(lighthearted music) >> We're here now with Manoj Nair, who's the general manager of Metallic and Dave Totten CTO with Microsoft. And we're going to talk about some of the announcements that we heard earlier today and what Metallic and Microsoft are doing to meet customer needs around cyber threats and ensuring secure cloud data management. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you. >> Hey Manoj, let me start with you. We heard early this morning, Dave Totten was here, David Noe, talk a lot about security. Has the conversation changed, how has it changed when you talk to customers, Manoj? What's top of mind. >> Yeah, thank you, Dave. And thank you, Dave Totten. You know, great conversation earlier. Dave, you and I have talked about this in the past, right? Security long a big passion of mine. You know, having lived through nation state attacks in the past and all that. We're seeing those kinds of techniques really just getting mainstream, right? Ransomware has become a mainstream problem in the scourge in our lives. Now, when you look at it from a lens of data and data management, data protection, backup, all of this was very much a passive you know, compliance centric use case. It was pretty static you know, put it in tapes, haul it all over. And what has really changed with this ransomware and cybercrime change rate is data, which is now your most precious asset, is under attack. So now you see security teams, just like you talked with Dave Martin, from ADP earlier, they are looking for that bridge between SecurityOps and ITOps. That data management solution needs to do more. It needs to be part of an active conversation, you know? Not just, you know, recovery readiness. Can you ensure that, are you testing that, is it recoverable? That is your last mile of defense. So then you get questions like that from security teams. You get you know, the need for doing more, signals. Can I get better signals from my data management stack to tell me I might be under attack? So what we're seeing in the conversation is the need to have more active conversations around data management and the bridge between ITOps and SecurityOps is really becoming paramount for our customers. >> Yeah, Dave Totten I mean, I often say that I think data protection used to be this bolt on. Now it's a fundamental component of the digital business stack. Anything you would add to what Manoj just said. >> Yeah, I would just say exactly that. Data is an asset, right? We talked about it a lot about the competitive advantage that customers are now realizing that no longer is IT considered sort of this cost center element. We need to be able to leverage our interactions with customers, with partners, with supply chains, with manufacturers, we need to be able to leverage that to sort of create differentiation and competitive advantage in the marketplace. And so if you think about it, as that way as the fuel for economic profitability and business growth, you would do everything in your power to secure it, to support it, to make sure you had access to it, to make sure that you didn't have you know, bad intent users accessing it. And I think we're seeing that shift with customers as they think more about how to be more efficient with their investments in information technology and then how just to make sure that they protect the lifeblood of their businesses. >> Yeah, and that just makes it harder because the adversary is very capable. They're coming in through the digital supply chain. So it's complicated. And so Dave and maybe Manoj, you can comment as well after, Microsoft and Commvault, you guys have been working together for decades and so you've seen a lot of the changes, a lot of the waves. So I'm curious as to how the partnership has evolved. You've got a recent strategic announcement around Azure with Metallic. Dave, take us through that. >> Yeah, I mean you know, Commvault and Microsoft aren't newlyweds, we've been together now for 25 plus years. We send each other anniversary gifts, all that good stuff. And you know, listen, there's a couple things that are key to our relationship. One, we started believing in each other's engineering organizations, right? We hire the best, we train and retain the best. And we both put a lot of investment behind our infrastructure and the ability to work together to really innovate at real time, rapid speeds. Two, we use Commvault products so you know, there's no greater I think, advantage that if a major supplier or platform partner like Microsoft uses your products. We've used it for years in our Xbox group to support and store the data for a hundred million XBox live users. And we're very avid with it with our data centers, our access to Azure data centers, our Microsoft office products. And so we use Commvault services as well. And through that mutual relationship you know, obviously Commvault has seen the ins and outs of what's great about our services and where we're continuing to build and invest. And so they've been able to really you know, dedicate a team of engineers and architects to support all that Azure as a platform, as a service can provide. And then how to take the best of those features and build it into their own first party products. I think when you get close enough to somebody for so many years right, 25 plus years, you figure out what they're great at and you learn to take those advantages like Commvault has with Microsoft and Azure and use it to your advantage, right? To build the best in class product that Metallic actually is. And you're right, the announcement this week it feels culminating, it feels like it's a major milestone in first off, industry innovation but also in our relationship. But it's really not that big of a step change from what we've been doing and building and innovating on for the past you know, 25 years. >> Yeah so Manoj, that's got to be music to your ears. Because you come at it with this rich data protection stack, Microsoft there's so many capabilities. One of the courses, which is Azure. It's like the secret weapon, it's become the secret weapon. How do you think about that relationship, Manoj? >> Absolutely Dave said it right. We are strong partners, 25 years, founding in Western Commvault, mutual customers, partnership. You know, really when you look at it from a customer lens, what our customers have appreciated, over the last year of that strengthening of that partnership basically the two pillars of Commvault the leader of data protection, or you know, for the last 25 years, 10 out of 10 in the Gartner MQ comes together with Azure, the enterprise secure cloud leader in creating Metallic. Metallic, now with 1,000 plus customers around the world, there's a reason they trust it. It's now become part of how they protect their Office 365. No workload left behind, which is very unique, you know? So what we have architected together and now we're taking it to the next phase, our joint partners, right? Our joint customers, that those are some of the things that are really changing in terms of how we're accelerating the partnership. >> Manoj, you and I have talked about ransomware a lot, we did a special segment a while back on that. The adversary is very capable. And you know, I put in the chat this morning, at Commvault Connections, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwarist. You can go on the dark web, you can buy ransomware as a service. All you need is access to a server and you can stick you know, some malware on it. So you know, it's very, very dangerous times. What is it about data management as a service that makes it a good fit right now from a customer perspective to solve this problem? >> Absolutely. Bad guys, real life, or in the cyber world, they have some techniques. First thing they do in a ransomware is you go after the exits. What are the exit doors? Now you back up data, they know that that backup data can be used to recover. So they go and try to defeat the backup products in that environment. That's number one game that changes with data management as a service. Your data management data protection environment is not inside your environment. Chances to do two simultaneous penetrations to try and anything is possible. But now you've got an additional layer of recovery readiness because that control plane secured on top of Microsoft, Azure, 3,500 security professionals, FedRAMP high standard only data management and service entity to get it. As one of our customers said, "A unicorn in the wild", that is what you have as your data management environment. So if something bad happens, worst case, this environment is ready. Our enterprise customers are starting to understand that this is becoming a big reason to shift to this model. You know, then it's okay if you're not ready to shift the entire model, you're given the easy button of just air gapping of your data. So if you're an existing Commvault customer, appliance, software, anything, secure air gap Metallic cloud storage on hardened Azure Blob protected jointly by us, start there. And finally things like active directory. Talk about shutting the exit path, right? Take that down, your entire environment is not accessible. We make it easy for you to recover that. And because of our partnership, we're able to get it for free to every one of our customers. Go protect your active directory environment using (speaks faintly) kind of three big reasons that we're seeing that entire conversation shift in the minds of our customers. >> Yeah, thank you for that. That's a no brainer. Dave, how do Metallic and Microsoft fit together? Where's the you know, kind of value chain if you will, when it comes to dealing with cyber protection or ransomware recovery, how are your customers thinking about that? >> Yeah well, first it's a shared responsibility model, right? When you've got the best in class platform like Azure with built in protections, scalable data centers all over the global footprint. But then also we spend 10 plus billion dollars a year in security and defense and our own data center environments, right? And so I always find it inspiring when companies believe that their investments in security and platform protection is going to do the job. That's true, that used to be true. Now with Azure, you can take advantage of this global scale and secure you know, footprint of investment that a company like Microsoft has done to really set your heart at ease. Now, what do you do with your actual applications and who has access to it, and how do you actually integrate like Manoj was talking about down to the individual or the individual account that's trying to get access to your environment? Well, that's where Commvault comes in at that point of attack or at that point of an actual data element. So if you've got that environment within Commvault system backed by the umbrella of the Azure security infrastructure, that's how the two sort of compliment each other. And again, it's about shared responsibility, right? We want every customer that leverages Azure to make sure that they know it's secure, it's protected. We've got a mechanism to protect your best interests. Commvault has that exact same mission statement, right? To make sure that every single element that comes into contact with their products is protected, is secure, is trustworthy. You know, I got a long lesson, long, long time ago, early in my career that says you can goof up a product feature, you can goof up the color scheme on a website but if you lose a customer's data or somebody trust, you never get it back. And so we don't take our relationships with customers very lightly. And I think our committed and joint responsibility to delight and support our customers is what has led to this partnership being so successful over the past couple of decades. >> Great, thank you, Dave. And so Manoj, I was saying earlier that data protection has become a fundamental component of your digital business stack. So that sounds good but what should customers be doing to make data protection and data management, a business value driver versus just a liability or exposure or cost factor that has to be managed? What do you think about that? >> No, and then David added earlier, right? It's no longer a liability. In fact it is you know, someone said data is the new oil, right? It is your crown jewels. You got to to start with thinking about an active data protection strategy, not you know, thinking about passive tools and looking at it in terms of a compliance or I need to keep the data around. So that's the number one part is like, how do I have something that protects all my workloads and everyone has a different pace of transformation. So unless you know, you're a company that just got created, you have environments that are on-prem, on the edge, in CoLOS, public cloud. You got you know, SaaS applications, all of those have a critical data that needs to come together. Look for breadth of data protection, something that doesn't leave your workloads behind. Siloed solutions, create a Swiss cheese that create light for the attackers to go after those gaps. You don't want to look for that, you know? And then finally trust. I mean you know, what are the pillars of trust that the solution is built on? You got to figure out how your teams can get to doing more productive things rather than patching systems. You know, making sure that the infrastructure is up. As Dave said you know, we invest a ton jointly in securing this infrastructure. Trust that and leverage that as a differentiator rather than trying to duplicate all of that. So those are some of the you know, key things. And you know, look for players who understand that hybrid is here, give you different entry points. Don't force you know, the single single mode of operation. Those are the things we have built to make it easier for our customers to have a more active data management strategy. >> Dave, Todd, I'll give you the last word we got to go but I want to hit on this notion of zero trust. It used to be a buzz word now it's mainstream. There's so much that this discussion, is it Prudentialist access? Every access is treated maybe as privileged but what does zero trust mean to you in less than a minute? >> Yeah you know, trust but verify, right? Every interaction you have with your infrastructure, with your data, with your applications and you do it at the identity level. We care about identity and we know that that's the core of how people are going to try and access infrastructure. Used to be protect the perimeter. The analogy I always use is we have locks on our houses. Now the bad guys are everywhere. They're getting inside our houses and they're not immediately taking things, they're hiding in the closet and they're popping out three weeks later before anybody knows it. And so being able to actually manage, measure, protect every interaction you have with your infrastructure and do it at the individual or application level, that's what zero trust is all about. So don't trust any interaction, make sure that you pass that authorization through with every ask. And then make sure you protect it from the inside out. >> Great stuff. Okay guys, we've got to leave it there. Thanks so much for the time today. All right next, right after a short break, we're headed into the CXL Power Panel to hear what's on the minds of the executives as it relates to data management in the digital era. Keep it right there, you're watching theCUBE. (lighthearted music)

(lighthearted music) >> Okay. We're here with Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager for GreenLake at HPE, and George Hope, who's the Worldwide Head of Partner Sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome gentlemen. Good to see you. >> Awesome to be here. >> Yeah. Thanks so much. >> You're welcome. Keith, last we spoke, we talked about how you guys were enabling high performance computing workloads to get GreenLake right, for enterprise markets. And you got some news today which we're going to get to, but you guys, you put out a pretty bold position with GreenLake, basically staking a claim, if you will. The Edge, Cloud, as a service, all in. How are you thinking about its impacts for your customers so far? >> You know, the impact has been amazing. And, you know, in essence, I think the pandemic has really brought forward this real need to accelerate our customers' digital transformation, their modernization efforts, and, you know, frankly help them solve what was amounting to a bunch of new business problems. And so, you know, this manifests itself in a set of workloads, a set of solutions, and across all industries, across all customer types. And as you mentioned, you know, GreenLake is really bringing that value to them. It brings the Cloud to the customer in their data center, in their Colo or at the Edge. And so frankly, being able to do that with that full Cloud experience all as a pay per use, you know, fully consumption-based scenario, all managed for them, so they get that, as I mentioned, true Cloud experience, it's really sort of landing really well with customers. And we continue to see accelerated growth. We're adding new customers, we're adding new technology and we're adding a whole new set of partner ecosystem folks as well that we'll talk about. >> You know, it's interesting, you mentioned that, just as a quick aside. The definition of cloud is evolving, and it's because customers ... It's the way customers look at it. It's not just vendor marketing. It's what customers want, that experience across Cloud, Edge, you know, multi clouds on prem. So George, what's your take? Anything you'd add to Keith's response? >> I would, you've heard Antonio Neri say it several times and you probably see it again for yourself. The cloud is an experience. It's not a destination and digital transformation is pushing new business models and that demands more flexible IT. The first round of digital transformation focused on a Cloud first strategy, where our customers were looking to get more agility. As Keith mentioned, the next phase of transformation will be characterized by bringing the Cloud speed, the agility to all apps and data, regardless of where they live. According to IDC, by the end of 2021 80% of the businesses will have some mechanism in place to shift the cloud centric, infrastructure and apps, and twice as fast as before the pandemic. So the pandemic has actually accelerated the impact of the digital divide. Specifically in the small and medium companies, which are adapting to technology change even faster and emerging stronger as a result. You know, they, the analyst degree cloud computing and digitalization will be key differentiators for small and medium business in years to come and speed and automation will be pivotal as well. And by 2022, at least 30% of the lagging SMBs will accelerate digitalization. But the focus will be on internal processes and operations the digital leaders, however, will differentiate by delivering their customers dynamic experience. And with our partner ecosystem we're helping our customers embrace our as a service vision and stand out wherever they are on their transformation journey. >> Well thanks for those stats. I always liked the data. I mean, look, if you're not a digital business today I feel like you're out of business and-- I'm sure there's some exceptions but you got to get on the, on the digital bandwagon. I think pre pandemic, a lot of times people really didn't know what it meant. We know now what it means. Okay, Keith. Let's get into the news when we do these things. I love that you guys always have som-- something new to share. What do you have? >> No, you got it. And you know, as we said, you know the world is hybrid and the world is multi-cloud and so customers are expecting these solutions. And so we're continuing to really drive up the innovation and we're adding additional cloud services to GreenLake. We just recently went to a general availability of our ML ops, mach-- machine learning operations and our containers for cloud services along with our virtual desktop which has become very big in a pandemic world where a lot more people are working from home. And then we have shipped our SAP HEC customer edition which allows SAP customers to run on their premise whether it's the data center or the Colo. And then today we're introducing our new bare metal capabilities as well as containers on bare metal as a service, for those folks that are running cloud native applications that don't require any sort of hypervisor. So we're really excited about that. And then second, I'd say similar to that HPC as a service experience, we talked about before where we were bringing HPC down to a broader set of customers. We're expanding the entry point for our private cloud which is virtual machines, containers, storage compute type capabilities in workload optimized systems. So again, this is one of the key benefits that HPE brings is it combines all of the best of our hardware, software, third-party software and our services and financial services into a package. And we've workload optimized this for small, medium, large and extra large. So we have a real sort of broader base for our customers to take advantage of and to really get that cloud experience through HPE GreenLake. And, you know, from a partner standpoint we also want to make sure that we continue to make this super easy. So we're adding self service capabilities or integrating into our distributors through a core set of APIs to to make sure that it plugs in for a very smooth customer experience. And this expands our reach to over a hundred thousand additional value add resellers. And, you know, we saw just fantastic growth in the channel in Q1 over 118% year over year growth for GreenLake cloud services through the channel. And we're continuing to expand our ex-- extend and expand our partner ecosystem with additional key partnerships. Like our Colos, that co-location centers are really key. So Equinix, Cirrus 1 and others that we're working with. And I'll let George talk more about that. >> Yeah. I wonder if you could pick up on that George I mean, look, if I'm a partner and and I mean, I see that I see opportunity here. Maybe, you know, I made a lot of money in the in the old days moving iron, but I got to move. I got to pivot my business. You know, COVID is actually, you know accelerating a lot of those changes, but, but there's a lot of complexity out there and partners can be critical in in helping customers make that journey. What do you see this meaning to partners, Georgia? >> So I completely agree with Keith the-- through and through in with our partners, we we give our customers choice, right? They don't have to worry about security or cost as they would with public cloud or the hyperscalers we're driving special initiatives via Cloud 28, which we run which is the World's largest Cloud aggregator. And also in collaboration with our distributors and their marketplaces. As, as Keith mentioned, in addition customers can leverage our expertise and support of our service provider ecosystem, our SIs, our ISBs to find the right mix of hybrid IT and decide where each application or workload should be hosted. Because customers are now demanding robust ecosystems, cloud adjacency, and efficient, low latency networks and the modern workload demands, secure compliant highly available, and cost optimized environments. And Keith touched on co-location, we're partnering with co-location facilities to provide our customers the ability to expand bandwidth, reduced latency and get access to a robust ecosystem of adjacent providers. We touched on Equinix a bit as one of them but we're partnering with them to enable customers to connect to multiple clouds with private on demand interconnections from hundreds of data center locations around the globe. We continue to invest in the partner and customer experience, you know making ourselves easier to do business with we've now fully integrated partners in GreenLake central. And can provide their customers end to end support in managing the entire hybrid IT estate. And lastly, we're providing partners with dedicated and exclusive enablement opportunities. So customers can rely on both HPE and partner experts and we have a competent team of specialists that can help them transform and differentiate themselves. >> Yeah. So I'm hearing a theme of simplicity. You know, I talked earlier about this being customer driven to me what the customer wants is they want to come in. They want simple, like you mentioned, self-serve. I don't care if it's on prem in the cloud, across clouds at the edge, abstract, all that complexity away from me make it simple to do not only the technology to work you know, you figure out where the workload should run and let the metadata decide. And that's a, that's a bold vision and then make it easy to do business. Let me buy as a service if that's the way I want to consume. And, and partners are all about, you know, making, you know reducing friction and driving that. So anyway guys, final thoughts. Maybe Keith, you can close it out here and maybe George-- >> Yeah. You summed it up really nice. You know, we're excited to continue to provide what we view as the largest and most flexible hybrid cloud for our customers apps, data, workloads, and solutions and really being that leading on-prem solution to meet our customer's needs. At the same time, we're going to continue to innovate. You know, our ears are wide open and we're listening to our customers on what their needs are, what their requirements are. So we're going to expand the use cases, expand the solution sets that we provide in these workload optimized offerings to a very very broad set of customers as they drive forward with that digital transformation and modernization efforts. >> Great. George, any final thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, with our partners we work as one team and continue to hone our skills in and embrace our confidence. We're looking to help them evolve their businesses and thrive, and we're here to help now more than ever. So, you know, please reach out to our team and our partners so we can show you where we've already been successful together. >> So that's great. We're seeing the expanding GreenLake portfolio partners are key part of it. We're seeing new tools for them and then this ecosystem evolution and build out an expansion. Guys, thanks so much. >> You bet, thank you. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome.

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's the CUBE, covering CISCO Live 2018, brought to you by CISCO, Veeam, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the CUBE's coverage of CISCO Live 2018 in Barcelona. You know, I'm a networking guy by background, but there's certain people in the industry that really I've gone to to learn, been really thrilled that I've had the opportunity to get to know, and every once in awhile I get to bring them to our audience, and really happy to bring back to the program Ivan Pepelnjak, from Slovenia, blogger, author, webinar, generally, you know, that network guy that those of us who watch the industry know. >> That grumpy networking guy. >> Ah, ya know, aren't most networking people at least online at least a little bit grumpy? And when you meet 'em in person, though, it's a slightly different experience, so thanks for joining us. >> Ah, thank you for inviting me. >> All right, so 2013 was the last time that we actually go to do one of these in person. >> Ivan: That's true. >> So networking, it's all the same, right? >> Ivan: It is. >> I mean we're probably still working on 10 gig rollout, ah, maybe 25 or 50 gig, speeds and feeds, and, ya know, oh, okay, ya know, IPV 6, I think we're kind of getting there, lots of other acronyms. We could talk awhile. But really, what's been some of the big things that you've been looking at? What are customers actually doing, and what are customers thinking of that you've been playing with? >> Well, it's amazing how little has changed. >> People are still talking about SDN like that's the big thing. No one has delivered on that apart from some point products like VMware, NSX, or CISCO ACI. Cloud is still the thing that will happen next year to most companies. We hear how 90% of all the companies that participate in some survey are using Cloud. And then the next question I'll ask is, "Well, is this Office 365, "or is this something more?" And they go like, "Well the survey "didn't differentiate on that." So thank you. >> Yeah, but, yeah look. The SDN, a friend of mine said SDN stands for Still Does Nothing. That being said, ACI, NSX, there's customers using it. >> Ivan: Oh, absolutely. >> It has not totally transformed the industry like they said. Cloud, I've yet to find a company that's not doing some SAS, and unless you have some regulation or things like that, you at least have some sandbox that you're doing some public Cloud. >> Ivan: Absolutely. >> But, absolutely people, they still have data centers, despite... >> Ivan: Well, it's a... >> It might not be their own building anymore. I was just talking to a service provider and the like, but yeah, I mean, the more things change the more things stay the same, right? >> Absolutely. Well yeah, we do see people moving to colos or, they would build their stuff somewhere else, or whatever, but it's amazing how much interest I am still getting in data center design courses, so there are still zillions of people who think that that is important, and yes, we all know we'll go to the Cloud, but everyone has his own hurdles, and so I think that eventually everyone will get to some sort of hybrid Cloud, where some stuff will be there, and some stuff legacy whatever will be here, and we'll have to live with that forever. >> Yeah, I mean, those of us we think back, I remember when this wave came, it was like, well, remember the XSPs in the 90s? There were two reasons why it failed. Number one, there wasn't enough network, and number two, ah, security. Well, you fast forward to, you know, two decades, and the network's gotten way better. I've got great speeds, and stuff like that, but you know physics is still a factor- >> Ivan: Well, yeah. >> And security is even more of an issue today than it was 20 years ago, I think. >> This started as a joke, but it is becoming more and more true. If you move to the Cloud, your security actually improves. >> Stu: Right. >> Because they have some security and you had none before. (both laugh) >> I at least get to rethink my security. >> Yeah. >> When I make some transformation. >> No, and they have the basics right. >> Right. >> Like physical access control, multi-tenant separation, encryption, trunk authentication. They get those things right, because otherwise they would be out of business. >> Okay, so we spent like more than a decade with how virtualization in networking. Have we gotten most of that at least reasonably well now? >> There are still people who don't get that ethernet was designed to be used on a single cable. So they still think that stretching a single ethernet across wide distances is a great idea, and everyone is still letting them get away with that. >> Yeah. >> Fortunately the Cloud vendors aren't buying. So if you want to move to Amazon, Google, whoever else, you have to redesign your applications and make them work correctly. So, eventually this thing will die, but it's like COBOL and mainframes, it will be there forever. >> Yeah, I mean, we've been saying for a few years on the Cube now that the challenge of our time is really distributed architectures, and of course they have a huge impact on networking, so how's the industry doing? How would you rate, you know, say we're here at CISCO Live, you know, how are they doing helping customers with these challenges? >> Most of them don't. >> I mean, if you look at a typical enterprise application, it still isn't developed for a distributed environment. Yeah, they use three tiers of servers, like always, but then they try to cope by solving all the problems in the ops phase, when they deploy stuff. And that's the biggest problem we are facing today. We are not changing the development processes and paradigms. >> Well, we're actually here in the Dev Net zone. I mean, I give CISCO kudos. Last time I came to CISCO Live was 2009. There weren't, we didn't talk about developers. >> Really? >> Everybody was, you know, doing plug fests, and getting their latest certification, but they're trying to embrace the developers more. There seem to be more of them here. >> Yeah. >> That boundary between network operator and developer, do you see? You know, is there communication, or are the network guys still stuck in a closet somewhere not talking to anybody? >> Well, there are two types of challenges. The first type of challenge is that the network guy in particular, but ops teams in general, are still not invited to the table when new stuff is discussed. So, the application developers dream up something based on their best knowledge. I mean, they're not evil or anything. They just don't know the operational impact of their decision. And because the networking security virtualization people are not at the table, then they have to cope with whatever these guys dream up in isolation. I'm never blaming them, because, you know, we should education them, and we are not doing that. >> Yeah. >> So anyone who manages to bring security, networking, and storage people in when the application architecture is being designed is my hero. But there are only few of them. And the other challenge is that the networking people don't realize that their world has changed. That they can't manually provision VLANs the way they've been doing for the last 20 years, and it's amazing once they get it, once they start simple automation stuff, how creative they become. What types of problems they solve. They don't have the shackles of CLI anymore. I shouldn't be saying that. (both laugh) I'm the old CLI junkie. But it's amazing how much can be done once you realize that you don't have to do everything manually. >> Yeah, CISCO's, you know, not shy about putting out strong visions. Marketing is definitely part of what they do. And the keynote this morning said it's a new era, and new infrastructure, powered by intent, informed by context. It sounded like a nice message, but this whole intent-based networking, what's your take on it? Is this, you know, are we going to come back five years from now and talk about intent based like we did SDN? Or, you know, what's your take? >> Well, let's keep in mind that this is all hype. What we're really talking about is an orchestration system with an abstraction layer. 'Cause first, it's really hard to define what intent based is, because there's no good definition. But there is a definition in programming which differentiates between declarative programming and imperative programming. And if we use declarative programming as something which could be intent based, that thing says, well, I don't tell the machine, or whatever, the system, how to do things. I just tell it what to do. And if you take a look at that from that perspective, then you figure out that every device configuration is an expression of your intent. >> Right. >> You never tell the device how to work. >> Yeah. >> You just tell the device what to do. >> Right. It's interesting, Ivan. I think back, you know, we used to manage individual boxes. Then we kind of created a little bit more pools, and the challenge they see right now is with the explosion of device, we're not going to have time to talk about all the IOT edge piece and everything, but there's no way an admin or a team of admins are going to be able to help there, so I need to infuse, I hate that, the ML, AI, choose your buzzword of choice, though, the machines need to be able to manage that a little bit more, you know, autonomous networks or something they (mumbles). I understand you're skeptical, so how do we get there, or, you know, otherwise, this whole label crap. >> There are two, there are three totally different things here. The first one, I totally agree with you that we should view networks as a single entity. Configuring boxes is stupid, and it's like, these admins don't do that. Well, some still do. They get the results they deserve. So, we should start thinking about network-wide data models which are then translated into device intent, which is really device configuration. And that makes absolute sense. But remember what I said. This is just a glorified orchestration system with an abstraction layer. The second problem is machine learning. Some of the things we are dealing with have physical limitations, like the speed of light, or the number of things you can put into a hardware forwarding table. Once you're faced with those physical limitations, it's like, you know, self-driving cars, yeah, they are self driving, but they cannot go 300 miles per hour because laws of physics. So, it's one thing to say, well, I have these infinite resources and I can learn how to play Go in eight hours. >> Right. >> And it's a completely different thing to say now I will figure out how to deal with my network, which has this physical limitations. And also, you know, whenever I hear about these autonomous distributed thingees, we have routing protocols. They have been autonomous and distributed and self healing for decades, and we didn't call them machine learning or artificial intelligence. And, finally, once you get to the bottom of it, and you're faced with all those physical limitations, and now, let's say you want to solve a simple problem, which is, how do I optimize the use of my network? You do some research. You figure out that this problem has been solved 20 years ago. There are companies with commercial products that have solved this problem. It's just that no one is using them because they are too expensive, because what you can save by using them doesn't offset the cost that these people had to invest into R and D to make this work. So, machine learning, yeah. Can you make it cheaper? I don't think so. >> All right, so, Ivan, I want to give you the last word. >> Mm-hmm. >> Grumpy networking, what do you look forward to the most at this show, and any final anecdotes you want to share, before we have to wrap? >> Well, the one thing I am looking forward is to see people to start automate their networks. To jump over that mental barrier, and when they break through it, it's amazing how many success stories you get. So I know a number of networking engineers who were on my automation course, and six months later, they write me saying, "Now I have this thing in production, "and we cut down the site deployment "from three days to five minutes." When I read emails like that, it's like, "You're my hero." >> Excellent, well I love it. For a grumpy person, you sure sound a little bit of an optimist about what some of the people come in and get this. Maybe a realist is more right. Ivan Pepelnjak, really appreciate you joining us. We'll be back with lots more coverage from CISCO Live 2018 from Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching the Cube. (the Cube jingle)