybrid because they're going to have two different cloud providers. But it's really hybrid cloud, so it's really distributed data center. And so the interesting piece happens, it's really two things that need to come together. There's this whole network automation analytics, which is, how do I get from my data center into a cloud and how do I treat this really like a utility. But that's the infrastructure. Then there's this front end, because what really drives this is the application refactoring. And this is where the application automation needs to come together with the infrastructure automation, and so that's one of the reasons why we have this integration with Terraform and the other one is like a Jenkins Pipeline tool. How do we actually take what the application was in the front end, and then seamlessly mix it into infrastructure, which is like a supernode, or infrastructure as a code thing. And that doesn't really matter whether that's in the cloud or on-prem, it has to work across. >> Automation is a huge thing. >> Yeah, and it's so nice to hear. Because Thomas, actually, when Cisco first came out with application-centric infrastructure, I kind of looked at it a little bit, I'm like, well, come on, how much are you actually tying to the application? Well, it was Cisco skating to where the puck was going. And I think the technology today and what you're talking about is closer to that application, and we have, we're here in the devNet zone, we're talking more about those pieces. Not just, oh, it's something that runs over the pipes and I've got buffers and traditional networking pieces. Would you say that's fair, that we're a little bit more application-centric today in 2020 than we might have been a couple of years ago? >> That's actually, that's a very good comment. I probably would spin it slightly different, because I'm the pragmatic guy. Yeah, do we want everything at the same time? Absolutely, right? But you do have to put some of the building blocks in place. And yes, application-centric really meant more we changed the configuration management scheme of infrastructure from thinking about network terms to using application terms. And that's really what application-centric means. It doesn't mean you change the application. It was more like, change the paradigm. How do you manage infrastructure to not just automate. Everybody does that. But actually have an abstraction layer that is meaningful to secure and apps people. And you're right, it takes time to get there. >> In the end, customers and users are looking to deploy applications faster, manage applications better. That's the whole purpose of building the data center, so that we can host the applications. So what we did is, we introduced constructs that can help you manage those applications better, deploy them faster, manage the life cycle of those applications faster, and that's why we introduced the concepts. And again, I mean, going back to your comment in terms of buffers and searches, we firmly believe that the plumbing which is the networking, has to be state of the art for us to abstract these things on top through software and exploit through software. So we have to have a best-in-class network and the searches and then we have to build the op section that we can exploit through the software means, right? >> And also, that highlights the partnerships that you mentioned. Companies like Splunk and HashiCorp, they're living in a multi-cloud environment. So, I shouldn't need to think about for some of them, oh, wait, is it hybrid cloud, public cloud A, or my data center, things like that. I'm going to have that common tooling and skill set across those environments. >> Right, because all the CIOs that we talk to, I mean, multi-cloud is a big part of their strategy. And they want to make sure that they have consistent security posture, whether it is on-prem, whether it is on multi-cloud, or like, consistent governance model across hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, that's a good point. I want to get your thoughts on that, because multi-cloud and hybrid we've both mentioned, it's interesting and what we were saying in our opening segment just earlier, multi-cloud is a business problem. It's what you have, it's a situation. Hybrid is technology, you're implementing new things for an operating model that hits core to what happens in your environment, whether it's software development, application awareness, network automation. So, they're two different things but they're kind of related, right? So you nail hybrid with public private or public on-premise, and then multi-cloud can be dealt with. This seems to be where you guys are fitting in, right? Because you can do the hybrid public, then you connect, just that's the outcome of the software. >> You're spot on, right. People use it and sometimes it means the same, and sometimes it's really not. And hybrid cloud is really around, how can I extend my data center to a public cloud infrastructure, right? And that's more of a technology discussion. What do I need to do to make that happen? Then there's the multi-cloud discussions really around how do I have consistent policy, because I want to get to a situation where I don't have to worry. And so I can deploy this, subscribers can deploy whenever I want to. And so you're right, they're two distinct things that need to happen. But I do, sorry, I do want to come back to your comment because I can take up the energy there. Users are common there, right? I mean for half these application developers that want to use tools like Terraform or Jenkins or... >> Yousuf: Ansible. >> Or Ansible or Splunk, all of them expect that they have an API. And they expect actually a network API. What they all prefer to have is something that makes sense from an application construct perspective. And so that's why we had to put something in place to make that work, right? Was it they weren't all there? That the application team could jump? Clearly not, but it's very clear if if I look, we are now, what? Six years into this? If I look back, I think it really jolted the market and I think it got everybody moving in that direction. >> Yeah and again, when we use the term application-centric infrastructure, the whole purpose is it is conducive to deploy applications faster and manage applications better. That's why, right? >> Wonder if you can dig in a little bit on the 400 gig? Tell us, you know, it's not just the next step function. We're trying to go more to the applications, you talk about these changes. So, what do people need to understand about 400 gig? You know, what's the same? What does this unlock for me? Does this tie in with all my WIFI 6 and 5G, and everything else that I'm doing? You know, where and when is this most important? >> Wow, let me take it maybe, on 400 gig. A, it is available and shipping. A little sneak preview, we're actually going to have a customer with us on Wednesday talk about what they do with 400 gig, in their European data center. It's a French customer. 400 gig is really an evolution. The way I look at it, right, I mean, we had 1 gig, 10 gig, 40, 100, 400, right? It's literally an evolution. And we're always looking back and saying, wow, do you really need that much bandwidth? Then later, you know, when you ask the question, you look like you missed it. Where is it deployed today? Service provider. No data arm, it's all in the service provider space. It's primarily what we call a large scale cloud provider. But also, the initial more tech DCs are looking at this. It's an evolution. How do we build 400 gig? The way we approach it is, this is not something special. Everything that we do today around ACI, everything we do around analytics has to work, right? Because customers are not building their own speeds. Customers are building around the operational model, and whatever they have has to work. Just because I've got my 4x speed, that has to work the same way. And so 400 gig for us, is really an extension on what we have. And you will see it. It plucks indirectly. So, can I build a 400 gig ACI fabric? Yes you can, if you want to. >> With all that horsepower, obviously the next logical question that comes to my mind is, okay, faster means more data, that means more potential fat-finger mistakes on configurating. But if you automate that away, you need AI, right? So, analytics and AI become interesting to that. How does that fit into the customer journey when they go, okay, I'm going faster. If I'm application-aware, is there an analytics angle on this? >> Ah, yes there is. >> No, you're absolutely right. I think based on the survey that we received, US corporations are spending billions of dollars due to the IT outages, right? And most of those outages are human errors, right? 43% of the IT corporations are spending 43% of their time in troubleshooting those outages. So I think it is very, very important, as the data centers are scaling, as the fabrics are getting automated, is that we grab them and provide them with the operation tools that can look smartly and proactively predict the network changes. They can assure that in turn the business intent has been translated into the network and proactively tell them what are the problems they might run into. And when they run into the problems, also intelligently explain to them what is the correlation of the events that they see on their log files and what is the root cause of the problem, right? >> Yeah, you've got a lot of data to work with there. And experience, right? That's where the predictive analytics-- >> Maybe let me expand it a little bit. So, I started off as saying we have this interesting extension and network insight which is precisely that, what Yousuf just elaborated on. It's really an engine that takes telemetry data and we're going actually one step further than everybody else that I know. Everybody talks telemetry, but they're talking about software telemetry, network state. We actually can marry that up with actual traffic data, in real time, and we can give you that correlation. And now I'm getting actually where you are kind of going to, is, I can actually tell you what's the root cause between why do I have a congestion, why do I have a problem and who is impacted, and who caused this? And I can actually predict the stuff. I can actually see this before it happens, and now help a customer. I can look at other customer experience and I do really more with machine learning. There's really an opportunity there. We're just scratching the surface, if you ask me. There's so much upside-- >> I mean, historically speaking, if you look at it, I mean, we had all the show commands in the world, which can tell you that what the (mumbles) looks like. What the CAM utilization is. But the co-relation, or the time-based co-relation was missing, in terms of when you're seeing some traffic degradation, you don't know whether it is dropped, dropped on what search, which type of traffic is getting affected. Now we have the ability to, using MLANI techniques to co-relate these events and give a meaningful picture back to the customer, so you can pinpoint that, look, my video traffic on search number five is getting affected because there is a drop in the output buffer, because my link is congested. >> And that only works if you have quality data. It's not so much volume. Volume, I mean, the faster you go, Facebook and these guys prove it, you can use machine learning. But if the data's good, then the outcomes are better on the predictive. >> You need to have the flow data. If you don't have it, there's nothing you can do. >> So, scale is something we talk a lot about in the network. When I walk through the show floor, I'm starting to see some of the small scale, because we're talking about edge computing, we talked about shrinking down some of the things we're doing. When I hear telemetry data and AI and everything, I'm like, oh, here's some big opportunities that we need to attack at the edge. So, what can you tell us about where your group is with some of the edge pieces? >> Well, interesting, actually I just came out of the service provider opening session, and I was there together with T-Systems, actually, on stage. It was a customer of ours, he's using actually an ACI fabric together with a (mumbles) environment, which is like a virtual infrastructure management on x86. And they're using that in a Taco Cloud environment. And clearly, as an interconnect for networking services and it's going to move, if you look at what they have in mind, moving into more edge services. And that's an SP example, that we have today deployed. But clearly, I think you're going to see this in enterprises. You see this pretty much in every customer base, right? Because what you do have is you have this trade off between do I want to get all my data back, centrally? Or do I want a computer on the edge? And what we have put in place was our ACI fabric. I can run this in a highly distributed and still scalable environment, managed centrally, with policy. So, not only is this actually where we think the world is going, we actually have customers doing this as we speak. >> Yeah, I think it's a tell sign too, and my final question for you guys is, and we've been saying this, I've been saying this in theCube with the team is, cloud helps everybody if hybrid kicks in, which we now have proven that hybrid cloud is a reality. That's what's going on, technically, operationally. If you believe that, then you go to the next level which is cloudification value. So I want to rattle off some keywords for you guys, and I want you to respond to 'em. So, cloudification of networking. Network as a service. WAN to cloud versus internal. SD WAN, simplification of the edge, BGP. Security in networking. Common policy. >> It's a lot of technology and gobbledegook. >> That all sounds complex, but it's got to be simplified. What's your reaction to that, cloudification? How does that kind of direction package itself out for the benefit of customers? Because there's a lot in there, right? SD WAN alone. >> There's a lot in there. >> Yeah, simplify it. >> My easy way I look at this is in the end, it's a business. It's that simple, right? And what's going on, you want to generate more revenue, more services, which is where the profit and the money comes from. And you have to scale, which means more service individually. More scale, how many customers you're going to deliver to, how fast you can roll this out. Without having your costs going up the same way. And that's really what it comes down to, at least in my book. And then you make your decisions what you're going to pick, right? How do I figure out how to develop an app faster? Maybe you're going to go to the cloud, to start cloud-first, to develop. And then you figure out, oh, I need to hit a certain scale, I'm going to start having it running and running here, My dev here, my production here, I need to connect it. But all of these things again coming down, how do we roll out services faster without my costs actually going up, but preferably staying flat or going down. >> So, business model. >> It's a business problem, that's what it is. >> Yeah, and I think from my perspective, it is about us building tools for the customer so that we can simplify the whole process for them, right? So that these multi-cloud can be treated as another site. Whether you are deploying it on-prem, whether you are deploying in AWS or Azure, these are different sites to you. And you don't have, as a user, have to worry about the nuances of AWS versus Azure versus IBM versus on-prem, you should be able to say this is my intent, deploy it in AWS, deploy it in on-prem, and be able to move the workloads accordingly. >> So, if I extract what you guys just said is, if the hybrid and cloud equation operationally solves itself, technically and with software and automation, all that stuff, the business issues, the app development, basically, the apps drive everything. >> Thomas: Absolutely. That's a good summary. >> That's the nirvana, I mean, are we going to hear some of that on the show this week? >> Absolutely. >> I think you're going to hear some of these pieces, actually. How we're tying together business intelligence with infrastructure intelligence. I think you're going to hear of some it. >> And the good trend for the data center businesses is that the edge can look like a data center too. >> The data center is everywhere the data is. That is our mantra, and so that means we're everywhere. >> Okay, thanks for coming on theCube, really appreciate your insights. Great to have you on, thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. >> Thanks again. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. theCube kicking off, day one. Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona, Spain. Thanks for watching.