(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You are watching theCube's coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'll tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000. And there's a little overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable. And we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the vice president of development and ops at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, vice-president of ecosystem partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. >> So, Jay, maybe you could take us through for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do? What do you all about? >> Yes, so PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong Telecom. So if it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable. We've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity. Came into business in 2005 if my brain is serving me correctly right now. So we have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a tier one service provider from that perspective as well. So we do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on that our network and our assets. >> Okay, so 2005, obviously you predated cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers, it's getting in the ocean, I mean, global networks, I mean, there was a big trend to do that and you had to think, you had to go bigger or go home and that business. >> Jay: Yes you had to do. >> So and Console Connect is your platform, is that right? So explain. >> Yeah, sorry. Yeah, Console Connect is our software defined interconnection platform. So we built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issue to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. And that may be extending to their data centers or extending or their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. And all of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> So, when you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the cloud model, AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated, heavy lifting, if you will, the visioning and management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? And AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting, and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. >> So it's a classic case of, okay, AWS has direct connect, people they go, "Ah, that's directly competitive, but it's not, you're adding value on top of that." Right. So describe where you fit Garrett inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem, what's that like? >> Okay, so where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. So we have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> Okay, so and you're doing that inside of AWS? I that right? Or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> Okay, so your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> And then, so your relationship with AWS is to sort of superpower direct connect, is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW Global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in clouds. >> Wherever there's a cloud you plug into it? Okay. >> That's correct. >> And then another advantage there is the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographic region. If for some reason you need to be connected to US West, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? Why, what's the use case there? >> Global diversity is certainly one of them, just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these cloud-based companies are beginning to kind of be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these pockets of use and they'll go, well, okay, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. And so then we want to our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset, that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What are the big, sort of macro trends in your business? I mean, broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughing) Because that's what our granularity is. So we allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. So if something happens, suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic. If a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you, or we've provisioned a new circuit for you. We've got your backup going whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume, so I can have one date or a three-year term. Presume if I commit to three years, I get a better deal, is that right or? >> You do, but I mean, at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. So yeah, if you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> Yeah, so it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. Is just you want to reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you would sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a floor and then everything above that is I can flex up? Is that how it works? Okay. And then the more I commit to the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat, right. >> So, okay. So I'm going to come in and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, I'll sign up for that and anything over it. You're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, and the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, or I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense I don't want. And we say, fine, take your one gig port, run one gig of services on it, if that's 20 different services, we're fine. So we allow you to multiplex your port and provision- >> It's awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend take a look at that pricing model. So, Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that way? Maybe you could draw paint a picture sort of the, the ideal partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but. >> Sure, so our ideal partners are internet exchanges, cloud partners, and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the cloud. And the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the cloud much easier and flexible in a flexible format for their customers. >> Yeah, so what can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the the scope, the scale. >> Well, of our business, kind of one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. So now, instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to kind of understand that now you're going, well, okay, so it's in the cloud now I need to manage my connectivity there. And, oh, well, wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just, bought into myself to try to run this? So the platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So you're a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. So that's really one of our guiding principles is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> Well, I don't understand, 'cause in the early days of cloud, a lot of enterprises, CIO they were concerned about security. And I think they realized that AWS has pretty good security, well, CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's bad security, it's just different. We move slow, Dave. So how do you accommodate, now I don't know, does that diversity, I mean, AWS has obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the cloud? Is that kind of how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> It is such now in the eco, it was all the diversity in the ecosystem. Is it such that there's enough common patterns that you you guys can kind of accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think the, one of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. Now we do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem, we can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of... I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. So we're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> Well, I would think 5G actually, I mean, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business, 'cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services I think, I could see somebody arguing the counter, but what's your point of view on that? >> No. I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor. And it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. And we're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge, rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse in Hare pending it. So, again, the ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, and ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. And that's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah, yeah and then you look at some of the car companies are coming on, you know, Tesla, you're driving around with like eight CPU's in that thing, communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah right. >> You start scaling that, and you start getting into some real bottleneck. >> Amazing business you guys having, obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you've got a big moat, and then it's a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Yeah. No, thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah, great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube, the leader in high-tech coverage, right back. (upbeat music)

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello everyone welcome to the special cube conversation with a remote guest Steve Herod managing director of general kennel s he's a venture capitalist former CTO of VMware cube alumni Steve welcome to this special cube conversation coming in remote from Palo Alto you're right across town but still we're gonna grab you big news happening and also get your thoughts on the Emerald 2019 welcome to our remote conversation yeah hey Jon yeah we're close and yet this makes it even more convenient go we'd love the new format of bring people into no matter where they are no matter what whatever it takes to get the stories we want to do that and and two important ones to having we we know vm world's coming next week but congratulations in order to you and your portfolio companies signal FX another cube alumni firm we've been covering since the beginning of their funding acquisition by Splunk today for over a billion dollars sixty percent in cash and forty percent in stop congratulations you've been on the board you've known these guys from VMware quite a team quite an exit it's a win-win for those guys congratulations yeah great group of guys several of which were at VMware has you as you mentioned and as you've had on your show that's great they were doing a really good job of monitoring and getting metrics about applications and how they're doing it and they're marrying it with spunks ability to ingest logs and really understand operational data and I think the combination will be very powerful it brings kind of what we've been monitoring cloud 2.0 essentially monitoring 2.0 is really observability as the world starts moving into the the kinds of services we're seeing with cloud and on-premises operations more than ever that game has changes much more dynamic and the security impact is significant and certainly as applications connect whether it's IOT or any IP device having that data at scale is really a critical part of that and I know signal FX was one of those companies where you invested early and I remember interview them a couple years ago and saying damn these guys might be too early I mean they're so smart they're so on it but this is an example of skating to where the as Wayne Gretzky would say these guys were just hitting their stride Steve can you can you share any color commentary on on the deal and or you know why this is so important well they've been at this for a long time and they're a great team I've been involved as an investor less time obviously but yeah it was the really original team out of Facebook monitoring really at scale applications and then trying to take that technology that Facebook could use and applied it to our world and you know as you discovered we're in a world of micro services and containers and that is definitely hitting its stride right now and so they were in the right place knowing how to monitor this very fast moving information and and make some sense out of it so yeah really good job on their part and it was a pleasure to be along for part of the ride with them it's great to meet great founders that have a vision and stay the course because you know it's always tricky when you're early to see the future especially around ok we're talking micro services and containers way back before it became the rage and now more relevant operationally for enterprises it's easy to get distracted and it's fashion well just jump on this trend or this wave they stayed the course they stayed the nose to the grindstone and now observability which to me is code word for monitoring 2.0 is probably one of the hottest segments you saw companies going public companies filing the pager Duty dynaTrace now the you guys with your acquisition with signal FX this is an important sector this would normally be viewed in the IT world as kind of lists of white space but it seems to be a much bigger landscape can you comment on your view on this and why it's so important why is observability so hot Steve well it's been this actually been a great market to be in for quite a while they've been a large number of companies continuing to be both built up and it's pretty simple the amount of e-commerce or the amount of customer interactions you're having over applications and over the web has gone up and so anything is not performing well or house downtime literally cost you a lot of money as a company and so as these applications get more complex and they're being relied on more for revenue and for customer interactions you know simply you have to have better tools and that's gonna be something that continues to evolve we have more complex apps and more commerce is going to go through them complexity is obviously something that people a lot of people are talking about I want to ask you something around today's marketplace but I want you to compare and contrast it similarly to what your experience was at VMware when you the CTO you know virtualization evolved very very quickly and ended up becoming a really critical component of the infrastructure and a lot of people were pooh-poohing that initially at first and then all the sudden became we got to kill VMware and you know so the resiliency of VMware was such that they continued to innovate on virtualization and so that's been you know part of the legacy of VMware and VM roads will cover next next week but when you look at what's happening now with cloud computing and now some of the hybrid cloud opportunities with micro services and other other cool things the the role of the application is being is important part of the equation it used to be the stand up infrastructure and that would enable the application to do things virtualization kind of changed that game now you don't need to stand up any infrastructure you can just deploy an application then the infrastructure can be code and be self formed so you can have unique requirements as infrastructure driven by the application the whole world seems to have flipped around do you see it that way is that accurate assessment and what's your thoughts on that I think you're right on a bunch of fronts people have been calling it different things but the beauty of VMware and you know this is a while ago now but the reason it was successful is that you didn't have to change any of your software to use it sort of slid in underneath and added value but at the same time applications evolved and so the path of looking like hardware was something that was great for not changing applications you have to think about a little differently when people are taking advantage of new application patterns or new services that are in the cloud and as you build up these as they're called cloud native applications it really is about the infrastructure you know it's job and life as to run applications and it's it sort of felt like the other way around it needs to be you wrote an application for what your infrastructure was it shouldn't be like that anymore it's about what what you need to do to get the job done and so we see the evolution of the clouds and their services that are there certainly the notion of containers and a lot the stuff that VMware is now doing has been focused on those new applications and making sure VMware adds value to them whatever type of application they are it's interesting one of the exciting things in this wave that we're on this year around multi cloud hybrid cloud and public cloud now that we've kind of crossed over to the reality that public cloud has been there done that succeeded I call that cloud 1.0 you saw the emergence of hybrid cloud even early on around 2012-2013 we were talking about that at VMworld you know certainly Pat Kelson here but now you're seeing hybrid cloud validated you got outpost you got Azure stack among other things the reality is if you are cloud native you might not need to have anything on premise like companies like ours with 50 plus people we don't have an IT department but most enterprises have stuff on premise so the the nuance these days is around you know what's the architecture of IT these days when you add security into it's complicated so there's debates can there be a sole cloud for a workload certainly that's been something that we've been covering with the Amazon Jedi contract where it's not necessarily a sole cloud for the entire department of defense it's a sole cloud for the workload the military application workload or app the military it's 10 billion dollar application and it's okay to have one cloud as we would say but yet they're gonna use Microsoft's cloud for other things so the DoD's having a multiple cloud approach multiple environments multiple vendors if you will but you don't have to split the cloud up or say this is kind of one of those conversations really evolving quickly because there's no real school of thought around this other than the old way which was have a multi-vendor environment split two things what's your thoughts on the the workload relationship to the cloud is it okay to have a workload have a single clap for that workload and coexist with other clouds it's funny I've been thinking about this more lately where if you went back earlier in time forgetting cloud there used to be a lot of different type of servers that you could run on whether it be a mainframe or a mini mainframe or UNIX system or a Linux system and to some extent people are choosing what would run where based on the demands of the application sometimes on price sometimes on certifications or even what's been ported to the right one so this is I'm beating myself but you know that's that's a while ago it's not too different to kind of think about the different kind of cloud services are out there whether you're running your own on your own data center or whether you're leveraging one from the other partners I really do think in the ideal world you get your choice of the best possible platform for the application across a variety of characteristics and it's kind of up to the vendors of management software and monitoring software at security software to give you more flexibility to choose where to run and so forgetting VMware exactly but think of a virtualization layer that that really tries to abstract out and let you more fluidly run things on different clouds I do think that's where a lot of the you know the core software is head of these days to really enable that to work better and so a million other use cases with with you know storage being moved around for disaster recovery or for whatever it else might be but that core of flexibility reminds me a lot of you know choosing what application would one run would run where within your own company and the kubernetes trend in container certainly really makes that so much more flexible because you can still run VMware's on the ends beams under the covers or put stuff on bare metal a lot of great opportunities so it's exciting and you slap an API in front of them and and micro-services sort of works in tandem with that so that you you could really have your application composed across multiple environments and I think the observable observability is so hot because it takes what network management was doing in the old way which is monitoring making sure things are operating effectively and combining with data and so when I heard about the acquisition of signal FX into Splunk I'm like there it is we're back to data so observability is really a data challenge and opportunity for using what would be a white space monitoring but it's more than monitoring because it's about the data and the efficacy of that data and how it's being used whether it's for security or whatever your thoughts so there's more data than ever for sure and so being able to stream that in being able to capture it at cost all that is a big part of our you know the environments we all work and the key thing is turning that into some actionable insight and whether you're using you know interesting calculations for that or different forms of machine learning like that's where this really has to go is with all this data coming in do I avoid false false positives how do i only alert people when needed and then that allows you to do what everyone has talked about for 30 years which is automatic remediation but for now let's talk about it is how do i process all of this rich data and give me the right information to take action see we want to thank you for coming on this promote cube conversation you've been with us at the cube since 2010 I think our first cube event was EMC world 2010 that show doesn't exist any longer because that folded into Dell technologies world so VM world next week is the last show standing that has been around since the cube cubes been around of course you guys had the VM worlds had their 10th anniversary I think was 2013 as a show but this is our 10th year I want to thank you for being part of our community and being a contributor with your commentary and your friendship and referral appreciate all that so I gotta ask you looking back over the 10 years since you've been with the cube VMworld what's the most exciting moments what are moments that you can say hey that was an amazing time that was a grind but we got through it funny moments your thoughts yeah boy that's a tough question I've enjoyed you know working with you John and the cube there have been so many really interesting things for me the some of the big acquisitions that we went through at VMware where I think the nsx acquisition when we get nasarah I think that really pushed us in an interesting spot but we had gone through IPOs and acquisition ourselves by EMC and we've gone through some pretty vicious competition from whether it be Citrix or Zin or Microsoft yeah that's just the joy of being at these companies it's lots of ups and downs along the way but they all kind of fit together to make an exciting life what were some moments for you I know you had left was a twenty fifteen or twenty six point eight vs world you go down there yeah about six years what do you miss about VMware the team is what everyone kind of cliche says but it's totally true the chance to kind of work with all those people at the executive staff all the way down to like these awesome engineers with Co ideas so I definitely missed that miss shipping products you don't get to do that as much as a venture capitalist but but on the flip side this is a great world to be and I get to see enthusiastic you know very optimistic founders all day long pushing the envelope and while that was existing at the EM where it's it's what I see every single day here you've been on the cube ten times at vmworld that's the all time spot you're tied but first congratulations on the leaderboard well it's been a great ten years going forward we've seen more so go looking back I would say that you know Palmer it's taking over from Diane Greene really set the table he actually laid out essentially what I think now as a clearly a cloud SAS architecture I think he got that pretty much right again or maybe early in certain spots of what he proposed at that time though some things that didn't materialize as fast but ultimately from a core perspective you guys got that right and then went in try to do the cloud but then and this year it comes in for a software-defined you know line with Amazon and since that time the stock has been really kind of up to the right so you know some key moments there for VMware from small somalia more stuff it's fun to see pivotal now possibly coming back into after after getting started there but I think you know there's there's a hugely talented team of executives there Pat Yeltsin jurors come in and done a great job I think Raghu and all these folks that are in there are good thinkers and so I think you'll consider to continue to see it evolve quite a bit and probably some cool announcements next week talk about the role Raghu and the team played because he doesn't really get a lot of the spotlight he avoids it I know he'd I've talked to him privately he won't come on the qoi let the other guys go on other guys and gals so he's been instrumental he was really critical in multiple deals could you share some insight into his role at VMware VMware and why it's been so important well I'll push them to get on especially now that you have remote you can probably grab him no he and Rajiv and andraia Ferrell just all the guys are I think he and regime basically split up half and half of the products but I know Raghu is very very similar in the whole cloud strategy that has clearly been working well he's good friend in a very smart guy well I want you to give me a personal word that you're gonna give him in a headlock and tell him to come on the cube this year we want him on he's a great great great guest he's certainly knowledgeable going forward Steve 10 years out we still got 10 more years of great change coming if you look at the wave that's coming you're out investing in companies again you had one big exit today with the billion dollar acquisition that was happening by Splunk and signal affects a lot more action you've been investing in security what's your outlook as you look at the next ten years there's a lot more action to happen we seem to be early days in this new modern era historic time in the computer industry has applications of now dictating infrastructure capabilities is still a lot more to do what are you excited about there's there's a million things I get to see everyday which are clearly where the world is headed but I think at the end of the day there's there's infrastructure which the job and life of infrastructure is to run applications and so then you look at applications how are they changing and and what is the underlying fabric gonna need to do to support them and if you look at the future of applications it's clearly some amazing things around artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually make them smarter it's all different factors form factors that they're running on and being displayed on I think we clearly have a world where with the next generation of networking you can do even more at the edge and communicate in a very different way with the backend so I kind of look at all these application patterns and really try to think about what is the change to the underlying clouds and fabrics and compute that's going to be needed to run them I think we have plenty of headroom of interesting ideas ahead stew Dave and I were talks to Dave Stuben they want this too many man died we're talking about you know as infrastructure and cloud get automated as automation comes in new waves are gonna be formed from it what new waves do you see is it's like RPAs a I I mean because as those things get sucked in and they ships in to new waves what are the some of the key ways people should pay attention to I'm not saying the inverse tress is going away but as it becomes automated and as the shift happens the value still is there where is those new waves well I think today it looks like most applications are going to be composed of a lot of services and I think they're gonna be able they're gonna need to be displaying on everything from big screens to small screens to purely as headless api friends and so again I think at the end of the day this this infrastructure is gonna have to have a lot of computation capability have to crunch through tons of data but also have to stitch together these connections between components and provide really good experiences and ability in the network and all those are very hard problems that we've been working on for a while I think we're gonna keep working on them and new forms for the next ten years at least awesome see thanks for being a friend with us in the cube what's your funny favorite moment of the Q can you share any observations about the cube and your experiences your observations over the 10 years we've come a long way you've come a long way actually I've enjoyed it I mean it's a microcosm of all the other stuff going on but I saw your first little box that you built and used for the cube like that was that was really cool but now the fact that I'm on my laptop you know doing this over the network and it's showing up is pretty awesome so I think you're following the same patterns of the other of the other applications moving to the cloud and having good user experience because cube native here software if the male native Steve thank you so much for staying the time commenting on the acquisition I know it's fresh on the press a lot more analysis and cut to come next week it's certainly I'll be co-hosting ATS plunks Kampf later in the year so I'm looking forward to connecting with the team there and again thanks for all your contribution into the cube community we really appreciate it one thank you for your time thanks John you guys are awesome thanks for chatting okay Steve Herod managing director at General Counsel top tier VC from here in Silicon Valley and they have offices around the world I'm Jean ferré breaking down the news as well as a VM real preview with the former CTO of VMware Steve hare now a big-time venture capitalist I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

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

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