hi everybody welcome back to re invent 2022. this is thecube's exclusive coverage we're here at the satellite set it's up on the fifth floor of the Venetian Conference Center and this is part of the global startup program the AWS startup showcase series that we've been running all through last year and and into this year with AWS and featuring some of its its Global Partners Ed wallson series the CEO of chaos search many times Cube Alum and Kevin Miller there's also a cube Alum vice president GM of S3 at AWS guys good to see you again yeah great to see you Dave hi Kevin this is we call this our Super Bowl so this must be like your I don't know uh World Cup it's a pretty big event yeah it's the World Cup for sure yeah so a lot of S3 talk you know I mean that's what got us all started in 2006 so absolutely what's new in S3 yeah it's been a great show we've had a number of really interesting launches over the last few weeks and a few at the show as well so you know we've been really focused on helping customers that are running Mass scale data Lakes including you know whether it's structured or unstructured data we actually announced just a few just an hour ago I think it was a new capability to give customers cross-account access points for sharing data securely with other parts of the organization and that's something that we'd heard from customers is as they are growing and have more data sets and they're looking to to get more out of their data they are increasingly looking to enable multiple teams across their businesses to access those data sets securely and that's what we provide with cross-count access points we also launched yesterday our multi-region access point failover capabilities and so again this is where customers have data sets and they're using multiple regions for certain critical workloads they're now able to to use that to fail to control the failover between different regions in AWS and then one other launch I would just highlight is some improvements we made to storage lens which is our really a very novel and you need capability to help customers really understand what storage they have where who's accessing it when it's being accessed and we added a bunch of new metrics storage lens has been pretty exciting for a lot of customers in fact we looked at the data and saw that customers who have adopted storage lens typically within six months they saved more than six times what they had invested in turning storage lens on and certainly in this environment right now we have a lot of customers who are it's pretty top of mind they're looking for ways to optimize their their costs in the cloud and take some of those savings and be able to reinvest them in new innovation so pretty exciting with the storage lens launch I think what's interesting about S3 is that you know pre-cloud Object Store was this kind of a niche right and then of course you guys announced you know S3 in 2006 as I said and okay great you know cheap and deep storage simple get put now the conversations about how to enable value from from data absolutely analytics and it's just a whole new world and Ed you've talked many times I love the term yeah we built chaos search on the on the shoulders of giants right and so the under underlying that is S3 but the value that you can build on top of that has been key and I don't think we've talked about his shoulders and Giants but we've talked about how we literally you know we have a big Vision right so hard to kind of solve the challenge to analytics at scale we really focus on the you know the you know Big Data coming environment get analytics so we talk about the on the shoulders Giants obviously Isaac Newton's you know metaphor of I learned from everything before and we layer on top so really when you talk about all the things come from S3 like I just smile because like we picked it up naturally we went all in an S3 and this is where I think you're going Dave but everyone is so let's just cut the chase like so any of the data platforms you're using S3 is what you're building but we did it a little bit differently so at first people using a cold storage like you said and then they ETL it up into a different platforms for analytics of different sorts now people are using it closer they're doing caching layers and cashing out and they're that's where but that's where the attributes of a scale or reliability are what we did is we actually make S3 a database so literally we have no persistence outside that three and that kind of comes in so it's working really well with clients because most of the thing is we pick up all these attributes of scale reliability and it shows up in the clients environments and so when you launch all these new scalable things we just see it like our clients constantly comment like one of our biggest customers fintech in uh Europe they go to Black Friday again black Friday's not one days and they lose scale from what is it 58 terabytes a day and they're going up to 187 terabytes a day and we don't Flinch they say how do you do that well we built our platform on S3 as long as you can stream it to S3 so they're saying I can't overrun S3 and it's a natural play so it's it's really nice that but we take out those attributes but same thing that's why we're able to you know help clients get you know really you know Equifax is a good example maybe they're able to consolidate 12 their divisions on one platform we couldn't have done that without the scale and the performance of what you can get S3 but also they saved 90 I'm able to do that but that's really because the only persistence is S3 and what you guys are delivering but and then we really for focus on shoulders Giants we're doing on top of that innovating on top of your platforms and bringing that out so things like you know we have a unique data representation that makes it easy to ingest this data because it's kind of coming at you four v's of big data we allow you to do that make it performant on s3h so now you're doing hot analytics on S3 as if it's just a native database in memory but there's no memory SSC caching and then multi-model once you get it there don't move it leverage it in place so you know elasticsearch access you know Cabana grafana access or SQL access with your tools so we're seeing that constantly but we always talk about on the shoulders of giants but even this week I get comments from our customers like how did you do that and most of it is because we built on top of what you guys provided so it's really working out pretty well and you know we talk a lot about digital transformation of course we had the pleasure sitting down with Adam solipski prior John Furrier flew to Seattle sits down his annual one-on-one with the AWS CEO which is kind of cool yeah it was it's good it's like study for the test you know and uh and so but but one of the interesting things he said was you know we're one of our challenges going forward is is how do we go Beyond digital transformation into business transformation like okay well that's that's interesting I was talking to a customer today AWS customer and obviously others because they're 100 year old company and they're basically their business was they call them like the Uber for for servicing appliances when your Appliance breaks you got to get a person to serve it a service if it's out of warranty you know these guys do that so they got to basically have a you know a network of technicians yeah and they gotta deal with the customers no phone right so they had a completely you know that was a business transformation right they're becoming you know everybody says they're coming a software company but they're building it of course yeah right on the cloud so wonder if you guys could each talk about what's what you're seeing in terms of changing not only in the sort of I.T and the digital transformation but also the business transformation yeah I know I I 100 agree that I think business transformation is probably that one of the top themes I'm hearing from customers of all sizes right now even in this environment I think customers are looking for what can I do to drive top line or you know improve bottom line or just improve my customer experience and really you know sort of have that effect where I'm helping customers get more done and you know it is it is very tricky because to do that successfully the customers that are doing that successfully I think are really getting into the lines of businesses and figuring out you know it's probably a different skill set possibly a different culture different norms and practices and process and so it's it's a lot more than just a like you said a lot more than just the technology involved but when it you know we sort of liquidate it down into the data that's where absolutely we see that as a critical function for lines of businesses to become more comfortable first off knowing what data sets they have what data they they could access but possibly aren't today and then starting to tap into those data sources and then as as that progresses figuring out how to share and collaborate with data sets across a company to you know to correlate across those data sets and and drive more insights and then as all that's being done of course it's important to measure the results and be able to really see is this what what effect is this having and proving that effect and certainly I've seen plenty of customers be able to show you know this is a percentage increase in top or bottom line and uh so that pattern is playing out a lot and actually a lot of how we think about where we're going with S3 is related to how do we make it easier for customers to to do everything that I just described to have to understand what data they have to make it accessible and you know it's great to have such a great ecosystem of partners that are then building on top of that and innovating to help customers connect really directly with the businesses that they're running and driving those insights well and customers are hours today one of the things I loved that Adam said he said where Amazon is strategically very very patient but tactically we're really impatient and the customers out there like how are you going to help me increase Revenue how are you going to help me cut costs you know we were talking about how off off camera how you know software can actually help do that yeah it's deflationary I love the quote right so software's deflationary as costs come up how do you go drive it also free up the team and you nail it it's like okay everyone wants to save money but they're not putting off these projects in fact the digital transformation or the business it's actually moving forward but they're getting a little bit bigger but everyone's looking for creative ways to look at their architecture and it becomes larger larger we talked about a couple of those examples but like even like uh things like observability they want to give this tool set this data to all the developers all their sres same data to all the security team and then to do that they need to find a way an architect should do that scale and save money simultaneously so we see constantly people who are pairing us up with some of these larger firms like uh or like keep your data dog keep your Splunk use us to reduce the cost that one and one is actually cheaper than what you have but then they use it either to save money we're saving 50 to 80 hard dollars but more importantly to free up your team from the toil and then they they turn around and make that budget neutral and then allowed to get the same tools to more people across the org because they're sometimes constrained of getting the access to everyone explain that a little bit more let's say I got a Splunk or data dog I'm sifting through you know logs how exactly do you help so it's pretty simple I'll use dad dog example so let's say using data dog preservability so it's just your developers your sres managing environments all these platforms are really good at being a monitoring alerting type of tool what they're not necessarily great at is keeping the data for longer periods like the log data the bigger data that's where we're strong what you see is like a data dog let's say you're using it for a minister for to keep 30 days of logs which is not enough like let's say you're running environment you're finding that performance issue you kind of want to look to last quarter in last month in or maybe last Black Friday so 30 days is not enough but will charge you two eighty two dollars and eighty cents a gigabyte don't focus on just 280 and then if you just turn the knob and keep seven days but keep two years of data on us which is on S3 it goes down to 22 cents plus our list price of 80 cents goes to a dollar two compared to 280. so here's the thing what they're able to do is just turn a knob get more data we do an integration so you can go right from data dog or grafana directly into our platform so the user doesn't see it but they save money A lot of times they don't just save the money now they use that to go fund and get data dog to a lot more people make sense so it's a creativity they're looking at it and they're looking at tools we see the same thing with a grafana if you look at the whole grafana play which is hey you can't put it in one place but put Prometheus for metrics or traces we fit well with logs but they're using that to bring down their costs because a lot of this data just really bogs down these applications the alerting monitoring are good at small data they're not good at the big data which is what we're really good at and then the one and one is actually less than you paid for the one so it and it works pretty well so things are really unpredictable right now in the economy you know during the pandemic we've sort of lockdown and then the stock market went crazy we're like okay it's going to end it's going to end and then it looked like it was going to end and then it you know but last year it reinvented just just in that sweet spot before Omicron so we we tucked it in which which was awesome right it was a great great event we really really missed one physical reinvent you know which was very rare so that's cool but I've called it the slingshot economy it feels like you know you're driving down the highway and you got to hit the brakes and then all of a sudden you're going okay we're through it Oh no you're gonna hit the brakes again yeah so it's very very hard to predict and I was listening to jassy this morning he was talking about yeah consumers they're still spending but what they're doing is they're they're shopping for more features they might be you know buying a TV that's less expensive you know more value for the money so okay so hopefully the consumer spending will get us out of this but you don't really know you know and I don't yeah you know we don't seem to have the algorithms we've never been through something like this before so what are you guys seeing in terms of customer Behavior given that uncertainty well one thing I would highlight that I think particularly going back to what we were just talking about as far as business and digital transformation I think some customers are still appreciating the fact that where you know yesterday you may have had to to buy some Capital put out some capital and commit to something for a large upfront expenditure is that you know today the value of being able to experiment and scale up and then most importantly scale down and dynamically based on is the experiment working out am I seeing real value from it and doing that on a time scale of a day or a week or a few months that is so important right now because again it gets to I am looking for a ways to innovate and to drive Top Line growth but I I can't commit to a multi-year sort of uh set of costs to to do that so and I think plenty of customers are finding that even a few months of experimentation gives them some really valuable insight as far as is this going to be successful or not and so I think that again just of course with S3 and storage from day one we've been elastic pay for what you use if you're not using the storage you don't get charged for it and I think that particularly right now having the applications and the rest of the ecosystem around the storage and the data be able to scale up and scale down is is just ever more important and when people see that like typically they're looking to do more with it so if they find you usually find these little Department projects but they see a way to actually move faster and save money I think it is a mix of those two they're looking to expand it which can be a nightmare for sales Cycles because they take longer but people are looking well why don't you leverage this and go across division so we do see people trying to leverage it because they're still I don't think digital transformation is slowing down but a lot more to be honest a lot more approvals at this point for everything it is you know Adam and another great quote in his in his keynote he said if you want to save money the Cloud's a place to do it absolutely and I read an article recently and I was looking through and I said this is the first time you know AWS has ever seen a downturn because the cloud was too early back then I'm like you weren't paying attention in 2008 because that was the first major inflection point for cloud adoption where CFO said okay stop the capex we're going to Opex and you saw the cloud take off and then 2010 started this you know amazing cycle that we really haven't seen anything like it where they were doubling down in Investments and they were real hardcore investment it wasn't like 1998 99 was all just going out the door for no clear reason yeah so that Foundation is now in place and I think it makes a lot of sense and it could be here for for a while where people are saying Hey I want to optimize and I'm going to do that on the cloud yeah no I mean I've obviously I certainly agree with Adam's quote I think really that's been in aws's DNA from from day one right is that ability to scale costs with with the actual consumption and paying for what you use and I think that you know certainly moments like now are ones that can really motivate change in an organization in a way that might not have been as palatable when it just it didn't feel like it was as necessary yeah all right we got to go give you a last word uh I think it's been a great event I love all your announcements I think this is wonderful uh it's been a great show I love uh in fact how many people are here at reinvent north of 50 000. yeah I mean I feel like it was it's as big if not bigger than 2019. people have said ah 2019 was a record when you count out all the professors I don't know it feels it feels as big if not bigger so there's great energy yeah it's quite amazing and uh and we're thrilled to be part of it guys thanks for coming on thecube again really appreciate it face to face all right thank you for watching this is Dave vellante for the cube your leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage we'll be right back foreign

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas, "theCube" is on our fourth day of covering AWS re:Invent, live from the Venetian Expo Center. This week has been amazing. We've created a ton of content, as you know, 'cause you've been watching. But, there's been north of 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. We've had amazing conversations across the AWS ecosystem. Lisa Martin, Paul Gillan. Paul, what's your, kind of, take on day four of the conference? It's still highly packed. >> Oh, there's lots of people here. (laughs) >> Yep. Unusual for the final day of a conference. I think Werner Vogels, if I'm pronouncing it right kicked things off today when he talked about asymmetry and how the world is, you know, asymmetric. We build symmetric software, because it's convenient to do so, but asymmetric software actually scales and evolves much better. And I think that that was a conversation starter for a lot of what people are talking about here today, which is how the cloud changes the way we think about building software. >> Absolutely does. >> Our next guest, Holger Mueller, that's one of his key areas of focus. And Holger, welcome, thanks for joining us on the "theCube". >> Thanks for having me. >> What did you take away from the keynote this morning? >> Well, how do you feel on the final day of the marathon, right? We're like 23, 24 miles. Hit the ball yesterday, right? >> We are going strong Holger. And, of course, >> Yeah. >> you guys, we can either talk about business transformation with cloud or the World Cup. >> Or we can do both. >> The World Cup, hands down. World Cup. (Lisa laughs) Germany's out, I'm unbiased now. They just got eliminated. >> Spain is out now. >> What will the U.S. do against Netherlands tomorrow? >> They're going to win. What's your forecast? U.S. will win? >> They're going to win 2 to 1. >> What do you say, 2:1? >> I'm optimistic, but realistic. >> 3? >> I think Netherlands. >> Netherlands will win? >> 2 to nothing. >> Okay, I'll vote for the U.S.. >> Okay, okay >> 3:1 for the U.S.. >> Be optimistic. >> Root for the U.S.. >> Okay, I like that. >> Hope for the best wherever you work. >> Tomorrow you'll see how much soccer experts we are. >> If your prediction was right. (laughs) >> (laughs) Ja, ja. Or yours was right, right, so. Cool, no, but the event, I think the event is great to have 50,000 people. Biggest event of the year again, right? Not yet the 70,000 we had in 2019. But it's great to have the energy. I've never seen the show floor going all the way down like this, right? >> I haven't either. >> I've never seen that. I think it's a record. Often vendors get the space here and they have the keynote area, and the entertainment area, >> Yeah. >> and the food area, and then there's an exposition, right? This is packed. >> It's packed. >> Maybe it'll pay off. >> You don't see the big empty booths that you often see. >> Oh no. >> Exactly, exactly. You know, the white spaces and so on. >> No. >> Right. >> Which is a good thing. >> There's lots of energy, which is great. And today's, of course, the developer day, like you said before, right now Vogels' a rockstar in the developer community, right. Revered visionary on what has been built, right? And he's becoming a little professorial is my feeling, right. He had these moments before too, when it was justifying how AWS moved off the Oracle database about the importance of data warehouses and structures and why DynamoDB is better and so on. But, he had a large part of this too, and this coming right across the keynotes, right? Adam Selipsky talking about Antarctica, right? Scott against almonds and what went wrong. He didn't tell us, by the way, which often the tech winners forget. Scott banked on technology. He had motorized sleds, which failed after three miles. So, that's not the story to tell the technology. Let everything down. Everybody went back to ponies and horses and dogs. >> Maybe goes back to these asynchronous behavior. >> Yeah. >> The way of nature. >> And, yesterday, Swami talking about the bridges, right? The root bridges, right? >> Right. >> So, how could Werner pick up with his video at the beginning. >> Yeah. >> And then talk about space and other things? So I think it's important to educate about event-based architecture, right? And we see this massive transformation. Modern software has to be event based, right? Because, that's how things work and we didn't think like this before. I see this massive transformation in my other research area in other platforms about the HR space, where payrolls are being rebuilt completely. And payroll used to be one of the three peaks of ERP, right? You would size your ERP machine before the cloud to financial close, to run the payroll, and to do an MRP manufacturing run if you're manufacturing. God forbid you run those three at the same time. Your machine wouldn't be able to do that, right? So it was like start the engine, start the boosters, we are running payroll. And now the modern payroll designs like you see from ADP or from Ceridian, they're taking every payroll relevant event. You check in time wise, right? You go overtime, you take a day of vacation and right away they trigger and run the payroll, so it's up to date for you, up to date for you, which, in this economy, is super important, because we have more gig workers, we have more contractors, we have employees who are leaving suddenly, right? The great resignation, which is happening. So, from that perspective, it's the modern way of building software. So it's great to see Werner showing that. The dirty little secrets though is that is more efficient software for the cloud platform vendor too. Takes less resources, gets less committed things, so it's a much more scalable architecture. You can move the events, you can work asynchronously much better. And the biggest showcase, right? What's the biggest transactional showcase for an eventually consistent asynchronous transactional application? I know it's a mouthful, but we at Amazon, AWS, Amazon, right? You buy something on Amazon they tell you it's going to come tomorrow. >> Yep. >> They don't know it's going to come tomorrow by that time, because it's not transactionally consistent, right? We're just making every ERP vendor, who lives in transactional work, having nightmares of course, (Lisa laughs) but for them it's like, yes we have the delivery to promise, a promise to do that, right? But they come back to you and say, "Sorry, we couldn't make it, delivery didn't work and so on. It's going to be a new date. We are out of the product.", right? So these kind of event base asynchronous things are more and more what's going to scale around the world. It's going to be efficient for everybody, it's going to be better customer experience, better employee experience, ultimately better user experience, it's going to be better for the enterprise to build, but we have to learn to build it. So big announcement was to build our environment to build better eventful applications from today. >> Talk about... This is the first re:Invent... Well, actually, I'm sorry, it's the second re:Invent under Adam Selipsky. >> Right. Adam Selipsky, yep. >> But his first year. >> Right >> We're hearing a lot of momentum. What's your takeaway with what he delivered with the direction Amazon is going, their vision? >> Ja, I think compared to the Jassy times, right, we didn't see the hockey stick slide, right? With a number of innovations and releases. That was done in 2019 too, right? So I think it's a more pedestrian pace, which, ultimately, is good for everybody, because it means that when software vendors go slower, they do less width, but more depth. >> Yeah. >> And depth is what customers need. So Amazon's building more on the depth side, which is good news. I also think, and that's not official, right, but Adam Selipsky came from Tableau, right? >> Yeah. So he is a BI analytics guy. So it's no surprise we have three data lake offerings, right? Security data lake, we have a healthcare data lake and we have a supply chain data lake, right? Where all, again, the epigonos mentioned them I was like, "Oh, my god, Amazon's coming to supply chain.", but it's actually data lakes, which is an interesting part. But, I think it's not a surprise that someone who comes heavily out of the analytics BI world, it's off ringside, if I was pitching internally to him maybe I'd do something which he's is familiar with and I think that's what we see in the major announcement of his keynote on Tuesday. >> I mean, speaking of analytics, one of the big announcements early on was Amazon is trying to bridge the gap between Aurora. >> Yep. >> And Redshift. >> Right. >> And setting up for continuous pipelines, continuous integration. >> Right. >> Seems to be a trend that is common to all database players. I mean, Oracle is doing the same thing. SAP is doing the same thing. MariaDB. Do you see the distinction between transactional and analytical databases going away? >> It's coming together, right? Certainly coming together, from that perspective, but there's a fundamental different starting point, right? And with the big idea part, right? The universal database, which does everything for you in one system, whereas the suite of specialized databases, right? Oracle is in the classic Oracle database in the universal database camp. On the other side you have Amazon, which built a database. This is one of the first few Amazon re:Invents. It's my 10th where there was no new database announced. Right? >> No. >> So it was always add another one specially- >> I think they have enough. >> It's a great approach. They have enough, right? So it's a great approach to build something quick, which Amazon is all about. It's not so great when customers want to leverage things. And, ultimately, which I think with Selipsky, AWS is waking up to the enterprise saying, "I have all this different database and what is in them matters to me." >> Yeah. >> "So how can I get this better?" So no surprise between the two most popular database, Aurora and RDS. They're bring together the data with some out of the box parts. I think it's kind of, like, silly when Swami's saying, "Hey, no ETL.". (chuckles) Right? >> Yeah. >> There shouldn't be an ETL from the same vendor, right? There should be data pipes from that perspective anyway. So it looks like, on the overall value proposition database side, AWS is moving closer to the universal database on the Oracle side, right? Because, if you lift, of course, the universal database, under the hood, you see, well, there's different database there, different part there, you do something there, you have to configure stuff, which is also the case but it's one part of it, right, so. >> With that shift, talk about the value that's going to be in it for customers regardless of industry. >> Well, the value for customers is great, because when software vendors, or platform vendors, go in depth, you get more functionality, you get more maturity you get easier ways of setting up the whole things. You get ways of maintaining things. And you, ultimately, get lower TCO to build them, which is super important for enterprise. Because, here, this is the developer cloud, right? Developers love AWS. Developers are scarce, expensive. Might not be want to work for you, right? So developer velocity getting more done with same amount of developers, getting less done, less developers getting more done, is super crucial, super important. So this is all good news for enterprise banking on AWS and then providing them more efficiency, more automation, out of the box. >> Some of your customer conversations this week, talk to us about some of the feedback. What's the common denominator amongst customers right now? >> Customers are excited. First of all, like, first event, again in person, large, right? >> Yeah. >> People can travel, people meet each other, meet in person. They have a good handle around the complexity, which used to be a huge challenge in the past, because people say, "Do I do this?" I know so many CXOs saying, "Yeah, I want to build, say, something in IoT with AWS. The first reference built it like this, the next reference built it completely different. The third one built it completely different again. So now I'm doubting if my team has the skills to build things successfully, because will they be smart enough, like your teams, because there's no repetitiveness and that repetitiveness is going to be very important for AWS to come up with some higher packaging and version numbers.", right? But customers like that message. They like that things are working better together. They're not missing the big announcement, right? One of the traditional things of AWS would be, and they made it even proud, as a system, Jassy was saying, "If we look at the IT spend and we see something which is, like, high margin for us and not served well and we announced something there, right?" So Quick Start, Workspaces, where all liaisons where AWS went after traditional IT spend and had an offering. We haven't had this in 2019, we don't have them in 2020. Last year and didn't have it now. So something is changing on the AWS side. It's a little bit too early to figure out what, but they're not chewing off as many big things as they used in the past. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Did you get the sense that... Keith Townsend, from "The CTO Advisor", was on earlier. >> Yep. >> And he said he's been to many re:Invents, as you have, and he said that he got the sense that this is Amazon's chance to do a victory lap, as he called it. That this is a way for Amazon to reinforce the leadership cloud. >> Ja. >> And really, kind of, establish that nobody can come close to them, nobody can compete with them. >> You don't think that- >> I don't think that's at all... I mean, love Keith, he's a great guy, but I don't think that's the mindset at all, right? So, I mean, Jassy was always saying, "It's still the morning of the day in the cloud.", right? They're far away from being done. They're obsessed over being right. They do more work with the analysts. We think we got something right. And I like the passion, from that perspective. So I think Amazon's far from being complacent and the area, which is the biggest bit, right, the biggest. The only thing where Amazon truly has floundered, always floundered, is the AI space, right? So, 2018, Werner Vogels was doing more technical stuff that "Oh, this is all about linear regression.", right? And Amazon didn't start to put algorithms on silicon, right? And they have a three four trail and they didn't announce anything new here, behind Google who's been doing this for much, much longer than TPU platform, so. >> But they have now. >> They're keen aware. >> Yep. >> They now have three, or they own two of their own hardware platforms for AI. >> Right. >> They support the Intel platform. They seem to be catching up in that area. >> It's very hard to catch up on hardware, right? Because, there's release cycles, right? And just the volume that, just talking about the largest models that we have right now, to do with the language models, and Google is just doing a side note of saying, "Oh, we supported 50 less or 30 less, not little spoken languages, which I've never even heard of, because they're under banked and under supported and here's the language model, right? And I think it's all about little bit the organizational DNA of a company. I'm a strong believer in that. And, you have to remember AWS comes from the retail side, right? >> Yeah. >> Their roll out of data centers follows their retail strategy. Open secret, right? But, the same thing as the scale of the AI is very very different than if you take a look over at Google where it makes sense of the internet, right? The scale right away >> Right. >> is a solution, which is a good solution for some of the DNA of AWS. Also, Microsoft Azure is good. There has no chance to even get off the ship of that at Google, right? And these leaders with Google and it's not getting smaller, right? We didn't hear anything. I mean so much focused on data. Why do they focus so much on data? Because, data is the first step for AI. If AWS was doing a victory lap, data would've been done. They would own data, right? They would have a competitor to BigQuery Omni from the Google side to get data from the different clouds. There's crickets on that topic, right? So I think they know that they're catching up on the AI side, but it's really, really hard. It's not like in software where you can't acquire someone they could acquire in video. >> Not at Core Donovan. >> Might play a game, but that's not a good idea, right? So you can't, there's no shortcuts on the hardware side. As much as I'm a software guy and love software and don't like hardware, it's always a pain, right? There's no shortcuts there and there's nothing, which I think, has a new Artanium instance, of course, certainly, but they're not catching up. The distance is the same, yep. >> One of the things is funny, one of our guests, I think it was Tuesday, it was, it was right after Adam's keynote. >> Sure. >> Said that Adam Selipsky stood up on stage and talked about data for 52 minutes. >> Yeah. Right. >> It was timed, 52 minutes. >> Right. >> Huge emphasis on that. One of the things that Adam said to John Furrier when they were able to sit down >> Yeah >> a week or so ago at an event preview, was that CIOs and CEOs are not coming to Adam to talk about technology. They want to talk about transformation. They want to talk about business transformation. >> Sure, yes, yes. >> Talk to me in our last couple of minutes about what CEOs and CIOs are coming to you saying, "Holger, help us figure this out. We have to transform the business." >> Right. So we advise, I'm going quote our friends at Gartner, once the type A company. So we'll use technology aggressively, right? So take everything in the audience with a grain of salt, followers are the laggards, and so on. So for them, it's really the cusp of doing AI, right? Getting that data together. It has to be in the cloud. We live in the air of infinite computing. The cloud makes computing infinite, both from a storage, from a compute perspective, from an AI perspective, and then define new business models and create new best practices on top of that. Because, in the past, everything was fine out on premise, right? We talked about the (indistinct) size. Now in the cloud, it's just the business model to say, "Do I want to have a little more AI? Do I want a to run a little more? Will it give me the insight in the business?". So, that's the transformation that is happening, really. So, bringing your data together, this live conversation data, but not for bringing the data together. There's often the big win for the business for the first time to see the data. AWS is banking on that. The supply chain product, as an example. So many disparate systems, bring them them together. Big win for the business. But, the win for the business, ultimately, is when you change the paradigm from the user showing up to do something, to software doing stuff for us, right? >> Right. >> We have too much in this operator paradigm. If the user doesn't show up, doesn't find the click, doesn't find where to go, nothing happens. It can't be done in the 21st century, right? Software has to look over your shoulder. >> Good point. >> Understand one for you, autonomous self-driving systems. That's what CXOs, who're future looking, will be talked to come to AWS and all the other cloud vendors. >> Got it, last question for you. We're making a sizzle reel on Instagram. >> Yeah. >> If you had, like, a phrase, like, or a 30 second pitch that would describe re:Invent 2022 in the direction the company's going. What would that elevator pitch say? >> 30 second pitch? >> Yeah. >> All right, just timing. AWS is doing well. It's providing more depth, less breadth. Making things work together. It's catching up in some areas, has some interesting offerings, like the healthcare offering, the security data lake offering, which might change some things in the industry. It's staying the course and it's going strong. >> Ah, beautifully said, Holger. Thank you so much for joining Paul and me. >> Might have been too short. I don't know. (laughs) >> About 10 seconds left over. >> It was perfect, absolutely perfect. >> Thanks for having me. >> Perfect sizzle reel. >> Appreciate it. >> We appreciate your insights, what you're seeing this week, and the direction the company is going. We can't wait to see what happens in the next year. And, yeah. >> Thanks for having me. >> And of course, we've been on so many times. We know we're going to have you back. (laughs) >> Looking forward to it, thank you. >> All right, for Holger Mueller and Paul Gillan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCube", the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is day four of theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of our Super Bowl, aka AWS re:Invent 2022. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. My name is Dave Vellante. Sanjay Poonen is in the house, CEO and president of Cohesity. He's sitting in as our guest market watcher, market analyst, you know, deep expertise, new to the job at Cohesity. He was kind enough to sit in, and help us break down what's happening at re:Invent. But Paul, first thing, this morning we heard from Werner Vogels. He was basically given a masterclass on system design. It reminded me of mainframes years ago. When we used to, you know, bury through those IBM blue books and red books. You remember those Sanjay? That's how we- learned back then. >> Oh God, I remember those, Yeah. >> But it made me think, wow, now you know IBM's more of a systems design, nobody talks about IBM anymore. Everybody talks about Amazon. So you wonder, 20 years from now, you know what it's going to be. But >> Well- >> Werner's amazing. >> He pulled out a 24 year old document. >> Yup. >> That he had written early in Amazon's evolution about synchronous design or about essentially distributed architectures that turned out to be prophetic. >> His big thing was nature is asynchronous. So systems are asynchronous. Synchronous is an illusion. It's an abstraction. It's kind of interesting. But, you know- >> Yeah, I mean I've had synonyms for things. Timeless architecture. Werner's an absolute legend. I mean, when you think about folks who've had, you know, impact on technology, you think of people like Jony Ive in design. >> Dave: Yeah. >> You got to think about people like Werner in architecture and just the fact that Andy and the team have been able to keep him engaged that long... I pay attention to his keynote. Peter DeSantis has obviously been very, very influential. And then of course, you know, Adam did a good job, you know, watching from, you know, having watched since I was at the first AWS re:Invent conference, at time was President SAP and there was only a thousand people at this event, okay? Andy had me on stage. I think I was one of the first guest of any tech company in 2011. And to see now this become like, it's a mecca. It's a mother of all IT events, and watch sort of even the transition from Andy to Adam is very special. I got to catch some of Ruba's keynote. So while there's some new people in the mix here, this has become a force of nature. And the last time I was here was 2019, before Covid, watched the last two ones online. But it feels like, I don't know 'about what you guys think, it feels like it's back to 2019 levels. >> I was here in 2019. I feel like this was bigger than 2019 but some people have said that it's about the same. >> I think it was 60,000 versus 50,000. >> Yes. So close. >> It was a little bigger in 2019. But it feels like it's more active. >> And then last year, Sanjay, you weren't here but it was 25,000, which was amazing 'cause it was right in that little space between Omicron, before Omicron hit. But you know, let me ask you a question and this is really more of a question about Amazon's maturity and I know you've been following them since early days. But the way I get the question, number one question I get from people is how is Amazon AWS going to be different under Adam than it was under Andy? What do you think? >> I mean, Adam's not new because he was here before. In some senses he knows the Amazon culture from prior, when he was running sales and marketing prior. But then he took the time off and came back. I mean, this will always be, I think, somewhat Andy's baby, right? Because he was the... I, you know, sent him a text, "You should be really proud of what you accomplished", but you know, I think he also, I asked him when I saw him a few weeks ago "Are you going to come to re:Invent?" And he says, "No, I want to leave this to be Adam's show." And Adam's going to have a slightly different view. His keynotes are probably half the time. It's a little bit more vision. There was a lot more customer stories at the beginning of it. Taking you back to the inspirational pieces of it. I think you're going to see them probably pulling up the stack and not just focused in infrastructure. Many of their platform services are evolved. Many of their, even application services. I'm surprised when I talk to customers. Like Amazon Connect, their sort of call center type technologies, an app layer. It's getting a lot. I mean, I've talked to a couple of Fortune 500 companies that are moving off Ayer to Connect. I mean, it's happening and I did not know that. So it's, you know, I think as they move up the stack, the platform's gotten more... The data centric stack has gotten, and you know, in the area we're working with Cohesity, security, data protection, they're an investor in our company. So this is an important, you know, both... I think tech player and a partner for many companies like us. >> I wonder the, you know, the marketplace... there's been a big push on the marketplace by all the cloud companies last couple of years. Do you see that disrupting the way softwares, enterprise software is sold? >> Oh, for sure. I mean, you have to be a ostrich with your head in the sand to not see this wave happening. I mean, what's it? $150 billion worth of revenue. Even though the growth rates dipped a little bit the last quarter or so, it's still aggregatively between Amazon and Azure and Google, you know, 30% growth. And I think we're still in the second or third inning off a grand 1 trillion or 2 trillion of IT, shifting not all of it to the cloud, but significantly faster. So if you add up all of the big things of the on-premise world, they're, you know, they got to a certain size, their growth is stable, but stalling. These guys are growing significantly faster. And then if you add on top of them, platform companies the data companies, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks, you know, Datadog, and then apps companies on top of that. I think the move to the Cloud is inevitable. In SaaS companies, I don't know why you would ever implement a CRM solution on-prem. It's all gone to the Cloud. >> Oh, it is. >> That happened 15 years ago. I mean, begin within three, five years of the advent of Salesforce. And the same thing in HR. Why would you deploy a HR solution now? You've got Workday, you've got, you know, others that are so some of those apps markets are are just never coming back to an on-prem capability. >> Sanjay, I want to ask you, you built a reputation for being able to, you know, forecast accurately, hit your plan, you know, you hit your numbers, you're awesome operator. Even though you have a, you know, technology degree, which you know, that's a two-tool star, multi-tool star. But I call it the slingshot economy. This is like, I mean I've seen probably more downturns than anybody in here, you know, given... Well maybe, maybe- >> Maybe me. >> You and I both. I've never seen anything like this, where where visibility is so unpredictable. The economy is sling-shotting. It's like, oh, hurry up, go Covid, go, go go build, build, build supply, then pull back. And now going forward, now pulling back. Slootman said, you know, on the call, "Hey the guide, is the guide." He said, "we put it out there, We do our best to hit it." But you had CrowdStrike had issues you know, mid-market, ServiceNow. I saw McDermott on the other day on the, on the TV. I just want to pay, you know, buy from the guy. He's so (indistinct) >> But mixed, mixed results, Salesforce, you know, Octa now pre-announcing, hey, they're going to be, or announcing, you know, better visibility, forward guide. Elastic kind of got hit really hard. HPE and Dell actually doing really well in the enterprise. >> Yep. >> 'Course Dell getting killed in the client. But so what are you seeing out there? How, as an executive, do you deal with such poor visibility? >> I think, listen, what the last two or three years have taught us is, you know, with the supply chain crisis, with the surge that people thought you may need of, you know, spending potentially in the pandemic, you have to start off with your tech platform being 10 x better than everybody else. And differentiate, differentiate. 'Cause in a crowded market, but even in a market that's getting tougher, if you're not differentiating constantly through technology innovation, you're going to get left behind. So you named a few places, they're all technology innovators, but even if some of them are having challenges, and then I think you're constantly asking yourselves, how do you move from being a point product to a platform with more and more services where you're getting, you know, many of them moving really fast. In the case of Roe, I like him a lot. He's probably one of the most savvy operators, also that I respect. He calls these speedboats, and you know, his core platform started off with the firewall network security. But he's built now a very credible cloud security, cloud AI security business. And I think that's how you need to be thinking as a tech executive. I mean, if you got core, your core beachhead 10 x better than everybody else. And as you move to adjacencies in these new platforms, have you got now speedboats that are getting to a point where they are competitive advantage? Then as you think of the go-to-market perspective, it really depends on where you are as a company. For a company like our size, we need partners a lot more. Because if we're going to, you know, stand on the shoulders of giants like Isaac Newton said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders giants." I need to really go and cultivate Amazon so they become our lead partner in cloud. And then appropriately Microsoft and Google where I need to. And security. Part of what we announced last week was, last month, yeah, last couple of weeks ago, was the data security alliance with the biggest security players. What was I trying to do with that? First time ever done in my industry was get Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Wallace, Tenable, CyberArk, Splunk, all to build an alliance with me so I could stand on their shoulders with them helping me. If you're a bigger company, you're constantly asking yourself "how do you make sure you're getting your, like Amazon, their top hundred customers spending more with that?" So I think the the playbook evolves, and I'm watching some of these best companies through this time navigate through this. And I think leadership is going to be tested in enormously interesting ways. >> I'll say. I mean, Snowflake is really interesting because they... 67% growth, which is, I mean, that's best in class for a company that's $2 billion. And, but their guide was still, you know, pretty aggressive. You know, so it's like, do you, you know, when it when it's good times you go, "hey, we can we can guide conservatively and know we can beat it." But when you're not certain, you can't dial down too far 'cause your investors start to bail on you. It's a really tricky- >> But Dave, I think listen, at the end of the day, I mean every CEO should not be worried about the short term up and down in the stock price. You're building a long-term multi-billion dollar company. In the case of Frank, he has, I think I shot to a $10 billion, you know, analytics data warehousing data management company on the back of that platform, because he's eyeing the market that, not just Teradata occupies today, but now Oracle occupies or other databases, right? So his tam as it grows bigger, you're going to have some of these things, but that market's big. I think same with Palo Alto. I mean Datadog's another company, 75% growth. >> Yeah. >> At 20% margins, like almost rule of 95. >> Amazing. >> When they're going after, not just the observability market, they're eating up the sim market, security analytics, the APM market. So I think, you know, that's, you look at these case studies of companies who are going from point product to platforms and are steadily able to grow into new tams. You know, to me that's very inspiring. >> I get it. >> Sanjay: That's what I seek to do at our com. >> I get that it's a marathon, but you know, when you're at VMware, weren't you looking at the stock price every day just out of curiosity? I mean listen, you weren't micromanaging it. >> You do, but at the end of the day, and you certainly look at the days of earnings and so on so forth. >> Yeah. >> Because you want to create shareholder value. >> Yeah. >> I'm not saying that you should not but I think in obsession with that, you know, in a short term, >> Going to kill ya. >> Makes you, you know, sort of myopically focused on what may not be the right thing in the long term. Now in the long arc of time, if you're not creating shareholder value... Look at what happened to Steve Bomber. You needed Satya to come in to change things and he's created a lot of value. >> Dave: Yeah, big time. >> But I think in the short term, my comments were really on the quarter to quarter, but over a four a 12 quarter, if companies are growing and creating profitable growth, they're going to get the valuation they deserve. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Do you the... I want to ask you about something Arvind Krishna said in the previous IBM earnings call, that IT is deflationary and therefore it is resistant to the macroeconomic headwinds. So IT spending should actually thrive in a deflation, in a adverse economic climate. Do you think that's true? >> Not all forms of IT. I pay very close attention to surveys from, whether it's the industry analysts or the Morgan Stanleys, or Goldman Sachs. The financial analysts. And I think there's a gluc in certain sectors that will get pulled back. Traditional view is when the economies are growing people spend on the top line, front office stuff, sales, marketing. If you go and look at just the cloud 100 companies, which are the hottest private companies, and maybe with the public market companies, there's way too many companies focused on sales and marketing. Way too many. I think during a downsizing and recession, that's going to probably shrink some, because they were all built for the 2009 to 2021 era, where it was all about the top line. Okay, maybe there's now a proposition for companies who are focused on cost optimization, supply chain visibility. Security's been intangible, that I think is going to continue to an investment. So I tell, listen, if you are a tech investor or if you're an operator, pay attention to CIO priorities. And right now, in our business at Cohesity, part of the reason we've embraced things like ransomware protection, there is a big focus on security. And you know, by intelligently being a management and a security company around data, I do believe we'll continue to be extremely relevant to CIO budgets. There's a ransomware, 20 ransomware attempts every second. So things of that kind make you relevant in a bank. You have to stay relevant to a buying pattern or else you lose momentum. >> But I think what's happening now is actually IT spending's pretty good. I mean, I track this stuff pretty closely. It's just that expectations were so high and now you're seeing earnings estimates come down and so, okay, and then you, yeah, you've got the, you know the inflationary factors and your discounted cash flows but the market's actually pretty good. >> Yeah. >> You know, relative to other downturns that if this is not a... We're not actually not in a downturn. >> Yeah. >> Not yet anyway. It may be. >> There's a valuation there. >> You have to prepare. >> Not sales. >> Yeah, that's right. >> When I was on CNBC, I said "listen, it's a little bit like that story of Joseph. Seven years of feast, seven years of famine." You have to prepare for potentially your worst. And if it's not the worst, you're in good shape. So will it be a recession 2023? Maybe. You know, high interest rates, inflation, war in Russia, Ukraine, maybe things do get bad. But if you belt tightening, if you're focused in operational excellence, if it's not a recession, you're pleasantly surprised. If it is one, you're prepared for it. >> All right. I'm going to put you in the spot and ask you for predictions. Expert analysis on the World Cup. What do you think? Give us the breakdown. (group laughs) >> As my... I wish India was in the World Cup, but you can't get enough Indians at all to play soccer well enough, but we're not, >> You play cricket, though. >> I'm a US man first. I would love to see one of Brazil, or Argentina. And as a Messi person, I don't know if you'll get that, but it would be really special for Messi to lead, to end his career like Maradonna winning a World Cup. I don't know if that'll happen. I'm probably going to go one of the Latin American countries, if the US doesn't make it far enough. But first loyalty to the US team, and then after one of the Latin American countries. >> And you think one of the Latin American countries is best bet to win or? >> I don't know. It's hard to tell. They're all... What happens now at this stage >> So close, right? >> is anybody could win. >> Yeah. You just have lots of shots of gold. I'm a big soccer fan. It could, I mean, I don't know if the US is favored to win, but if they get far enough, you get to the finals, anybody could win. >> I think they get Netherlands next, right? >> That's tough. >> Really tough. >> But... The European teams are good too, but I would like to see US go far enough, and then I'd like to see Latin America with team one of Argentina, or Brazil. That's my prediction. >> I know you're a big Cricket fan. Are you able to follow Cricket the way you like? >> At god unearthly times the night because they're in Australia, right? >> Oh yeah. >> Yeah. >> I watched the T-20 World Cup, select games of it. Yeah, you know, I'm not rapidly following every single game but the World Cup games, I catch you. >> Yeah, it's good. >> It's good. I mean, I love every sport. American football, soccer. >> That's great. >> You get into basketball now, I mean, I hope the Warriors come back strong. Hey, how about the Warriors Celtics? What do we think? We do it again? >> Well- >> This year. >> I'll tell you what- >> As a Boston Celtics- >> I would love that. I actually still, I have to pay off some folks from Palo Alto office with some bets still. We are seeing unprecedented NBA performance this year. >> Yeah. >> It's amazing. You look at the stats, it's like nothing. I know it's early. Like nothing we've ever seen before. So it's exciting. >> Well, always a pleasure talking to you guys. >> Great to have you on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you. Love the expert analysis. >> Sanjay Poonen. Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. re:Invent 2022, day four. We're winding up in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lighthearted soft music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. There's the cubes coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 formerly world. We've been here since 2010 and world 2010 to now it's 2022. And it's VMware Explorer. We're here at the CEO, regular writer. Welcome back to the cube. Great to see you in person. >>Yeah. Great to be here in person, >>Dave and I are, are proud to say that we've been to 12 straight years of covering VMware's annual conference. And thank you. We've seen the change in the growth over time and you know, it's kind of, I won't say pinch me moment, but it's more of a moment of there's the VMware that's grown into the cloud after your famous deal with Andy jazzy in 2016, we've been watching what has been a real sea change and VMware since taking that legacy core business and straightening out the cloud strategy in 2016, and then since then an acceleration of, of cloud native, like direction under your leadership at VMware. Now you're the CEO take us through that because this is where we are right now. We are here at the pinnacle of VMware 2.0 or cloud native VMware, as you point out on your keynote, take us through that history real quick. Cuz I think it's important to know that you've been the architect of a lot of this change and it's it's working. >>Yeah, definitely. We are super excited because like I said, it's working, the history is pretty simple. I mean we tried running our own cloud cloud air. We cloud air didn't work so well. Right. And then at that time, customers really gave us strong feedback that the hybrid they wanted was a Amazon together. Right. And so that's what we went back and did and the andjay announcement, et cetera. And then subsequently as we were continue to build it out, I mean, once that happened, we were able to go work with the Satia and Microsoft and others to get the thing built out all over. Then the next question was okay, Hey, that's great for the workloads that are running on vSphere. What's the story for workloads that are gonna be cloud native and benefit a lot from being cloud native. So that's when we went the Tansu route and the Kubernetes route, we did a couple of acquisitions and then we started that started paying off now with the Tansu portfolio. And last but not the least is once customers have this distributed portfolio now, right. Increasingly everything is becoming multi-cloud. How do you manage and connect and secure. So that's what you start seeing that you saw the management announcement, networking and security and everything else is cooking. And you'll see more stuff there. >>Yeah know, we've been talking about super cloud. It's kinda like a multi-cloud on steroids kind a little bit different pivot of it. And we're seeing some use cases. >>No, no, it's, it's a very great, it's a, it's pretty close to what we talk about. >>Awesome. I mean, and we're seeing this kind of alignment in the industry. It's kind of open, but I have to ask you, when did you, you have the moment where you said multicloud is the game changer moment. When did you have, because you guys had hybrid, which is really early as well. When was the Raghu? When did you have the moment where you said, Hey, multicloud is what's happening. That's we're doubling down on that go. >>I mean, if you think about the evolution of the cloud players, right. Microsoft really started picking up around the 2018 timeframe. I mean, I'm talking about Azure, right? >>In a big way. >>Yeah. In a big way. Right. When that happened and then Google got really serious, it became pretty clear that this was gonna be looking more like the old database market than it looked like a single player cloud market. Right. Equally sticky, but very strong players all with lots of IP creation capability. So that's when we said, okay, from a supplier side, this is gonna become multi. And from a customer side that has always been their desire. Right. Which is, Hey, I don't want to get locked into anybody. I want to do multiple things. And the cloud vendors also started leveraging that OnPrem. Microsoft said, Hey, if you're a windows customer, your licensing is gonna be better off if you go to Azure. Right. Oracle did the same thing. So it just became very clear. >>I am, I have gone make you laugh. I always go back to the software mainframe because I, I think you were here. Right. I mean, you're, you're almost 20 years in. Yeah. And I, the reason I appreciate that is because, well, that's technically very challenging. How do you make virtualization overhead virtually non-existent how do you run any workload? Yeah. How do you recover from, I mean, that's was not trivial. Yeah. Okay. So what's the technical, you know, analog today, the real technical challenge. When you think about cross cloud services. >>Yeah. I mean, I think it's different for each of these layers, right? So as I was alluding to for management, I mean, you can go each one of them by themselves, there is one way of Mo doing multi-cloud, which is multiple clouds. Right. You could say, look, I'm gonna build a great product for AWS. And then I'm gonna build a great product for Azure. I'm gonna build a great product for Google. That's not what aria is. Aria is a true multi-cloud, which means it pulls data in from multiple places. Right? So there are two or three, there are three things that aria has done. That's I think is super interesting. One is they're not trying to take all the data and bring it in. They're trying to federate the data sources. And secondly, they're doing it in real time and they're able to construct this graph of a customer's cloud resources. >>Right. So to keep the graph constructed and pulling data, federating data, I think that's a very interesting concept. The second thing that, like I said is it's a real time because in the cloud, a container might come and go like that. Like that is a second technical challenge. The third it's not as much a technical challenge, but I really like what they have done for the interface they've used GraphQL. Right? So it's not about if you remember in the old world, people talk about single pan or glass, et cetera. No, this is nothing to do with pan or glass. This is a data model. That's a graph and a query language that's suited for that. So you can literally think of whatever you wanna write. You can write and express it in GraphQL and pull all sorts of management applications. You can say, Hey, I can look at cost. I can look at metrics. I can look at whatever it is. It's not five different types of applications. It's one, that's what I think had to do it at scale is the other problem. And, and >>The, the technical enable there is just it's good software. It's a protocol. It's >>No, no, it's, it's, it's it's software. It's a data model. And it's the Federation architecture that they've got, which is open. Right. You can pull in data from Datadog, just as well as from >>Pretty >>Much anything data from VR op we don't care. Right? >>Yeah. Yeah. So rego, I have to ask you, I'm glad you like the Supercloud cuz you know, we, we think multi-cloud still early, but coming fast. I mean, everyone has multiple clouds, but spanning this idea of spanning across has interesting sequences. Do you data, do you do computer both and a lot of good things happening. Kubernetes been containers, all that good stuff. Okay. How do you see the first rev of multi-cloud evolving? Like is it what happens? What's the sequence, what's the order of operations for a client standpoint? Customer standpoint of, of multicloud or Supercloud because we think we're seeing it as a refactoring of something like snowflake, they're a data base, they're a data warehouse on the cloud. They, they say data cloud they'd they like they'll tell us no, you, we're not a data. We're not a data warehouse. We're data cloud. Okay. You're a data warehouse refactored for the CapEx from Amazon and cooler, newer things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a behavior change. Yeah. But it's still a data warehouse. Yeah. How do you see this multi-cloud environment? Refactoring? Is there something that you see that might be different? That's the same if you know what I'm saying? Like what's what, what's the ne the new thing that's happening with multi-cloud, that's different than just saying I'm I'm doing SAS on the cloud. >>Yeah. So I would say, I would point to a, a couple of things that are different. Firstly, my, the answer depends on which category you are in. Like the category that snowflake is in is very different than Kubernetes or >>Something or Mongo DB, right? >>Yeah. Or Mongo DB. So, so it is not appropriate to talk about one multi-cloud approach across data and compute and so, so on and so forth. So I'll talk about the spaces that we play. Right. So step one, for most customers is two application architectures, right? The cloud native architecture and an enterprise native architecture and tying that together either through data or through networks or through et cetera. So that's where most of the customers are. Right. And then I would say step two is to bring these things together in a more, in a closer fashion and that's where we are going. And that is why you saw the cloud universal announcement and that's already, you've seen the Tansu announcement, et cetera. So it's really, the step one was two distinct clouds. That is just two separate islands. >>So the other thing that we did, that's really what my, the other thing that I'd like to get to your reaction on, cause this is great. You're like a masterclass in the cube here. Yeah, totally is. We see customers becoming super clouds because they're getting the benefit of, of VMware, AWS. And so if I'm like a media company or insurance company, if I have scale, if I continue to invest in, in cloud native development, I do all these things. I'm gonna have a da data scale advantage, possibly agile, which means I can build apps and functionality very quick for customers. I might become my own cloud within the vertical. Exactly. And so I could then service other people in the insurance vertical if I'm the insurance company with my technology and create a separate power curve that never existed before. Cause the CapEx is off the table, it's operating expense. Yep. That runs into the income statement. Yep. This is a fundamental business model shift and an advantage of this kind of scenario. >>And that's why I don't think snowflakes, >>What's your reaction to that? Cuz that's something that, that is not really, talk's highly nuanced and situational. But if Goldman Sachs builds the biggest cloud on the planet for financial service for their own benefit, why wouldn't they >>Exactly. >>And they're >>Gonna build it. They sort of hinted at it that when they were up on stage on AWS, right. That is just their first big step. I'm pretty sure over time they would be using other clouds. Think >>They already are on >>Prem. Yeah. On prem. Exactly. They're using VMware technology there. Right? I mean think about it, AWS. I don't know how many billions of dollars they're spending on AWS R and D Microsoft is doing the same thing. Google's doing the same thing we are doing. Not as much as them that you're doing oral chair. Yeah. If you are a CIO, you would be insane not to take advantage of all of this IP that's getting created and say, look, I'm just gonna bet on one. Doesn't make any sense. Right. So that's what you're seeing. And then >>I think >>The really smart companies, like you talked about would say, look, I will do something for my industry that uses these underlying clouds as the substrate, but encapsulates my IP and my operating model that I then offer to other >>Partners. Yeah. And their incentive for differentiation is scale. Yeah. And capability. And that's a super cloud. That's a, or would be say it environment. >>Yeah. But this is why this, >>It seems like the same >>Game, but >>This, I mean, I think it environment is different than >>Well, I mean it advantage to help the business, the old day service, you >>Said snowflake guys out the marketing guys. So you, >>You said snowflake data warehouse. See, I don't think it's in data warehouse. It's not, that's like saying, you >>Know, I, over >>VMware is a virtualization company or service now is a help desk tool. I, this is the change. Yes. That's occurring. Yes. And that you're enabling. So take the Goldman Sachs example. They're gonna run OnPrem. They're gonna use your infrastructure to do selfer. They're gonna build on AWS CapEx. They're gonna go across clouds and they're gonna need some multi-cloud services. And that's your opportunity. >>Exactly. That's that's really, when you, in the keynote, I talked about cloud universal. Right? So think of a future where we can go to a customer and say, Mr. Customer buy thousand scores, a hundred thousand cores, whatever capacity you can use it, any which way you want on any application platform. Right. And it could be OnPrem. It could be in the cloud, in the cloud of their choice in multiple clouds. And this thing can be fungible and they can tie it to the right services. If they like SageMaker they could tie it to Sage or Aurora. They could tie it to Aurora, cetera, et cetera. So I think that's really the foundation that we are setting. Well, I think, I >>Mean, you're building a cloud across clouds. I mean, that's the way I look at it. And, and that's why it's, to me, the, the DPU announcement, the project Monterey coming to fruition is so important. Yeah. Because if you don't have that, if you're not on that new Silicon curve yep. You're gonna be left behind. Oh, >>Absolutely. It allows us to build things that you would not otherwise be able to do, >>Not to pat ourselves on the back Ragu. But we, in what, 2013 day we said, feel >>Free. >>We, we said with Lou Tucker when OpenStack was crashing. Yeah. Yeah. And then Kubernetes was just a paper. We said, this could be the interoperability layer. Yeah. You got it. And you could have inter clouding cuz there was no clouding. I was gonna riff on inter networking. But if you remember inter networking during the OSI model, TCP and IP were hardened after the physical data link layer was taken care of. So that enabled an entire new industry that was open, open interconnect. Right. So we were saying inter clouding. So what you're kind of getting at with cross cloud is you're kind of creating this routing model if you will. Not necessarily routing, but like connection inter clouding, we called it. I think it's kinda a terrible name. >>What you said about Kubernetes is super critical. It is turning out to be the infrastructure API so long. It has been an infrastructure API for a certain cluster. Right. But if you think about what we said about VSE eight with VSE eight Kubernetes becomes the data center API. Now we sort of glossed over the point of the keynote, but you could do operations storage, anything that you can do on vSphere, you can do using a Kubernetes API. Yeah. And of course you can do all the containers in the Kubernetes clusters and et cetera, is what you could always do. Now you could do that on a VMware environment. OnPrem, you could do that on EKS. Now Kubernetes has become the standard programming model for infrastructure across. It >>Was the great equalizer. Yeah. You, we used to say Amazon turned the data center through an API. It turns, turns of like a lot of APIs and a lot of complexity. Right. And Kubernetes changed. >>Well, the role, the role of defacto standards played a lot into the T C P I P revolution before it became a standard standard. What the question Raghu, as you look at, we had submit on earlier, we had tutorial on as well. What's the disruptive enabler from a defacto. What in your mind, what should, because Kubernetes became kind of defacto, even though it was in the CNCF and in an open source open, it wasn't really standard standard. There's no like standards, body, but what de facto thing has to happen in your mind's eye around making inter clouding or connecting clouds in a, in a way that's gonna create extensibility and growth. What do you see as a de facto thing that the industry should rally around? Obviously Kubernetes is one, is there something else that you see that's important for in an open way that the industry can discuss and, and get behind? >>Yeah. I mean, there are things like identity, right? Which are pretty critical. There is connectivity and networking. So these are all things that the industry can rally around. Right. And that goes along with any modern application infrastructure. So I would say those are the building blocks that need to happen on the data side. Of course there are so many choices as well. So >>How about, you know, security? I think about, you know, when after stuck net, the, the whole industry said, Hey, we have to do a better job of collaborating. And then when you said identity, it just sort of struck me. But then a lot of people tried to sort of monetize private reporting and things like that. So you do you see a movement within the technology industry to do a better job of collaborating to, to solve the acute, you know, security problems? >>Yeah. I think the customer pressure and government pressure right. Causes that way. Yeah. Even now, even in our current universe, you see, there is a lot of behind the scenes collaboration amongst the security teams of all of the tech companies that is not widely seen or known. Right. For example, my CISO knows the AWS CSO or the Microsoft CSO and they all talk and they share the right information about vulnerability attacks and so on and so forth. So there's already a certain amount of collaboration that's happening and that'll only increase. Do, >>Do you, you know, I was somewhat surprised. I didn't hear more in your face about security would, is that just because you had such a strong multi-cloud message that you wanted to get, get across, cuz your security story is very strong and deep. When you get into the DPU side of things, the, you know, the separation of resources and the encryption and I'll end to end >>I'm well, we have a phenomenal security story. Yeah. Yeah. Tell security story and yes. I mean I'll need guilty to the fact that in the keynote you have yeah, yeah, sure time. But what we are doing with NSX and you will hear about some NSX projects as you, if you have time to go to some of the, the sessions. Yeah. There's one called project, not star. Another is called project Watchman or watch, I think it's called, we're all dealing with this. That is gonna strengthen the security story even more. Yeah. >>We think security and data is gonna be a big part of it. Right. As CEO, I have to ask you now that you're the CEO, first of all, I'd love to talk about product with you cuz you're yeah. Yeah. We just great conversation. We want to kind of read thet leaves and ask pointed questions cuz we're putting the puzzle together in real time here with the audience. But as CEO, now you have a lot of discussions around the business. You, the Broadcom thing happening, you got the rename here, you got multi-cloud all good stuff happening. Dave and I were chatting before we came on this morning around the marketplace, around financial valuations and EBIDA numbers. When you have so much strategic Goodwill and investment in the oven right now with the, with the investments in cloud native multi-year investments on a trajectory, you got economies of scale there. >>It's just now coming out to be harvest and more behind it. Yeah. As you come into the Broadcom and or the new world wave that's coming, how do you talk about that value? Cuz you can't really put a number on it yet because there's no customers on it. I mean some customers, but you can't probably some for form. It's not like sales numbers. Yeah. Yeah. How do you make the argument to the PE type folks out there? Like EBIDA and then all the strategic value. What's the, what's the conversation like if you can share any, I know it's obviously public company, all the things going down, but like how do you talk about strategic value to numbers folks? >>Yeah. I mean, we are not talking to PE guys at all. Right. I mean the only conversation we have is helping Broadcom with >>Yeah. But, but number people who are looking at the number, EBIDA kind of, >>Yeah. I mean, you'd be surprised if, for, for example, even with Broadcom, they look at the business holistically as what are the prospects of this business becoming a franchise that is durable and could drive a lot of value. Right. So that's how they look at it holistically. It's not a number driven. >>They do. They look at that. >>Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's a misperception to say, Hey, it's a numbers driven conversation. It's a business driven conversation where, I mean, and Hawk's been public about it. He says, look, I look at businesses. Can they be leaders in their market? Yeah. Because leaders get, as we all know a disproportionate share of the economic value, is it a durable franchise that's gonna last 10 years or more, right. Obviously with technology changes in between, but 10 years or more >>Or 10, you got your internal, VMware talent customers and >>Partners. Yeah. Significant competitive advantage. So that's, that's really where the conversation starts and the numbers fall out of it. Got it. >>Okay. So I think >>There's a track record too. >>That culture >>That VMware has, you've always had an engineering culture. That's turned, you know, ideas and problems into products that, that have been very successful. >>Well, they had different engineering cultures. They're chips. You guys are software. Right. You guys know >>Software. Yeah. Mean they've been very successful with Broadcom, the standalone networking company since they took it over. Right. I mean, it's, there's a lot of amazing innovation going on there. >>Yeah. Not, not that I'm smiling. I want to kind of poke at this question question. I'll see if I get an answer out of you, when you talk to Hawk tan, does he feel like he bought a lot more than he thought or does he, did he, does he know it's all here? So >>The last two months, I mean, they've been going through a very deliberate process of digging into each business and certainly feels like he got a phenomenal asset base. Yeah. He said that to me even today after the keynote, right. Is the amazing amount of product capability that he's seeing in every one of our businesses. And that's been the constant frame. >>But congratulations on that. >>I've heard, I've heard Hawk talk about the shift to, to Mer merchant Silicon. Yeah. From custom Silicon. But I wanted to ask you when you look at things like AWS nitro yeah. And graviton and train and the advantage that AWS has with custom Silicon, you see Google and Microsoft sort of Alibaba following suit. Would it benefit you to have custom Silicon for, for DPU? I mean, I guess you, you know, to have a tighter integration or do you feel like with the relationships that you have that doesn't buy you anything? >>Yeah. I mean we have pretty strong relationships with in fact fantastic relationships with the Invidia and Intel and AMD >>Benon and AMD now. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've been working with the Pendo team in their previous incarnations for years. Right, right. When they were at Cisco and then same thing with the, we know the Melanox team as well as the invi original teams and Intel is the collaboration right. From the get go of the company. So we don't feel a need for any of that. We think, I mean, it's clear for those cloud folks, right. They're going towards a vertical integration model and select portions of their stack, like you talked about, but there is always a room for horizontal integration model. Right. And that's what we are a part of. Right. So there'll be a number of DPU pro vendors. There'll be a number of CPU vendors. There'll be a number of other storage, et cetera, et cetera. And we think that is goodness in an alternative model compared to a vertically integr >>And yeah. What this trade offs, right. It's not one or the other, I mean I used to tell, talk to Al Shugar about this all the time. Right. I mean, if vertically integrated, there may be some cost advantages, but then you've got flexibility advantages. If you're using, you know, what the industry is building. Right. And those are the tradeoffs, so yeah. Yeah. >>Greg, what are you excited about right now? You got a lot going on obviously great event. Branding's good. Love the graphics. I was kind of nervous about the name changed. I likem world, but you know, that's, I'm kind of like it >>Doesn't readily roll off your phone. Yeah. >>I know. We, I had everyone miscue this morning already and said VMware Explorer. So >>You pay Laura fine. Yeah. >>Now, I >>Mean a quarter >>Curse jar, whatever I did wrong. I don't believe it. Only small mistake that's because the thing wasn't on. Okay. Anyway, what's on your plate. What's your, what's some of the milestones. Do you share for your employees, your customers and your partners out there that are watching that might wanna know what's next in the whole Broadcom VMware situation. Is there a timeline? Can you talk publicly about what? To what people can expect? >>Yeah, no, we, we talk all the time in the company about that. Right? Because even if there is no news, you need to talk about what is where we are. Right. Because this is such a big transaction and employees need to know where we are at every minute of the day. Right? Yeah. So, so we definitely talk about that. We definitely talk about that with customers too. And where we are is that the, all the processes are on track, right? There is a regulatory track going on. And like I alluded to a few minutes ago, Broadcom is doing what they call the discovery phase of the integration planning, where they learn about the business. And then once that is done, they'll figure out what the operating model is. What Broadcom is said publicly is that the acquisition will close in their fiscal 23, which starts in November of this year, runs through October of next year. >>So >>Anywhere window, okay. As to where it is in that window. >>All right, Raghu, thank you so much for taking valuable time out of your conference time here for the queue. I really appreciate Dave and I both appreciate your friendship. Congratulations on the success as CEO, cuz we've been following your trials and tribulations and endeavors for many years and it's been great to chat with you. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's been great to chat with you, not just today, but yeah. Over a period of time and you guys do great work with this, so >>Yeah. And you guys making, making all the right calls at VMware. All right. More coverage. I'm shot. Dave ante cube coverage day one of three days of world war cup here in Moscone west, the cube coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 be right back.

(gentle music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase. Season two, episode three. This is about MarTech, emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is our ongoing series that you know and love hopefully that feature a great number of AWS ecosystem partners. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Got a great guest here from Branch. Michelle Lerner joins me, the senior director of business development. She's going to be talking about Branch but also about one of your favorite brands, Peet's, yep, the coffee place, and how they supercharged loyalty and app adoption with Branch. Michelle, it's great to have you on the program. >> Yeah. Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. >> Tell us a little bit about Branch, what you guys do for the modern mobile marketer. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you can think about Branch as a mobile linking platform. So what that means is we offer a seamless deep linking experience and insightful campaign measurement across every single marketing channel and platform on mobile. We exist so that we can break down walled gardens to help our customers engage with their customers in the most optimal way across any device and from every marketing channel. Our products are specifically designed to help create an amazing user experience, but also provide full picture holistic downstream measurement across any paid, owned, and earned channels so that brands can actually see what's working. So what that really means is that we make it really easy to scale our links across every single marketing channel, which then route the users to the right place at any device through even past install so that they can get to the context that they expect for a seamless experience. We then provide that cross channel analytics back to the brand so that they could see what's working and they can make better business decisions. So kind of summing it up, our industry leading mobile linking actually powers those deep links, also supports that measurement so that brands can build a sophisticated experience that actually delight their users but also improve their metrics and conversion rates. >> Those two things that you said are key. We expected to be delighted with whatever experience we're having and we also want to make sure, and obviously, the brands want to make sure that they're doing that but also that from an attribution perspective, from a campaign conversion perspective, that they can really understand the right tactics and the right strategic elements that are driving those conversions. That's been a challenge for marketers for a long time. Speaking of challenges, we've all been living through significant challenges. There's no way to say it nicely. The last two years, every industry completely affected by the pandemic talk. We're going to talk about Peet's Coffee. And I want to understand some of the challenges that you saw in the quick service restaurant or QSR industry at large. Talk to me about those industry challenges and then we'll dig into the Peet's story. >> Yeah, absolutely. So obviously the pandemic changed so much in our lives whether it's going to work or commuting or taking our kids to school or even getting our morning coffee. So when you think about Peet's, specifically within the QSR industry, they knew that they needed to innovate in order to make sure that they could provide their customers with their daily cups of coffee in a really safe and effective way. So they thought really quickly on their feet, they engaged us at Branch to help launch their order ahead messaging across their online and offline channels. They really wanted to maintain their commitment to an excellent customer experience but in a way that obviously would be safe and effective. >> That was one of the things that I missed the very most in the very beginning of the pandemic was going to my local Peet's. I missed that experience. Talk me about, you mentioned the online and offline, I'm very familiar with the online as an app user, mobile app user, but what were some of the challenges that they were looking to Branch to resolve on the offline experiences? People were queuing outside or for those folks that were they trying to get folks to convert to using the mobile app that maybe weren't users already? What was that online and offline experience? What were some of the challenges they were looking to resolve? >> Yeah, absolutely. The modern marketer is really both, like you said, online and offline, there is a heavy focus within the app and Peet's kind of wanted to bridge those two by pushing users into the app to provide a better experience there. So what they ended up doing was they used our deep linking capabilities to seamlessly route their customers to their loyalty program and their rewards catalog and other menu offerings within the app so that they could actually get things done in real time, but also in real time was the ability to then measure across those different campaigns so that they had visibility, Peet's, into kind of the way that they could optimize that campaign performance but also still give that great experience to their users. And they actually saw higher loyalty adoption, order values, and attributed purchases when they were able to kind of see in real time where these users were converting. But another thing that we're actually seeing across the board and Peet's did a great job of this was leveraging Branch power QR codes where we are seeing like the rebirth of the QR code. They're back, they're here to stay. They actually used that across multiple channels. So they used it with their in-store signage. You might have even seen it on their to go cups, coffee cards that were handed out by baristas. They were all encouraging customers to go order ahead using the Peet's coffee app. But that was kind of just the beginning for them. The creation of unique links for those QR codes actually spread for them to create Branch links across everything from emails to ads on Instagram. So before long, most of Peet's retail marketing were actually Branch links just because of the ease of creation and reliability, but more so again, going back to that customer experience, it really provided that good experience for the customers to make sure that they were getting within the mobile app so that they can take action and order their coffee. Another way that Branch kind of bridges the different platforms is actually between mobile web and app. Peet used Branch Journeys and that's a product of ours. It's a way that they can convert their mobile web users into app users. So they used deferred deep links with the ultimate goal of then converting those users into high value app users. So the Peet's team actually tested different creative and interstitials across the mobile site which would then place those users into the key pages, like either the homepage or the store locator, or the menu pages within the app. So that also helped them kind of build up not just their mobile app order online but also their delivery business so they could hire new trials of seasonal beverages. They could pair them with a free delivery offering. So they knew that they were able to leverage that at scale across multiple initiatives. >> I love those kinds of stories where it's kind of like a land and expand where there was obviously a global massive problem. They saw that recognized our customers are still going to be is demanding. Maybe if not more than they were before with I want my coffee, I want it now, you mentioned real time. I think one of the things we learned during the pandemic is access to realtime data isn't a nice to have anymore. We expect it as consumers even in our business lives, but the ability to be able to measure, course correct, but then see, wow, this is driving average order value up, we're getting more folks using our mobile app, maybe using delivery. Let's expand the usage of Branch across what we're doing in marketing can really help transform our marketing organization and a business at the brand level. >> Absolutely. And it also helps predict that brand loyalty. Because like you said, we, as consumers expect that that brands are going to kind of follow us where we are in our life cycle as consumers and if you don't do that, then you're going to be left in the dust unfortunately. >> I think one of the memories that will always stick with me, Michelle, during the last couple years is that first cup of Peet's that I didn't have to make at home myself. Just finally getting the courage to go back in, use the app, go in there, but oh man, that was probably the best taste of coffee I probably will ever have. You mentioned some of the products, you mentioned Journeys, and that allows them to do AB testing, looking at different CTAs, being able to kind of course correct and adjust campaigns in real time. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Journeys, what it does is it's basically a banner or a full page interstitial that is populated on the mobile web. So if you go to let's say Peets.com, you could get served as a user, either different creative or depending on where you are, location wise, you could be in the store, maybe there's a promotion. So it's triggered by all these different targeting capabilities. And so what that does is it takes me as a user. I can click that and go into the app where, like we said before, we have higher order value, higher lifetime value of a customer. And all my credit card information is saved. It just makes it so much more seamless for me to convert as a user within the app. And obviously Peet's likes that as well because then their conversion rates are actually higher. There's also kind of fun ways to play around with it. So if I am already a loyal customer and I have the app, you probably would target different creative for me than you would for someone who doesn't have the app. So you could say, hey, download our app, get $5 off of your next mobile order. Things like that you could play around with and you can see really does help increase that loyalty. But actually they were able to take, they kind of are experimenting with the geotargeted journeys in different key markets with different Peet's. And actually it was helping ultimately get their reinstalls growing. So for customers who maybe had the app before but needed to reinstall it because now there's such a bigger focus, they saw it both on the acquisition and the re-engagement side as well. >> So Branch has been pretty transformative, not in my estimation to Peet's marketing, but to Peet's as a business I'm hearing absolutely customer loyalty, revenue obviously impacted, brand loyalty, brand reputation. These are things that really kind of boil up to the top of the organization. So we're not just talking about benefits to the marketing and the sales folks. This is the overall massive business outcomes that you guys are enabling organizations like Peet's to generate. >> Yeah, definitely. And that's kind of what we tell our customers when they come to Branch. We want them to think about what their overall business objectives are versus if you think just campaign by campaign, okay, that's fine. But ultimately what are we trying to achieve? How could we help the bottom line? And then how can we also kind of help integrate with other mobile marketing technology or the modern tech stack that they're using? How do we integrate into that and actually provide not just a seamless experience for their end user, but with their marketing orgs, their product orgs, whoever's kind of touching the business as well? >> Have you noticed along those lines in the last couple of years as things like customer delight, seamless experience, the ability to translate, if I start on my iPad and I go to my laptop and then I finish a transaction on my phone, have you noticed your customer conversations increasing up to the C-suite level? Is this much more of a broad organizational objective around we've got to make sure that we have a really strong digital user experience? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like we were talking about before, it really does help affect the bottom line when you're providing a great experience with Branch being a mobile linking platform, our links just work. We outperform everybody else in the space and it might sound like really simple, okay, a link is working getting me from point A to point B, but doing it the right way and being consistent actually will increase performance over time of all these campaigns. So it's just an addition to providing that experience, you're seeing those key business results every single time. >> Talk about attribution for a minute because I've been in marketing for a long time in the tech industry. And that's always one of the challenges is we want to know what lever did the customer pull that converted them from opportunity to a lead to whatnot? Talk about the ability for Branch from an attribution perspective to really tell those marketers and the organization exactly, tactically, down to the tactical level, this is what's working. This is what's not working. Even if it's a color combination for example. That science is critical. >> Yeah, absolutely. Because we are able to cover the entire marketing life cycle of that they're trying to reach their customers. We cover off on email. We have mobile web to app. We have organic, we have search. No matter what you can look at that purview under a Branch lens. So we are just providing not just the accurate attribution down to the post-install, what happens after that, but also a more holistic view of everything that's happening on mobile. So then you can stitch all that together and really look at which ones are actually performing so you could see exactly which campaigns attributed directly to what amount of spend or which campaigns helped us understand the true lifetime long term value of customers, let's say in this case who ordered delivery or pickup. So to the kind of customer persona, it really helped. And also they actually were able to see Peet's because of our attribution, they saw actually a four and a half time increase in attributed purchases at the peak of the pandemic. And even since then, they're still seeing a three times increase in monthly attributed purchases. So because they actually have the view across everything that they're doing, we're able to provide that insight. >> That insight is so critical these days, like we mentioned earlier talking about real time data. Well we expect the experiences to be real time. And I expect that when I go back on the app they're going to know what I ordered last time. Maybe I want that again. Maybe I want to be able to change that, but I want them to know enough about me in a non creepy way. Give me that seamless experience that I'm expecting because of course that drives me to come back over and over again and spend way too much money there which I'm guilty of, guilty as charged. >> Coffee is totally fine. >> Right? Thank you. Thank you so much for validating that. I appreciate that. But talk to me about, as we are kind of wrapping things up here, the brick and mortars, it was such a challenge globally, especially the mom and pops to be able to convert quickly and figure out how do we reach a digital audience? How do we get our customers to be loyal? What's some of the advice that you have for the brick and mortars or those quick service restaurants like Peet's who've been navigating this the last couple years now here we are in this interesting semi post pandemic I would like to believe world? >> Yeah, we're getting there slowly but surely, but yeah, it's really important for them to adapt as we kind of move into this semi post pandemic world, we're kind of in the middle of like a hybrid online, offline, are we in stores, are we ordering online? These brand and customer relationships are super complex. I think the mobile app is just one part of that. Customers really shouldn't have any problems getting from the content or item they're looking for, no matter if they're in the store, if they're in the app, if they're on the desktop, if they're checking their email, if they're perusing TikTok, the best customer relationships really are omnichannel in nature. So what I would say, the need for providing the stellar customer experience isn't going to go away. It's actually really key. Whether it's driving users from their mobile properties to the app, providing a great in-store experience, like the QR codes, customers are expecting a lot more than they did before the pandemic. So they're not really seeing these brand touch points as little silos. They're seeing one brand. So it really should feel like one brand you should speak to the customers as if it's one brand across every single device, channel, and platform, and really unify that experience for them. >> Absolutely. That's going to be I think for so many different brands, whether it's a brick and mortar QSR, that's going to be one of the defining competitive advantages. If they can give their end users a single brand experience across channels, and you mentioned TikTok, those channels are only going to grow. As are I think or expectations. I don't think anybody's going to go back to wanting less than they did two years ago, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Well this has been great, Michelle, thank you so much for joining me, talking about Branch, what you guys are doing, mobile linking platform, mobile measurement platform, the deep links, what you were able to do with Peet's Coffee, a beloved brand since the 60s and so many others. We appreciate your insights, your time and the story that you shared. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. I hope you have a great rest of your day. >> You as well. For Michelle Lerner, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Showcase. Keep it right here. More great content coming up from theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, Cube coverage live on the floor in the Moscone center in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier host of the Cube. AWS summit 2022 is here in San Francisco, we're back in live events. Of course, Amazon summit in New York city is coming, Amazon summit this summer we'll be there as well. We've got a great guest Mike Miller, GN of AI devices at AWS always one of my favorite interviews. We've got a little prop here, we got the car, DeepRacer, very popular at the events. Mike, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >> Hey John, thank you for having me. It's really exciting to be back and chat with you a little bit about DeepRacer. >> Well I want to get into the prop in a second, not the prop, the product. >> Yeah. >> So DeepRacer program, you got the race track here. Just explain what it is real quick, we'll get that out of the way. >> Absolutely so, well, you know that AI, AWS is passionate about making AI and ML more accessible to developers of all skill levels. So DeepRacer is one of our tools to do that. So DeepRacer is a 3D cloud-based racing simulator, a 1/18th scale autonomously driven car and a league to add a little spicy competition into it. So developers can start with the cloud-based simulator where they're introduced to reinforcement learning which basically teaches the, our car to drive around a track through trial and error and of course you're in a virtual simulator so it's easy for it to make mistakes and restart. Then once that model is trained, it's downloaded to the car which then can drive around a track autonomously, kind of making its own way and of course we track lap time and your successful lap completions and all of that data feeds into our league to try to top the leaderboard and win prizes. >> This is the ultimate gamification tool. (chuckles) >> Absolutely >> Making it fun to learn about machine learning. All right, let's get into the car, let's get into the showcase of the car. show everyone what's going on. >> Absolutely. So this is our 1/18th scale autonomously driven car. It's built off of a monster truck chassis so you can see it's got four wheel drive, it's got steering in the front, we've got a camera on the front. So the camera is the, does the sensing to the compute board that's driven by an Intel atom a processor on the, on the vehicle, that allows it to make sense of the in front of it and then decide where it wants to drive. So you take the car, you download your trained model to it and then it races around the track. >> So the front is the camera. >> The front is the camera, that's correct. >> Okay, So... >> So it's a little bit awkward but we needed to give it plenty of room here so that I can actually see the track in front of it. >> John: It needs eyes. >> Yep. That's exactly right. >> Awesome. >> Yes. >> And so I got to buy that if I'm a developer. >> So, developers can start in two ways, they can use our virtual racing experience and so there's no hardware cost for that, but once you want the experience, the hands on racing, then the car is needed but if you come to one of our AWS summits, like here in San Francisco or anywhere else around the world we have one or more tracks set up and you can get hands on, you can bring the model that you trained at home download it to a car and see it race around the track. >> So use a car here. You guys are not renting cars, but you're letting people use the cars. >> Absolutely. >> Can I build my own car or does it have to be assembled by AWS? >> Yeah, we, we sell it as a, as a kit that's already assembled because we've got the specific compute board in there, that Intel processor and all of the software that's already built on there that knows how to drive around the track. >> That's awesome, so talk about the results. What's going on? What's the feedback from developers? Obviously it's a nerd dream, people like race cars, people love formula one now, all the racing there. IOT is always an IOT opportunity as well. >> Absolutely, and as you said, gamification, right? And so what we found and what we thought we would find was that adding in those sort of ease of learning so we make it the on-ramp to machine learning very easy. So developers of all skill levels can take advantage of this, but we also make it fun by kind of gamifying it. We have different challenges every month, we have a leader board so you can see how you rank against your peers and actually we have split our league into two, there's an open division which is more designed for novices so you'll get rewarded for just participating and then we have a pro league. So if you're one of the top performers in the open league each month, you graduate and you get to race against the big boys in the pro leagues. >> What's the purse? >> Oh, the, (John laughing) we definitely have cash and prizes that happen, both every month. We have prizes cause we do races every month and those winners of those races all get qualified to race at the championship, which of course happens in Las Vegas at re:Invent. So we bring all the winners to re:Invent and they all race against each other for the grand prize the big trophy and the, and the, and the cash prize. >> Well, you know, I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing so I'm kind of obviously biased on this whole program but you got to look at trend of what's going on in eSports and the online engagement is off the charts, are there plans to kind of make this more official and bigger? Is there traction there or is this just all part of the Amazon goodness, love that you guys give back? I mean, obviously it's got traction. >> Yeah. I mean, the thing that's interesting about eSports is the number of young people who are getting into it and what we saw over the last couple years is that, there were a lot of students who were adopting DeepRacer but there were some hurdles, you know, it wasn't really designed for them. So what we did was we made some changes and at the beginning of this year we launched a student focused DeepRacer program. So they get both free training every month, they get free educational materials and their own private league so they know students can race against other students, as part of that league. >> John: Yeah. >> So that was really our first step in kind of thinking about those users and what do we need to do to cater to their kind of unique needs? >> Tell about some of the power dynamics or the, or not power dynamics, the group dynamics around teams and individuals, can I play as an individual? Do I, do I have to be on a team? Can I do teams? How does that look? How do you think about those things? >> Yeah, absolutely. Great, great question. The primary way to compete is individually. Now we do have an offering that allows companies to use DeepRacer to excite and engage their own employees and this is where operating as a team and collaborating with your coworkers comes into play so, if, if I may there's, you know, Accenture and JPMC are a couple big customers of ours, really strong partners. >> John: Yeah. >> Who've been able to take advantage of DeepRacer to educate their workforce. So Accenture ran a 24 hour round the, round the globe race a couple years ago, encouraging their employees to collaborate and form teams to race and then this past year JPMC, had over 3000 of their builders participate over a three month period where they ran a private league and they went on to win the top two spots, first place and second place. >> John: Yeah. >> At reinvent last year. >> It reminds me the NASCAR and all these like competitions, the owners have multiple cars on the race. Do you guys at re:Invent have to start cutting people like, only two submissions or is it free for all? >> Well, you have to qualify to get to the races at re:invent so it's very, it's very cutthroat leading up to that point. We've got winners of our monthly virtual contests, the winners like of the summit races will also get invited. So it's interesting, this dynamic, you'll have some people who won virtual races, some people who won physical races, all competing together. >> And do you guys have a name for the final cup or is it like what's the, what's the final, how do you guys talk about the prizes and the... >> It's, it's the DeepRacer Championship Cup of course. >> John: Of course. (laughter) >> Big silver cup, you get to hoist it and... >> Are the names inscribed in it, is it like the Stanley cup or is it just one. >> It's a unique one, so you get to hold onto it each year. The champion gets their own version of the cup. >> It's a lot of fun. I think it's really kind of cool. What's the benefits for a student? Talk about the student ones. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So I'm a student I'm learning machine learning, what's in it for me is a career path and the fund's obvious, I see that. >> Yeah absolutely. You know, the, for students, it's a hands on way that's a very easy on-ramp to machine learning and you know, one of the things, as I mentioned we're passionate about making it accessible to all. Well, when we mean all we were really do mean all. So, we've got a couple partners who are passionate about the same thing, right? Which is how do we, if, if AI and ML is going to transform our world and solve our most challenging problems, how can we get the right minds from all walks of life and all backgrounds to learn machine learning and get engaged? So with two of our partners, so with Udacity and with Intel we launched a $10 million AWS, AI and ML scholarship program and we built it around DeepRacer. So not only can students who are college and high school students, age 16 and over can use DeepRacer, can learn about machine learning and then get qualified to win one of several thousand scholarships. >> Any other promotions going on that people should know about? >> Yeah, one, one final one is, so we talked about enterprises like JPMC and Accenture, so we've got a promotion that we just started yesterday. So if you are an enterprise and you want to host a DeepRacer event at your company to excite your employees and get 'em collaborating more, if you have over 50 employees participating, we're going to give you up to a hundred thousand dollars in AWS credits, to offset the costs of running your DeepRacer event at your, at your company so >> That's real money. >> Yeah. Real, real, real exciting I think for companies now to pick up DeepRacer. >> So, I mean, honestly, I know Andy Jassy, I have many sports car conversations with him. He's a sports guy, he's now the CEO of Amazon, gets to go all the sporting events, NFL. I wish I could bring the Cube there but, we'll stick with with cloud for now. You got to look at the purse kind of thing. I'm interested in like the whole economic point of cause I mean, forget the learning for side for a second which is by the way awesome. This is great competition. You got leader boards, you got regional activities, you got a funneling system laddering up to the final output. >> And we've really done a decent job and, and of adding capabilities into that user experience to make it more engaging. You can see the countries that the different competitors are from, you can see how the lap times change over time, you know, we give awards as I mentioned, the two divisions now. So if you're not super competitive, we'll reward you for just participating in that open league but if you want to get competitive, we'll even better rewards monthly in the Pro League. >> Do you guys have any conversations internally like, this is getting too big, we might have to outsource it or you keep it in inside the fold? (laughter) >> We, we love DeepRacer and it's so much fun running this, >> You see where I'm going with this. You see where I'm going with this right? The Cube might want to take this over. >> Hey. >> And you know >> We're always looking for partners and sponsors who can help us make it bigger so, absolutely. >> It's a good business opportunity. I just love it. Congratulations, great stuff. What's the big learning in this, you know, as a as an executive, you look back you got GM, AI super important and, and I think it is great community, communal activity as well. What's the learning, what have you learned from this over the years besides that it's working but like what's the big takeaway? >> Yeah, I mean. We've got such a wide range of developers and builders who are customers that we need to provide a variety of opportunities for people to get hands on and there's no better way to learn a complex technology like AI and ML than getting hands on and seeing, you know, physically the result of the AI and I think that's been the biggest learning, is that just having the hands on and the sort of element of watching what it does, just light bulbs go off. When, when developers look at this and they start piecing the, the puzzle pieces together, how they can benefit. >> So I have to ask the question that might be on other peoples minds, maybe it's not, maybe I'm just thinking really dark here but gamers love to hack and they love cheat codes, they love to get, you know, get into the system, any attempts to do a little hacking to win the, the the game, have you guys, is there, you know? >> Well, well, you know, last year we, we we released an open source version of the vehicle so that people could start using it as a platform to explore and do that kind of hacking and give them an opportunity build on top of it. >> So using mods, mods modules, we can mod out on this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. If you go to deepracer.com, we have sort of extensions page there, and you can see, somebody mounted a Nerf cannon onto the top of this, somebody built a computer vision model that could recognize you know, rodents and this thing would kind of drive to scare 'em, all kinds of fun topics. >> So it's a feature, not a bug. >> Absolutely. >> Open it up. >> Yeah. >> And also on transparency, if you have the source code out there you guys can have some review. >> Yeah. The whole idea is like, let's see what developers, >> It's really not hackable. It's not hackable. >> Yeah, I mean, for the, if you think about it when we do the races, we bring the cars ourselves, the only way a developer interacts is by giving us their trained models so... >> And you, do you guys review the models? Nothing to review, right? >> Yeah. There's nothing really to review. It's all about, you know, there, there was a model that we saw one time where the car went backwards and then went forwards across the finish line but we, we, we gently told them, well that's really not a valid way to race. >> That was kind of a hack, not really a hack. That was a hack hack. (laughter) That was just a growth hack. >> Exactly, but everybody just has a lot of fun with it across the board. >> Mike, great, thanks for coming on. Love the prop. Thanks for bringing the car on, looks great. Success every year. I want to see the purse, you know, big up to $1,000,000 you know, the masters, you know, tournament. >> Someday. (John chuckles) >> You guys.. >> Thank you for having me John. >> DeepRacer again, Fun Start has a great way to train people on machine learning, IOT device, turns into a league of its own. Great stuff for people to learn, especially students and people in companies, but the competitive juices flowing. That's what it's all about, having fun, learning. It's the Cube here in San Francisco. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. The Cube is live. I can't say that enough. We are alive at AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Hey Dave. >> Hey Lisa. >> Having a good day so far. >> So far, so good. >> We have an alumni back with us. We have about a hundred segments on the cube at AWS remit. We've got one of our original alumni back with us. Zaki Bajwa joins us the global head of partner solution engineers at Stripe. Zaki welcome back. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, Dave. Pleasure to be here. >> Lisa: Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Love it. Love it. Can't do a whiteboard virtually, you can, it's not the same. >> It's not the same and all those conversations I'm sure that you've had with partners and with customers the last couple of days that you just can't replicate that over zoom. >> Zaki: Exactly. >> So just for anyone who doesn't understand, AWS has a massive ecosystem of partners. So we'll get to talk about Stripe and AWS, but for anyone that doesn't know what Stripe is, give us the lowdown. You guys started 10 years ago. Talk to us about Stripe, the business strategy, what it's like today. >> Yeah, sure. So you guys know Stripe started 10 years ago by two brothers, John and Patrick Collison. And they've really focused on the developer and helping the developers accelerate digital commerce. Why? Cause the status quo at the time was one where a developer needed to, you know, build banking relationships with issuing banks, merchant banks, card networks, payment networks, tax liabilities, data compliance, and all of these manual processes that they had to deal with. So what Stripe aspires to do is build a complete commerce platform. Leveraging our integrated suite of products that is really allowing us to build what we call the global payments and treasury network. So if you think about the global payment and treasury network or what we call the G P T N it's meant to not only help abstract all of that complexity from a global payment infrastructure point of view, but also help move money in a simple and borderless and a programmable way just like we do in the internet. So that's the core essence of Stripe is to build this global payment treasury network to allow for money movement to happen in a simple and borderless manner. >> Simple and borderless two key things there. How has the business strategy evolved in the last 10 years and specifically in the last 20, 22 months? >> Yeah. Great question. So as you can imagine with COVID, you know, David you can order a cup of coffee or a brand new car, and that whole direct to consumer model has accelerated in COVID right. We've accelerated ourselves going to upwards of 6,000 employees. We've been able to answer or manage upwards of 170 billion API requests in the last 12 months alone. Right we deliver upwards of five nines from a availability performance point of view. That means 13 seconds of downtime or less a month. And we're doing this originally starting off for the developer David as you talked about allowing developers to deliver, you know, what I call process payments, accept payments and reconcile payments. But the evolution that you're talking about Lisa has really led to three key areas of focus that our users are requesting from us. And Stripe's first operating principle is really that user first mentality similar to the Amazons where we listen to our users and they're really asking for three key areas of focus. Number one is all around modernizing their digital commerce. So this is big enterprises coming to us and saying, whether I'm a uni lever or a Ford, how do you help me with a direct to consumer a e-commerce type platform? Number one. Secondly, is companies like Deliveroo and Lyft creating what we call marketplaces. Also think about Twitter and clubhouse, more solopreneurs entrepreneurs kind of marketplaces. Third is all around SaaS business models. So think about slack and Atlassian. That are customer vivers and accelerating the journey with us around digitizing digital commerce. So that's the first area of evolution. The second area is all around what we call embedded FinTech. So we know just like Amazon helped accelerate infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and function as a service. We're helping accelerate FinTech as a service. So we believe every company in every industry aspires to add more and more FinTech capabilities in their core services that they offer to their customers. So think about a Shopify or a Lyft they're adding more FinTech capabilities, leveraging Stripe APIs that they offer to their consumers. Likewise, when you think about a Monzo bank or a and 26, what we call Neo banks. They're creating more banking as a service component so a second area of evolution is all around FinTech as a service or embedded FinTech. And the third area of focus again, listen to our users is all around users are saying. Hey, Stripe, you have our financial data. How do you help us more with business operations and automating and optimizing our business operations? So this is revenue management, revenue reconciliation, financial reporting, all of the business processes, you and I know, code to cash, order to cash, pay to procure. Help us automate, optimize, and not just optimize, but help us create net new business models. So these are the three key areas of evolution that we've seen modernizing digital commerce, embedded FinTech, and then certainly last but not least business operations and automating that. >> And your target audience is the developers. Or are you having conversations now that are more, I mean, this is like transformative to industries and disruptive. Are you having conversations higher up in the chain? >> Great, great question. And this is the parallel with Amazon, just like Amazon started with developers, AWS. And then what up to the C-suite, if you will, we're seeing the same exact thing. Obviously our DNA is developer first making it intuitive, natural easy for developers to build on Stripe. But we're seeing more and more C-suite leaders come to us and saying, help us evolve our business model, help us modernize and digitize net new business models to get new revenue streams. So those parallel work streams are both developer mindset and C-suite led is certainly a big evolution for us. And we're looking to learn from our Amazon friends as to the success that they've had there. >> Do you have any examples of projects that developers have proposed that were at first glance, completely outlandish? Something that, you know, is there any sort of corner of the chart use case where Stripe didn't think of it, some developer came up with the idea, maybe it can't be done yet. If you have an example of that, that would be very interesting. >> Yeah, I'll give you two examples. So as I said, we're definitely a user first entity. That's our operating principle. We always think about the user. So let me go to developers and say, what are you struggling with? What are you thinking about? What are the next set of things you need from us? And a simple comment around tax started to come up and do you know in the U S there's 11,000 tax jurisdictions that you and you're selling something online have to abide to these different jurisdictions. So one of the things that we then evolved into is created a Stripe tax product, which initially users or developers were really struggling with and working on. So we created a Stripe tax product. We've done an acquisition called tax jar that helps us accelerate that journey for tax. The other one is this notion of low code that we see in the marketplace right now, where developers saying. Hey, give me more embeddables on top of the primitives that you've created on top of the APIs. So we went leveraging what our customers have already done, created things like a checkout capability, which is a simple redirect highly customized for conversion, which you can just integrate to one API. You have a full checkout capability. You can embed that into your platform, which didn't exist before and needed you to really integrate into different APIs. So all of these capabilities are what developers have really focused on and built that we've done leverage and Excel on. >> Yeah, I think between Lisa and myself, we've paid taxes in about 7,000 of those >> Lisa: Yeah, probably. >> Not 11,000 jurisdictions, but all the various sales taxes and everything else. So we're sort of familiar with it. >> I think so, so here we are, you know, on the floor at re-invent. Great, as we said to be back in person, the 10th annual, but with, as each year goes by AWS has a ecosystem of partners gets bigger and bigger. The flywheel gets, I don't know, I think faster and faster, the number of announcements that came out yesterday and today talk to us about some of the common traits that Stripe and AWS share. >> Yeah. So I've mentioned a few of them. One is certainly the user first mentality where we're listening to users. That tax example is a perfect one of how do we decide new features, new capability based on user first, Amazon does that better than anyone else. Second is that developer mindset focus on the developer. Those will be the core persona we target give you an example, Lyft, we all know Lyft. They wanted to create instant payouts for their drivers. So their developers came to us and say, our developers don't want to get paid. I'm sorry. Our drivers don't want to get paid in a week or two weeks. So we work with their developers who create a instant payout mechanism. Now in six months, over 40% of their drivers are using Stripe instant payout powered by Stripe. And that's a developer first mindset again, back to AWS. And then the third is really around the go to market. And the market opportunity is very similar. You talked about the developer persona and the C-suite very similar to Amazon. But also we're not just catering to enterprise and strategic big customers. We are just so much focused on startups, SMB, mid-market, digital native, just like Amazon is. And I would say the last parallel, which is probably the most important one is innovation. I come from enterprise software where we looked at monthly, quarterly, biannual, annual release cycles. Well, as Stripe, all of that goes out the door just like Amazon. We may have a hundred to a thousand APIs in motion at any time in alpha beta production. And just like Amazon we're iterating and releasing new innovations consistently. So I would say that's probably the most important one that we have with Amazon. >> So a lot of synergies there like deep integrated trusted partner synergies it sounds like. >> Agreed, definitely and then we're seeing this. I was going more as we are going more up market. We're seeing a demand for end to end solutions that require integrations with a CRM vendor for customer 360 with our accounting vendor for pivotal procure order to cash, billing accounting with a e-commerce company like Adobe Magento to do better econ. So more end to end solutions with these tech partners, we're working with our GSI to help deliver those end to end solutions. And certainly, but not least the dev agencies who are still sort of our core constituents that help us keep relevant with those developers. >> You mentioned this at the outset, but some things bear repeating. Can you go into a little more detail on the difference between me wanting to start up a business and take credit cards as payment 10 years ago? Let's say versus today, how much of the friction have you removed from that system? >> It is literally an hour to two hour process versus weeks and months before. >> But what are those steps? Like who would I, you mentioned this, again you mentioned this already, but the go through that, go through that again who would I have to reach out to, to make this happen? And we were talking, you know, relationships with banks, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yeah. So it starts at initiating and registering that company. So imagine you going and having to register a company today, you can do that with a Stripe Atlas product in a matter of hours, get your EIN number, get your tax jurisdictions on your registration as a Delaware entity within the U S you can be anywhere at globally and go do that within a matter of one hour. That's number one, you start there. From there, then it's a matter of embedding payment embeddables within your e-commerce platform, marketplace platform, et cetera. As you've heard us talk about seven lines of code to get payments going, you can quickly onboard accept payments, process payments, reconcile payments all within an hour. And that's just the start. But now you get into more complex use cases around marketplaces and multi-party connection. Multi-party payouts, different commission rates, different subscription models. Think about a flat tier model, a metered tier model, all of these different things that we've abstracted and allow you to just use one to three different integrations to help accelerate and use that in your digital commerce platform. So all of these different workflows have is what we've automated through our APIs. >> Dave: That's unbelievable. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It is unbelievable, the amount of automation and innovation that's gone on in such a short time period. What are some of the things as we kind of wrap up here that we can look forward to from stripe from a roadmap perspective, technology wise, partner wise? >> Yes. I mean, we have a slew of data you can imagine billions of billions of transactional data. And you guys know what we do with data is we're looking at fraud prevention. We're looking at, we have a product called radar that looks at fraud, we're doing acceptance, adaptive acceptance to do more AIML learned data and authorization. We're also looking at how do we feed a lot of this financial data into the right mechanisms to allow you to then create new business models on top of this, whether it's cross sell upsell to new user business capture. As well as you know, one of the things I did not talk about, which coming from a farming background is this notion of Stripe climate. Where we have upwards of 2000 companies across 37 countries that are leveraging our Stripe climate product to give back to tech advanced companies that are helping in carbon offset. And super exciting times there from an ESG environmental social governance point of view. So all of those combined is what excites us about the future at Stripe. >> Wow. The future seems unlimited. Lots going on. >> Super excited. Zaki, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what's going on with Stripe. All the innovation that's going on. The synergies with AWS and what's coming down the pipe. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, David. Appreciated All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube. The global leader in live tech coverage. (lighthearted piano music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Security Summit, brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin here live in Napa Valley at the Fortinet Championship. This is the site of kickoff to the 2021-22 FedEx Cup regular series. We're here with Fortinet and we're here with one of our distinguished alumni, John Madison, the CMO and EVP of products. John, it's great to see you in person. >> Yes, Lisa it's been a while. >> It has been a while. >> Good to be back here, live. >> I know, you're not on Zoom, you're actually right six feet across from me. >> Yep, look, yes, it's definitely physical. >> It does, talk to me about the PGA and Fortinet. What are some of the synergies? >> There's a lot. I think one of the biggest ones is the culture of the two companies. So I mean, PGA tour, I think they've donated almost $3 billion to charities over the last 15 years, 20 years and we're the same. We would definitely want to give back to the community. We want to make sure we're providing training and education. We're trying to re-skill some of the veterans, for example, over 2000, also women in technology, you may have heard one of the key notes today about that, attempts from a education and training perspective. So there's a lot of synergies between the PGA Tour, and Fortinet from a cultural perspective. >> I love that. Cultural synergy is so important but also some of the initiatives, women in tech, STEM, STEAM, those are fantastic. Give our audience a little overview of what's going on here. We've got over 300 partners and customers here. What are some of the key themes being discussed today? >> Yeah, we're going to try and keep it smaller, this event. We don't want 10,000, 20,000 people. We'll keep it smaller. So about 300 customers and partners, and what we want to do is bring together, you know, the top people in cybersecurity and networking, we want to bring in customers so they can net with each other, we want to bring the partners here. And so, what you're going to see is you can see the tech expo behind you there, where people are talking technology. Some of the keynotes focus on areas like ransomware, for example, and cyber security in different industries. So definitely it's a smaller gathering, but I think it's very focused on cybersecurity and networking. >> Well, that's such an important topic these days. You know, you and I have spoken a number of times this summer by Zoom, and talking about the threat landscape and the changes-- >> Yep. >> And the work from anywhere. When you and I spoke, I think it was in June, you said 25% we expect are going to go back to the office, 25% permanently remote and the other 50 sort of transient. Do you still think given where we are now in September that that's still-- >> Yeah, I'm going to modify my prediction a bit, I think it's going to be hybrid for some time. And I don't think it's just at home or not at home or at work or not at work, I think it's going to be maybe one or two days, or maybe three days versus five days. And so, we definitely see the hybrid mode of about 50% for the next couple of years at least. I think that, you know, ransomware has been in the news a lot. You saw the Colonial, the ransomware has increased. We did a threat report recently. Showed about a 10X increase in ransomware. So, I think customers are very aware of the cybersecurity threats. The damage now is not just sucking information out and IP, it's causing damage to the infrastructure. So definitely the, you know, the attack surface is increased with people working from home, versus in the office, and then you've got the threat landscape, really, really focused on that ransomware piece. >> Yeah, ransomware becoming a household word, I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that is. And talking about the nearly 11X increase in, what was that, the first half of 2021? >> Yeah, over the last 12 months. And I think what's also happened is ransomware used to be a broad attack. So let me send out, and see if I can find a thousand companies. Again, you saw with the Colonial attack, it's very targeted now as well. So you've got both targeted and broad ransomware campaigns going on. And a lot of companies are just rethinking their cybersecurity strategy to defend against that. And that work from home component is another attack surface. So a lot of companies that were operational technology companies that had air gaps and people would come to work, now that you can remotely get into the network, it's again, you can attack people at home, back into the network. >> Is that a direct correlation that you've saw in the last year, in terms of that increase in ransomware and this sudden shift to working from home? >> Well, I also think there's other components. And so, I think the ransomware organizations, the gangs, could use crypto more reasonably than checks and dollars and stuff like that. So they could get their money out. It became very profitable versus trying to sell credit card data on the dark web. So you saw that component. You also saw, as I said, the attack surface be larger for companies, and so those two things unfortunately have come together, and you know, really seen an exponential rise in attacks. >> Perfect storm. Let's talk about some of your customer conversations and how they've changed and evolved in the last 18 months. Give me a snapshot of when you're talking with customers, what are some of the things that they're coming to you for help, looking for the most guidance? >> Yeah, well I think, you know, the digital innovation transformation is almost accelerated because of, you know, COVID. They've accelerated those programs, especially in industries like retail, where it becomes almost essential now to have that digital connectivity. So they can't stop those programs. They need to accelerate those programs, but as they move those programs faster, again they expand their attack surface. And so, what I'm definitely seeing is a convergence of traditional kind of networking, connectivity, and cybersecurity teams like the CIO and the CSO working on projects jointly. So whether it be the WAN connectivity, or whether it be endpoint, or whether it be cloud, both teams are working much more closely going forward. >> Synergies there that are absolutely essential. Talk to me about what you guys announced with Linksys yesterday, speaking of work from home and how that has transformed every industry. Talk to us about the home work solution powered by Fortinet. >> Yeah, well, we definitely see work from home being there for some time. And so the question is, what do you do there? So I think initially 18 months ago, what happened was companies turned on their, what they call a VPN, which gives them an encrypted access when they went from 5% to a 100% people on the VPN. I speak to customers now and they're saying, that was kind of a temporary solution. It puts an end point security there. It was kind of temporary and now I need a longer-term solution because I can see this at least 50% for the next two years, being this hybrid work from home, and some of them are saying, "Well, let's look at something. Let's try and take the best of enterprise networking and security, and then try and match that with an easy to set up Wi-Fi or routing system." So the two companies, you know, have come together with this joint venture. We're taking Linksys technology from an ease of use at home, it's very simple to set up, you can do it on an app or whatever. And then we integrate the Fortinet technology inside there from a security and enterprise networking. The enterprises can manage themselves, the enterprise component and the consumer can manage their piece. What's very important is that separation as well. So the privacy of your home network, and then to make sure the enterprise piece is secure, and then also introducing some simple, what we call quality of service. So for a business person, things like Teams or Zoom as preference over some of the gaming and downloads of the family. So I think it brings the best of both worlds: ease of use and enterprise security together. >> I'm sure the kids won't like that it's not optimized for gaming, but it is optimized for things like video conferencing which, in the last year we've been dependent on for collaboration and communication. Tell me a little bit about the tuning for video conferencing and collaboration. >> Yeah, so we announced both Zoom and Microsoft Teams, probably the two biggest apps, which I use from a work from home business perspective. And definitely if you've got a normal system at home and your kids they've been downloading something, a new game or something like that, they can just take the whole bandwidth. And so the ability to kind of scale that back and make sure the Zoom meeting or the Teams meeting is first priority, I think is very important, to get that connectivity and that quality of service, but also have that security component as well. >> Yeah, the security component is increasingly important. Talk to me about why Linksys, was COVID the catalyst for this partnership? >> Well, I think we looked at it and we have our own work from home solutions as well. I mean, our own gear. We definitely wanted to find something where we could integrate into more of a ease of use solution set. And it just so happened we were speaking to Linksys on some other things and as soon as we started talking, it was very, very clear that this would be a great relationship and joint venture and so we made the investment. Not just "here's some of our code", we made a substantial investment in Linksys and yeah, we see some other things coming in the future as well. >> Can you talk to me a little bit about what the go to market will be, how can enterprises and consumers get this? >> Yeah. So it's more of an enterprise sale. I know some people think Linksys, they think consumer straight away. For us, this is a sale to the enterprises. So the enterprises buy it, it's a subscription service. So they just pay a monthly fee and they can have different levels of service inside there as well. They will get, you know, for each employee they'll get one, two or three nodes. And then so the, so the enterprise is paying for it, which I think will help a bit and they will manage it through their system, but the consumer will get this kind of a game that's very easy to use, very high speed connectivity, mesh technology. So yes, Linksys will sell some of it as well. But I think, you know, actually Fortinet will be the major kind of go to market because of our 500,000 business customers we have out there. >> Right. And your huge partner network. >> Yes. >> So let's talk about, give me a little bit of a view in terms of the benefit that IT will get leveraging the Linksys home work solution. I imagine that centralized visibility of all the devices connected to the corporate network, even though, wherever the devices are? >> Yeah, it actually extends the corporate network. So not in this initial release, in the second release. In the first release, they can go to a cloud portal and they can manage what they can manage from an enterprise perspective. The employee can go to the same portal, but gets a different view, can manage their piece. In the second release, we'll actually have support in our management systems. So if you're an existing Fortinet customer and you've got our management systems and say you've got, I don't know, 250 sites, and you're managing some of our firewalls or SD WAN systems, You'll be able to see all the employees links as systems as well, in that same management system. But again, there's a separation of duty and privacy where they can just manage the enterprise components, not they can't see the traffic from the employees' side, from the non-business transactions. >> Good. That privacy is key there. Do you think that in a perfect world, would help quiet down some of the perfect storm that we're seeing with ransomware and this explosion, this work from anywhere, work from home, going to be persisting technologies, like what you're doing with Linksys, is going to help make a dent in that spike? >> I think it's a component. So for us, the long term strategy for users, end point, this kind of Linksys component is an element. We also feel like there needs to be a transition of VPN technology into zero trust. So you're limiting again, the access to applications versus the network. And then definitely the third component would be a technology like EDR, which is more behavioral-based versus signature-based. And so you bring all those three together. Absolutely we'll make a dent in ransomware because you're just reducing the attack surface greatly, but also scanning the technology to make sure if you see something, you can act straight away. >> And then pair that with what you guys are doing and the investment that Fortinet's been making for a while in training and helping to fill that cybersecurity skills gap, which is growing year on year. >> Yeah. I speak to a lot of CSOs and CIOs and they go "What's the latest technology? What can you do next?" I say, well, the most important thing you can do is train your people. Train them not to click on that phishing link, right? Because still our numbers are around 6% of employees click on things and it doesn't matter what company you are. And so the education and the training is the one of the core, the most basic steps. We're introducing what we call an IT awareness program as part of NSC, which allows companies to download some tools. And they'll try some phishing emails that go out there, they'll see the response, see how they can (mumbles). So I always say that the people, the social engineering is the first step to try and fix and reduce. That's the biggest attack surface you will have. >> It's getting so sophisticated and so personalized. I mean I've seen examples with training that I've done for various companies where you really have to look 2, 3, 4 times at it and have the awareness alone to know that this might not be legitimate. >> Yeah, especially when people are just clicking on more things because they're going to more places. And so you have to be very careful. You can stop a bunch of that with some rule sets. So the systems, but if they're faking the domain, spear phishing, where they know exactly the context of where the email's coming out, it's hard, but you've just got to be very, very careful. If in doubt don't click on it. >> I agree if in doubt, don't click it. Well, John, it's always great talking to you. Exciting to hear the growth of Fortinet, what you're doing with PGA tour, the synergies there, the cultural synergies and the growth in customers and partners, lots of stuff to come. Can't wait till our next conversation, which I hope is also in person. >> Yes, yes, yes, for sure. You know, I think this is a great venue in that it's- as you can see it's open, which helps a lot. >> Yeah. >> It's not far from our headquarters, just down the road there, we've committed to this event for six or seven years. And so this is our first time, but definitely we're hoping to get out a bit more as we go forward. >> Excellent. I'm glad to see to see a company like Fortinet taking the lead and you look like you're dressed for golf. You said you have meetings, but I'm going to let you go because you probably have to get to that. >> I have a few more meetings. I wish they would leave a little gap for some golf. I'll try and work one as we go forward. >> Yeah. Anyway, John, thank you for joining me, great to see you. For John Madison, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from the Fortinet Championship Security Summit in Napa. (Upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Security Summit brought to you by Fortinet. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at the Fortinet Championship, the PGA Tour Kickoff to the 2021-2022 FedEx Regular Season Cup. And this is so exciting to be here with Fortinet, to be at an in-person event, and to be talking about a very important topic of cybersecurity. One of our alumni is back with me, Sandra Wheatley is here, the SVP of Marketing, Threat Intelligence, and Influencer Communications at Fortinet. Sandra, it's great to see you. >> You too, Lisa. Thank you for having me. >> This is a great event. >> Yeah, it's awesome, yeah. >> Great to be outdoors, great to see people again, and great for Fortinet for being one of the first to come back to in-person events. One of the things I would love to understand is here we are at the PGA tour, what's the relationship with Fortinet and the PGA Tour? >> Well, first of all, I think the PGA tour is an amazing brand. You just have to look around here and it's extremely exciting, but beyond the brand, there's a lot of synergies between the PGA tour and Fortinet CSR initiatives, particularly around STEM, diversity inclusion, as well as veterans rescaling. And so some of the proceeds from the Fortinet Championship will go to benefit local nonprofits and the local community. So that's something we're very excited about overall. >> Lisa: Is this a new partnership? >> It is a new partnership and we will be the Fortinet Championship sponsor for about the next five years. So we're looking forward to developing this partnership and this relationship, and benefiting a lot of nonprofits in the future. >> Excellent, that's a great cause. One of the things, when you and I last saw each other by Zoom earlier in the summer, we were talking about the cybersecurity skills gap. And it's in its fifth consecutive year, and you had said some good news on the front was that data show that instead of needing four million professionals to fill that gap, it's down to three, and now there's even better news coming from Fortinet. Talk to me about the pledge that you just announced to train one million people in the next five years. >> Absolutely, we're very excited about this. You know, Fortinet has been focused on reducing the skills gap for many years now. It continues to be one of the biggest issues for cybersecurity leaders if you think about it. You know, we still need about 3.1 million professionals to come into the industry. We have made progress, but the need is growing at about 400,000 a year. So it's something that public and private partnerships need to tackle. So last week we did announce that we are committed to training a million professionals over the next five years. We're very excited about that. We're tackling this problem in many, many ways. And this really helps our customers and our partners. If you really think about it, in addition to the lack of skills, they're really tackling cybersecurity surface that's constantly changing. In our most recent FortiGuard's threat report, we saw that ransomware alone went up 10 times over the last year. So it's something that we all have to focus on going forward. And this is our way of helping the industry overall. >> It's a huge opportunity. I had the opportunity several times to speak with Derek Manky and John Maddison over the summer, and just looking at what happened in the first half, the threat landscape, we spoke last year, looking at the second half, and ransomware as a service, the amount of money that's involved in that. The fact that we are in this, as Fortinet says, this work from anywhere environment, which is probably going to be somewhat persistent with the attack surface expanding, devices on corporate networks out of the home, there's a huge opportunity for people to get educated, trained, and have a great job in cybersecurity. >> Absolutely, I like to say there's no job security like cybersecurity, and it is. I mean, I've only been in this industry about, I'm coming up on six years, and it's definitely the most dynamic industry of all of the IT areas that I've worked in. The opportunities are endless, which is why it's a little bit frustrating to see this big gap in skills, particularly around the area of women and minorities. Women make up about 20%, and minorities are even less, maybe about 3%. And so this is a huge focus of ours. And so through our Training Advancement Agenda, our TAA initiative, we have several different pillars to attack this problem. And at the core of that is our Network Security Expert Training or NSC training and certification program. We made that freely available to everybody at the beginning of COVID. It was so successful, at one point we we're seeing someone register every five minutes. And that was so successful, we extended that indefinitely. And so to date, we've had about almost 700,000 certifications. So it's just an amazing program. The other pillars are Security Academy Program, where we partner with nonprofits and academia to train young students. And we have something like 419 academies in 88 countries. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then the other area that's very important to us is our Veterans Program. You know, we have about 250,000 veterans every year, transfer out of the service, looking for other jobs in the private sector. And so not only do we provide our training free, but we do resume building, mentoring, all of these types of initiatives. And we've trained about 2,000 veterans and spouses, and about 350 of those have successfully got jobs. So that's something we'll continue to focus on. >> That's such a great effort. As the daughter of a Vietnam combat veteran, that really just hits me right in the heart. But it's something that you guys have been dedicated for. This isn't something new, this isn't something that is coming out of a result of the recent executive order from the Biden administration. Fortinet has been focused on training and helping to close that gap for a while. >> That's exactly true. While we made the commitment to train a million people on the heels of the Biden administration at Cybersecurity Summit about two weeks ago, we have been focused on this for many years. And actually, a lot of the global companies that were part of that summit happened to be partners on this initiative with us. For example, we work with the World Economic Forum, IBM, and Salesforce offer our NSC training on their training platforms. And this is an area that we think it's really important and we'll continue to partner with larger organizations over time. We're also working with a lot of universities, both in the Bay Area, local like Berkeley, and Stanford and others to train more people. So it's definitely a big commitment for us and has been for many years. >> It'll be exciting to see over the next few years, the results of this program, which I'm sure will be successful. Talk to me a little bit about this event here. Fortinet is 100% partner driven company, more than 300 or so partners and customers here. Tell me a little bit about what some of the interesting topics are that are going to be discussed today. >> Sure, yeah, so we're delighted to bring our partners and customers together. They will be discussing some of the latest innovations in cybersecurity, as well as some of the challenges and opportunities. We are seeing, you know, during COVID we saw a lot of change with regards to cybersecurity, especially with remote working. So we'll discuss our partnership with LYNX that we just announced. We'll also be talking about some of the emerging technologies like CTNA, 5G, SASE, cloud, and really understanding how we can best help protect our customers and our partners. So it's very exciting. In addition to our Technology Summit, we have a technology exhibition here with many of our big sponsors and partners. So it's definitely going to be a lot of dynamic conversation over the next few days. >> We've seen so much change in the last year and a half. That's just an understatement. But one of the things that you touched on this a minute ago, and we're all feeling this is is when we all had to shift to work from home. And here we are using corporate devices on home networks. We're using more devices, the edge is expanding, and that became a huge security challenge for enterprises to figure out how do we secure this. Because for some percentage, and I think John Maddison mentioned a few months ago to me, at least 25% will probably stay remote. Enterprises have to figure out how to keep their data secure as people are often the weakest link. Tell me about what you guys announced with LYNX that will help facilitate that. >> Well, we're announcing an enterprise grade security offering for people who are working remotely. And the nice thing about this offering is it's very easy to set up and implement, so consumers and others can easily set this up. It also provides a dashboard for the enterprise, IT organization to, they can see who's on the network, devices, everything else. So this should really help because we did see a big increase in attacks, really targeting remote workers. As cyber criminals try to use their home as a foothold into the enterprise. So we're very excited about this partnership, and definitely see big demand for this going forward. >> Well, can you tell me about the go-to market for that and where can enterprises and people get it? >> Well, we're still working through that. I know you'll talk with John later on, he'll have more details on that. But definitely, we'll be targeting both of our different sets of customers and the channel for this. And I definitely think this is something that will, it's something that enterprises are definitely looking for, and there'll be more to come on this over the next few months. >> It's so needed. The threat landscape just exploded last year, and it's in a- >> Sandra: Yeah, absolutely. >> Suddenly your home. Maybe your kids are home, your spouse is working, you're distracted, ransomware, phishing emails, so legitimate. >> Sandra: They do. >> Lisa: But the need for what you're doing with LYNX is absolutely essential these days. >> Sandra: Yeah, these threats are so sophisticated. They're really difficult. And the other thing we did in addition to LYNX was as we got into COVID, we saw that, or the most successful organizations were really using this as an opportunity to invest for the longterm in cybersecurity. We also saw that, and this continues to be the case that, the insider threat continues to be one of the biggest challenges, where an employee will accidentally hit on a phishing email. So we did roll out an infosec awareness training, and we made that free for all of our customers and partners. So we're trying to do everything we can to really help our customers through this demanding time. >> Lisa: Right, what are some of the feedback that you're hearing from customers? I'm sure they're very appreciative of the education, the training, the focus effort from Fortinet. >> Sandra: Absolutely, it's definitely huge. And more and more we're seeing partners who want to work with us and collaborate with us on these initiatives. We've had a really positive response from some of the companies that I mentioned earlier, some of the big global names. And we're very excited about that. So we feel like we have some key initiatives on pillars, and we'll continue to expand on those and bring more partners to work with us over time. >> Lisa: Expansion as the business is growing amazingly well. Tell me a little bit about that. >> Sandra: Yeah, I think, in our last quarter we announced our largest billings growth for many, many years. And so, Fortinet, we're been very fortunate over the last few years, has continued to grow faster than the market. We now have half a million customers, and I think our platform approach to security is really being adopted heavily. And we continue to see a lot of momentum, especially around our solutions like SD-WAN. I think we're the only vendor who provides security in SD-WAN appliance. And so that's been a key differentiator for us. The other thing that's increasingly important, especially with the rollout of 5G is performance. And, you know, Fortinet, from the very beginning, created its own customized ASX or SPU, which really provides the best performance in security compute ratings in the industry. So all of this is really helping us with our growth, and we're very excited about the opportunities ahead. >> Lisa: And last question, on that front, what are some of the things that you're excited about as we wrap up 2021 calendar year and go into 2022? >> Sandra: Well, this been very exciting year for Fortinet. And I think we're in a great position to take advantage of many of the different growth areas we're seeing in this new and changing space. And, you know, we're all on board and ready to take advantage of those opportunities, and really fire ahead. >> Lisa: Fire ahead, I like that. Sandra, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about the commitment, the long standing commitment that Fortinet has to training everybody from all ages, academia, veterans, to help close that cybersecurity skills gap. And such an interesting time that we've had. There's so much opportunity, and it's great to see how committed you are to helping provide those opportunities to people of all ages, races, you name it. >> Sandra: Thank you, Lisa, I really appreciate it. >> Lisa: Ah, likewise. For Sandra Wheatley, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube at the Fortinet Championship Security Summit. (soft bright music)

welcome everyone to thecube virtual i am your host rebecca knight today we are talking about cyber security and health care our guest is ken checker he is a problem solver at netscout thanks so much for coming on the show ken oh my pleasure thank you for having me i love your job title a problem solver tell our viewers a little bit about netscout and about your role there sure no i appreciate that uh yeah netscout's been around since 1984 uh and the the gentleman starter company two gentlemen starter company uh anil sengal is still our ceo he's very passionate about what we do believes in what we do and our focus really is is really service triage and making sure that important customer services and none more important than health care are are up and running and functional and so our focus is really they're really protecting we call ourselves guardians of the connected world uh we take that very seriously uh because when you think about the the technology uh the complexity and how we all really the reliance on everything that we do and how we uh rely on technology as a just a society um we really our focus is protecting that so the applications the services the network uh that's all part of the the service chain for that well we know that healthcare organizations and hospitals are under tremendous strain and pressure because of the covet-19 pandemic but also recently hospitals all over the country have been hit and targeted in a scourge of ransomware attacks can you tell our viewers a little bit about what you're seeing and what's what's happening right now oh yes it's uh it's really sad uh it's just an interesting uh it's an interesting time in the world obviously uh but we are seeing a very heavy increase in the number of attacks on from a cyber security perspective really an extortion and ransomware and there's a there's a slight difference between the two um but effectively what's happening the we'll call them the uh the bad guys are going after healthcare organizations that have some some vulnerabilities uh where you know they have some they have some areas where they can be attacked and effectively what happens is they will either launch a denial of service attack which is really a lot of robot type computers launching just directed attacks at these particular caregiving organizations these hospitals uh and then so they're trying to take down services um and that's one thing and so that's really more of a ransomware where they hey we showed you we can do it now we're going to extort money from you until you pay the other one is more of a ransomware where they've already penetrated the what we'll call defenses of the of the hospital and then now they're they're saying okay we've already we've already taken control of your system and they lock you out until you pay the ransom both we're seeing lots of attacks in that realm so what is the upshot in terms of patient care i mean this this sounds awful what are patients seeing what are doctors seeing well it's a really good point uh especially in today's world with the pandemic but really any time for health care we all have you know children aunts uncles moms dads nobody wants to be in the hospital for extended periods of time and when they're in the hospital we want to make sure that you know from a healthcare organization they want to make sure they give the best care possible and the caregiver so the nurse the doctor has the opportunity to do what they do and focus on what their their caregiving and not on the technology so when things like ransomware extortion or any particular uh impact on performance for a particular application it just impacts the caregiver which is you know and it affects us because these are people that you care about you don't want them in the hospital you don't want them in pain and the caregivers there you know these are passionate people that do what they do obviously they're dedicated to it so when there's an impact from a cyber security perspective or a application or network issue that affects health care that affects our loved ones and you just you know you really put yourself in that position we uh especially netscout we like to view we partner with our customers so and we don't take that lightly that's something that we mean and it's heartfelt and the reason for that is we look at ourselves as an extension of their team this is what healthcare organizations offer to their to their patients and they're there for for care to get well we want to make sure they have every opportunity to do that and because those healthcare organizations rely so much on technology networks applications and really protection from bad guys in cyber security uh we just want to make sure that those services are assured and that's why that's where our focus is so this i mean there are lives in the balance as you're describing this is a technical challenge but it's also one of resources a lot of these organizations just simply do not have the resources to deal with these problems effectively great point that's a great point i mean especially in today's world the the actual industry for healthcare has really taken a beating because it really had to focus their their whole uh all of their funds frankly and all of their uh the resources towards the pandemic which would be personal equipment mobile hospitals and that's that's taken a tremendous toll and they've also from just a revenue perspective they've really taken a beating frankly on on what happens from their revenue cycles because elective surgeries are way down so when you start looking at you take that into consideration so they've got very very tight resources and cyber security in general is a just a thankless job they're under attack every single day no matter what their industry is so when you look at the at the current situation to get tight resources cyber security is under a lot of stress and oh by the way here come the ransomware and extortion attacks it's just it's just a it's terrible what's going on but this is an area where where we feel this is a spot where we can really help number one our focus is really on network and service assurance so the applications in the network and that's what we're very good at and been doing it for many years but the the upside and the place where we really feel we can help uh is really twofold and that is that same solution the same deployment that we have for network and application really can be leveraged by cyber security folks as well mainly towards the areas of denial of service mainly towards areas of voice over ip we think of telecommunications and telemedicine that's all being leveraged and heavily leveraged right now specifically by healthcare organizations well again if i'm a bad guy and i know you're trying to use your telemedicine to take care of your patients and have that interaction with the doctor and the patient and i take those services down well now i've impacted patient care though that all runs over unified communications protocols voice and video things that we can monitor not only for performance but also when we see cyber type issues and that's a it's a really big uh i would call it a bit of a hole at the moment because that's a spot where cyber security teams are so strapped so resource strapped as well uh from from what they're trying to deal with every day that's a spot we can help with and help with immediately and as i mentioned the other part is really the denial of service pieces which is that's part of what we do as part of our our framework of what we deliver for services so you're describing an exceedingly complex caregiver chain on so many different levels in terms of cyber security in terms of telemedicine um and you also said that netscout really partners with its clients talk a little bit about netscout solution and how it helps clients and or healthcare organizations grapple with these challenges no that's a great question well the the one thing uh right off the bat is we look at network traffic and that means application traffic so while we plug in on the network and take traffic from taps and spans and whatnot we take traffic into our appliances so that we can then we crunch that the data through our smart data we call adaptive service intelligence that's our patent and we run it through that engine and that creates smart data and that smart data then can be leveraged for muji is my problem with my network is my problem with my application is it something like a service enabler like dns or dhcp or ldap which is really the basic uh basic building box for active directory for authentication uh so when you look at a complete as you mentioned a complex chain uh an electronic medical records application uh an emr that's really the that's really the go-to application for for a hospital uh because it's scheduling that's billing that's diagnosis that's that's history that's patient history it's just so it's so integral to what they do and when there's an impact with that that affects patient care and no one ever wants to hear oh my goodness we we log we had a bad outcome with the patient because of a complete a computer glitch you know network application what have you uh and so what we do is the ability to take all that data in crunch it through our engine and then and then display that in dashboards that are very easily consumable by not just network people but really application even management cyber security unified communications folks and and the focus here is we want to get the problem set we know they're going to be problems it happens every day and you know networks and applications are complex the idea is when we have an issue like that let's get the problem to the right team so that they can then go through their service restoration process and again the whole point here is keep services up and running but the the challenge becomes in a complex application team set up where you've got dns dhcp ldap radius so you've got service enablers then you've got web servers application server database servers load balancers firewalls when somebody says oh my goodness the emr is down or we're having issues with our network that's a very tough chain to try and pinpoint it's almost needle in a haystack so what we do and this is kind of our our bailiwick in the world is really we take all of that different traffic and we expose uh where where the hot spots where's the latency where are the error codes where do we see protocols that aren't behaving well where are we seeing things that are we're seeing authentication failures and the big win for the for the healthcare organization on that and that standpoint is i can see all of my traffic all of my applications and then i can pinpoint where i'm having issues so that i can restore services very quickly what are some of the best practices that have emerged in terms of the company in terms of the organizations and hospitals that are doing this well what would you say that they're doing right one thing they want a partner so they recognize the fact that number one you know they've got limited staff uh and they actually want to partner with netscout and what that means is we actually go in and we'll design solutions that will address their specific requirements that's that's very important what we do but when we do so we take uh you know we different product sets but our infinite stream our infinite stream next generation isng is our data collector and that's really the the workhorse of our solution it processes all the packets from you know we'll get technical here for a second one gig to 100 gig and that's a lot of data to to to process and because we can just get to the point with the process to the smart data engine and get to the problem show me where my latency is show where my problems are showing my protocols uh pulling that up through our packet flow which engine which kind of facilitates us collecting from multiple hops of the network uh a lot of times uh iit folks will ask us well we want hop to hop views of this i'm like great let's do that we can do it right now we just need to sit down design it but we really design towards their their use cases and in healthcare it's very common you can have dmz's you're going to have people accessing their electronic medical records through their dmz uh and things like that and as it goes through the back end services we basically take a traffic feed from all those different hops of the network or in cases there that make the most sense uh the primary spartan choke points and then take that data in and then we do what we do we expose the data and expose the performance information and most customers and it's like this in the world people usually don't call you up to say hey rebecca you're doing a great job today i want to buy you a cup of coffee especially in i.t they call up to say hey things aren't working hey fix it hey i can't do something and so our our job is to help facilitate with those customers and really partner with them to design solutions so that they can not only view that information uh but also triage it really quick and the word triage makes a great deal of uh sense in health care for example if you have a you know you hurt your finger they're not going to take an x-ray of your foot it makes no sense because they've already triaged that that's not your problem we do the same thing but we do it more from the network and application side to see where the hot spots are you are the it triage so talk a little bit about about this you are a problem solver and so right now we have a crisis on our hands of monumental proportions do you think that it has forced healthcare organizations and hospitals to innovate more quickly at this time or do you think that there is still just so much uncertainty taking place right now that it is hard to see the forest for the trees what what are you seeing that's a that's a really good question uh we're seeing both uh just to put it just very so one of the biggest changes that really the the pandemics had on everybody is the switch to everybody went from i have 10 maybe 20 of my workers working remotely over vpn contractors uh things like people are there just can't be in the office for a reason they switched from 10 to 20 to 70 80 90 percent so it was an overnight change so think of the impact on that the caregivers are at the hospital they're actually you know the frontline workers they're at the hospital you know serving their p their their patients but people in the administration accounting i.t other things that are important to the organization all had to switch to work from home obviously for safety reasons so the impact on just the internet link number one huge impact before it was used for outbound hey i'm gonna go check you know i'm gonna go do some research i'm gonna go check a website i'm gonna you know see what's what's uh what sports activities going on today now all the traffic is coming inbound on the internet and number so that's number one number two big change vpns vpns took an enormous beating that maybe they were size for for that type of scalability overnight and maybe they weren't so the organizations that were kind of prepped for it not such a big change and we've seen some good results from that but there are also organizations that immediately had to switch to oh my goodness i need to upgrade my vpns and my internet links because i wasn't prepared for this um so the the larger organizations sometimes have a little more uh capabilities to make that change quick the smaller organizations that's a tough call so they really have had to innovate quite a quite a bit on that side of it but when you add the that stress on things that also puts shows that the internet and the vpn is really points where the bad guys are going to target which again we're seeing we're starting to see that in the ransomware and the extortion attacks so it has forced innovation certainly um but you bring it to the point of force through the trees uh there's still a lot of work to be done uh so that's that's where we're really uh putting a lot of our focus especially in health care right now because it's got the the biggest impact uh well frankly to society right now and the religious uh the companies so as company as healthcare organizations are navigating this period of new normal and of course we've had some positive vaccine news so we can say that that perhaps there is going to be an end to this pandemic uh in the coming year but how are they planning ahead i want you to close us out here with how healthcare organizations are thinking about the next 12 to 24 months and if you have any advice for them i'm sure they would be all ears uh yeah i think we could all use some good advice right now on that one short answer is you know i don't know either right now in healthcare it is a big challenge because of that as mentioned earlier the impact on on on the personal protection equipment mobile hospitals and and frankly where they've had in the revenue laws so it's become a you basically have to do more with less right now uh which is one of the things that we do uh and really it's kind of our message for customers anyway i'm a big proponent of use what we have what if you have our solution use what you have and use it to its fullest extent uh especially while times are lean you know we just don't the wallets aren't as big right now so we're gonna have to really focus yet i mean has there been a bigger time in healthcare ever than right now i can't think of one so our focus right now and our message to our customers and anyone else is if you've got our types of solution use it to its fullest capability so that you can triage and so that you can you know not have patient impacting issues and on top of all the other things you have to deal with you bring up the point about the vaccines one of the things that we've seen especially for what's called healthcare organizations that are more research focused is um the bad guys aren't very nice so the bad guys are going to go after organizations where they can have a big we'll call it splash or they can steal something so research hospitals that that are working on vaccines or something in that realm have been huge targets again ddos for ransomware and extortion my message for anyone in healthcare right now is you know bless you first of all and second of all use what you have to its fullest extent which means a solution like ours yes use it for network monitor use it for application monitoring but but please use it to protect yourself for cyber security type visibility uh we typically in a lot of cases uh we'll see uh traffic that that some cyber security tools don't and not because they're bad tools but because we're installed in places that they sometimes aren't so that might be uh where they're typically installed maybe on the perimeters of network and endpoints we actually are instrumented through that service chain so not only the outbound internet the wide area network links the vpns and dmzs and and vdi and all those acronyms that i'm throwing out those are typical spots for us as well as though virtualization so that can be cloud or private cloud so effectively we have areas of visibility that can be leveraged in big bigger and better ways even really on the cyber security and unified communication sides of the fence so my message would be to be just use the what you have to its fullest capability uh especially when times are lean and uh keep up the good fight excellent leverage what you got ken checkout problem solver at netscout thank you so much for coming on thecube thank you for having me been a pleasure i'm rebecca knight stay tuned for more of the cube virtual you

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Oh, welcome back to the cube. As we continue our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, you know, I know you're familiar with Moneyball, the movie, Brad Pitt, starting as Billy Bean, the Oakland A's general manager, where the A's were all over data, right. With the Billy Bean approach, it was a very, uh, data driven approach to building his team and a very successful team. Well, AWS is taking that to an extraordinary level and with us to talk about that as Matt Hearst, who was the head of global sports marketing and communications at AWS and Matt, thanks for joining us here on the queue. >>John is my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. You >>Bet. Um, now we've already heard from a couple of folks, NFL folks, uh, at re-invent, uh, about the virtual draft. Um, but for those of our viewers who maybe aren't up to speed on that, or having a chance to see, uh, what those folks had to say, uh, let's just talk about that as an opener, um, about your involvement with the NFL and particularly with, with the draft and, and what that announcement was all about. >>Sure. We, we saw, we've seen a great evolution with our work with the NFL over the past few years. And you mentioned during the infrastructure keynote where Michelle McKenna who's, the CIO for the NFL talks about how they were able to stage the 2020 virtual draft, which was the NFL is much most watched ever, uh, you know, over 55 million viewers over three days and how they were unable to do it without the help and the power of AWS, you know, utilizing AWS is reliability, scalability, security, and network connectivity, where they were able to manage thousands of live feeds to flow to the internet and go to ESPN, to airline. Um, but additionally, Jennifer LinkedIn, who's the SVP of player health and innovation at the NFL spoke during the machine learning keynote during reinvent. And she talked about how we're working with the NFL, uh, to co-develop the digital athlete, which is a computer simulation model of a football player that can replicate infinite scenarios in a game environment to help better foster and understanding of how to treat and rehabilitate injuries in the short term and in the long-term in the future, ultimately prevent, prevent and predict injuries. >>And they're using machine learning to be able to do that. So there's, those are just a couple of examples of, uh, what the NFL talked about during re-invent at a couple of keynotes, but we've seen this work with the NFL really evolve over the past few years, you know, starting with next gen stats. Those are the advanced statistics that, uh, brings a new level of entertainment to football fans. And what we really like to do, uh, with the NFL is to excite, educate, and innovate. And those stats really bring fans closer to the game to allow the broadcasters to go a little bit deeper, to educate the fans better. And we've seen some of those come to life through some of our ads, uh, featuring Deshaun Watson, Christian McCaffrey, um, these visually compelling statistics that, that come to life on screen. Um, and it's not just the NFL. AWS is doing this with some of the top sports leagues around the world, you know, powering F1 insights, Buddhist league, and match facts, six nations, rugby match stats, all of which utilize AWS technology to uncover advanced stats and really help educate and engage fans around the world in the sports that they love. >>Let's talk about that engagement with your different partners then, because you just touched on it. This is a wide array of avenues that you're exploring. You're in football, you're in soccer, you're in sailing, uh, you're uh, racing formula one and NASCAR, for example, all very different animals, right? In terms of their statistics and their data and of their fan interest, what fans ultimately want. So, um, maybe on a holistic basis first, how are you, uh, kind of filtering through your partner's needs and their fans needs and your capabilities and providing that kind of merger of capabilities with desires >>Sports, uh, for AWS and for Amazon are no different than any other industry. And we work backwards from the customer and what their needs are. You know, when we look at the sports partners and customers that we work with and why they're looking to AWS to help innovate and transform their sports, it's really the innovative technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, high performance computing, internet of things, for example, that are really transforming the sports world and some of the best teams and leagues that we've talked about, that you touched on, you know, formula one, NASCAR, NFL, Buena, Sligo, six nations, rugby, and so on and so forth are using AWS to really improve the athlete and the team performance transform how fans view and engage with sports and deliver these real-time advanced statistics to give fans, uh, more of that excitement that we're talking about. >>Let me give you a couple of examples on some of these innovative technologies that our customers are using. So the Seattle Seahawks, I built a data Lake on AWS to use it for talent, evaluation and acquisition to improve player health and recovery times, and also for their game planning. And another example is, you know, formula and we talk about the F1 insights, those advanced statistics, but they're also using AWS high-performance computing that helped develop the next generation race car, which will be introduced in the 2022 season. And by using AWS F1 was able to reduce the average time to run simulations by 70% to improve the car's aerodynamics, reducing the downforce loss and create more wheel to wheel racing, to bring about more excitement on the track. And a third example, similar to, uh, F1 using HPC is any of those team UK. So they compete in the America's cup, which is the oldest trophy in international sports. And endosteum UK is using an HPC environment running on Amazon, easy to spot instances to design its boat for the upcoming competition. And they're depending on this computational power on AWS needing 2000 to 3000 simulations to design the dimension of just a single boat. Um, and so the power of the cloud and the power of the AWS innovative technologies are really helping, uh, these teams and leagues and sports organizations around the world transform their sport. >>Well, let's go back. Uh, you mentioned the Seahawks, um, just as, uh, an example of maybe, uh, the kind of insights that that you're providing. Uh, let's pretend I'm there, there's an outstanding running back and his name's Matt Hearst and, uh, and he's at a, you know, a college let's just pretend in California someplace. Um, what kind of inputs, uh, are you now helping them? Uh, and what kind of insights are you trying to, are you helping them glean from those inputs that maybe they didn't have before? And how are they actually applying that then in terms of their player acquisition and thinking about draft, right player development, deciding whether Matt Hertz is a good fit for them, maybe John Wallace is a good fit for them. Um, but what are the kinds of, of, uh, what's that process look like? >>So the way that the Seahawks have built the data Lake, they built it on AWFs to really, as you talk about this talent, evaluation and acquisition, to understand how a player, you know, for example, a John Walls could fit into their scheme, you know, that, that taking this data and putting it in the data Lake and figuring out how it fits into their schemes is really important because you could find out that maybe you played, uh, two different positions in high school or college, and then that could transform into, into the schematics that they're running. Um, and try to find, I don't want to say a diamond in the rough, but maybe somebody that could fit better into their scheme than, uh, maybe the analysts or others could figure out. And that's all based on the power of data that they're using, not only for the talent evaluation and acquisition, but for game planning as well. >>And so the Seahawks building that data Lake is just one of those examples. Um, you know, when, when you talk about a player, health and safety, as well, just using the NFL as the example, too, with that digital athlete, working with them to co-develop that for that composite NFL player, um, where they're able to run those infinite scenarios to ultimately predict and prevent injury and using Amazon SageMaker and AWS machine learning to do so, it's super important, obviously with the Seahawks, for the future of that organization and the success that they, that they see and continue to see, and also for the future of football with the NFL, >>You know, um, Roger Goodell talks about innovation in the national football league. We hear other commissioners talking about the same thing. It's kind of a very popular buzz word right now is, is leagues look to, uh, ways to broaden their, their technological footprint in innovative ways. Again, popular to say, how exactly though, do you see AWS role in that with the national football league, for example, again, or maybe any other league in terms of inspiring innovation and getting them to perhaps look at things differently through different prisms than they might have before? >>I think, again, it's, it's working backwards from the customer and understanding their needs, right? We couldn't have predicted at the beginning of 2020, uh, that, you know, the NFL draft will be virtual. And so working closely with the NFL, how do we bring that to life? How do we make that successful, um, you know, working backwards from the NFL saying, Hey, we'd love to utilize your technology to improve Clare health and safety. How are we able to do that? Right. And using machine learning to do so. So the pace of innovation, these innovative technologies are very important, not only for us, but also for these, uh, leagues and teams that we work with, you know, using F1 is another example. Um, we talked about HPC and how they were able to, uh, run these simulations in the cloud to improve, uh, the race car and redesign the race car for the upcoming seasons. >>But, uh, F1 is also using Amazon SageMaker, um, to develop new F1 insights, to bring fans closer to the action on the track, and really understand through technology, these split-second decisions that these drivers are taking in every lap, every turn, when to pit, when not to pit things of that nature and using the power of the cloud and machine learning to really bring that to life. And one example of that, that we introduced this year with, with F1 was, um, the fastest driver insight and working F1, worked with the Amazon machine learning solutions lab to bring that to life and use a data-driven approach to determine the fastest driver, uh, over the last 40 years, relying on the years of historical data that they store in S3 and the ML algorithms that, that built between AWS and F1 data scientists to produce this result. So John, you and I could sit here and argue, you know, like, like two guys that really love F1 and say, I think Michael Schumacher is the fastest drivers. It's Lewis, Hamilton. Who's great. Well, it turned out it was a arts incentive, you know, and Schumacher was second. And, um, Hamilton's third and it's the power of this data and the technology that brings this to life. So we could still have a fun argument as fans around this, but we actually have a data-driven results through that to say, Hey, this is actually how it, how it ranked based on how everything works. >>You know, this being such a strange year, right? With COVID, uh, being rampant and, and the major influence that it has been in every walk of global life, but certainly in the American sports. Um, how has that factored into, in terms of the kinds of services that you're looking to provide or to help your partners provide in order to increase that fan engagement? Because as you've pointed out, ultimately at the end of the day, it's, it's about the consumer, right? The fan, and giving them info, they need at the time they want it, that they find useful. Um, but has this year been, um, put a different point on that for you? Just because so many eyeballs have been on the screen and not necessarily in person >>Yeah. T 20, 20 as, you know, a year, unlike any other, um, you know, in our lifetimes and hopefully going forward, you know, it's, it's not like that. Um, but we're able to understand that we can still bring fans closer to the sports that they love and working with, uh, these leagues, you know, we talk about NFL draft, but with formula one, we, uh, in the month of may developed the F1 Pro-Am deep racer event that featured F1 driver, uh, Daniel Ricardo, and test driver TA Sianna Calderon in this deep racer league and deep racers, a one 18th scale, fully autonomous car, um, that uses reinforcement learning, learning a type of machine learning. And so we had actual F1 driver and test driver racing against developers from all over the world. And technology is really playing a role in that evolution of F1. Um, but also giving fans a chance to go head to head against the Daniel Ricardo, which I don't know that anyone else could ever say that. >>Yeah, I raced against an F1 driver for head to head, you know, and doing that in the month of may really brought forth, not only an appreciation, I think for the drivers that were involved on the machine learning and the technology involved, but also for the developers on these split second decisions, these drivers have to make through an event like that. You know, it was, it was great and well received. And the drivers had a lot of fun there. Um, you know, and that is the national basketball association. The NBA played in the bubble, uh, down in Orlando, Florida, and we work with second spectrum. They run on AWS. And second spectrum is the official optical provider of the NBA and they provide Clippers court vision. So, uh, it's a mobile live streaming experience for LA Clippers fans that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to visualize data through on-screen graphic overlays. >>And second spectrum was able to rely on, uh, AWS is reliability, connectivity, scalability, and move all of their equipment to the bubble in Orlando and still produce a great experience for the fans, um, by reducing any latency tied to video and data processing, um, they needed that low latency to encode and compress the media to transfer an edit with the overlays in seconds without losing quality. And they were able to rely on AWS to do that. So a couple of examples that even though 2020 was, uh, was a little different than we all expected it to be, um, of how we worked closely with our sports partners to still deliver, uh, an exceptional fan experience. >>So, um, I mean, first off you have probably the coolest job at AWS. I think it's so, uh, congratulations. I mean, it's just, it's fascinating. What's on your want to do less than in terms of 20, 21 and beyond and about what you don't do now, or, or what you would like to do better down the road, any one area in particular that you're looking at, >>You know, our, our strategy in sports is no different than any other industry. We want to work backwards from our customers to help solve business problems through innovation. Um, and I know we've talked about the NFL a few times, but taking them for, for another example, with the NFL draft, improving player health and safety, working closely with them, we're able to help the NFL advance the game both on and off the field. And that's how we look at doing that with all of our sports partners and really helping them transform their sport, uh, through our innovative technologies. And we're doing this in a variety of ways, uh, with a bunch of engaging content that people can really enjoy with the sports that they love, whether it's, you know, quick explainer videos, um, that are short two minute or less videos explaining what these insights are, these advanced stats. >>So when you see them on the screening and say, Oh yeah, I understand what that is at a, at a conceptual level or having blog posts from a will, Carlin who, uh, has a long storied history in six nations and in rugby or Rob Smedley, along story history and F1 writing blog posts to give fans deeper perspective as subject matter experts, or even for those that want to go deeper under the hood. We've worked with our teams to take a deeper look@howsomeofthesecometolifedetailingthetechnologyjourneyoftheseadvancedstatsthroughsomedeepdiveblogsandallofthiscanbefoundataws.com slash sports. So a lot of great rich content for, uh, for people to dig into >>Great stuff, indeed. Um, congratulations to you and your team, because you really are enriching the fan experience, which I am. One of, you know, hundreds of millions are enjoying that. So thanks for that great work. And we wish you all the continued success down the road here in 2021 and beyond. Thanks, Matt. Thanks so much, Sean.

>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, >>Hi. We are the Cube live covering AWS reinvent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got one of our cube alumni back with me. Mike Miller is here. General manager of A W s AI Devices at AWS. Mike, welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. It's really great to join you all again at this virtual reinvent. >>Yes, I think last year you were on set. We have always had to. That's at reinvent. And you you had the deep race, your car, and so we're obviously socially distance here. But talk to me about deepracer. What's going on? Some of the things that have gone on the last year that you're excited >>about. Yeah, I'd love to tell. Tell you a little bit about what's been happening. We've had a tremendous year. Obviously, Cove. It has restricted our ability to have our in person races. Eso we've really gone gone gangbusters with our virtual league. So we have monthly races for competitors that culminate in the championship. Um, at reinvent. So this year we've got over 100 competitors who have qualified and who are racing virtually with us this year at reinvent. They're participating in a series of knockout rounds that are being broadcast live on twitch over the next week. That will whittle the group down to AH Group of 32 which will have a Siris of single elimination brackets leading to eight finalists who will race Grand Prix style five laps, eight cars on the track at the same time and will crown the champion at the closing keynote on December 15th this year. >>Exciting? So you're bringing a reinforcement, learning together with with sports that so many of us have been missing during the pandemic. We talked to me a little bit about some of the things that air that you've improved with Deep Racer and some of the things that are coming next year. Yeah, >>absolutely so, First of all, Deep Racer not only has been interesting for individuals to participate in the league, but we continue to see great traction and adoption amongst big customers on dare, using Deep Racer for hands on learning for machine learning, and many of them are turning to Deep Racer to train their workforce in machine learning. So over 150 customers from the likes of Capital One Moody's, Accenture, DBS Bank, JPMorgan Chase, BMW and Toyota have held Deep Racer events for their workforces. And in fact, three of those customers Accenture, DBS Bank and J. P. Morgan Chase have each trained over 1000 employees in their organization because they're just super excited. And they find that deep racers away to drive that excitement and engagement across their customers. We even have Capital one expanded this to their families, so Capital One ran a deep raise. Their Kids Cup, a family friendly virtual competition this past year were over. 250 Children and 200 families got to get hands on with machine learning. >>So I envisioned some. You know, this being a big facilitator during the pandemic when there's been this massive shift to remote work has have you seen an uptick in it for companies that talking about training need to be ableto higher? Many, many more people remotely but also train them? Is deep Racer facilitator of that? Yeah, >>absolutely. Deep Racer has ah core component of the experience, which is all virtualized. So we have, ah, console and integration with other AWS services so that racers can participate using a three d racing simulator. They can actually see their car driving around a track in a three D world simulation. Um, we're also selling the physical devices. So you know, if participants want to get the one of those devices and translate what they've done in the virtual world to the real world, they can start doing that. And in fact, just this past year, we made our deep race or car available for purchase internationally through the Amazon Com website to help facilitate that. >>So how maney deep racers air out there? I'm just curious. >>Oh, thousands. Um, you know, And there what? What we've seen is some companies will purchase you, know them in bulk and use them for their internal leagues. Just like you know, JP Morgan Chase on DBS Bank. These folks have their own kind of tracks and racers that they'll use to facilitate both in person as well as the virtual racing. >>I'm curious with this shift to remote that we mentioned a minute ago. How are you seeing deepracer as a facilitator of engagement. You mentioned engagement. And that's one of the biggest challenges that so Maney teams develops. Processes have without being co located with each other deep Brister help with that. I mean, from an engagement perspective, I think >>so. What we've seen is that Deep Racer is just fun to get your hands on. And we really lower the learning curve for machine learning. And in particular, this branch called reinforcement Learning, which is where you train this agent through trial and error toe, learn how to do a new, complex task. Um, and what we've seen is that customers who have introduced Deep Racer, um, as an event for their employees have seen ah, very wide variety of employees. Skill sets, um, kind of get engaged. So you've got not just the hardcore deep data scientists or the M L engineers. You've got Web front end programmers. You even have some non technical folks who want to get their hands dirty. Onda learn about machine learning and Deep Racer really is a nice, gradual introduction to doing that. You can get engaged with it with very little kind of coding knowledge at all. >>So talk to me about some of the new services. And let's look at some specific use case customer use cases with each service. Yeah, >>absolutely. So just to set the context. You know, Amazon's got hundreds. A ws has hundreds of thousands of customers doing machine learning on AWS. No customers of all sizes are embedding machine learning into their no core business processes. And one of the things that we always do it Amazon is We're listening to customers. You know, 90 to 95% of our road maps are driven by customer feedback. And so, as we've been talking to these industrial manufacturing customers, they've been telling us, Hey, we've got data. We've got these processes that are happening in our industrial sites. Um, and we just need some help connecting the dots like, how do we really most effectively use machine learning to improve our processes in these industrial and manufacturing sites? And so we've come up with these five services. They're focused on industrial manufacturing customers, uh, two of the services air focused around, um, predictive maintenance and, uh, the other three services air focused on computer vision. Um, and so let's start with the predictive maintenance side. So we announced Amazon Monitor On and Amazon look out for equipment. So these services both enable predictive maintenance powered by machine learning in a way that doesn't require the customer to have any machine learning expertise. So Mono Tron is an end to end machine learning system with sensors, gateway and an ML service that can detect anomalies and predict when industrial equipment will require maintenance. I've actually got a couple examples here of the sensors in the gateway, so this is Amazon monitor on these little sensors. This little guy is a vibration and temperature sensor that's battery operated, and wireless connects to the gateway, which then transfers the data up to the M L Service in the cloud. And what happens is, um, the sensors can be connected to any rotating machinery like pump. Pour a fan or a compressor, and they will send data up to the machine learning cloud service, which will detect anomalies or sort of irregular kind of sensor readings and then alert via a mobile app. Just a tech or a maintenance technician at an industrial site to go have a look at their equipment and do some preventative maintenance. So um, it's super extreme line to end to end and easy for, you know, a company that has no machine learning expertise to take advantage of >>really helping them get on board quite quickly. Yeah, >>absolutely. It's simple tea set up. There's really very little configuration. It's just a matter of placing the sensors, pairing them up with the mobile app and you're off and running. >>Excellent. I like easy. So some of the other use cases? Yeah, absolutely. >>So So we've seen. So Amazon fulfillment centers actually have, um, enormous amounts of equipment you can imagine, you know, the size of an Amazon fulfillment center. 28 football fields, long miles of conveyor belts and Amazon fulfillment centers have started to use Amazon monitor on, uh, to monitor some of their conveyor belts. And we've got a filament center in Germany that has started using these 1000 sensors, and they've already been able to, you know, do predictive maintenance and prevent downtime, which is super costly, you know, for businesses, we've also got customers like Fender, you know, who makes guitars and amplifiers and musical equipment. Here in the US, they're adopting Amazon monitor on for their industrial machinery, um, to help prevent downtime, which again can cost them a great deal as they kind of hand manufacture these high end guitars. Then there's Amazon. Look out for equipment, which is one step further from Amazon monitor on Amazon. Look out for equipment. Um provides a way for customers to send their own sensor data to AWS in order to build and train a model that returns predictions for detecting abnormal equipment behavior. So here we have a customer, for example, like GP uh, E P s in South Korea, or I'm sorry, g S E P s in South Korea there in industrial conglomerate, and they've been collecting their own data. So they have their own sensors from industrial equipment for a decade. And they've been using just kind of rule basic rules based systems to try to gain insight into that data. Well, now they're using Amazon, look out for equipment to take all of their existing sensor data, have Amazon for equipment, automatically generate machine learning models on, then process the sensor data to know when they're abnormalities or when some predictive maintenance needs to occur. >>So you've got the capabilities of working with with customers and industry that that don't have any ML training to those that do have been using sensors. So really, everybody has an opportunity here to leverage this new Amazon technology, not only for predicted, but one of the things I'm hearing is contact list, being able to understand what's going on without having to have someone physically there unless there is an issue in contact. This is not one of the words of 2020 but I think it probably should be. >>Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, that that was some of the genesis of some of the next industrial services that we announced that are based on computer vision. What we saw on what we heard when talking to these customers is they have what we call human inspection processes or manual inspection processes that are required today for everything from, you know, monitoring you like workplace safety, too, you know, quality of goods coming off of a machinery line or monitoring their yard and sort of their, you know, truck entry and exit on their looking for computer vision toe automate a lot of these tasks. And so we just announced a couple new services that use computer vision to do that to automate these once previously manual inspection tasks. So let's start with a W A. W s Panorama uses computer vision toe improve those operations and workplace safety. AWS Panorama is, uh, comes in two flavors. There's an appliance, which is, ah, box like this. Um, it basically can go get installed on your network, and it will automatically discover and start processing the video feeds from existing cameras. So there's no additional capital expense to take a W s panorama and have it apply computer vision to the cameras that you've already got deployed, you know, So customers are are seeing that, um, you know, computer vision is valuable, but the reason they want to do this at the edge and put this computer vision on site is because sometimes they need to make very low Leighton see decisions where if you have, like a fast moving industrial process, you can use computer vision. But I don't really want to incur the cost of sending data to the cloud and back. I need to make a split second decision, so we need machine learning that happens on premise. Sometimes they don't want to stream high bandwidth video. Or they just don't have the bandwidth to get this video back to the cloud and sometimes their data governance or privacy restrictions that restrict the company's ability to send images or video from their site, um, off site to the cloud. And so this is why Panorama takes this machine learning and makes it happen right here on the edge for customers. So we've got customers like Cargill who uses or who is going to use Panorama to improve their yard management. They wanna use computer vision to detect the size of trucks that drive into their granaries and then automatically assign them to an appropriately sized loading dock. You've got a customer like Siemens Mobility who you know, works with municipalities on, you know, traffic on by other transport solutions. They're going to use AWS Panorama to take advantage of those existing kind of traffic cameras and build machine learning models that can, you know, improve congestion, allocate curbside space, optimize parking. We've also got retail customers. For instance, Parkland is a Canadian fuel station, um, and retailer, you know, like a little quick stop, and they want to use Panorama to do things like count the people coming in and out of their stores and do heat maps like, Where are people visiting my store so I can optimize retail promotions and product placement? >>That's fantastic. The number of use cases is just, I imagine if we had more time like you could keep going and going. But thank you so much for not only sharing what's going on with Deep Racer and the innovations, but also for show until even though we weren't in person at reinvent this year, Great to have you back on the Cube. Mike. We appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks, Lisa, for having me. I appreciate it for Mike Miller. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes Live coverage of aws reinvent 2020.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco and welcome back to the cubes coverage. Just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual. We're not face to face the cubes been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro, his beast vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom. You are the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area it's converged in multiple theaters and technology super important. So I want to get into that with you. But first thousand eyes was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important, the new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco is going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco. Tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to enable your employees to be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, the home of the conference and book talk track we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandoned from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe. Maybe it's SD when maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running off for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed this at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand nights thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a early, simple, uh, connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone. We'll totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing barrel independence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application. >>Those three things together ultimately are creating that level of complex service chain. It really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And yet then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it and be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, as you're getting to some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation self-healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices earlier, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on cube before. How does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things what's important to look at? Can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. Your first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talked about right aside, you know, data, um, alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data to become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly. They'll allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back to the network fabric, whether that is a dressing you're modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as our employees, >>Classic policy based activities take into a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or arcane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have naturally thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CTP and infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes endpoint point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, a great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence to action and where in the past you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the Nike organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes and how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language and allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, within thousand eyes in terms of a need, enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our Sherlyn capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, what, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. They're having worked collaboratively with the different ESPs that they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I've got to ask you the question we think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it. Teams. Um, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because it does a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a, a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler. The new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. Talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that, as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type event analogy, you'll be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to, uh, be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light as people using say, thousand eyes, as part of saying se land base for allow where you're looking to say benchmark and gain confidence as you look to scale out and either, you know, benchmarking different ESPs within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights. The classic financial model ROI got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation, automation's awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products, it means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you look at automation and everything as a, and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And, you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking, salt >>Feature it's under the hood, the feature of everything, because the service is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness and the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>And ultimately, I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, we, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network it's connected to. And then ultimately the user in the sense of that user and by leveraging a thousand eyes, being able to then integrate thousand 18 to how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developers looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Do you have a car, a vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco I'm John farrier, host of the cube cube virtual for dev net. Create virtual. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with dev net in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube, but in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that. Creativity. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net senior vice president in general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe presenting accelerating automation with damnit brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX all that great stuff. Many Wade Lee, who's the director, senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first. We don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net creative, all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years where virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you've had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are >>Coming online is, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. Uh, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps riding on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for start a, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the COVID hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business stay alive. And to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there and working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>Now one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and, you know, have you guys got some acquisitions, you about thousand eyes? Um, um, you've got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game in security Cooper and all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place and now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, um, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation and the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they have to build in and what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home? How many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first, everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>Cause you know, you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. Well, you've >>Been falling, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people rumblings are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>We got dev net created right around the corner, virtual unfortunate won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you've got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. >>Thanks. Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard, uh, Susie is about people and one of the things that's close to your heart and you've been driving is, uh, as senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multicloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network, automation, developer, which Susie mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite data that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we were actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on a dev net site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group, that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dump space as well, and are helping people with that service or what it's great seeing the community come along and really see that. Okay. >>I ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned a observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we need it? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me old days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licenses started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they have the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that in trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, um, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Eric and Mandy. If you guys can wrap up this accelerate automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. And again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, I'm only can imagine the enablement that's gonna create. Can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with dev net and tee up dev net create Mandy, we'll start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every Devin event over the past years, you know, damnit is bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that the people's skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the Duveneck community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping >>That customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. >>Can I add one, add one more thing? Yeah. I was just gonna say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>Yeah. That's what I was going to close out and just put the final bow on that. By saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. Happy to be here. >>Okay. I'm Jennifer with the cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment virtual tour face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching. >>Welcome back. And Jeffrey, >>The cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev data van, it's called accelerating automation with dev net and the new normal. And we certainly know the new normal is, is not going away. They've been doing this since the middle of March or all the way to October. And so we're excited to have our next guest is Thomas Shively. He's the vice president of product marketing and data center networking for the intent based networking group at Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. Exactly, >>Exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light switch moment, which was, you know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you got the kids home, you got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls in their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16 hit and everybody had to go home. >>Wow, good point. Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network >>Much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls and zoom calls, but, you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more operative as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it, 2000 East to West, as we say on the data center. Right. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. >>Right. You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning, can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends and the way I look at this trans as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while then. So in a sense, we, we, we prep was, or no, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little block, a little, little, uh, abrupt before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if he didn't, if he didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we sold our match. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. Yeah, >>I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of, of trends, right? The other great, uh, trend as public cloud, um, and hybrid cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me, it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focused on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might have played some compliance reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your sinks. And so I sing in the end, what a, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed. But the logic context section, which we see in the last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is where a lot of my discussions I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focused on and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of. >>Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. And I said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which is in most of our infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just the foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? >>Right? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools, uh, and that's a whole range, right? And this is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speeds, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use NoMo tools that they have on a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for further and saying, I want to integrate this with some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pleasing, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration with relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right? And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see a given. I, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this. It is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about. The cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all of these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throat to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer. You, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just sit. I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they want to actually structure the operation. Right? One of the nice things around this or automation plus, uh, tool integration, cloning to, and integration is you actually opened this up, not a soul automation train, not just to the network operations personnel, right. You also open it up and can use this for the second ops person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, is literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional, you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I got to hand over the sec ups team, and they can directly call these these KPIs, right? Or even one step further, you can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>That's interesting, you know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously change software programming for the last 20 years. And I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those. None of those is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it is just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes to saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI decent, a controller or our multicell orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right. Uh, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she formed Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is emotion where in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying, Neil, all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little plugin. I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at us, whether you're a NetApps person or dev ops person or SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right. And it's simplest thing that like sent books and why moments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code Coda there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly. And that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation we're in and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning, that's the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily. Right, >>Right. That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right. Democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and can make the changes and then opening up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the, it says application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happening with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of changed the degree of difficulty to get projects started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lands, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right. This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right. And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to, uh, adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's not just automation. I say, we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private, private networks into which of private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing, what a business looks at, right. They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment. What's a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this. Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. It's really democratisation. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>Yeah. It's, it's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in, in, in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting is we, we started on the Cisco data center side. We started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on these, on these products, uh, they have all the capabilities they are, they can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them point. >>Well, it's good times for you because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and in social media, right. What what's driving your digital transformation is that the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. I highly recommend everybody roll up his sleeves and you know, the best races you can have. >>And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So, you know, like say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. I look forward to that as well. All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? >>I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, or along with our partner, DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's know, North of 70% >>Plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our, our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable as sort of the, of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my, you know, dog's name is the password, you know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all of the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively. And I make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if, when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, that there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I, I see that with an asterisk because, um, if, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant Tessa mill component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? Let's say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there in that, in that data set. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation, and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on the outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in, in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about what computers are gonna run on, or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so what, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right? There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to, you know, security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical do, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines, if the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if, if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code while we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company likes companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatize is the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick doc. I don't care, but they sort of laid out this pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy mean beyond GDPR and California consumer privacy act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and Mose. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He needs to be walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me, >>Really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is, is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or are you >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, try not try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming a, this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there? And what are you? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters. Isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass players go over there. Like what happened to the band? That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So things thanks for inviting me and I miss you, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says kidney, thanks so much for coming to the Q. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>After the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual. We're not face to face the cubes been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's, who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is beast vice president of product. Uh, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multi-cloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area it's converged in multiple theaters and technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you, but first thousand eyes is recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important, the new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talking programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, it's really been an exciting six months for the entire team and customers, >>You know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the Cova dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, the home of the conference book talk track we'll get to in a second, but it exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandoned from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home. VPNs are passe. Maybe it's SD when maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed this at scale. What's your view on this? And what is thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was a early, simple, uh, connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. And you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say, functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience and ultimately the it organization newly chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, to be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, as you get into some of these high-scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data at the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're going to look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. First off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right inside, you know, data, um, alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen. You have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, to allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the form of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen within our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as our employees, >>Classic policy based activity, taking it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it, people are like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I got to ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw it within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams were really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their CTPs infrastructure across, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device in the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you've got the cloud. How has your technology helped the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, a great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and where in the past you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need, enabling that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, what, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization. But it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. They're having to work collaboratively with a different ISP. If they're pairing with, with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question, we think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it. Teams. Um, you see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them just got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talk about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a war situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve that issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment at time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you that ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your bounds, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to, uh, be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same se land-based rollout, where you're looking to say benchmark, and you can confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ESPs within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch, give you that competence to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights. The classic financial model ROI got baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation and who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things, but as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products, it means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the deal that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only process and gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you've said, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need with the level of automation, you'll be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And, you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally difficult to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking for. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>And ultimately, I think, you know, when you're looking at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a fraud perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure that's running upon, but the network it's connected to, and then ultimately the user in the sense of that user and by leveraging that thousand eyes and being able to then integrate thousand into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the developer's looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. We've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks Joe Vaccaro, vice president of product here, but thousand nine is now part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. You really have to automate you human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got a Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. >>Good to see Kuhn. >>Thank you for having me >>Joining him as Eric nip. He is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was cool. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think that the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them as the women, the flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah. W we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic that just overall, the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a serve as an elastic is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>And then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the, you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CIC pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as, and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. You know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. We like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security change from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no, I'm so, wow. The kudos that you, you found that book I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis in the primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices, that's digitally connected devices. >>Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right expression for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about parameters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guys up or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data and the context, what data is being accessed. And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because of the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable under current, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We at Dave runs it on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days at Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd and, and I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, con really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, because five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they've been able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to, you know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have a host Sarah that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing, you know, partners and customers employing programmability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that can provide, >>Um, bringing on board those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>So, Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT in the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you, uh, clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an you're an a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So I mean, not itself was a, was a, a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean, obviously he looked back to the very early days of our vision, right? It was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, we were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several years, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to me, programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that is automated, or if that decision requires some type of manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough, like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I don't want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for anybody that can get there before me. Maybe there's a little incentive tied to it and the incentive, although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, who achieved it when incentive was secondary, they just wanted to have the bragging rights, like yeah, I beat Eric. Right? >>Right. Absolutely. No, it's a, it's it, you know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well, but I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media means, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So I, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are a bubble, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and do their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I, and I believe the status, this, and I'll probably get number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a, in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kind of gotten out of the fog of, of, of war for our fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that our customers, that people are happier working from home, people are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent and some estimates put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to stay in there in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part time, right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally gonna work from home unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events base where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to, to travel and, and check into a hotel and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part time as, as Eric also explained. But a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team or, you know, even here in Belgium, our, our local general manager has a virtual effort. TIF every Friday obviously skipped the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that the network enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four, five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but you know, it's really, really grown and, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really about the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, uh, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes that relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of, of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to it. Uh, we're seeing really people dive into that and customers, um, co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of like the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology >>Can provide, but also how it impacts people. Has it been discussed and redefines process? >>I love that the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry, and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it is, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and it's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place, uh, in the end, the, it lexicon as being that critical or that poor critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with them in another program, ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? And I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. >>All right. Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for, for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and, and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, mob bell must be happy because the old mother's day problem is finally solved when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power, that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners. And he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's businesses transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want to way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along the step in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. >>Right. That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that's the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. A new Cisco has pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional form. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. >>You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in this definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, in, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to bring it all together. It's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now, everything is cloud native. We have the ability to, to better, to better adjust, to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something ups to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. >>Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. Right. >>Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other side, >>Cloud multicloud >>Public cloud, you know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective in helping customers work through this, cause still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses, how are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. >>But you know, aside from, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of, uh, operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry, and the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. In that thing. You used to know what that was. Now you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. >>You really need to understand what's going on. And the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path there, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of that. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're on, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about in a dev net, really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some, you know, non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a, as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the doublet that gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they've built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology case that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes that the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here from around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with Devin brought to you by Cisco. >>When I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net, with Cisco, and we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event and hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at DevNet create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open mic for demos, where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into, you know, IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called street from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. Thanks so much. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. This is Dave Volante, and I want to welcome you to the cubes presentation of accelerating automation with Devon it in this special program, we're going to explore how to accelerate digital transformation and how the global pandemic is changing the way we work and the kinds of work that we do, the cube has pulled together experts from Cisco dev net. Now dev net is essentially Cisco as code. I've said many times in the cube that in my opinion, it's the most impressive initiative coming out of any established enterprise infrastructure company. What Cisco has done brilliantly with dev net is to create an API economy by leveraging its large infrastructure portfolio and its ecosystem. But the linchpin of dev net is the army of trained Cisco engineers, including those with the elite CC I E designation. Now dev net was conceived to train people on how to code infrastructure and develop applications in integrations. >>It's a platform to create new value and automation is a key to that creativity. So today you're going to hear from a number of experts. For example, TK key Anini is a distinguished engineer and a security pro. He's going to join us, his colleagues, Thomas Scheiber and Joe Vaccaro. They're going to help us understand how to apply automation to your data center networks, cloud, and security journeys. Cisco's Eric nip and Coon Jacobs will also be here with a look into Cisco's marketplace shifts. We'll also hear from dev net partners. Now let's kick things off with the architect of dev net, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's dev net and CX ecosystem success. Susie, we roam around the globe. It's the cube presenting >>Decelerating automation with damnit >>Brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. I'm Sean for a year host. We've got a great conversation, a virtual event, accelerating automation with dev net, Cisco dev net. And of course we got the Cisco brain trust here, our cube alumni, Susie wee vice president, senior vice president GM, and also CTO of Cisco dev net and ecosystem success CX, all that great stuff. Any Wade Lee, who's the director, a senior director of dev net certifications, Eric field, director of developer advocacy, Susie Mandy, Eric. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, John. So we're not in first, then we don't, can't be at the dev net zone. We can't be on site doing dev net, create all the great stuff we've been doing over the past few years. We're virtual the cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I got to ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the success you had has been awesome, but dev net create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the dev net community. This is what this ties into the theme, accelerating automation with dev net, because you said to me, I think four years ago, everything should be a service or X, a AAS as it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision because this is really important and still only five to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and programmability. What's your, what's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that as more and more businesses are coming online as well, I mean, they're all online, but as they're growing into the cloud is they're growing in new areas. As we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on, but what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security, it has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure? How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be able to, you know, really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable. The infrastructure is programmable and you don't need just apps writing on top, but now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You know, I remember a few years ago when dev net created for started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we were talking about Meraki, you know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was a Cisco, um, uh, Europe in Barcelona before all the covert hit. And you had this massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on, right when the pandemic hit. And even now more than ever the cloud scale, the modern apps, the momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing more innovation at scale because the pressure to do that, um, cause the business to stay alive and to get your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world because you were there in person now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are. Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers, as businesses around the world, as we ourselves all dealt with, how do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because you have to go home and then figure out how from home, can I make sure that my it infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there working safely and securely, you know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and be in kind of, you know, just, you know, uh, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. >>So we had to extend business applications to people's homes, uh, in countries like, you know, well around the world, but also in India where it was actually not, you know, not, they wouldn't let, they didn't have rules to let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer, you know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home. So that put extra stress on automation. It put extra stress on our customer's digital transformation and it just forced them to, you know, automate digitally, transform quicker. And they had to, because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers, you had to figure out how to automate all of that. And we're still all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observability, uh, Coobernetti's serve, uh, microservices. So those things, again, all dev ops and you know, you guys got some acquisitions youth about thousand eyes. Um, um, you got a new one you just bought, um, recently port shift to raise the game and security, Kubernetes, all these microservices. So observability super hot, but then people go work at home. As you mentioned, how do you observe, what are you observing? The network is under a huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on people's zooms and WebExes and, uh, education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this and the app side? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observability challenges. It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right. You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Meraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has Cisco's entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that bigger, at that bigger scale for Cisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observability and the dashboards and the automation of the API APIs into all of it. Um, but when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in. Um, they had to build it. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people to work from home and how well you could reach customers. >>All of that used to be an it conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of it and the CIO and saying, you know, how's our VPN connectivity is everybody working from home, how many people are connected and able to work and what's their productivity. So all of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure, it stuff became a board level conversation. And, you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they are now building in automation and digital transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observability, you know, looking for those events, the dashboards, you know, so it really has, has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners are doing to really rise to that next level. >>I know you got to go, but real quick, um, describe what accelerating automation with dev net means. >>Well, you've been following, you know, we've been working together on dev net and the vision of the infrastructure programmability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that and you need the right skill sets and the programmability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people and it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run things are definite community has risen to this challenge. Um, people have jumped in, they've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. Uh, you know, we have, you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals, we have partners, you know, they're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate, accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of, you know, cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people just as much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got dev net created right around the corner of virtual unfortunate. Won't be in person, but we'll be virtual. Susie. Thank you for your time. We're going to dig into those people, challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're going to dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Have fun. Thanks John. >>Okay. Mandy, you heard Susie is about people. And one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of dev net certifications, um, is getting people leveled up. I mean the demand for skills, cybersecurity network, programmability automation, network design solution architect, cloud multi-cloud design. These are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh yes, absolutely. The, you know, what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning, those are, what's accelerating a lot of the technology changes and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like DevSecOps engineer, network, automation, engineer, network automation, which Susie >>Mentioned, and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current scope and broaden out and take on new challenges. >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um, um, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is as director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving. What's the state of it now because with COVID people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your, what's your role? >>Absolutely. So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the Devin that creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and to help share tech mountain technical information with them, um, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into how do you really start solving these problems? Um, so that's had to pivot quite a bit. Um, obviously Cisco live us. We committed very quickly to a virtual event when, when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect as we found out with a much larger audience. So, you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of, you know, how big the convention center is, uh, we were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with our, uh, our definite date that was kind of attached on to Cisco live. >>And we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. Um, but to your broader question of, you know, what my team does. So that's one piece of it is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes and your learning labs, things like that, that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the dev net site. And then my team also looks after community, such as the Cisco learning network where this there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. And we've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the domain certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with programmability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up the community with, you know, helping you answer questions, helping provide content. They've moved now into the dev net space as well, and are helping people with that servicer. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I got to ask you on the trends around automation, what skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are, is there anything in particular, obviously network automation has been around for a long time. Cisco has been leader in that, but as you move up, the stack as modern applications are building, do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What are people learning? Yeah, absolutely. >>So you mentioned, uh, observability was big before COVID and we actually really saw that amplified during COVID. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observability, uh, now that we needed? Well, we're virtual. Um, so that's actually been a huge uptake and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that are now figuring out how can I do this at scale? And I think one good example that, uh, Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SES in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up. And one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that it departments might care about, about their firewalls, things that you do normally look at me all days, you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. >>And when that number went to a hundred percent things like licensing started coming into play, where they needed to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the STDs actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use some open source tooling, to monitor and alert on these things and then published it. So the whole community could go out and get a copy of it, try it out their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out, okay, now I can take that and I can adapt it to what I need to see for my observability. >>That's great. Mandy. I want to get your thoughts on this too, because as automation continues to scale, it's going to be a focus and people are at home and you guys had a lot of content online for you recorded every session that didn't the dev Ned zone learnings going on, sometimes linearly. And nonlinearly you got the certifications, which is great. That's key, key, great success there. People are interested, but what are the learnings? Are you seeing? What are people doing? What's the top top trends. >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time. They want to advance their skillset. And just like any kind of learning people want choice because they want to be able to choose what's matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors, leading them through a study plan. And we have two new, uh, expert led study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do, uh, an immersive learning experience together, uh, with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new, um, offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kinds of team experiences called automation boot camp. And then we're also seeing individuals who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, get some skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. >>And so we have really modular self-driven hands on learning through the dev net fundamentals course, which is available through dev net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like to experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're, they're spending a lot of time in our dev net sandbox, trying out different technologies, Cisco technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things. And three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center, using infrastructure as code type principles. So those are three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing some more about that at dev net create >>Awesome. Eric and Mandy, if you guys can wrap up, um, this accelerated automation with dev net package and a virtual event here, um, and also tee up dev net create because dev net create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important cause it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end programmability and with everything as a service that you guys are doing everything with API APIs, um, only can imagine the enablement that's gonna name, uh, create, can you share the summary real quick on accelerating automation with, at and T up dev net create Mandy we'll start. Yeah. >>Yes. I'll go first. And then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, that's bringing APIs across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating, uh, automation with dev net. Susie mentioned the people aspect of that. The people skilling up and how that transformed teams, transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so what I think about accelerating automation with dev net, it's about the dev community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community. With those new skills. >>Eric take us home. He accelerating automation, dev net and dev net create a lot of developer action going on in cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for Devin that day, this year for Cisco live. And we're seeing, we're able to leverage it even further with creative this year. So, whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding the start now track for people that want to be there. They want to be a developer, a network automation developer, for instance, we've now got attract just for them where they can get started and start learning. Some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Um, so I love that we're able to bring that together with the experienced community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud, to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. >>So I'm really excited to bring that whole mix together, as well as getting some of our business units together too, and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new APIs into their platforms? What are the, what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So like I said, Cisco learning network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much, God, man, you can add, add one more thing. >>I'm just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is it it's happening in three regions and um, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions and uh, content and speakers and the region stepping up to have things personalized to their area, to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for them that create that's going to be fantastic this year. Yeah. >>I was just gonna close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now during what this virtual dev net virtual dev net create virtual, the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups and sharing content, we're going to learn new things. We're going to try new things and ultimately people will rise up and we'll be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And we'll, we'll, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the cube and talk about your awesome accelerating automation and dev net. Great. Looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Yeah. >>The cube virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment say virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching Jeffrey here with the cube. Uh, we have our ongoing coverage of the Cisco dev net event. It's really accelerating with automation and programmability in the new normal, and we know the new normal is definitely continuing to go. We've been doing this since the middle of March and now we're in October. So we're excited to have our next guest he's Thomas Sheba. He is the vice president of product management for data center for Cisco Thomas. Great to see you. >>Hey, good to see you too. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody can see on our background. >>Exactly, exactly. So, I mean, I'm curious, we've talked to a lot of people. We talked to a lot of leaders, you know, especially like back in March and April with this light moment, which was, >>You know, no time to prep and suddenly everybody has to work from home. Teachers got to teach from home. And so you've got the kids home, you've got the spouse home, everybody's home trying to get on the network and do their zoom calls and their classes. I'm curious from your perspective, you guys are right there on the, on the network you're right in the infrastructure. What did you hear and see kind of from your customers when suddenly, you know, March 16th hit and everybody had to go home? >>Well, good point, Hey, I do think we all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before. Uh, and then the only other difference is I'm really more on WebEx calls to zoom calls, but you know, otherwise, uh, yes. Um, what, what I do see actually is that as I said, network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so before we really talked a lot about, uh, agility and flexibility these days, we talk much more about resiliency quite frankly. Uh, and what do I need to have in place with respect to network to get my things from left to right. And you know, it was 2000, he still West, as we say on the data center. Uh, and that just is for most of my customers, a very, very important topic at this point. Right. >>You know, it's, it's amazing to think, you know, had this happened, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know, the ability for so many people in, in, in the information industry to be able to actually make that transition relatively seamlessly, uh, is, is actually pretty amazing. I'm sure there was some, some excitement and some kudos in terms of, you know, it, it is all based on the network and it is kind of this quiet thing in the background that nobody pays attention to. It's like a ref in the football game until they make a bad play. So, you know, it is pretty fascinating that you and your colleagues have put this infrastructure and that enabled us to really make that move with, with, with really no prep, no planning and actually have a whole lot of services delivered into our homes that we're used to getting at the office are used to getting at school. >>Yeah. And I mean, to your point, I mean, some of us did some planning. Can we clearly talking about some of these, these trends in the way I look at this trends as being distributed data centers and, um, having the ability to move your, your workloads and access for users to wherever you want to be. And so I think that clearly went on for a while. And so in a sense, we, we, we prep was, are normal, but we're prepping for it. Um, but as I said, resiliency just became so much more important than, you know, one of the things I actually do a little plot, a little, little, uh, Bret before a block I put out end of August around resiliency. Uh, you, you, if you didn't, if you didn't put this in place, you better put it in place. Because I think as we all know, we saw her March. This is like maybe two or three months, we're now in October. Um, and I sing, this is the new normal for some time being. >>Yeah, I think so. So let's stick on that theme in terms of trends, right? The other great trend as public cloud, um, and cloud and multi cloud, there's all types of variants on that theme you had in that blog post about, uh, resiliency in data center, cloud networking, data center cloud, you know, some people think, wait, it's, it's kind of an either, or I either got my data center or I've got my stuff in the cloud and I've got public cloud. And then as I said, hybrid cloud, you're talking really specifically about enabling, um, both inner inner data center resiliency within multi data centers within the same enterprise, as well as connecting to the cloud. That's probably counterintuitive for some people to think that that's something that Cisco is excited about and supporting. So I wonder if you can share, you know, kind of how the market is changing, how you guys are reacting and really putting the things in place to deliver customer choice. >>Yeah, no, it's actually, to me it's really not a counterintuitive because in the end was what, uh, I'm focusing on. And the company is focusing on is what our customers want to do and need to do. Uh, and that's really, um, would, you know, most people call hybrid cloud or multi-cloud, uh, in, in the end, what it is, what it is, is really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be. And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might've placed them for security reasons. You might've played some clients reasons, depending on which customer segment you after, if you're in the United States or in Europe or in Asia, there are a lot of different reasons where you're going to put your things. And so I think in the end, what, uh, an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility, and resiliency. >>And so really what you want to put in place is what we call like the cloud on ramp, right? You need to have an ability to move sings as needed, but the logic context section, which we see in the, um, last couple of months, accelerating is really this whole seam around digital transformation, uh, which goes hand in hand then was, uh, the requirement on the at T side really do. And I T operations transformation, right. How it operates. Uh, and I think that's really exciting to see, and this is excellent. Well, a lot of my discussions, I was customers, uh, what does it actually mean with respect to the it organization and what are the operational changes? This a lot of our customers are going through quite frankly, accelerated right. Going through, >>Right. And, and automation is in the title of the event. So automation is, you know, is an increasingly important thing, you know, as the, as we know, and we hear all the time, you know, the flows of data, the complexity of the data, either on the security or the way the network's moving, or as you said, shifting workloads around, based on the dynamic situations, whether that's business security, et cetera, in a software defined networking has been around for a while. How are you seeing kind of this evolution in adding more automation, you know, to more and more processes to free up those, those, um, no kind of limited resources in terms of really skilled people to focus on the things that they should be focusing and not stuff that, that hopefully you can, you know, get a machine to run with some level of automation. Yeah. >>Yeah. That's a good point. And it said the tech line, I have, you know, sometimes when my mind is really going from a cloud ready, which has in most of the infrastructure is today to cloud native. And so let me a little expand on those, right? There's like the cloud ready is basically what we have put in place over the last five to six years, all the infrastructure that all our customers have, network infrastructure, all the nexus 9,000, they're all cloud ready. Right. And what this really means, do you have API APIs everywhere, right? Whether this is on the box, whether it's on the controller, whether this is on the operations tools, all of these are API enabled and that's just a foundation for automation, right? You have to have that. Now, the next step really is what do you do with that capability? Right? >>And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. Uh, and that's a whole range, right? This is where the it operation transformation kicks in different customers at different speed, right? Some just, you know, I use these API APIs and use normal tools that they have in a network world just to pull information. Some customers go for it further and saying, I want to integrate this with like some CMDB tools. Some go even further and saying, this is like the cloud native pieces saying, Oh, I want to use, let's say red hat Ansible. I want to use, uh, how she called Terraform and use those things to actually drive how I manage my infrastructure. And so that's really the combination of the automation capability. Plus the integration was relevant cloud native enabling tools that really is happening at this point. We're seeing customers accelerating that, that motion, which really then drives us how they run their it operations. Right. And so that's a pretty exciting, exciting area to see, uh, giving us, I said, we have the infrastructure in place. There's no need for customers to actually do change something. Most of them have already the infrastructures that can do this is just no doing the operational change. The process changes to actually get there. >>Right. And it's funny, we, we recently covered, you know, PagerDuty and, and they highlight what you just talked about, the cloud native, which is, you know, all of these applications now are so interdependent on all these different API APIs, you know, pulling data from all these applications. So a, when they work great, it's terrific. But if there's a problem, you know, there's a whole lot of potential throats to choke out there and find, find those issues. And it's all being connected via the network. So, you know, it's even more critically important, not only for the application, but for all these little tiny components within the application to deliver, you know, ultimately a customer experience within a very small units of time, uh, so that you don't lose that customer or you, you complete that transaction. They, they check out of their shopping cart. You know, all these, these things that are now created with cloud native applications that just couldn't really do before. >>No, you're absolutely right. And that's, this is like, just to say, sit, I'm actually very excited because it opens up a lot of abilities for our customers, how they to actually structure the operation. Right. One of the nice things around this or automation plus a tool integration to an integration is you actually opened us up, not a sole automation train, not just to the network operations personnel. Right. You also open it up and can use this for the SecOps person or for the dev ops person or for the cloud ops engineering team. Right. Because the way it's structured, the way we built this, um, it's literally as an API interface and you can now decide, what is your process do you want to have? And what traditional process you have a request network, operation teams executes the request using these tools and then hand it back over. >>Or do you say, Hey, maybe some of these security things I gotta hand over the sec ups team and they can directly call, uh, these, these API is right, or even one step further. You can have the opportunity that the dev ops or the application team actually says, Hey, I got to write a whole infrastructure as code kind of a script or template, and I just execute. Right. And it's really just using what the infrastructure provides. And so that whole range of different user roles and our customer base, what they can do with the automation capability that's available. It's just very, very exciting way because it's literally unleashes a lot of flexibility, how they want to structure and how they want to rebuild the it operations processes. >>Interesting. You know, cause the, you know, the DevOps culture has taken over a lot, right. Obviously changed software programming for the last 20 years. And, and I think, you know, there's a, there's a lot of just kind of the concept of dev ops versus necessarily, you know, the actual things that you do to execute that technique. And I don't think most people would think of, you know, network ops or, you know, net ops, you know, whatever the equivalent is in the networking world to have, you know, kind of a fast changing dynamic, uh, kind of point of view versus a, you know, stick it in, you know, spec it, stick it in, lock it down. So I wonder if you can, you can share how, you know, kind of that dev ops, um, attitude point of view, workflow, whatever the right verb is, has impacted, you know, things at Cisco and the way you guys think about networking and flexibility within the networking world. >>Yeah, literally, absolutely. And again, it's all customer driven, right? There's none of those, none of this is really actually, you know, a little bit of credit, maybe some of us where we have a vision, but a lot of it's just customer driven feedback. Uh, and yeah, we, we do have network operations teams comes from saying, Hey, we use Ansible heavily on the compute side, we might use this for alpha seven. We want to use the same for networking. And so we made available all these integrations, uh, with sobriety as a state, whether these are the switches, whether these are ACI dcnm controller or our multi-site orchestration capabilities, all of these has Ansible integration the way to the right, the other one, as I mentioned, that how she from Turco Terraform, we have integrations available and they see the requests for these tools to use that. >>Uh, and so that is the emotion we're in for all the, you know, and, uh, another block actually does out there, we just posted saying all set what you can do and then a Palo to this, right. Just making the integration available. We also have a very, very heavy focus on definite and enablement and training, uh, and you know, a little clock. And I know, uh, probably, uh, part of the segment, the whole definite community that Cisco has is very, very vibrant. Uh, and the beauty of this is right. If you look at those, whether you're a net ops person or a dev ops person or a SecOps person, it doesn't really matter. It has a lot of like capability available to just help you get going or go from one level to the next level. Right? And there's simple things like sandbox environments where you can, we know what's out stress, try sinks out snippets of code are there, you can do all of these things. And so we do see it's a kind of a push and pull a tremendous amount of interest and a tremendous, uh, uh, time people spend to learn quite frankly, then that's another site product of, of, you know, the situation where, and people said, Oh man, and say, okay, online learning is the thing. So these, these, these tools are used very, very heavily, right? >>That's awesome. Cause you know, we've, we've had Susie Lee on a number of times and I know he and Mandy and the team really built this dev net thing. And it really follows along this other theme that we see consistently across other pieces of tech, which is democratization, right democratization of the access tool, taking it out of, of just a mahogany row with, again, a really limited number of people that know how to make it work and it can make the changes and then opening it up to a software defined world where now that the, you know, the it's as application centric, point of view, where the people that are building the apps to go create competitive advantage. Now don't have to wait for, you know, the one network person to help them out in and out of these environments. Really interesting. And I wonder if, you know, when you look at what's happened with public cloud and how they kind of change the buying parameter, how they kind of change the degree of difficulty to get project started, you know, how you guys have kind of integrated that, that type of thought process to make it easier for app developers to get their job done. >>Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, uh, I typically look at this more from a, from a customer lens, right? It's the transformation process and it always starts as I want agility. I want flexibility. I want to resiliency, right? This is where we talk to a business owner, what they're looking for. And then that translates into, into an I, to operations process, right? Your strategy needs to map then how you actually do this. Uh, and that just drives then what tools do you want to have available to actually enable this? Right? And the enablement again is for different roles, right? There is you need to give sync services to the app developer and, uh, the, the platform team and the security team, right. To your point. So the network, uh, can act at the same speed, but you also give to us to the network operations teams because they need to adjust. >>Then they have the ability to react to, uh, to some of these requirements. Right. And it's just automation. I think we, we, we focused on that, but there's also to your point, the, the need, how do I extend between data centers? You know, just, just for backup and recovery and how do I extend into, into public clouds, right? Uh, and in the end, that's a, that's a network connectivity problem. Uh, and we have soft as, uh, we have made as available. We have integrations into, uh, AWS. We have integrations into a joy to actually make this very easy from a, from a network perspective to extend your private domains, private networks into which have private networks on these public clouds. So from an app development perspective, now it looks like he's on the same network. It's a protective enterprise network. Some of it might sit here. >>Some of it might sit here, but it's really looking the same. And that's really in the enticing. What, what a business looks at, right? They don't necessarily want to say, I need to have something separate for this deployment was a separate for that deployment. What they want is I need to deploy something. I need to do this resilient. And the resilient way in an agile way gives me the tools. And so that's really where we focused, um, and what we're driving, right? It's that combination of automation consistently, and then definite tools, uh, available that we support. Uh, but they're all open. Uh, they're all standard tools as the ones I mentioned, right. That everybody's using. So I'm not getting into this, Oh, this is specific to Cisco, right. Uh, it's really democratization. I actually liked your term. Yeah. >>It's a great terminate. And it's, it's really interesting, especially with, with the API APIs and the way everything is so tied together that everyone kind of has to enable this because that's what the customer is demanding. Um, and it is all about the applications and the workloads and where those things are moving, but they don't really want to manage that. They just want to, you know, deliver business benefit to their customers and respond to, uh, you know, competitive threats in the marketplace, et cetera. So it's really an interesting time for the infrastructure, you know, to really support kind of this app first point of view, uh, versus the other way around is kind of what it used to be and, and enable this hyper fast development hyper fast, uh, change in the competitive landscape or else you will be left behind. Um, so super important stuff. >>Yeah, no, I totally agree. And as I said, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting because we, we started on a Cisco data center. So we started this probably six or seven years ago. Uh, when we, when we named the application centric, uh, clearly a lot of these concepts evolve, uh, but in a sense it is that reversal of the role from the network provides something and you use to, uh, this is what I want to do. And I need a service, uh, thinking on a networking side to expose. So as that can be consumed. And so that clearly is playing out. Um, and as I said, automation is a key key foundation that we put in place, uh, and our customers, most of our customers at this point, uh, on, on these products, >>They have all the capabilities there. They can literally take advantage. There's really nothing that stops them >>Good times for you, because I'm sure you've seen all the memes and social media, right? What what's driving your digital transformation. Is it the CEO, the CMO or COVID, and we all know the answer to the question. So I don't think the, the pace of change is going to slow down anytime soon. So keeping the network up and enabling us all to get done, what we have to get done and all the little magic that happens behind the scenes. >>Yeah. No thanks. Thanks for having me. And again, yeah. If you're listening and you're wondering, how do I get started Cisco? Definitely just the place to go. It's fantastic. Fantastic. And I highly recommend everybody roll up your sleeves, you know, the best reasons you can have. >>Yeah. And we know once the physical events come back, we've been to dev net create a bunch of times, and it's a super vibrant, super excited, but really engaged community sharing. Lots of information is kind of, it's still kind of that early vibe, you know, where everyone is still really enthusiastic and really about learning and sharing information. So I say Susie and the team are really built a great thing, and we're a, we're happy to continue to cover it. And eventually we'll be back, uh, face to face. >>Okay. I look forward to that as well. >>All right, thanks. Uh, he's Thomas I'm Jeff, you're watching continuing coverage of Cisco dev net accelerating with automation and programmability >>TK Kia. Nini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. How are you? Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we know that no one did, but yeah, that was right before everything happened. Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred. >>Uh, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent, what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side, a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but, but people essentially accept, expect that to at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So how, what is that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator, but as, as work shifts from home, yeah, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experienced day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, uh, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business? Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have, uh, take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight. Right? >>Well, there's, they're clever, uh, give them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then, uh, they have a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavior anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, or our survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the datasets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red, Cisco is business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help, you know, simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I came to this trade show, looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year have been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And, and I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no, no data center required, no disk drive required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical. What are you doing? You're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of the cloud. Um, it's it's machines is the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the, the, uh, I, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threat model, you, you, you say, you know, Ken, my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything has code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as, um, human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I, I saw, um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a communities, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your premise. >>That's a good point. When I, when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to the text-based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time, and I'm this old curmudgeon in the back of the room. Um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It, two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is sort of the, the magic recipe. Um, it's, it's not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems it'd be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you putting on? >>And it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high-performance businesses. >>No, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring the band and say, okay, all you can talk later is go over here. All your bass players go over there. I'm like, what happened to the band? >>That's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's awesome to have you as a guest. I love these, I love these sessions. So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. And I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Like the sign says doing my part to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the cube. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We've right back with our next guest. This short break, >>Come back to the cubes coverage, just to keep virtuals coverage of dev net create virtual will not face to face the cubes. Been there with dev net and dev net create. Since the beginning, dev net create was really a part of the dev net community. Looking out at the external market outside of Cisco, which essentially is the cloud native world, which is going mainstream. We've got a great guest here. Who's who's been the company's been on the cube. Many times. We've been talking to them recently acquired by Cisco thousand eyes. We have Joe Vaccaro is BC vice president of product, Joe, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Great. And thanks for having me. You have the keys to the kingdom, you, the vice president of product, which means you get to look inside and you get to look outside, figure it all out, uh, make everything run on thousand eyes. >>You guys have been finding common language, uh, across multiple layers of network intelligence, external services. This is the heart of what we're seeing in innovation with multicloud microservices, cloud native. This is really a hot area. It's converging multiple theaters in technology. Super important. I want to get into that with you. But first thousand nine was recently acquired by Cisco, um, big acquisition, uh, super important new CEO of Cisco, very clear API, everything we're seeing that come out. That's a big theme at dev net create the ecosystem of Cisco's going outside their own, you know, their, their walls outside of the Cisco network operators, network engineers. We're talking to developers talk programmability. This is the big theme. What's it like at Cisco? Tell us, honestly, the COVID hits. You get acquired by Cisco, tell us what's happening. >>Yeah, surely been an exciting six months, 4,000 eyes on the entire team and our customers, you know, as we all kind of shifted to the new normal of working from home. And I think, you know, that change alone really kind of amplified. Even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company that you know, cloud is becoming the new data center or customers that Indra internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone. And that SAS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident as we rely upon the cloud to be able to, to work as we rely upon our own home networks and the internet in order to be productive. And as we access more sized applications on a daily basis. And as you think about those fundamental truths, what's common across all of them is that you rely upon them now more than ever, not only to run your business, but to any of your employees would be productive, but you don't own them. And if you don't own them, then you lack the ability in a traditional way to be able to understand that digital experience. And I think that's ultimately what, what thousand eyes is trying to solve for. And I think it's really being amplified in really these last six months. >>Talk about the COVID dynamic because I think it highlighted and certainly accelerated digital transformation, but specifically exposes opportunities, challenges, weaknesses, I've talked to many CXOs CSOs. Uh, sec security is huge. Um, home of the conference book talk track, we'll get to in a second, but exposes what's worth doubling down on what to abandon from a project standpoint, as people start to look at their priorities, they're going, Hey, we got to have a connected experience. We got to have security. People are working at home. No one has VPNs at home VPNs or passe, maybe it's way. And maybe it's something else they're on a backbone. They're connecting to the internet, a lot of different diversity in connections. At the same time, you got a ton of modern apps running along for these networks. This is a huge issue. COVID is exposed us at scale. What's your view on this? And what does thousand eyes thinking about this? >>You know, if you think about the kind of legacy application delivery, it went from largely users in an office connected over, say a dedicated corporate network, largely to traditional say internal hosted applications. And that was early simple connectivity bath. And as you mentioned, we've seen amplifications in terms of the diversity from the users. So users are not in the office. Now they're connected in distributed disparate locations that are dynamically changing. When you think that how they're getting to that application, they're going across a really complex service chain of different network services that are working together across as public internet backbone will totally to land them on an application. And then those applications themselves are becoming now, as you mentioned, distributed largely based upon a microservices architecture and increasing their own dependence upon third party sample size applications to fulfill say key functions of that application, those three things together. >>Ultimately you're creating that level of level of complex service chain that really makes it difficult to understand the digital experience. And ultimately the it organization it's really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience. And you have to then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility, that experience, you know, to measure it and understand, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees, as well as your customers are getting the right overall, um, approach to being able to leverage those assets. >>It's funny, you know, I was getting to some of these high scale environments, a lot of these concepts are converging. You know, we had terms like automation, self healing networks. Um, you mentioned microservices early, you mentioned data out of the clouds, the new data center, uh, or when's the new land. However, we're gonna look at it. It's a whole different architecture. So I want to get your thoughts on, on the automation piece of networking and internet outages, for instance, um, because when you, you know, there's so many outages going up and down, it is like, uh, catching, looking for a needle in a haystack, right. So, um, we've had this conversation with you guys on the cube before, how does automation occur when you guys look at those kinds of things? Uh, what's important to look at, can you comment on and react to, you know, the internet outages and how you find resolve those? >>Yeah. It's um, it was really great. And as you mentioned, automation really in a place that a key, when you think about the, just a broad problem that it is trying to drive and, you know, from our lens, we look at it in really three ways. You're first off is you have to be able to gain the level of visibility from where it matters and be able to, to test and be able to provide that level of active measurements across the, the type of ways you want to be able to inspect the network. But then also from the right vantage points, you want to inspect it. But what we talk about right aside, you know, data alone, doesn't solve that problem. As you mentioned, that needle in the haystack, you know, data just provides the raw metrics that are screaming across the screen, and you have to then enable that data to provide meeting. >>You need to enable that data become intelligent. And that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly, allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet. And then the last step of automation really comes in the, of the action, right? How do you enable that intelligence to be put, to use? How do you enable that intelligence to then drive across the rest of your it workflow as well as to be able to be used as a signaling engine, to be able to then make the fundamental changes back at the network fabric, whether that is a dressing or modifying your BGB pairing, that we see happen with our customers using thousand eyes data, to be able to route around major internet outages that we've seen over the past six months, or to be able to then use that data, to be able to optimize the ultimate experience that they're delivering to both our customers, as well as their employees, >>Classic policy based activities. And you take it to a whole nother level. I got to get your thoughts on the employees working at home. Okay. Because, um, you know, most it people like, Oh yeah, we're going to forecast in cases of disruption or a hurricane or a flood or hurricane Sandy, but now with COVID, everyone's working at home. So who would have forecasted a hundred percent, um, you know, work from home, which puts a lot of pressure on him, everything. So I gotta ask you, now that employees are working at home, how do you tie network visibility to the actual user experience? >>Yeah, that's a great question. As you, you know, we saw within our own customer base, you know, when COVID head and we saw this rise of work from home, it teams are really scrambling and said, okay, I have to light up this, say VPN infrastructure, or I need to now be able to support my users in a work from home situation where I don't control the corporate network. In essence, now you have essentially thousands. Every employee is acting across their own corporate network and people were then using thousand eyes in different ways to be able to monitor their safety VPN infrastructure across, uh, back into the corporate network, as well as in using our thousand eyes end point agents that runs on a local, a user's laptop or machine in their home to help you to be able to gain that visibility down to that last mile of connectivity. >>Because when a user calls up support and says, I'm having trouble say accessing my application, whether that's Salesforce or something else, what ultimately might be causing that issue might not necessarily be a Salesforce issue, right? It could be the device and the device performance in terms of CPU, memory utilization. It could be the wifi and the signal quality within your wifi network. It could be your access point. It could be your raw, local home router. It can be your local ISP. It could be the path that you're taking ultimately to your corporate network or that application. There's so many places that could go wrong that are now difficult to be able to see, unless you have the ability to see comprehensively from the user to the application, and to be able to understand that full end to end path, >>You know, it teams have also been disrupted. They've been on offsite prop off property as well, but you got the cloud. How is your technology help the it teams? Can you give some examples there? Um, >>Yeah, great way is, you know, how people use thousand eyes as part of that data sharing ecosystem. Again, that notion of how do you go from visibility to intelligence action and we're in the past, you might be able as an it administrator to walk over to their network team and say, Hey, can you take a look at what I'm seeing now? That's no longer available. So how do you be able to work efficiently as the United organization? You know, we think a thousand eyes in how our customers are using us a thousand times becomes a common operating language that allows them to be able to analyze across from the application down into the underlying infrastructure, through those different layers of the network what's happening. And where do you need to focus your attention? And then furthermore, with 10,000 eyes in terms of a need nibbling, that data sharing ecosystem, leveraging our share link capability really gives them the ability to say, you know, here's what I'm seeing and be able to send that to anybody within the it organization, but it goes even further and many times in recent times, as well as over the course of people using thousand eyes, they take those share links and actually send them to their external providers because they're not just looking to resolve issues within their own it organization. >>They're having to work collaboratively with the different ISP that they're appearing with with their cloud providers that they're appearing, uh, they're leveraging, or the SAS applications that are part of that core dependency of how they deliver their experience. >>I asked you the question when you think about levels of visibility and making the lives easier for it, teams, um, and see a lot of benefits with thousand eyes. You pointed out a few of them. It's got to ask you the question. So if I'm an it person I'm in the trenches, are you guys have, uh, an aspirin or a vitamin or both? Can you give an example because there's a lot of pain point out there. So yeah. Give me a cup, a couple Advils and aspirins, but also you're an enabler to the new things are evolving. You pointed out some use case. You talked about the difference between where you're helping people pain points and also enabling them be successful for it teams. >>Yeah, that's a great analogy. You're thinking it, like you said, it definitely sits on both sides of that spectrum, you know, thousand eyes is the trusted tool, the source of truth for it. Organizations when issues are happening as their alarm bells are ringing, as they are generating the, um, the different, uh, on call, uh, to be able to jump into a worm situation thousand eyes is that trusted source of truth. Allow them to focus, to be able to resolve the issue in the heat of the moment. But that was a nice also when we think about baselining, your experience, what's important is not understanding that experience at that moment in time, but also how that's deviated over time. And so by leveraging thousand eyes on a continuous basis, it gives you the ability to see the history of that experience, to understand how your network is changing is as you mentioned, networks are constantly evolving, right? >>The internet itself is constantly changing. It's an organic system, and you need to be able to understand not only what are the metrics that are moving out of your balance, but then what is potentially the cause of that as a network has evolved. And then furthermore, you can be begin to use that as you mentioned, in terms of your vitamin type of an analogy, to be able to understand the health of your system over time on a baseline basis so that you can begin to be able to ensure its success in a great way to really kind of bring that to light. As people using say, thousand eyes as part of the same SC land-based rollout, where you're looking to seek benchmark and confidence as you look to scale out in either, you know, benchmarking different ISP within that, I feel like connectivity for as you look to ensure a level of success with a single branch to give you that competence, to then scale out to the rest of your organization. >>That's great insights, the classic financial model ROI, you get baseline and upside, right? You got handle the baseline as you pointed out, and the upside music experience connectivity, you know, application performance, which drives revenue, et cetera. So great point. Great insight, Joe. Thank you so much for that insight. It's got a final question for you. I want to just riff a little bit with you on the industry. A lot of us have been having debates about automation. I mean, who doesn't, who doesn't love automation. Automation is awesome, right? Automate things. But as the trend starts going on, as everything is a service or X, a S as it's called, certainly Cisco's going down that road. Talk about your view about the difference between automation and everything is a service because at the end of the day, everything will be a service, but without automation, you really can't have services, right? So, you know, automation, automation, automation, great, great drum to bang all day long, but then also you got the same business side saying as a service, as a service, pushing that into the products means not trivial. Talk about, talk about how you'd look at automation and everything as a service and the relationship and interplay between those two concepts. >>Yeah. Ultimately I think about in terms of what is the problem that the business is trying to solve in ultimately, what is the value that they're trying to face? And in many ways, right, they're being exploded with increase of data that needs, they need to be able to not only processing gather, but then be able to then make use of, and then from that, as we mentioned, once you've processed that data and you'd say, gather the insights from it. You need to be able to then act on that data. And automation plays a key role of allowing you to be able to then put that through your workflow. Because again, as that, it experience becomes even more complex as more and more services get put into that digital supply chain. As you adopt say increased complexity within your infrastructure, by moving to a multicloud architecture where you look to increase the number of say, network services that you're leveraging across that digital experience. >>Ultimately you need the level of automation. You'd be able to see outside of your own vantage point. You need to be able to look at the problem from as broad of a, a broad of a way as possible. And you know, data and automation allows you to be able to do what is fundamentally to do from a very narrow point of view, in terms of the visibility you gather intelligence you generate, and then ultimately, how do you act on that data as quick as possible to be able to provide the value of what you're looking to solve. >>It's like a feature it's under the hood. The feature of everything comes to the surface is automation, data, machine learning, all the goodness in the software. I mean, that's really kind of what we're talking about here. Isn't it a final question for you as we wrap up, uh, dev net create really, again, is going beyond Cisco's dev net community going into the industry ecosystem where developers are there. Um, these are folks that want infrastructure as code. They want network as code. So network programmability, huge topic. We've been having that conversation, uh, with Cisco and others throughout the industry for the past three years. What's your message to developers out there that are watching this who say, Hey, I just want to develop code. Like I want, you know, you guys got that. That was nice. Thanks so much. You know, you take care of that. I just want to write code. What's your message to those folks out there who want to tap some of these new services, these new automation, these new capabilities, what's your message. >>You know, ultimately I think, you know, when you look at thousand eyes, um, you know, from a product perspective, you know, we try to build our product in an API first model to allow you to be able to then shift left of how you think about that overall experience. And from a developer standpoint, you know, what I'd say is, is that while you're developing in your silo, you're going to be part of a larger ultimate system. In your experience you deliver within your application is now going to be dependent upon not only the infrastructure it's running upon, but the network gets connected to, and then ultimately the user and the stance of that user, if I leveraging a thousand eyes and being able to then integrate that into how you think closely on that experience, that's going to help ensure that ultimately the application experience that the is looking to deliver meets that objective. And I think what I would say is, you know, while you need to focus on your, uh, your role as a developer, having the understanding of how you fit into the larger ecosystem and what the reality of the, of how your users will access that application is critical. >>Awesome, Joe, thank you so much. Again, trust is everything letting people understand that what's going on underneath is going to be, you know, viable and capable. You guys got a great product and congratulations on the acquisition that Cisco made of your company. And we've been following you guys for a long time and a great technology chops, great market traction, congratulations to everyone, 1,009. Thanks for coming on today. >>I appreciate it. Thanks for having me >>Vice president of product here with thousand eyes. Now, part of Cisco, John, for your host of the cube cube virtual for dev net, create virtual. Thanks for watching. >>Even prior to the pandemic, there was a mandate to automate the hyperscale cloud companies. They've shown us that to scale. >>You really have to automate your human labor. It just can't keep up with the pace of technology. Now, post COVID that automation mandate is even more pressing. Now what about the marketplace? What are S E seeing on the horizon? The cubes Jeff Frick speaks with Cisco engineers to gather their insights and explore the definite specialized partner program. We've got >>Coon Jacobs. He's the director of systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Kuhn, >>Thank you for having me >>And joining him as Eric nappy is the VP of system systems engineering for Cisco. Good to see Eric. Good to be here. Thank you. Pleasure. So before we jump into kind of what's going on now in this new great world of programmability and, and control, I want to kind of go back to the future for a minute, because when I was doing some research for this interview, it was Coon. I saw an old presentation that you were giving from 2006 about the changing evolution of the, uh, the changing evolution of networking and moving from. I think the theme was a human centered human centered network. And you were just starting to touch a little bit on video and online video. Oh my goodness, how far we have come, but, but I would love to get kind of a historical perspective because we've been talking a lot and I know Eric son plays football about the football analogy of the network is kind of like an offensive lineman where if they're doing a good job, you don't hear much about them, but they're really important to everything. >>And the only time you hear about them is when a flag gets thrown. So if you look back with the historical perspective, the load and the numbers and the evolution of the network, as we've moved to this modern time, and, you know, thank goodness cause of COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, all of us in the information space would not have been able to make this transition. So I just, I just love to get some historical perspective cause you've been kind of charting this and mapping this for a very long time. >>Yeah, we absolutely have. I think, you know, what you're referring to was back in the day, the human network campaign, and to your point, the load, the number of hosts that traffic, the just overall the intelligence of the network has just evolved tremendously over these last decade and a half, uh, 15 years or so. And you look at where we are now in terms of the programmable nature of the network and what that enables in terms of new degrees of relevance that we can create for the customers. Um, and how, you know, the role of it has changed entirely again, especially during this pandemic, you know, the fact that it's now as a service and elastic, uh, is, is absolutely fundamental to being able to ensure, uh, on an ongoing basis, a great customer experience. And so, uh, it's been, it's been, uh, a very interesting ride. >>Yeah. And then, and then just to close the loop, the, one of your more later interviews talking to Sylvia, your question is, are you a developer or an engineer? So it was, and, and your whole advice to all these network engineers is just, just don't jump in and start doing some coding and learning. So, you know, the focus and really the emphasis and where the opportunity to differentiate as a company is completely shifting gears over to the S you know, really software defined side. >>Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, you look at how the software world and the network has come together and how we're applying now, you know, basically the same construct of CICB pipeline to network, uh, infrastructure, look at network really as code and get all of the benefits from that. And the familiarity of it, the way that our engineers have had to evolve. And that is just, you know, quite, quite significant in, in, in like the skill set. And the best thing is jump in, right. Um, you know, dip your toe in the water, but continue to evolve that skill set. And, uh, you know, don't, don't be shy. It's, it's a leap of faith for some of us who've been in the industry a bit longer. Uh, you know, we like to look at ourselves as the craftsman of the network, but now it's definitely a software centricity and programmability, right? >>So Eric, you've got some digital exhaust out there too, that I was able to dig up going back to 2002 752 page book, and the very back corner of a dark dirty dusty Amazon warehouse is managing Cisco network security, 752 pages. Wow. How has security changed from a time where before I could just read a book, a big book and, you know, throw some protocols in and probably block a bunch of ports to the world that we live in today, where everything is connected. Everything is API driven, everything is software defined. You've got pieces of workloads spread out all over the place and Oh, by the way, you need to bake security in at every single level of the application stack. >>Yeah, no I'm so, wow. Cocoon is that you, you found that book on the I'm really impressed. There was a thank you a little street, correct. So, uh, I want to hit on something that you, you talked about. Cause I think it's very important to, to this overall conversation. If we think about the scale of the network and Coon hit on it briefly, you talked about it as well. We're seeing a massive explosion of devices by the I, you know, it's estimated by the end of this year, there's going to be about 27 billion devices on the global internet. That's about 3.7 devices for every man, woman and child life. And if we extrapolate that out over the course of the next decade on the growth trajectory we're on. And if you look at some of the published research on this, it's estimated there could be upwards of 500 billion devices accessing the global internet on a, on a daily basis. >>And primarily that, that, that is a IOT devices. That's digitally connected devices. Anything that can be connected will be connected, but then introduces a really interesting security challenge because every one of those devices that is accessing the global internet is within a company's infrastructure or accessing pieces of corporate data is a potential attack factor. So we really need to, and I think the right for this is we need to reimagine security because security is, as you said, not about perimeters. You know, I wrote that book back in 2002, I was talking about firewalls and a cutting edge technology was intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Now we need to look at security really in the, in the guise of, or under the, under the, under the realm of really two aspects, the identity who is accessing the data in the context, what data is being accessed. >>And that is going to require a level of intelligence, a level of automation and the technologies like machine learning and automated intelligence are going to be our artificial intelligence rather are going to be table stakes because the sheer scale of what we're trying to secure is going to be untenable, undercurrent, you know, just current security practices. I mean, the network is going to have to be incredibly intelligent and leverage again, a lot of that, uh, that AI type of data to match patterns of potential attacks and ideally shut them down before they ever cause any type of damage. >>Really interesting. I mean, one thing that COVID has done a bunk many things is kind of retaught us all about the power of exponential curves and how extremely large those things are and how fast they grow. We had Dave runs and on a Google cloud a couple of years ago. And I remember him talking about early days of Google when they were starting to map out kind of, as you described kind of map out their growth curves, and they just figured out they could not hire if they hired everybody, they couldn't hire enough people to deal with it. Right. So really kind of rethinking automation and rethinking about the way that you manage these things and the level, right. The old, is it a pet or is it, or is it, um, uh, part of a herd? And I think it's interesting what you talked about, uh, can really the human powered internet and being driven by a lot of this video, but to what you just said, Eric, the next big wave, right. >>Is IOT and five G. And I think, you know, you talk about 3.7 million devices per person. That's nothing compared to right. All these sensors and all these devices and all these factories, cause five G is really targeted to machine the machines, which there's a lot of them and they trade a lot of information really, really quickly. So, you know, I want to go back to you Coon thinking about this next great wave in a five G IOT kind of driven world where it's kind of like when voice kind of fell off compared to IP traffic on the network. I think you're going to see the same thing, kind of human generated data relative to machine generated data is also going to fall off dramatically as a machine generated data, just skyrocket through the roof. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think too, also what Eric touched on the visibility on that, and they'd be able to process that data at the edge. That's going to catalyze cloud adoption even further, and it's going to know, make the role of the network, the connectivity of it all and the security within that crucially important. And then you look at the role of programmability within that. We're seeing the evolution going so fast. You look at the element of the software defined network in an IOT speed space. We see that we have hosts there that are not necessarily, um, you know, behaving like other hosts would, uh, on a network, for example, manufacturing floor, uh, production robot, or a security camera. And what we're seeing is we're seeing partners and customers employing program ability to make sure that we overcome some of the shortcomings, uh, in terms of where the network is at, but then how do you customize it in terms of the relevance that it can provide, uh, bringing on board, uh, those, uh, those hosts in a very transparent way, and then, you know, keep, keep the agility of it and keep the speed of innovation going. >>Right. >>Right. So Eric, I want to come back to you and shift gears kind of back to the people will leave the IOT and the machines along, along for a minute, but I'm curious about what does beat the boss. I mean, I go to your LinkedIn profile and it's just filled with congratulatory statements, but everyone's talking about beating the boss. You know, it's, it's a really, you know, kind of interesting and different way to, to motivate people, to build this new skillset in terms of getting software certifications, uh, within the Cisco world. And I just thought it was really cute the way that you clearly got people motivated, cause there's posts all over the place and they've all got their, their nice big badge or their certification, but, you know, at a higher level, it is a different motivation to be a developer versus an engineer and a technician. And it's kind of a different point of view. And I just wonder if you could share, you know, some of the ways that you're, you're kind of encouraging, you know, kind of this transformation within your own workforce, as well as the partners, et cetera, and really adopting kind of almost a software first and this program kind of point of view versus, you know, I'm just wiring stuff up. >>Apparently a lot of people like to beat me. So of itself was a, was a, it was a great success, but you know, if we think we take a step back, you know, what is Cisco about as an organization? Um, I mean obviously if you look back to the very early days of our vision, right, it was, it was to change the way the world worked, played, live and learn. And that you think about, and you hit on this when we were, you know, you were discussion with co with Kuhn in the early days of COVID. We really saw that play out as so much shifted from, you know, in-person type of interactions to virtual interactions in the network that, uh, that our, our customers, our partners, our employees built over the course of the last several, the last three decades really helped the world continue to, um, to, to do business for students to continue to go to school or clinicians, to connect with patients. >>If I think about that mission to meet programmability is just the next iteration of that mission, continuing to enable the world to communicate, continuing, to enable customers, employees, uh, partners, uh, to essentially leverage the network for more than just connectivity now to leverage it for critical insight. Again, if we look at some of the, uh, some of the use cases that we're seeing for social distancing and contact tracing and network has a really important place to play there because we can pull insight from it, but it isn't necessarily an out of the box type of integration. So I look at programmability and in what we're doing with, with dev net to give relevance to the network for those types of really critical conversations that every organization is having right now, it's a way to extrapolate. It's a way to pull critical data so that I can make a decision. >>And if that decision is automated, or if that decision requires some type of a manual intervention, regardless, we're still about connecting. And in this case, we're connecting insight with the people who need it most, right. The debit challenge we ran is really in respect for how critical this new skill set is going to be. It's not enough. Like I said, just to connect the world anymore. We need to leverage that network, the network for that critical insight. And when we drove, we were, we created the beat, the boss challenge. It was really simple. Hey guys, I think this is important and I am going to go out and I'm going to achieve the certification myself, because I want to continue to be very relevant. I want to continue to be able to provide that insight for my customers and partners. So therefore I'm going for it. Anybody that can get there before me, maybe there's a little incentive tied to the incentive. Although it's funny, we interviewed a lot of, a lot of our team who, uh, who achieved it when incentive was secondary. They just wanted to have the bragging rights, like, yeah, I beat Eric, right. >>You know, putting your money where your mouth is, right. If it's important, then why, you know, you should do it too. And, and you know, the whole, you're not asking people to do what you wouldn't do yourself. So I think there's a lot of good leadership, uh, leadership lessons there as well. But I want to extend kind of the conversation on the covert impact, right? Cause I'm sure you've seen all the social media meme, you know, who's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question, but you know, you guys have already been dealing with kind of an increased complexity around enterprise infrastructure world in terms of cloud and public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud. And people are trying to move stuff all, all the way around now suddenly had this COVID moment right in, in March, which is really a light switch moment. >>People didn't have time to plan or prepare for suddenly everybody working from home. And it's not only you, but your spouse and your kids and everybody else. So, but now we're six months plus into this thing. And I would just love to get your perspective and kind of the change from, Oh my goodness, we have to react to the light switch moment. What do we do to make sure people can, can get, get what they need when they need it from where they are. Uh, but, but then really moving from this is a, an emergency situation, a stop gap situation to, Hmm, this is going to extend for some period of time. And even when it's the acute crisis is over, you know, this is going to drive a real change in the way that people communicate in the way that people, where they sit and their jobs and, and kind of how customers are responding accordingly as the, you know, kind of the narrative has changed from an emergency stop gap to this is the new normal that we really need to plan for. >>So, uh, I think, I think you said it very well. I think anything that could be digitized, any, any interaction that could be driven virtually was, and what's interesting is we, as you said, we went from that light switch moment where I believe the stat is this, and I'll probably get the number wrong, but like in the United States here at the beginning, at the end of February, about 2% of the knowledge worker population was virtual, you know, working from home or in a remote work environment. And over the course of about 11 days, that number went from 2% to 70%. Wow. Interesting that it worked, you know, there was a lot of hiccups along the way, and there was a lot of organizations making really quick decisions on how do I enable VPN scale of mass? How do I, you know, leverage, uh, you know, things like WebEx for virtual meetings and virtual connectivity, uh, much faster now that as you said, that we kinda gotten out of the fog of war or frog fog of battle organizations are looking at what they accomplished. >>And it was nothing short of Herculean and looking at this now from a transition to, Oh my gosh, we need to change too. We have an opportunity to change. And we're looking, we see a lot of organizations specifically around, uh, financial services, healthcare, uh, the, uh, the K through 20, uh, educational environment, all looking at how can they do more virtually for a couple of reasons. Obviously there is a significant safety factor. And again, we're still in that we're still on the height of this pandemic. They want to make sure their employees, their customers, students, patients remain safe. But second, um, we've found in, in discussions with a lot of senior it executives that are customers that people are happier working from home. People are more productive working from home. And that, again, the network that's been built over the course of the last few decades has been resilient enough to allow that to happen. >>And then third, there is a potential cost savings here outside of people. The next most expensive resource that organizations are paying for is real estate. If they can shrink that real estate footprint while providing a better user experience at the locations that they're maintaining, again, leveraging things like location services, leveraging things like a unified collaboration. That's very personalized to the end user's experience. They're going to do that. And again, they're going to save money. They're going to have happier employees and ultimately they're going to make their, uh, their employees and their customers a lot safer. So we see, we believe that there is in some parts of the economy, a shift that is going to be more permanent in some estimates, put it as high as 15% of the current workforce is going to >>Stay in a virtual or a semi virtual working environment for the foreseeable future. >>Interesting. And I, and I, and I would say, I'd say 15% is low, especially if you, if you qualify it with, you know, part-time right. I, there was a great interview we were doing and talking about working from home, we used to work from home as the exception, right? Cause the cable person was coming, are you getting a new washing machine or something where now that's probably getting, you know, in many cases we'll shift to the other where I'm generally going to work from home, unless, you know, somebody is in town or having an important meeting or there's some special collaboration, uh, that drives me to be in. But you know, I want to go back to you Kuhn and, and really doubled down on, you know, I think most people spent too much time focusing, especially, we'll just say within the virtual events space where we play on the things you can't do virtually, we can't meet in the hall. >>We can't grab a quick coffee and a drink instead of focusing on the positive things like we're accomplishing right here, you're in Belgium, right. Eric is in Ohio, we're in California. Um, and you know, we didn't take three days to travel and, and check into a hotel and, and all that stuff to get together, uh, for this period of time. So there's a lot of stuff that digital enables. And I think, you know, people need to focus more on that versus continuing to focus on the two or three things that, that it doesn't replace and it doesn't replace those. So let's just get that off the table and move on with our lives. Cause those aren't coming back anytime soon. >>No, totally. I think it's the balance of those things. It's guarding the fact that you're not necessarily working for home. I think the trick there is you could be sleeping at the office, but I think the positives are way, way more outspoken. Um, I, you know, I look at myself, I got much more exercise time in these last couple of months than I usually do because you don't travel. You don't have the jet lag and the connection. And then you talked about those face to face moments. I think a lot of people are in a way, um, wanting to go back to the office part-time as, as Eric also explain, but a lot of it you can do virtually we have virtual coffees with team, or, you know, even here in Belgium, our local general manager has a virtual effort, TIF every Friday, obviously skip the one this week. But, uh, you know, there's, there's ways to be very creative with the technology and the quality of the technology that enables, um, you know, to, to get the best of both worlds. Right? >>So I just, we're going to wrap the segment. I want to give you guys both the last word you both been at Cisco for a while and, you know, Susie, we, and the team on dev net has really grown this thing. I think we were there at the very beginning couple of four or five, six years ago. I can't keep track of time anymore, but it has really, really grown. And, you know, the timing is terrific to get into this more software defined world, which is where we are. I wonder if you could just, you know, kind of share a couple of thoughts as you know, with a little bit of perspective and you know, what you're excited about today and kind of what you see coming down the road since you guys have been there for a while you've been in this space, uh, let's start with Yukon. >>I think the possibility it creates, I think really programmability software defined is really >>About the art of the possible it's what you can dream up and then go code. Um, Eric talked about the relevance of it and how it maximizes the relevance on a customer basis. Um, you know, and then it is the evolution of the teams in terms of the creativity that they can bring to us. We've seen really people dive into that and customers co-creating with us. And I think that's where we're going in terms of the evolution of the value proposition there in terms of what technology can provide, but also how it impacts people as we discussed and redefines process >>That the art of the possible, which is a lot harder to execute in a, in hardware than software certainly takes a lot longer. I'd love to get your, uh, your thoughts. >>Absolutely. So I started my career at Cisco, uh, turning, uh, putting IP phones onto the network. And back then, you know, it was, you know, 2001, 2002, when, uh, the idea of putting telephones onto the network was such a, um, just such an objectionable idea. And so many purists were telling us all the reasons it wouldn't work. Now, if we go forward again, 19 years, the idea of not having them plugging into the network is a ridiculous idea. So we have a, we're looking at an inflection point in this industry and it's really, it's not about programming. It's not necessarily about programming. It's about doing it smarter. It's about being more efficient. It's about driving automation, but again, it's, it's about unlocking the value of what the network is. We've moved so far past. What can, you know, just connectivity, the network touches everything and there's more workload moves to the cloud is more workload moves to things like containers. >>Um, the network is the really, the only common element that ties all of these things together. The network needs to take its rightful place in the end, the it lexicon as being that critical or that critical insight provider, um, for, for how users are interacting with the network, how users are interacting with applications, how applications are interacting with one, another program ability is a way to do that more efficiently, uh, with greater a greater degree of certainty with much greater relevance into the overall delivery of it services and digitization. So to me, I think we're going to look back 20 years from now, probably even 10 and say, man, we used to configure things manually. What was that like? I think, I think really this is, this is the future. And I think we want to be aligned with where we're going versus where we've been. Right. >>Well, Coon, Eric, thank you for sharing your perspective. You know, it's, it's really nice to have, you know, some historical reference, uh, and it's also nice to be living in a new age where you can, you can, you know, stay at the same company and still refresh, you know, new challenges, new opportunities and grow this thing. Cause as you said, I remember those IP first IP phone days and I thought, well, my bell must be happy because the old mother's problem is finally solved. And when we don't have to have a dedicated connection between every mother and every child in the middle of may. So good news. So thank you very much for sharing your, uh, your insights and really, uh, really enjoyed the conversation. >>Thank you. >>We've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and in getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here. >>And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco DevNet partners and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and, and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the dub net certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>That's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning our customers and in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there and I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in a, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building and at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that's that our customers have made as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right, right. That's interesting. And Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just >>Like another data center, but what it's really become is a place to host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about, you know, the assets per se, we're talking about the applications and what, what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. >>You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was a, was it a controller or is it a new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible. Right, >>Right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that had to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandons their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not >>Scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to, to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability and a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud multicloud, public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. >>And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, because still there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because, you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like, what did he still look like when you, when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. >>And some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to, to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right. You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. >>It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that into microservices, you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. And once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Chuck, I want to shift gears a little bit, cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This what we're doing with the dev that specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into, into a scenario where it's working with their vertical and working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. >>We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value on top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes. If the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion, that's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco dev net shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computer museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together, uh, maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. It happens happy to be here >>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco. What I'm Sean for the cube, your host for accelerating automation with dev net with Cisco. And we're here to close out the virtual event with Mindy Whaley, senior director, Mandy, take it away. >>Thank you, John. It's been great to be here at this virtual event, hearing all these different automation stories from our different technology groups, from customers and partners. And what I'd like to take a minute now is to let people know how they can continue this experience at dev net create, which is our free virtual event happening globally. On October 13th, there's going to be some really fun stuff. We're going to have our annual demo jam, which is kind of like an open for demos where the community gets to show what they've been building. We're also going to be, um, giving out and recognizing our dev net creator award winners for this year, which is a really great time where we recognize our community contributors who have been giving back to the community throughout the year. And then we find really interesting channels. We have our creators channels, which is full of technical talks, lightening talks. >>This is where our community, external Cisco people come in share what they've been working on, what they've been working learning during the year. We also have a channel called API action, which is where you can go deep into IOT or collaboration or data center automation and get demos talks from engineers on how to do certain use cases. And also a new segment called straight from engineering, where you get to hear from the engineers, building those products as well. And we have a start now for those people just getting started, who may need to dive into some basics around coding, API APIs and get that's a whole channel dedicated to getting them started so that they can start to participate in some of the fun challenges that we're going to have during the event. And we're going to have a few fun things. Like we have some definite, um, advocate team members who are awesome, musically talented. They're going to share some performances with us. So, um, we encourage everyone to join us there. Pick your favorite channel, uh, join us in whichever time zone you live in. Cause we'll be in three different time zones. And, um, we would love for you to be there and to hear from you during the event. >>That's awesome. Very innovative, multiple time zones, accelerating automation with dev net. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you at dev net create thanks for watching.

from around the globe it's thecube covering space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly hello everyone welcome to the space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together i'm john furrier your host with thecube here in california i want to welcome our featured guest lieutenant general john f thompson with the united states space force approach to cyber security that's the topic of this session and of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in los angeles air force base also heading up space force general thank you for coming on really appreciate you kicking this off welcome to the symposium hey so uh thank you very much john for that very kind introduction also uh very much thank you to cal poly uh for this opportunity to speak to this audience today also a special shout out to one of the organizers uh dustin brun for all of his work uh helping uh get us uh to this point uh ladies and gentlemen as uh as uh john mentioned uh i'm jt thompson uh i lead the 6 000 men and women of the united states space forces space and missile system center which is headquartered here at los angeles air force base in el segundo if you're not quite sure where that's at it's about a mile and a half from lax this is our main operating location but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country with about 500 people at kirtland air force base in albuquerque new mexico uh and about another 500 people on the front range of the rockies uh between colorado springs and uh and denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide uh we're responsible for uh acquiring developing and sustaining the united states space force's critical space assets that includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites and we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the u.s space force and a number of our critical mission partners across the uh department of defense and the intelligence community um just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustained the 31 satellite gps constellation that satellite constellation while originally intended to help with global navigation those gps signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy uh over the past three decades i mean gps is everywhere i think everybody realizes that agriculture banking the stock market the airline industry uh separate and distinct navigation systems it's really pervasive across both the capabilities for our department of defense and capabilities for our economy and and individuals billions of individuals across our country and the planet some of the other work we do for instance in the communications sector uh secure communications satellites that we design and build that link america's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real-time support and comms for our deployed forces and those of our allies we also acquire uh infrared missile warning satellites uh that monitor the planet for missile launches and provide advanced warning uh to the u.s homeland and to our allies uh in case some of those missile launches are uh nefarious um on a note that's probably a lot closer to home maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of california in 2018 smc jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy uh to partner with the u.s forest service during the two of the largest wildfires in the state's history the camp and woolsey fires in northern california as those fires spread out of control we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet and we collaborated with the us forest service so that firefighters on the ground uh could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading thereby saving lives and and property by identifying hot spots and flare-ups for firefighters that data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the u.s forest service and authorities here in california was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters it was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread we've continued uh that involvement in recent years using multiple systems to support firefighters across the western u.s this fall as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue working together with the u.s forest service and with other partners uh we like to make uh we like to think that we made a difference here but there's still a lot more work to go and i think that we should always be asking ourselves uh what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to uh stakeholders so that they can use it for for purposes of good if you will how else can we protect our nation how else can we protect our friends and allies um i think a major component of the of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly um just over the past few years uh john and i were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have uh space programs 80 nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet um if you just look at one mission area that uh the department of defense is interested in and that's small launch there are currently over a hundred different small launch companies uh within the u.s industrial base vying for commercial dod and civil uh payload capabilities uh mostly to low earth orbit it's it's just truly a remarkable time if you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning um where we're revolutionary revolutionizing really uh the ways that we generate process and use data i mean it's really remarkable in 2016 so if you think about this four years ago uh nasa estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day and that was four years ago um uh obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience of this congress or in this conference uh we need to work with big thinkers like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data we need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge edge theories of data mining cyber behaviorism and internet of things 2.0 it's just truly a remarkable time uh to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the states of the space business are truly truly daunting and important to uh to all of us um integrating cyber security into our space systems both commercial and government is a mandate um it's no longer just a nice to have as the us space force and department of the air force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years space is becoming congested and contested and that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security uh in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on uh cyber security day in and day out the value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer from the ground control segments associated with it and this value is not just military it's also economic and it's not just american it's also a value for the entire world particularly particularly our allies as we all depend upon space and space systems your neighbors and friends here in california that are employed at the space and missile system center uh work with network defenders we work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers um our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global commons of space free and open for exploration and for commerce um as john and i were talking earlier before we came online there's an aspect of cyber security for space systems especially for some of our legacy systems that's more how do we bolt this on because we fielded those space systems a number of years ago and the the challenges of cyber security in the space domain have grown so we have a part that we have to worry about bolting it on but then we have to worry about building it in as we as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that that realizes that the cyber threat or the cyber security landscape will evolve over time it's not just going to be stagnant there will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we always have to look at look uh as secretary barrett who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning the american way of life really depends on space and as part of the united states space force we work with defense leaders our congress joint and international military teammates and industry to ensure american leadership in space i really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today john and thanks so much to cal poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event i really look forward to this for uh several months and so with that i look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here general thank you very much for the awesome uh introductory statement uh for the folks watching on the stream brigadier general carthan is going to be in the chat answering any questions feel free to chat away he's the vice commander of space and missile systems center he'll be available um a couple comments from your keynote before i get to my questions because it just jumped in my head you mentioned the benefits of say space but the fires in california we're living that here that's really real time that's a benefit you also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space and i only imagine moore's law smaller faster cheaper applies to rockets too so i'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned so you know is it going to be more rules around that i mean this is an interesting question because it's exciting space force but for all the good there is potentially bad out there yeah so i i john i think the uh i think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space what kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps deorbit themselves what kind of basic protections does do all satellites should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space i think those are all fantastic questions and i know that u.s and many uh allied policy makers are looking very very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we uh you know how how we field and field is the military term but you know how we uh populate uh using civil or uh commercial terms uh that space layer at different altitudes uh low earth orbit mid mid-earth orbit geosynchronous earth orbit different kinds of orbits uh what the kind of mission areas we accomplish from space that's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as uh as the place gets a little bit not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out well i'm super excited for space force i know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging changing great space the focus here at this conference is space and cyber security intersection i'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that space force is taking to cyber security and how it impacts our national goals here in the united states yeah yeah so that's a that's a great question john let me let me talk about in two uh two basic ways but number one is and and i know um some people in the audience this might make them a little bit uncomfortable but i have to talk about the threat right um and then relative to that threat i really have to talk about the importance of uh of cyber and specifically cyber security as it relates to that threat um the threats that we face um really represent a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber uh we've seen a lot of action in recent months uh from certain countries notably china and russia uh that have threatened what i referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space for example uh it through many unclassified sources and media sources everybody should understand that um uh the russians have been testing on orbit uh anti-satellite capabilities it's been very clear if you were following just the week before last the department of defense released its uh 2020 military and security developments involving the people's republic of china um uh and uh it was very clear that china is developing asats electronic jammers directed energy weapons and most relevant to today's discussion offensive cyber uh capabilities there are kinetic threats uh that are very very easy to see but a cyber attack against a critical uh command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of gps and important to note that that gps system also impacts many civilians who are dependent upon those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to a system to mislead operators so that they send emergency services personnel to the to the wrong address right attacks on spacecraft on orbit whether directly via a network of intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the systems production uh while we're building the satellite can [ __ ] or corrupt the data denial of service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control i mean if gps went down i you know i hesitate to say it this way because we might elicit some screams from the audience but if gps went down a starbucks wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you and domino's certainly certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less right so with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek there from a military operations perspective it's dead serious um uh we have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like lance ransomware and malware and those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems however what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled if you will to use against our national security space systems uh day in and day out um as i said during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity if commanders in the field uh firefighters in california or baristas in in starbucks can't trust the data they see they're receiving then that really harms their decision-making capabilities one of the big trends we've recently seen is the mood move towards proliferated leo uh uh constellations obviously uh spacex's uh starlink uh on the commercial side and on the military side the work that darpa and my organization smc are doing on blackjack and casino as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionize how we plan and field warfighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems but they're also heavily reliant on cyber security uh we've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage uh loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from uh you know satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning on board spacecraft or at the edge our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector they're basically flying boxes full of software right and we need to ensure the data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms govern governing the right actions and that those uh that those systems are impervious to the extent possible uh to nefarious uh modifications so in summation a cyber security is vital element of everything in our national security space goals and i would argue for our national uh goals uh writ large including uh economic and information uh uh dimensions uh the space force leadership at all levels uh from uh some of the brand new second lieutenants that general raymond uh swore into the space force this morning uh ceremonially from the uh air force association's air space and cyberspace conference uh to the various highest levels general raymond uh general d t thompson myself and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise we've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems because it they absolutely depend on it you know you mentioned uh hardware software threats opportunities challenges i want to ask you because you you got me thinking of the minute there around infrastructure i mean we've heard critical infrastructure you know grids here on on earth you're talking about critical infrastructure a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is an extension of what we have so i'd love to get your thoughts about space force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors because you know the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyber space oh yeah threat vectors they're always increasing the surface area well if the surface area is from space it's an unlimited surface area so you got different vectors so you got new critical infrastructure developing real time really fast and you got an expanded threat vector landscape putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues how would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things well so i tell you um i just like um uh just like uh i'm sure people in the security side or the cyber security side of the business in the banking industry feel they feel like it's uh all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system to the financial sector on the department of defense side we've got to have sort of the same mindset um that threat vector from to and through space against critical space systems ground segments the launch enterprise or transportation uh to orbit and the various different uh domains within uh within space itself like i mentioned before uh leo mio and geo-based satellites with different orbits all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that i mentioned earlier some that i didn't mention like weather tactical or wide band communications uh various new features of space control all of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security uh threat perspective and it's a it's a daunting challenge right now right yeah it's awesome and one of the things we've been following on the hardware side here in the on the ground is the supply chain we've seen you know malware being you know really put into really obscure hardware who manufactures it as being outsourced obviously government has restrictions but with the private sector uh you mentioned china and and the us kind of working together across these these peaceful areas but you got to look at the supply chain how does the supply chain the security aspect impact the mission of the u.s space force yeah yeah so so um how about another um just in terms of an example another kind of california-based historical example right um the very first u.s satellite uh explorer one was built by uh the jet propulsion uh laboratory folks uh not far from here in el segundo up in uh up in pasadena um that satellite when it was first built in the late 50s uh weighed a little bit over 30 pounds and i'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by u.s companies fast forward to today the global supply chain is so tightly coupled and frankly many industries are so specialized almost specialized regionally around the planet we focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the the heritage if you will of some of the parts that are used the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized right the space industry especially uh national security space sector um uh is relatively small compared to other commercial industries and we're moving to towards using more and more parts uh from non-us companies uh cyber security and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily um understand 100 percent like an explorer one uh the the lineage of that particular part the environmental difficulties in space are well known the radiation environment the temperature extremes the vacuum those require specialized component and the us military is not the only uh customer in that space in fact we're definitely not the dominant customer uh in space anymore all those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains from a quality perspective a security perspective and availability um there's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from um many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of uh you know compromised patches if you will and our adversaries are aware of these techniques as i mentioned earlier with other forms of attack considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries so we have to uh take that threat seriously um between the government and industry sectors here in the u.s we're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities last fall we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at space and missile system center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio and it sounds really kind of you know businessy geeky if you will you know hey we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cyber security as dynamically as we possibly could and so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts to require system developers to implement some more advanced uh protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment so that data handling and supply chain perspective uh protections um from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account uh cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now it's as important as the the mission performance of the system it's as important as cost it's as important as schedule because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost uh it can perform that missile warning or that communications mis mission perfectly but it's not cyber secure if it doesn't have cyber protections built into it or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber uh threats then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the k the the war fighter or the nation uh any good um supply chain risk management is a is a major challenge for us uh we're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners uh we're all facing it head on uh to try and build secure and trusted components uh that keep our confidence as leaders firefighters and baristas uh as the case may be uh but it is a challenge and we're trying to rise to that challenge you know this so exciting this new area because it really touches everything you know talk about geeking out on on the tech the hardware the systems but also you put your kind of mba hat on you go what's the roi of the extra development and how you how things get built because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like you're building cool stuff people love it's it's exciting but you still have to build and cyber security has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture so you're still building things which means you've got to acquire things you got to acquire parts you got to acquire build software and and sustain it how is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space yeah from initial development uh through planning for the acquisition design development fielding or production fielding and sustainment it impacts all aspects of of the life cycle john uh we simply especially from the concept of baking in cyber security uh we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure so we've moved way further uh towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cyber security from the very beginning of a system's development cyber security and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute as i mentioned earlier equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance we like to talk in uh in the space world about uh mission assurance and mission assurance has always you know sort of taken us as we as we technically geek out right mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space right can it work in a vacuum can it work in you know as it as it uh you know transfers through uh the van allen radiation belt or through the the um the southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly right will it work out in space and now from a resiliency perspective yeah it has to work in space it's got to be functional in space but it's also got to be resistant to these cyber security threats it's it's not just i think uh general dt thompson quoted this term it's not just widget assurance anymore it's mission assurance um uh how does that satellite uh operator that ground control segment operate while under attack so let me break your question a little bit uh just for purposes of discussion into into really two parts uh cyber uh for cyber security for systems that are new and cyber security uh for systems that are in sustainment or kind of old and legacy um obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threaten both and we really have to employ different strategies for for defense of of each one for new systems uh we're desperately trying to implement across the department of defense in particular in the space world a kind of a devsecops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems here at smc we have a program called enterprise ground services which is a tool kit basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems egs as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of of bad behavior malicious behavior if you will um uh it's rudimentary at this point but because we're using devsecops and that incremental development approach as we scale it it just becomes more and more capable you know every every product increment that we field here at uh at uh la air force base uh uh we have the united space space forces west coast software factory which we've dubbed kobayashi maru they're using those agile devops uh software development practices uh to deliver uh space awareness software uh to the combined space operations center uh affectionately called the csp that c-spock is just down the road uh from cal poly uh there in san luis obispo at vandenberg air force base they've securely linked the c-spock with other space operation centers around the planet our allies australia canada and the uk uh we're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations so lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development uh capabilities for our our space systems but as i mentioned earlier we've got large constellations on satellite of satellites on orbit right now some of them are well in excess of a decade or more old on orbit and so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old and so but we still have to worry about them because they're critical to our space capabilities um we've been working with an air force materiel command organization uh called crows which stands for the cyber resiliency office for uh weapon systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to to live through this increasingly cyber security uh concerned era that we currently live in our industry partners have been critical to to both of those different avenues both new systems and legacy systems we're working closely with them to defend and upgrade uh national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with uh with new national assets coming online the vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threaten the way we've done business in the past both militarily and in the case of gps economically the impacts of that cyber security risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes but i've got to tell you it that as the threat vectors change as the vulnerabilities change we've got to be nimble enough agile enough to be able to bounce back and forth we can't just say uh many people in the audience are probably familiar with the rmf or the risk management framework approach to um to reviewing uh the cyber security of a system we can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an rmf on a system and then hey high five we're all good uh it's a journey not a destination that's cyber security and it's a constant battle rhythm throughout a weapon systems life cycle not just a single event i want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question but before i go there you mentioned the agile and i see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles you've got to be faster and we saw this in the computer industry mainframes mini computers and then when you started getting beyond me when the internet hit and pcs came out you saw the big enterprises the banks and and government start to work with startups it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that you know there's no way if you're a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise now that used to be for public sector and certainly uh for you guys so as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved i'm sure would love to love to have a contract with space force there's an roi calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view edit software you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you uh whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile but they might not be that big company we are john that's a fantastic question we are desperately trying to reach out to to those new space advocates to those startups to those um what we sometimes refer to within the department of defense those non-traditional uh defense contractors a couple of things just for uh thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight um uh three years ago we created here at uh space and missile system center uh the space enterprise consortium uh to provide a platform uh a contractual vehicle really to enable us to rapidly prototype uh development of space systems and to collaborate uh between the u.s space force uh traditional defense contractors non-traditional vendors like startups and even some academic institutions uh spec as we call it space enterprise consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts uh awarded quickly many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements and that's what spec is based on and so far in just three years spec has awarded 75 different uh prototyping contracts worth over 800 million dollars with a 36 reduction in time to award and because it's a consortium based competition for um for these kinds of prototyping efforts the barrier to entry for small and non-traditional for startups even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototypings is really lowered right um uh these types of partnerships uh that we've been working through on spec uh have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security uh for their systems both their developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build we want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together and support um uh kind of mutually beneficial uh relationships between all um recently uh at the annual air force association uh conference that i mentioned earlier i moderated a panel with several space industry leaders uh all from big traditional defense contractors by the way and they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships uh between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrants uh and that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those uh larger contractors uh that we rely on day in and day out advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that i think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations as i mentioned earlier the spec has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values and it's just going to get better right there's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium 80 of them are non-traditional kinds of vendors and we just love working with them another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators uh if you will and innovators that include uh cyber security experts is our space pitch day events right so we held our first event last november in san francisco uh where we awarded over a two-day period about 46 million dollars to 30 different companies um that had potentially game-changing ideas these were phase two small business innovative research efforts uh that we awarded with cash on the spot uh we're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. uh we're planning on doing it right here in los angeles uh covent 19 environment permitting um and we think that these are you know fantastic uh uh venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups startups and small businesses who are interested in uh really truly partnering with the us air force it's a as i said before it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business uh and working with the innovation economy uh is something that the department of defense uh really needs to do in that um the innovation that we used to think was ours you know that 80 percent of the industrial-based innovation that came from the department of defense uh the the script has been flipped there and so now more than 70 percent uh particularly in space innovation uh comes from the commercial sector not from uh not from the defense business itself and so um that's a tsunami of uh investment and a tsunami of uh capability and i need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it you know what i mean yeah i mean it's one of those things where the flip the script has been flipped but it's exciting because it's impacting everything are you talking about systems architecture you're talking about software you're talking about a business model you talk about devsecops from a technical perspective but now you have a business model innovation all the theaters of uh are exploding in innovation technical business personnel this brings up the workforce challenge you've got the cyber needs for the u.s space force there's probably a great roi model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts that's a entrepreneurial innovation you got the the business model theater you've got the personnel how does the industry adopt and change you guys are clearly driving this how does the industry adjust to you yeah so um i think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the u.s space force from a from an acquisition perspective and in this particular case from a from a cyber security perspective as i mentioned earlier it's the most exciting time to be in space programs uh really since the days of apollo um uh you know just to put it in terms that you know maybe have an impact with the audience uh from 1957 until today approximately 9 000 satellites uh have been launched from the various space faring countries around the planet uh less than two thousand of those nine thousand are still up on orbit and operational and yet in the new space regime um players like spacex have plans to launch you know 12 000 satellites for some of their constellations alone it really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities whether they're commercial civil or defense are going to require appropriate cyber security uh protections it's just a really exciting time uh to be working in stuff like this and so uh folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cyber security are just the kind of people that we want to work with because we need to make sure our systems are are secure and resilient we need folks that have technical and computing expertise engineering skills to be able to design cybersecure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks uh but we also as you alluded to we need people that have that business and um you know business acumen human networking background so that we can launch the startups and work with the non-traditional businesses uh help to bring them on board help to secure both their data and our data and uh and and make sure our processes and systems are are free as much as possible from uh uh from attack um for preparation for for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this uh trade space um you gotta be smart on digital networking uh you gotta understand basic internet protocols concepts uh programming languages uh database design uh learn what you can from penetration or vulnerability testing and and uh risk assessment i will tell you this and i don't think he will i know he will not mind me telling you this but you've got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago i'm at home one evening and i get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss the commander of air force space command uh general j raymond who is now currently the chief of space operations and he is on temporary duty flying overseas he lands where he's going and he first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes jt um while i was traveling um i noticed that there were e-books available on the commercial airliner i was traveling on and there was an e-book on something called scrumming and agile devsecops and i read it have you read it um and i said no sir but if you tell me what the title of the book is i will read it and so i got to go to my staff meeting um you know the very next week the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the stab meeting hey if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming then i'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our gs13s all of our government employees can get smart on uh the scrumming development process and interestingly as another side i had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays where he was trying to take some leave and i said sir what are you up to today are you are you you know making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever and the chief of space operations told me no i'm trying to teach myself python i'm at lesson two and it's not going so well but i'm i'm gonna figure this out and so that kind of thing if the chief of staff or the you know the the the chief of space operations can prioritize scrumming and python language and innovation in his daily schedule then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that and we'll just say lower levels of rank uh throughout our entire space force enterprise um look i i we don't need to need people that can code a satellite from scratch but we need to know we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cyber security requirements and that can turn those things into into meaningful actions obviously in the space domain things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important uh space is not an intuitive uh domain so under understanding how things survive uh on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions and you know i know there's probably a lot because of this conference i know there's a probably a whole lot of high-speed cyber security experts out in the audience and i need those people in the u.s space force the the country is counting on it but i wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy right i have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers and they don't have to be high-end cyber security experts but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections um into our space system so the skill set is is really really broad um our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into uh define designing uh and fielding offensive and destructive space cyber security weapons right they've repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit and the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that as i mentioned before peaceful uh global commons of space we really need all hands on deck if you're interested in helping in uniform if you're interested in helping uh not in uniform uh but as a government employee a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important uh or more cape more able to be developed for our space systems then we'd really love to uh to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems lieutenant general john thompson great insight thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too and motivation for the young next generation the united states space force approach of cyber security really amazing talk thank you for your time final parting question is as you look out and you had your magic wand what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish it's a super exciting time what do you hope for so um um first of all john thanks to you and and thanks to cal poly uh for the invitation and and thanks to everybody for uh for their interest in cyber security especially as it relates to space systems that's here at the conference um uh there's a quote and i'll read it here uh from uh bernard schriever who was the uh the founder if you will uh a legend in uh dod space the founder of the western development division which was a predecessor organization to space and missile systems center general shrever i think captures the essence of what how we see the next couple of years the world has an ample supply of people who can always come up with a dozen good reasons why new ideas will not work and should not be tried but the people who produce progress are breed apart they have the imagination the courage and the persistence to find solutions and so i think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cyber security innovation are going to be a pony ride at the county fair then perhaps you should look for another line of work because i think the next few years in space and cyber security innovation are going to be more like a rodeo um and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes it is a an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem it's really an honor for me to um to be able to play some small role uh in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it uh while i'm trying to improve the chances of uh of the united states of america in a uh in a space war fighting uh uh environment um and so i thank all of you for uh participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you thank you sir thank you for your leadership and thank you for the for the time for this awesome event space and cyber security symposium 2020 i'm john furrier on behalf of cal poly thanks for watching [Music]