>>The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid two thousands permanently changed the way we think about it at the heart of it. The cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs more than half of it, budgets were spent on people. And much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning management, recovery optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut costs, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to simplifying hybrid cloud made possible by Cisco today, we're going to explore hybrid cloud as an operating model for organizations or the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. >>No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure. And it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where it managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing the growth and diversity of applications continues. And now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIO is by enterprise technology. Research ETR indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. >>So the challenge for it managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of it. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next we're going to hear from Maneesh Agra wall and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex, which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment we'll drill into unified compute more than a decade ago. Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS unified compute system. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade, and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. >>Okay. Let's start things off. Gus is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. DD. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, >>Our pleasure here. Uh, look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but um, every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing, um, while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications. Um, and then most modern applications are, um, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, uh, uh, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering a change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across, um, all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, uh, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the bus storage team. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right. Um, back to the origins of UCS, I mean, we widen the networking company, builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So we do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the software for our, um, for our and you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. Um, but the software is called intersite and, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. Um, but then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does go into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, uh, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, uh, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, we brought a platform, I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. Uh, and so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So w tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, um, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, uh, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we took on this ball goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same is the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or on software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how they work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. Um, but it was a pretty big boat patient because, you know, um, the big change with SAS is, is you're, uh, as you're familiar today is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, um, working with, uh, our own companies, security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. Um, so again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but, uh, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compete, I of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business, and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like doing stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right. Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that your intro introducing I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, um, search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants, I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies, and then figure out how to stitch it all together. Cause it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's, that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, um, you know, infrastructure partners like, uh, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, you know, others who want their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are other SAS offerings and software vendors, um, who have now become partners. Like we do not, we did not write to Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, uh, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem, we partnered with a company called ergonomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, uh, you know, w how we have gone about this. >>And, uh, it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the inner side platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, uh, soon coming on, uh, on GC, on, uh, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site is since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage the end in, in a, in an easy to instance. So, >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. Um, so my last question is how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing has become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center. It doesn't matter if they're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades, or they're looking for a consistent operating model. What my crystal ball doesn't mean. There's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So allegations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is most as the data moving data is the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be located with the data that's on the edge. We on the air colo public cloud doesn't matter, but, um, basically you're gonna see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific, I think sovereign is going to play a huge role. Uh, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it goes to making, you know, a good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, whether it's, gonna play control, um, and then distributed cloud also on edge, um, is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way, every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workload data, um, you know, upgrading your liability concerns. That's really what, what we are trying to enable for our customers. >>Uh, you know, I think I agree with doing that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world, uh, a solid open, flexible platform, and it's flexible in terms of the technology flexible in how they want to consume it at some customers are fine with a SAS software. What if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team now that does not work so how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, our perspective sovereignty, we talked about it. So, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. Um, but the last thing I would mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage into some of those, um, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex. Um, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right, thanks DDL. It was a pleasure to have you in the queue. Great to see you. You're welcome in a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where HyperFlex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question and, you know, customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer, and I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move, and process large datasets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think that give our customers kind of some, you know, pose some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today, or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I rightsize it without over provisioning for example? But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or Blade approach which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have, and that creates a lot of, you know, opportunity for siloing infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU-focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together, that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align, for a lot of our customers they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase, without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really rightsized for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009 we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took a management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time, however, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Dave: All right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right, you know, Jim I said in my open that you guys, Cisco had sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things. These data-intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed so how is it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake, we're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned which is one infrastructure that can run any application into it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco but also within the industry. And I think right now as a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground-up work that we did is really paying off, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June, when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So, Vikas I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way, and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way, and hybrid cloud so, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures, and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that and I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-Series right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? >> Sure, and that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs, and hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory-dense system, GPU-dense system, core-dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across the firmware, and software, and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade references of their own. As a result we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really, seeing a slowness in their agility, and high burdened in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile, and drive lower these issues. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the rightful footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model. Where they can create the policy once across compute, network, storage, and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade, and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where, the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their issues. >> Oh, that's key. Less friction is always a good thing. Now of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone, you have hard news as well, what innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely, so we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year Dave, and we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the 5th generation of our very popular Unified Fabric Technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the HCI workload, the SDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular farm factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 Gig end-to-end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of this performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, may it be ethernet adapter, may it be with fiber channel adapters, or may it be the other storage adapters, they've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in the smart release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So Jim you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move, again, to the, kind of to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI, that's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market every, every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow, we have the, you know, the premier cloud-based management you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that you, that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well, and, you know, I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect, and Virtual Interface Card, and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand in creating this 100 Gig end-to-end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to, that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve of these life cycle mismanagement issues, they solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for, like it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly, the fabric that stitches them together is critical and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. X, and the X Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So we, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas, talk, give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to. >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about and James also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCA in less than four to five to six, without rip and replace, as they embrace CXL without rip and replace, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe-based dense drives and so forth. We are also looking forward to X Fabric next generation which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO, by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there, in a moment I'll have some closing thoughts. (bright upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something it figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations, and is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data-intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation, remember all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net, and if you want to learn more please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, let's start things off Didi Dasgupta is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. Didi. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >>Yeah, our pleasure here. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution off the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications and then most modern applications are, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering the change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the, the storage team of, and now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right back of the origins of UCS. I mean, we, you know, why the networking company builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our. And you know, we've been on this journey for about four years, but the software is called intersite. And, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices, but then we've evolved it the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one, one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does goes into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that managed their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, he brought a platform. I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. And so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, you know, three or four guys getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same in the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or the cyber talk software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how their assets work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it, it was pretty big boat invasion. Cause you know, the big change with SAS is your, as you're familiar, Dave is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities. And we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, working with our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. So again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but I wanted to point out that we are in some ways eating our own dog food. Cause we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I, I of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right? Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that you're introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control multi-tenants I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies and then figure out how to stitch it all together because it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, or, you know, others who want to their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are there other SAS offerings, software vendors who have now become partners? Like we did not, we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem we partnered with a company called urbanomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, you know, w how we have gone about this. And it actually ducked a dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today, that we're announcing on the underside platform, where we're actually been announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on, on GC, on, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site, since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage VMs in, in a, in an instance. >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at know $2 or $3 depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing is become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades or liability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What Mike is the law doesn't mean? I think there's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So obligations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is data moving data is it's the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be co-located with the data that's on the edge, on the edge colo public cloud doesn't matter, but you're basically going to see more customer droughts, more industry-specific clouds. You know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific. I think sovereign is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it comes to making good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, control. And the distributor cloud is also on edge is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey that will have their choice of workloads, data, you know, uptime, reliability, concerns. That's really what, what we are returning any of our customers. >>You know, I think I agree with you that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world a solid open, flexible, and flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some customers are fine with a SAS software, but as I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. So how they want to consume it. They want to, you know, a hundred percent, no sovereignty. We, we talked about. So, you know, job for a decent structure vendor like ourselves is to give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage me to some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right. Thanks, Deedee. Always a pleasure to have you in the cube. Great to see you. >>You're >>Welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

(upbeat music) >> Man: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2020 (upbeat music) brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBEs live coverage of Cisco live 2020 here in Barcelona. It's our second full day of coverage. We're actually doing about three and a little bit more days of coverage I'm Stu Miniman my co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante, John Furrier is also in the house. A lot of interesting announcements at Cisco. We've been watching for the three years we've been at Cisco Live. Really Cisco getting much deeper into the software space. Of course we're here in the DevNet Zone where we're watching the changing workforce go even more towards developers. Hardware and software, living together nicely and to help us dig into that topic, we'll welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Todd Brannon, who is the Senior Director of Computing with Cisco. Todd, thanks so much for joining us. >> It's a pleasure to be here -- >> Dave: Good to see you man. >> Pleasure All right, so let's tee up what I was just talking about there. You know, there are certain companies that think about Cisco in the boxes and ports, we know the future is more software is eating the world developers of course are the new kingmakers. >> That's right. And Cisco has been moving on that journey, so bring us inside a little bit the announcements that you've been working on and where your team's seeing where customers are going. >> It's all about the application. So the AppDynamics team, they did some surveys. They found that the average consumers, 7,000 people worldwide, they surveyed them, average consumers using 34 apps a day or 34 digital experiences and so if you think about applications and infrastructure, we've always talked about applications infrastructure, right People don't buy a server to use as a coat warmer. It's always going to be running some sort of workload. But I think in the past, there wasn't as visceral connection between what the operations and infrastructure teams were running. If it was CRM or ERP, it wasn't as visceral connections you have today when it say the hotels interface to their customers in terms of booking or getting that early checkout, right? So the application experience has become much more personal, much more visceral and really incredibly critical to the business. And so that puts enormous pressure on the infrastructure teams that are a big part of making sure that application experience is a good one, right? Response time or is the app even available? So for us it's how do we start to begin to bring that infrastructure operations team into the fight with the teams that are thinking about applications, which oftentimes when using different tool sets or sort of some operational silos though. So this announcement is all about trying to break down some of those silos all in service of that application experience. >> Right, and of course AppDynamics was a large bet by Cisco. We've seen them in a lot of a Cloud environment, very much tied to the application. One of the announcements this week is taking Cisco Intersight which first time I ran across it was in things like UCS in other Cisco gear there. Help us understand how those are going together now and how should we be thinking about Intersight today in 2020? >> We should definitely be thinking about it differently cause you're right. Here to fore, Intersight has been focused on our computing infrastructure, HyperFlex UCS and, you know, when we started with UCS, we took management out of devices, we moved it into the network fabric and then three years ago with Intersight, we moved our management control plane into the Cloud. So think of Muraki but for computing and but it was always around Cisco and our infrastructure. Now we're taking two really big steps. One is we're integrating a product that we've had called our Workload Optimizer into Intersight. And that Workload Optimizer software has always been inherently a heterogeneous approach. So databases, Cloud management platforms, all the Hypervisors, Operating System, storage partnerships. We've been able to do telemetry and interdependency mapping with that in a heterogeneous way for some time. So now it breaks Intersight out of being more of a Cisco focus to really the reality which is a heterogeneous Data Center environment. Second thing is that, now we've done a data integration with AppD, and so the beauty of that is AppD best-in-class and understanding the interdependencies, those complex web of interdependencies at the application tier. Our Workload Optimizer best in class to understanding infrastructure interdependencies. And now we correlate those and you get a top to bottom view. Again, they kind of get you to where you can see what's an application, how's it performing from a business context with AppD but been able to connect it all the way down into your Cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Make that correlation and ensure that your infrastructure is doing the right things for the app. >> So the application portfolio has evolved dramatically over (laughs) the last 20 years, right? >> Yep. It used to be, you know, and it still is the crown jewels of the organization, but you'd have a mission critical App that's insurance company would have a claims app and then it'd be a zillion other applications around it, but the claims and the sales apps were really the key and whatever happened in the other apps, okay, fine. Now you have developers, you have Shadow IT came in and just do saying everybody's a software company and you had this explosion of apps that are all sucking resources from the network. So the traffic has changed (laughs) and that just brings massive complexity. So wonder if you could talk about how that trend has affected network traffic. >> You hit it, it's the interdependency. So, you know, it's been estimated that the typical enterprise application until very recently needed to talk to four to eight other enterprise applications to function properly. We're seeing that number jumped to 20 in a very near future. And it's because applications to your point are becoming much more modular, right? The development environment in the Cloud where all the innovation is occurring is inherently distributed Microservices, Serverless or functions-based in many cases. So all of the things that conspire together to create that experience, like an insurance claim on your phone, all of those interdependent components, it's become much more distributed, much more complex. And the key thing is underneath each of those components is going to sometimes be different infrastructure managed by different teams with different tooling. And so it's become almost impossible for it teams to correlate all that and manage it. Especially as it becomes, you know, higher velocity. >> Right, it got to. Yeah, Todd, I would like you to put a point on that, cause you've talked about applications are becoming much more distributed. I want to hear what you're hearing from customers. Cause sometimes it's like, "Well, I think of this application as either one thing", or this collection of things that I put one place or another. We're starting to see some customers that well, I start tears things apart and therefore it becomes developed hybrid in nature and people often complain it is, "It's hybrid, it's moldy", it's all this other things. Well, it's a real difference between "I had something in my Data Center and a piece of it is in a Public Cloud", versus, "Oh, Hey, I'm just going to throw a thing in whatever Public Cloud I want to use today or tomorrow". >> I think that's an incredibly important distinction. So multi-Cloud is the notion of, "Hey, I want to be able to consume innovation from different Cloud providers. But a hybrid application is really this idea of Public Cloud or Microservice connecting back to monolith on-prem side and I think it's still very, very rare that people are building applications that tie together multiple Public Cloud services to your point but it's very much more common for people to be saying, "Hey, I've gone out and built something innovative, a new customer experience out in the Public Cloud, but now I have to connect it". Data gravity is real, right? And GDPR here in Europe, right? So there are very real reasons why applications and data are staying on-prem, but they need to connect it out to this Cloud innovation. And that's what this announcement was all about. How do we give people a tool set? Because if you think about it, you're going to have infrastructure powering these pieces in the Cloud, and on-prem, how do you monitor that? How do you ensure that you're not over provisioning or under provisioning? It's a very complex problem. >> Well, it's critical because the Cloud brings scale. You know it used to be, "Okay, we're going to deploy a website. Hey the websites, it's important, it's slow, let's figure it out." Now you have these dozens and hundreds of applications coming in, many if not, most of which are customer facing. So if there's a problem, it's really escalated and the Cloud helps scale that problem, you know, massively. So Todd, help us understand sort of ... in the keynote yesterday there was a sort of the circular diagram of the visualization, the insight and the action. So give us a little sort of insight as to how this works. >> Coupled together. >> What's the secret sauce underneath it? >> So the secret sauce is correlating data, right? So telemetry data is something that we've always collected in the context of either infrastructure or applications. So with AppDynamics, we have a platform that based in the industry, it going out and figuring out all the independencies between an application and all of those services that are there. And then we have all of the similar things on the infrastructure side. And so what we've done here is correlate those data sets. So we're using the API as a feed data between AppDynamics and Cisco Intersight, which is the infrastructure side of the equation. And we create a data Lake now that we can then be able to apply analytics to. And so we can start to think about the Data Center as a demand supply equation and how do I want to match up my applications with the business context intact from AppD to what I'm doing with my infrastructure and provisioning that, so it's really a story of collecting all the telemetry, integrating it, stitching it together, and then applying the analytics to help our operators because it's gone beyond human scale, keeping track of the needs of all these VMs and especially when you get to containers. So it's first about stitching together the data, then applying the analytics for insight and then taking action. So it's automation informed by insight. But first you have to have visibility of everything. So that's the loop. >> It's interesting you talk about demand supply. Again, it used to be you'd manage demand, IT demand with an IT Project Management System and now you've got this infrastructure that is, you know, being sucking apps or sucking resources out of it and you can't just manage it manually. You've got to have the data which you've got and you've got to have some level of automation to be able to remediate things. So how does that fit in to the product and sort of the roadmap? >> So our optimizer product has, you know, you're going to give your credentials for all of the different tooling in your Data Center and you're going to bring it all together for the analytics and then be able to take action in a similar fashion from a central position. So what you see in Intersight Optimizer, it's really powerful as a recommendation engine. So it's going to tell you straight up, "Hey, you've got an ... you have an application and it's going to look at historical data". So over the past, whatever, 30 days, this VM over on AWS, 95% of the time has been running at less than 70% utilization of its assigned resources, so guess what? You should go from instance size three to Instance Size two, and we can even tell the operator, "Here's how much money that's going to save you every month" Do you want to do this, yes or no?" Bum. >> Boom Off you go and you kind of stand up the new instance. Similarly on the on-prem site, this VM has been consuming, you know, more than 95% of its allocated memory. You know, 80% of the time over the past month you should give it some more memory. And because we have optimized our controlling vCenter or you know, the micro, we can go off and make that change. So it's really the analytics to decide what is the right action to take. Then giving the operator the go button to go instantiate it and that's, that's incredibly powerful. >> And it's the same experience for my on-prem workloads, my Amazon, my Azure, and my Alibaba, whatever workloads I'm going to run in the future? >> Correct, and that's essential because of the hybrid dynamic. You know, the innovation is going to go on out in the Cloud, but you got to tie it the backend. So we have to be able to manage both of these at the same time. >> So people might be asking that aren't as you know, into this world as, "Well, why can't I just ... isn't Amazon going to do that for me? Isn't Azure going to do that for me? Or you know, the IBM Cloud, whatever, right? Can you explain, sort of help people understand the differences in the way in which each of these environments, including on-prem handles this type of of activity? >> I think what we're seeing is a maturation of the on-prem side of the equation. So the Cloud-like operating model consuming resources, That model ... Clouds and operating model, it's not a place, right? Everyone's been throwing that around for a few years, but it's very true. And so now on-prem, you know, OpenStack was hard, right? For folks, you know, we know that it just was difficult for people to get to the Private Cloud Nirvana that they wanted to. So with things like Intersight, we're basically starting to deliver, you know, enterprise-ready hardened systems. We're not calling it a Private Cloud, but effectively that's what it is especially when we talk tomorrow about HXAP and what we're doing on the container side, that's ultimately what we're delivering is a Cloud-like experience for the operator. So we're, you know, as a company we're focused on ... we've been focused for 10 years on "How do we create a better operating model in the Data Center". But now we're competing on experience just like our customers are with their App. So we have a mobile app for Intersight, right? And we're focused now on the experience for the operator and bringing that Cloud-like experience on-prem. That's really the ... >> Todd, I'd like you to dig into the organizational impact here a little bit. First of all, from your partners selling these solutions into the customer as well as from a customer standpoint. Because I kind of hear individualized a little bit. Well, you know, AppD is very much an application-centric focus as opposed to Intersight is more of the infrastructure piece of it and those worlds haven't necessarily communicated or you know, there's some gaps. >> They have been the victims of silos on a technology basis and then that does manifest in the organization, right? And we used to see this when we started with Blades back in the early aughts, right? Is it the network? Is the networking team that assign off on this Blade chassis? Well, they can't manage the switching, we're not going to let the server guys manage that, right? So we've kind of seen technology kind of reveal very dysfunctional (laughs) organizational constructs and I think we're trying to help the same dynamic here, but between the folks that are concerned about the application how it relates to the business and looking at the application performance and the teams that manage infrastructure, they haven't had common tooling. And this provides common data sets, a single source of truth so that when something goes wrong, everyone's aware of the same set of conditions. They can see, they can correlate it. We're correlating these two data sets from the app side and the infrastructure side. And it helps the teams work together because you're right, I mean, you've got app teams that look at the world as a you can think of it as a horizontal application topology. But underneath every one of those points on the graph, there's an infrastructure component, maybe different teams. So, and they're looking at the world as stacks. So you've got the infrastructure folks looking up the app folks looking down and unless you've got these worlds correlated, that's what the war-rooms and the finger pointing, it must be the network, who knows. You know, so we're really trying to help teams come together cause ultimately in a business, they're all working for somebody that cares about the whole edge ladder. >> So for from a selling motion, is it that person that they report up to that will drive that? >> It's both. or you find -- >> Well, what we're doing is, you know, we have our infrastructure operations teams, the folks that we work with there now we can bring them a tool set that says, "Here's how we can help you be directly relevant to the business in real time. Here's how to hug your application team and make them happy. He is right, so it's a story of relevance and in a real time way". and then for the application team, it's a story of, "Hey, here's a tool set that ensures the thing that you care about most, which is your precious baby, your application is going to get all the care and feeding it needs from the infrastructure on-prem and the Cloud. And so our AppD team is talking to those application-centric monitoring and operations teams and our, you know, all the folks that work in our Data Center Organization are talking to the infrastructure buyers, but we're now selling them a common tool set. You know, one team kind of coming bottom up the other common top down. >> And it's heterogeneous, I don't need, I don't have to have Cisco gear >> Correct to make this work. And it's a SaaS model -- >> It is SaaS, yes pretty sure. And it's a 2020 availability, right? >> Yes. The calender 2020? >> First half. Yeah. First half. Great. >> Yep All right, Todd, want to give you the final word as we look through 2020 what should be customers be looking for in this space? >> I think they should be thinking about how can they impact the top line and the bottom line, so as an IT organization And on the top line, it's going to be these new application experiences. That's where the companies are innovating, right? To drive revenue, new experiences. And then on the bottom line is, "How do we get rid of over provisioning? How do we operate in a more efficient way?" And to do that, you need analytics, right? I haven't said AIOps, but I'll throw it out in the close, right? But you need analytics to really understand "How do I optimize the environment, reduced my cost of computing and help out with a bottom line." So that's, that's the rest of the year. >> Todd Brannon, really appreciate the conversation. Thanks so much for all the updates. Look forward to talking to you again soon. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> All right, for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with much more wall to wall coverage here from Cisco live 2020 in Barcelona. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2020, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host for this segment is Dave Volante. John Furrier is also in the house. We're doing a little more than three days wall-to-wall coverage. One of the big themes we're talking about this week is in this complicated world, networking, containerization, applications going through transformation. Future work simplification is something that is very important and helping us to really tease through and understand some of the integration, some of the announcements where Cisco is helping to simplify the environment, happy to welcome back to the program one of our Cube alumni, Kaustubh Das who is a Vice President of Product Management at Cisco. KD, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, I'm delighted to be here, it's great to be here. >> All right. So but up on the main stage, they walk through a number of the announcement. Listen Tony, I was talking about some of the pieces and two of the announcements from the main stage are under your purview. So why don't we start there, walk us through the news. >> Yeah, so there's two two major announcements. The first one's called Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. And what it is, it's a way to have visibility into your data center, all the way from the applications and in fact, the user journeys within those applications, all the way down through the virtualization there, through the app servers, through the container platforms down into the servers, the networks, storage lands. So you have a map of the data center. You have a common data set that the application owner and the infrastructure owner can both look at and you finally have a common vocabulary so that it helps them to troubleshoot faster so on a fast reactor way, they talking the same language not pointing fingers at each other or do things proactively to prevent problems from happening when you see a server running hot, a virtual machine running hot, an application server running hot. You can diagnose it and have that conversation before it happens. >> My understanding is that Intersight and there's also some integrations with AppDynamics there, AppD which of course we know we talk to that team at the Amazon Cloud shows a lot. So that common vocabulary spans between my hybrid and multi cloud environments. Am I getting that right? >> Correct and there's two pieces even within that. So certainly that's integrations with AppD so from AppD we get information about the application performance. We get information about the business metrics associated with the application performance. We get information about the journeys that user take within the application and then we take that data then we stitch it together with infrastructure data to map how many applications are dependent on which application servers, how many VMs are those dependent on, what does those VMs run on? What hosts are they dependent on, what networks do they Traverse, what lands do they run on? And each one of these is an API call into that element in the infrastructure stack. Each API call gives us a little bit of data and then we piece together this data to create this map of the of the entire data center. There's a multi cloud aspect to it obviously and so we also make API calls into AWS and Azure and clouds out there and we get data about utilization of the various instance types. We get data about performance from the cloud as well. >> So two announcements. Insight Workload Optimizer and HyperFlex AppDynamics, is that right or they are separate? >> HyperFlex application platform. >> Okay. >> So if we look at the, let me just put these two in context. Every enterprise is doing two things. It's trying to run application that it already hosts and then it's writing some bespoke new applications. So the first announcement, the Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer and the integration of the AppD, that helps us be more performant for applications we're running, to have troubleshoot faster, to have reduced cost in a multiply cloud environment. The second announcement Dave, the HyperFlex application platform, it's really targeted towards developers who are writing new applications on a container platform. And for those developers, IT needs to give them a simple appliance like easy to use container as a service platform. So what HX AP HyperFlex application platform is is a container as a service platform driven from the cloud so that the developer gets the same experience that they get when they go to an AWS and and request a pod. But they get it on-prem and it's fully 100% upstream Kubernetes compliant. It's curated by us so it's very simple appliance like feel for development environments on container. >> Okay. So Insight Workload Optimizer, it really attacks the problem of sort of the mystery of what goes on inside VMs and the application team, the infrastructure team, they're not talking to each other. You're bringing a common, like you said parlance together. >> Kaustubh: Correct. >> Really so they can solve problems and that that trickles down to cost optimization as well as performance. >> It does, aha. >> And I understand hyper HyperFlex app platform it's really bringing that cloud experience to on-prem for hybrid environments. >> For our new development. So if you're developing on containers, you're probably using Kubernetes but you're probably using this entire kind of ecosystem of open source tools. >> Yeah. >> And we make that simple. >> Okay. >> We make it simple for developers to use that and variety to provide that to developers. >> Okay. since underneath, there's HyperFlex. is there still virtualization involved in there and how does this tie in with the rest of the Kubernete solutions that we were talking about with your cloud partner? >> Great, great. Great question. So yes, there is HyperFlex underneath this. So to develop, you need a platform. The best platform we think is the elastic platform that is hyper-convergence. And with type of flex, we took storage networking and compute, packaged it together, made it super simple. We're doing the same thing with Kubernetes. So it's the same concept that how do you take complex things, package it together and make it almost appliance like. We said we're doing the same thing with Kubernetes. Now Stu, the point about virtualization is a good one. A lot of container deployments today are run in virtual machines. And they run in virtual machines for good reason, for isolation, for multi-tenancy, for all these kinds of ignition. However, the promise of containers was to sort of get rid of the tax that you pay when you deploy a virtualization environment. And what we're giving out right now is no tax, no virtualization tax virtualization environment. So we have a layer over transition in there. It's designed for this use case so it does give the isolation, it does give the multi-tenancy benefits but you don't need to need to pay additionally for it if you're deploying on containers-- >> Job wise it is some KB and base type solution >> Kaustubh: Correct. >> Underneath, it makes a lot of sense if you look at the large virtualization player out there. It's been talking about how do I enable the infrastructure that's all virtualized and everything and bring them along to that journey >> Correct. >> For that bridge if you will to the environment? Sure containerization sometimes I want to be able to spin it up super fast. It leaves, it dies, but if I'm putting something in my data center, probably the characteristics I'm looking at are a little bit different. >> Correct, correct. The other thing it does and you touched on it a little bit was we have a homogeneous environment with the major clouds out there. So one of the things developers want to do is they want to develop in one place and they want to deploy in another place so develop on Amazon and deploy on-prem or Azure. We've got an environment with very native integrations so that it's natively integrated into EKS and AKS. And we facilitate that develop anywhere, deploy anywhere motion for developers who are trying to build on this. >> So okay. What does the customer have to do to consume these solutions? >> So our customer right now for this one is IT operations. It maybe helps to bit back a little bit on why we did this. I had a lot of customers come to me and they said listen, I'm IT, I'm in the business of taking shrink-wrap software, taking enterprise-grade resilient infrastructure, putting that together. I'm not in the business of getting open source drops, every week, every day, every month, putting them together by making sure all the versions line up and doing that again and again and again. So the putting together an Ikea piece part of open source software has not been traditionally the IT operator's business. So our customer is that IT operator. What they need to do is they buy a, if they may have a HyperFlex system already, or they buy a HyperFlex effect system. They add on a license for the HyperFlex application platform. They have an Intersight license. This is delivered from the cloud so Intersight manages that deployment, manages the lifecycle, manages the upgrades and so forth. If they have a state that spreads across multiple sites, Intersight is cloud-based so it can actually reach all those sites and so they're in business. >> Okay, so very low prerequisite. You just got to have the product and you can add on to it. >> Yeah, I have the HyperFlex system, add on to the license, you're done. >> So I'm curious. How unique do you see this in the marketplace? I think the keynotes this morning is that there's no other company that can actually do this. I wonder if you can sort of add some color to that and just help our viewers understand the uniqueness of Cisco's offer. >> Sure. So I think it's unique on a number of different dimensions. The first dimension is HyperFlex itself. We've had an appliance mentality to this for a long time and we really co-designed the software and the hardware to build the most performance hyper-converged system out there. We took the same approach when we went down the path of Kubernetes and building this container platform. And so it's called design software and infrastructure together. The second thing is we said we're going to be 100% upstream Kubernetes compliant right, so if you look at the major offerings out there in this space, they're often several months actually behind where the open source is, where the upstream of the sources and developers don't want that. They want the latest and greatest, they want they want to be current, right. So we are far ahead of most of the other offerings out there in terms of how close they are to their upstream commodities. The final piece is Intersight. Intersight gives us immense ability to have scale where especially if you're developing on containers and micro services, you're talking tens of thousands, many tens of thousands of N nodes, maybe more. And being in the cloud, we have the scale and we have reached so a lot of our customers have distributed assets and branches and you know, hotel chains with hotels and so forth. Intersight allows us the ability to actually deploy across a distributed asset class with with the centralized kind of provisioning. >> You see a huge uptake right now and containers generally Kubernetes, specifically. It's sort of across the board but I wonder if you could comment on how much of that demand and activity is coming from sort of the traditional IT roles versus with other hoody developers? >> Yeah, that's that's a great question. So yes, there is a on a hype cycle it's at the top of the hype cycle. Everybody's in actual adoption. I think it's pretty good as well right. So that is every company I talk to is doing something in containers, every company. But usually, it starts at the developers. It starts with like you described with the folks in the hoodies and that's great. I mean they're experimenting, they're getting this thing. What hasn't happened is it hasn't gotten mainstream. And things can mainstream is when IT picks it up. It certifies hey this is resilient, this is enterprise-grade, I can stand behind it, I can manage the lifecycle of it. That's what we're enabling here. I'm giving IT a path to mainstream containers, to mainstream Kubernetes so that the adoption kind of takes it from that pipe cycle to mainstream adoption. >> Do you see K.D. new sort of data protection approaches or thinking as containers come into play? I mean they're ephemeral, you know microservices sometimes aren't so micro. Like you say, they're running often times inside a VM. So how are people thinking about protecting containers? >> Yeah, yeah, that's a big topic in itself. I mean one of the things that we found is even though they were supposed to be ephemeral, they require persistent storage so we've implemented within hyperflex a CSI plugin that provides that persistent storage layer to containers. Then once you do that, all of the data protection mechanism of HyperFlex come into play. So within the cluster, the resiliency, the triple replication, the backups, the partnerships we have with their other data protection pairs, all of those mechanisms become available instantly and those are enterprise-grade. Those are ones that IT knows and can stand behind. Those become available to containers right away >> Great. >> But it's great, great question. >> Awesome. >> Just want to go back to when you were talking about Intersight and the reach and the scale of the solution reminds me that Cisco has a strong legacy in global environment. What I'm curious about, we've talked a little bit about Edge computing in the past. >> Kaustubh: Yes. >> Where are you seeing Edge today? Where is that going? What should we be looking at in that space when it comes to Edge? >> Yeah, no, it's a big part of our customer demand. In fact, we haven't seen I think all flash was the other technology that took place so fast but Edge has been really phenomenal in its growth rate. Over the last year, we've seen I think probably up to 15% to 20% of my engagements are in this space on at least the hyper convert side. So we see that as a big growth area. More and more deployments are happening. They're being centrally managed, deployed at the edges and so the only solution that scales to something like that is something that's based on the cloud. But it's not just enough to be based in the cloud. You've got to maintain that entire lifecycle right? You've got to make sure you can do installs, upgrades, you know OS installs, health monitoring and so as we built that Intersight platform, we've added all those capabilities to it over time So we started with hey this is a SAS-based management platform and then we added telemetry and then we said if we can actually match signatures, now machines can manage machines. So a good amount of my support calls are now machines calling each other and then fixing themselves. So that's just path-breaking from an informant Edge environment. You don't have an IT person, add an Edge location. You want to drop, ship an appliance there, and you want to be able to see it remotely. So I think it's a completely new operating model. >> I know we got to go but I want to run your scenario by K.D.'s. Do share with me from one of my breaking analysis. Look Dave, you mentioned Flash, that's what triggered me. (laughing) So think of containers and Kubernetes, think of like Flash. Remember Flash used to be the separate thing which we used to think it was a separate market and now it's just everywhere, it's embedded in everything. >> Kaustubh: Yes. >> So the same thing is going to happen with Kubernetes. It's going to be embedded in solutions. This is exactly what it is. By 2023, we're probably not going to be talking about it as a separate thing, maybe that's sooner. It's really just going to be ubiquitous, yeah. >> No, I totally agree. I think the underpinnings that you need for that future, you need a common infrastructure platform and a common management platform. So you don't want to have a new Silo creator and this has been our philosophy even for hyperconvergence. We said hey, there's going to be converging infrastructure that will be hyper converted. But they need to be the same management system, they need to be the same fabric. And so if it's Silo is not going to work. Same thing for containers you know. It's got to be the same platform in this case, it's HyperFlex. Hyperflex runs virtualization, it runs containers with HXAP. You get all of those benefits that I've talked about. It's all management insights, it's a common management platform across both of those. At some point, these are all tools in somebody's tool kit and you pick the right one for the job. >> Kaustubh, it is wonderful to hear the company that has been dominant in one of the silos for so long of course helping to bring the silos together work across the domains. Congratulations on that good news, always great to have you. >> Yeah, always great to be here, thank you. >> Dave: Thank you. >> For Dave Folante, I'm Stu Miniman back from lunch where we hear more from Cisco live in Barcelona 2020. Thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's "theCUBE." Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," I want to look into Cisco. You know theCUBE is in Barcelona this week to cover Cisco Live. There's an expected attendance of about 17,000 people. Now today, Cisco is a company in transition. It remains a leader in key segments, but it's refocusing its business for the next decade, having exited a number of areas over the last several years. Allow me to briefly give you my perspective and review how we got here. Near the end of the dot-com bubble, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, with a $500 billion market cap. It was one of the four horsemen of the internet, remember that? Along with Oracle, Sun, and EMC. Cisco really rose to prominence by betting big on ethernet. Old reliable TCP/IP was the linchpin of the internet, and allowed Cisco to power the wave that virtually decimated the mini-computer industry in the 1990s. There were many levers that Cisco pulled, brilliantly, during its ascendancy, and I want to call out two big ones. First was it created an army of network engineers. Literally hundreds of thousands of professionals trained on installing, configuring, managing, and optimizing Cisco gear. Cisco created very complex solutions and thrived on this complexity, and the Cisco Certified Inter-network Experts, or CCIEs, deeply understood the dark art of networking, and Cisco was their beacon. The second was acquisitions. Under the leadership of CEO John Chambers, Cisco completed about 180 acquisitions over a roughly 20-year period. This enabled TAM expansion, growth, and maintained Cisco's relevance to customers, who very typically and often were the generator of acquisition ideas. Cisco diversified quickly into a conglomerate with a portfolio that spanned video, set-top boxes, telepresence, compute, collaboration, security, wireless. At one point, Chambers talked about dozens of adjacent businesses, each of which would account for a billion dollars of incremental revenue for Cisco. Many, if not most, didn't pan out, and Chambers slashed and burned prior to handing the reins over to current CEO, Chuck Robbins. Now, under Robbins, Cisco was a more focused company, kind of going back to the basics. They're betting on what I would say are more sure bets, including data center, wireless, collaboration, security, and the Edge. Cisco is also evolving its model towards software subscriptions. Now today, I want to look at how some of those bets are performing. I'll discuss the impact of cloud on Cisco's business, and then I want to drill in to the performance in some areas like networking, collaboration, security, and then close on hyper-converged. And then the last thing I'm going to do is share some things that I'm watching as barometers of success, over the next 18 to 24 months. Now the first thing I want to do is give you a snapshot of Cisco's financials today. What this chart shows is some KPIs on a trailing 12-month basis. Cisco is about a $50 billion company with a $200 billion market value. That's a 4X revenue multiple, which is pretty good for a company that's generally viewed as a traditional hardware player. Now Cisco is guiding analysts on a flat to down year, and talking about a challenging macro environment, despite the stock market's seemingly insurmountable rise. Cisco is a very profitable company, with a 33% operating margin, and very nice, 66%, roughly, gross margin. Cisco throws off a lot of cash, around $15 billion annually in free cashflow. They make a big deal that 70% of its software revenue is now coming from subscriptions. And Cisco is mandating a new consumption model that is subscription-based. Now it's somewhat hard to tell exactly how large Cisco's software revenue is, as they're opaque in that detail, but I'm pegging it at between 11 and 12 billion by the end of this year. Today it's probably seven to eight billion. Cisco is riding some big waves, adding software to its portfolio, security grew at 22% last quarter, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, which by 2021 should start kicking in, it uses a chunk of its cash of course to buy back stock to keep the street happy, and it's leveraging a leadership position to compete. Now finally, I want to make some comments, later actually, on how they're approaching developers in a strategy that I really like. Now there are some headwinds that Cisco's facing, namely cloud, this macro picture that they talk about, which is not positive for them evidently, the company's overall complex portfolio, the competitive dynamics, and the perception that they have an aging, or that they are an aging hardware company, and they're really still touting, selling ports. So, let's drill into some of the spending data, and I want to start with this notion of leadership. This chart shows Cisco's position in its core networking segment. The chart depicts market share over time, which remember is a measure of pervasiveness into each ETR dataset. Now look at what happens. Look how Cisco maintains its leadership, far outpacing the others in this networking sector each quarter. I'm going to make some comments on the sector overall, but notice the net score in the blue bars, which is a measure of spending velocity. It holds firm at 25%. Not great, but holding steady. And you can see the pie chart of the public cloud's impact on the sector, and I'm going to make some comments there later as we go on. But first let's look at the networking sector overall. ETR just released its January survey, and here's what they said in their sentiment on networking. So, when you see the networking space, it's been sort of down for a while, and ETR has been somewhat negative on the entire space, but what this shows is really net score, which is spending velocity, and the January 2020 results, with previous periods within Fortune 500 buyers. And you can see there's an uptick in momentum for networking generally, and Cisco is really cited as rebounding. But now look at the blue call-out. It's from an ETR VENN discussion, with an IT buyer, who essentially says, "Look, as we move to the cloud, "we are going to spend less on networking gear." And given that Cisco is the leader, we want to understand how the public cloud is affecting Cisco's networking business. So to answer that, what I'm showing here is data from the latest ETR January spending survey. And I'm filtering the data on organizations that are spending on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platform, and showing Cisco's performance measured in market share, or pervasiveness. You see, that's what's happening now in these big cloud accounts. There's an N of 809 cloud customers, and 480 Cisco customers within those accounts. And you can see the impact that the cloud is having on Cisco, much the same way it is affecting virtually every large supplier of on prime infrastructure. A slow, steady decline over the past 10 years. And you can see a net score, which measures spending intensity, in the upper right-hand corner, of almost 30%, which is somewhat lower than Cisco's average in the ETR dataset. But the story's not just about cloud. There are other waves in the industry, of what I've referred to in the past as innovation cocktail ingredients, namely data, plus AI, plus cloud. So the next question I want to pose is, how is Cisco doing in leveraging these waves? So here we have 916 customers in these superpower segments of data, AI, and cloud, that are combined, and we show the market share, or pervasiveness, over time, of Cisco, as compared to VMware's NSX, HPE, and Dell EMC. What the data shows is a couple of points. One is that Cisco is the most pervasive competitor shown in these customer segments. Its net score is 37%, four points higher, meaningfully, than the cloud-only chart. Actually seven points higher than I showed earlier. Only NSX has a higher net score, and relatively speaking, NSX is much newer, and should be growing much faster than Cisco, so that makes sense. So I would say that Cisco is holding its own here. Its challenge really, in my view, is to use data and AI to create better customer experiences. So, be a consumer of AI, if you will, as a means of better serving customers, and compete in the multi-cloud market directly with these players and others, none of whom own a public cloud. Okay, so I spoke earlier about Cisco's portfolio, so let's look at some of the ETR data, and see how various parts of Cisco's business are doing. This chart shows the net score, or remember, spending velocity, across Cisco's offerings, and includes Meraki, which is wireless, AppDynamics, AppD, is application performance management, we're showing here Cisco overall, Cisco Umbrella, which is cloud and DNS security, and Springpath, which comprises infrastructure for Cisco's hyper-converged offering. And as you can see, the segments in which Cisco plays, there are 10 in the ETR taxonomy, spanning analytics, security, mobile, device management, infrastructure, video conferencing, et cetera, et cetera. In the interest of time, I will say just the following. Red is bad, green is good, and gray is neutral. And again, Cisco is holding its own in these major segments, with decent spending velocity. So now, let's take a look in an area that I think is going to get a lot of attention in Cisco Live, and that's collaboration. This ETR chart that I ran shows net score, or spending velocity, for video conferencing platforms. And you can see, Cisco, they got some work to do. It's sort of teetering on the red zone. So I would expect some continued enhancements there. Now comparatively, you can see GotoMeeting losing steam, and Skype really falling off a cliff in January, but look at Microsoft Teams, that blue dot, with very very strong momentum. So what Microsoft's doing is they're migrating Skype and Lync, their install base, to Teams, and they're really really well-positioned there. And you can see as well, newcomer Zoom is right there in the mix, across this sample of 500 buyers. Now, I want to turn your attention to a really important sector, which of course is security. This chart that I'm showing here shows net score, again, spending velocity, in the cyber security sector. And Cisco is both large and credible in this space. Its security business grew 22% last quarter, as I said, and it's at a $3.2 billion run rate. So, spending momentum, maybe not as strong as Palo Alto Networks, which I'm showing here, and it's not as high as the rocket ship companies, like CrowdStrike, or Okta, or CyberArk, or SailPoint, or some of the others that I've highlighted in previous "Breaking Analysis" episodes, but Cisco's pretty solid. And you can see the likes of IBM and Symantec, by comparison, these guys are leaders in security, but their spending momentum is in the red. So once again, the steam of Cisco as a large player who has credibility, this story is playing out. And clearly this is going to be an area of focus at Cisco Live. So this next data point is kind of interesting, and looks at Cisco's data center business, and specifically, I'm trying to better understand what's going on in hyper-converged, the software-defined platforms that bring together storage, compute, and networking. Now the power of the ETR platform is that I can ask the question, how are the hyper-converged players doing inside of Cisco accounts? So what I've done is I've filtered on 458 Cisco accounts across three sectors, storage, compute, and networking, and I've isolated on Nutanix, VMware, or VMware's vSAN, Cisco itself, and Dell EMC with VxRail. And what we're doing is we're showing net score, or spending intensity, spending velocity. And the first thing to point out is that all of the vendors are in the green, and that's because this is a growing market that still has legs. Nutanix has noticeable spending momentum, ahead of vSAN, ahead of Cisco, and Dell EMC. Now here's the thing about Cisco. On the one hand, it's putting forth its own HyperFlex platform, based on the Springpath acquisition. But it has to tread carefully because it partners with converge players, like NetApp with FlexPod and IBM with VersaStack. And its HyperFlex, as an HCI play, is essentially designed to replace converge platforms like these. Now the same is true for VBlock, the business with Dell EMC, the old VCE business, but Cisco and Dell are at each other's throats, so, neither really cares that it's replacing them. Okay, long segment, a lot to cover, I got to wrap, but I want to end by saying what to look for over the next sort of 18 to 24 months as barometers. First thing is the pace of transition to software. The second thing that I'm watching is the uptake of the new core announcement that Cisco just made for big routers, silicon, and optics. This is Cisco's wheelhouse, and I expect that the 5G rollout in 2021 is really going to start to pick up and be a tailwind for Cisco. You know the macro should be a concern. Cisco is saying its business is soft, kind of across the board, there's China, there's Brexit, but the S and P is on fire. Now does that mean upside for Cisco? In other words, are they sandbagging a little bit? Or, are there more fundamental, structural, or execution issues? I think personally, Cisco may have a little bit of upside here, but they're big and exposed, so that's something to watch. The other thing is the impact of cloud on Cisco's business, and the company's ability to compete in multi-cloud, including how it embraces Kubernetes. Cisco, and I've said this before, has to position itself as the best, the most cost-effective, the most secure, and highest performance network to connect hybrid and multi-clouds. Now as well, the company's got to hold serve in networking, which I fully expect it to do. We're seeing a little uptick in Juniper, Arista's doing okay, but they're sort of smaller in the grand scheme of things relative to Cisco. Now the wild card here is VMware's NSX. So we'll be watching that and what impact it has. A lot of customers have both. Finally, I want to talk about developers. Cisco DevNet, as I've said many times, I really like what Cisco is doing there. I think they've outshone some of the traditional players. They are retraining hundred of thousands of CCIEs to code in Python, and really, code Cisco infrastructure. So Cisco has an infrastructure-as-code strategy that's going to help propel them in multi-cloud, the Edge, new Workloads, and they're leveraging this engineering force that they have. So, very long segment here. Watch the coverage at Cisco Live on theCUBE and on SiliconANGLE. It's a big chewy company, and a lot for me to swallow in one of these segments. So tweet me @DVellante if I've missed something, or comment on my LinkedIn feed, or you can email me at David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis, "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live, US, 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back we're here at the San Diego convention center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman we've had three days wall to wall coverage my co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house and I'm really excited to actually sit down one on one with one of the users at this user conference the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco with their users and partners over 28,000 so speaking for all of them right? We have Sebastien Morissette who's an IT architect specialist at Intact Financial Corporation come to us from beautiful Montreal Canada. >> Exactly. >> All right thank you so much for joining us so Sebastien first of all how many Cisco Lives have you been too? >> Honestly this is my first. >> Oh absolutely exciting for that, my first one I came too was actually 10 years ago I joked at the 20th anniversary they went back 20 years to have some 80's bands they had The Bangles and Devo on and now on the 30 year they moved 10 years forwards they have two great bands from the 90's Wheezer and Foo Fighters so your first time at Cisco Live give us your general impressions of the show. >> Well actually it's been very great I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well so I got some sessions in I did some work as well so it's amazing to see how these events unfold right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths how many technical sessions you can have so, I was very pleased I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intact so you know we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well so it's interesting right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love which is technology but at the same time spend some time together outside of work. >> That's awesome, we've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego hope you definitely get to see the sights before we geek out on some of the technology just give our audience a little bit about Intact and the insurance business but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. >> Okay well Intact is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions we've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010 and afterwards we were publicly traded now so we're Intact Financial Corp. Typically we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative which is kind of a new offering of you know modern IT services within Intact. >> Okay great and just to, your purview in the company and just the comment about the company is you know when you talk about those transformations you know MNA is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're doing that but tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people however you measure you know what, boxes or ports or whatever. >> Okay well you know typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America Intact through acquisition we actually bought OneBeacon Insurance last year, so typically we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines so typically whenever we're looking at different technologies we look at the skills sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to you know accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology so in some cases whatever we're looking at building up these new features like I was talking for data center 2.0 it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco which is why we are here today with the team. >> All right so Sebastien you talk about data center 2.0 and transformation there at the organizational level is it branded data center transformation does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? >> Yeah data center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years but it really is at the essence a digital transformation, what we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the Cloud so we're building an on-prem private Cloud offering with multi-sites so we have three sites in the scope right now and the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the Cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment when we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public Cloud our software engineering teams our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there so it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team so we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team and that we can share with them so they can actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VM's or stuff so trying to accelerate that. >> Awesome I love that 'cause sometimes you hear okay we're going to 2.0 it's basically a fancy refresh but we're going to keep things mostly the same when I hear DevOps I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that, I have to ask you without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private Cloud that's in your data center we understand some of the covenants and reasons what you have but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a Cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? >> I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president typically we were looking at how can we access the Cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go what I asked him to do is say you know trust me I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for Cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services so typically in the end we didn't overhaul anything that we had we built a brand new sandbox for Intact to be able to work with so we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move we've built a three site approach because when I was looking at kind of my capex expenditure if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity when you go to three sites it seems awkward but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements, so in the end you're actually spending 150% of your capacity, or your capex to buy the compute, so there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely it's very easy for us to see how it's a Cloud because we're not operating it the same way we're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch every process has been revised we haven't kept everything we had before so we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software engineering groups were asking us to do. >> All right that's exciting stuff there when you look at these multi-site deployments I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments, management, security and networking are absolutely critical, I hear oh okay I've got 50% in each oh my God what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two so luckily I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your rollout, we're obviously here at Cisco Live so give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially you know what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? >> All right well you know typically the way that our story started was kind of weird the first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ but actually rebuild our whole design to you know integrate ACI into the fabric and then when you start talking about firewalls or switches they tell you well with ACI you have contracts so it really started that way so we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure as our compute layer so typically think of it as Intact is building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that we have all the components so we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier which is running like you know VMware on site, on top of the HyperFlex and then we have the ACI since we had three sites we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites and in the end we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that and when we were looking at it early on it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker we were looking at finding a Cloud management platform, so we ended up using CloudCenter which is now CloudCenter Suite and in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using CloudCenter today we're taking it into the data center and out to the Cloud whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week he was saying you know what sometimes our clients buy it more for the Cloud first and I was like well we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite but it works as well, so typically where we stand today I have the three sites we're able to deploy with CloudCenter we've got multi-site on top of that and the idea it really is that, I spoke about training wheels earlier well we're taking them off right? In the next couple of weeks we're starting to look into negotiations with public Cloud providers trying to move towards the public Cloud and you know there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now you know they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS and now they have all the three major Cloud providers covered with ACI Anywhere so that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all, everywhere so to be honest I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back I think we're in our sweet spot right now. >> Yeah and you're right it's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers which is I have all of these public Cloud's and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the CloudCenter Suite is there so you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public Cloud or public Cloud you choose are you at the point there that do you know which public Cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? >> Well to be honest you know we're keeping our options open you know we have different providers that are offered, you know the major public one there's Amazon there's Google Cloud we're not closing any options it's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure that we get all the information back so I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating but in the end we're not limiting ourselves we just want to be able to scale. >> Right you're confident that the Cisco solution that you choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or need to make switches along the way? >> Yeah. >> Question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-Cloud one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skillsets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected but understanding how I manage each of those environments so do you feel CloudCenter Suite's going to help you through that? You know what do you see as you look out over your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for you know your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public Cloud? >> Actually I'm feeling really confident because you know especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and Kip have announced for the data center and for the Cloud piece we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different Cloud providers. So for me what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a Cloud we need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products you know Cisco's branding it the Anywhere right? They have the HX Anywhere the ACI Anywhere and typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skillsets and allow the people to use it one thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the Cloud First ACI right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the Cloud I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the Cloud you're going to be able to to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on prem or anywhere in other Clouds afterwards so I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to you know transparently migrate apps between sites. >> All right so Sebastien you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco you talk about the HX the ACI the CloudCenter Suite what advice do you give to your peers out there and they say you know I've used Cisco products for a long time Cisco makes great products but you know simplicity and management across the product lines was something that you know needed some work what does the Cisco of today look like you know what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? >> Well you know for us one of the things that was nice like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield so I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built so my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment there's nothing in Cloud native applications that is you know symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center, it's completely different ways of working we have one week sprints we patch everything as it comes out if an application goes into the environment it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every time we're at n or n-1 so, my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure, let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere right? So that's one of the things I would say, from what you said about Cisco and the integration you were right, we have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half, however I've noticed that these new software components like CloudShare and everything not necessarily the hardware part Cisco nails hardware like it works they've been doing it for years the thing is with these software teams they're very customer driven we have access to the engineers now I mean we've had meetings with the Canadian execs Roland Acra's team we were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US so, every company has challenges I would be lying if I told you that even at Intact we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together but I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. >> Well it's interesting Sebastian you bring that up because I look at you say okay, you've got a greenfield environment awesome, we can go do some new tech, well let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces you're like completely overhauling your environment how much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that or you know I look people, process and technology sounded like you were taking it all on at once, did that work well? Would you have if you looked back would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe you know gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of you know start brand new start fresh and get everything going? >> Well I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh however, it helped us get really good pace and work you know it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group so all of that was great learning experience the only thing I would say is you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach but where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get onboard. because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups here's a new area where you can play in but you know typically I'd say that it's been well received we have not had the need to build new skillsets because we're doing infrastructure as code so typically a lot of the stuff we're building we're making sure it's automated so that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy so lessons learned like you've asked me I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of Intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology it's fine for the time it took and everything it's fine, it's really people the change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts it's like if we were disrupting our own company right? So typically I'd say, that would be something that I would say to people manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. >> Well Sebastien I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation I want to just give you the final word sounds like you've got great access to Cisco really hope you're happy with what you've done final word is to you know your expectations coming into a show like this and you know what your take aways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego? >> Well outside from the amazing weather you mean or yeah? so you know typically I like the event I've been to other events before, like I said this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology so they're really present so I really liked how you know we were given the opportunity to do hands on labs and actually learn new technologies so typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. >> Well Sebastien Morissette congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. >> Thank you so much. >> All right we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall to wall coverage Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE. 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>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman and Lisa Martin is also in the house. This is day three of our coverage, Danny Allan is here. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam and one of the key thought leaders at the company, one of the main figures at VeeamON, which we were just doing three weeks ago. Danny, great to see you again. >> Wonderful to be here with you. >> That was a really fun show VeeamON, it always is. You guys got a cool vibe. >> You chose the Fontainebleau Hotel this year in Miami, in Miami Beach which is just a great location. Many thousands of customers and you guys hit some milestones recently. You talked about a billion dollars in revenue, it's been something you're going after for a while, you've seen that happen. Of course things change, right? All the subscription stuff started to happen. That slowed you down a little bit but that's awesome that you guys finally hit that, so congratulations. Raised a big pile of dough and you just keep moving that ball forward. Give us the update on Veeam. >> So as you said, Veeam has a great culture, right? There's a passionate green army out there that loves us and we're thankful for that. We hit one billion in bookings for the trailing 12 months, we have 350,000 customers and the business is going well. One of the interesting things about Veeam is because we're private, we actually have the opportunity to decide when and how we do things like switch from perpetual to subscription type bookings. But business is doing great, we love it, we're glad to be here. >> One of the things that you talked about at VeeamON was kind of getting back to the basics. You talked a lot about look, it starts with backup. There's a lot of noise in the market today. You hear a lot about, you know, data management. We talk a lot about date assurance but at the end of the day, it starts with backup. That's something that you gave a lot of thought to. I mentioned that you were one of the thought leaders at Veeam. Double click on that, add some color. What were you thinking in terms of that being the starting point and that really driving a lot of your messaging at VeeamON? >> Yeah, I always say it's three things, right? This is a journey that we're on and I get excited about the end stages of that journey. But how many people actually have a budget for machine learning or blockchain or artificial intelligence? No one has a budget for that. What they have a budget for is backup and so we believe A, it's a journey, B, it does start with backup. There's a budget for that and the key thing is choose a partner for this journey and we believe Veeam is the right partner obviously to choose for that but we really wanted to go back to who is spending money to buy the products and for that, it's the technical decision maker who has the budget for backup today. >> Yeah, all right. So Danny, we talk about the Cisco relationship and budgets like you were talking about there. Cisco UCS was from day one a heavily virtualized environment and therefore had strong affinity with Veeam there. But you've got some great visibility into where UCS is going, what CI and HCI solutions are really starting to gain traction. So talk a little bit about that partnership and which ones of those Cisco solutions are really starting to, you know, kick in the market. >> We have a great partnership with Cisco, first of all and really in two areas, if you're talking infrastructure. So on the HyperFlex, the Converged Infrastructure but also on just the S3260 for example, a storage dense system and we have a target this year, this is public information, we have a target, a joint target of $100 million. We're actually at 80% of that right now. Business has been doing really well. In fact, we've been on the Global Price List now for 18 months and in 18 months, we've actually closed over 350 transactions. Like it's been going really, really well and here's what's exciting about that. Those customers that are spending money on Cisco gear with Veeam software, they might start in the drag, these are quantifiable numbers, it's about five to one. So every dollar they spend on Veeam, it's about $5 on Cisco. But over 35% of those customers within twelve months come back and buy more Cisco gear and actually if you look at the actual drag, quantifiable drag that we're bring for Cisco, it's 11 to one. So for every dollar they spend with Veeam, they're spending $11 in Cisco HyperFlex or S3260. So it's been a great partnership both for us obviously because we're on their resell list but also for them. >> And you said you're 80% of the way there. We're talking a calendar year or is that a fiscal year? >> That is their fiscal year, so that's ending in August or July. I should know the date but I know we're 80%. We're on track to hit that $100 million. >> What do you think is driving that? I mean obviously this is a partnership, which takes time. >> Yes. >> This is not just a press release partnership. What else have you done to really facilitate this? >> Well I would say two things. One is their infrastructure is great. In fact we have one of our Veeam cloud service providers that is protecting over a million VMs right now. So these are massive scale, are using S3260s in the backend as a repository, so their hardware actually works. But I would say the other thing that really resonates is, so they have this Hyper FEX Solution and on top of that they have Intersite and that concept of a cloud management plain that can roll out the hardware, can update it not only at the infrastructure but also the Veeam software is really critical and that resonates with customers. It's again, good for them but it's also good for us. >> Let's see. The last couple years you guys have had a big emphasis on the enterprise and then again we're hearing this theme of kind of back to basics. I mean you heard at VeeamON, it starts with backup. You talk to people at VeeamON, the customers. It's the, you know, a lot of medium sized customers, a lot of smaller customers. Do you feel like you over-rotated to the enterprise or do you feel like hey, we could get there just by slow and steady and still putting the accelerator on our core business? Can you just add some color to that and explain? >> Yeah, so if you back three years, our focus was very much on the small and medium enterprise where we said we wanted to capture the major enterprise and that by the way has worked. If you look, since January of 2017 we've done over a billion just in enterprise, enterprise being 1,000 employees or above. So focusing on the enterprise for a few years was the right thing to do. However, that was all on the messaging side and we had this core constituent that has been with us for over decade now and we didn't want to pivot away from them. So in the last six months, nine months, what you've seen is pivoting back towards the center. So we do a third of our business with SMB, a third with commercial and a third with enterprise. So we believe we're right there on the fairway now and it's a perfect alignment of that messaging. >> Well I mean history would show that the disruptors oftentimes come from, you know, down below and move up. I mean you certainly saw that with Microsoft in the 80s and there are many other examples. Is that part of the philosophy, that you guys just can keep adding value that will appeal to the enterprise customers? It sounds like with a 30 year business, you're actually already there in terms of functionality. Is there a functionality gap though still that you need to close in your opinion? >> I don't think so. We announced as you know probably v10 a few years ago and what we've done is we've introduced that over the years and so the final check box if you will for v10 is coming in our next release later this year. But that really covers off the gambit of everything that needs to be done and that's been resonating really strongly. We believe we have a portfolio that addresses everything from the smallest customer to the largest customer. >> Yeah and you don't live and die, we heard this from Radmere, you don't live and die by your long term product development roadmap. You tend to be very tactical and listen to customers and-- >> We're very agile, so we keep a backlog of all the things that we want to do but we will pivot on a dime if we believe hey, this is really strategic for our customer base. We'll change something that, you know, we had planned for year out and do something else in the interim. >> Dave: Pretty judicious about how you decide there. >> Yeah so Danny, bring us inside some of the customer conversations you're having here to show, you know, when I watch the keynotes, many of the messages about multi-cloud sound like the same kind of things that I've been hearing at VeeamON for the last couple of years. What are you hearing from the customers at this? >> Well, definitely cloud date management is top of mind. I ate dinner last night with an enterprise customer. They're rolling this out across about 100 different locations around the world and they very much wanted a local repository of data but they also wanted to tier that data into the HyperScale public cloud, so that is clearly an enterprise-centric message. But that same capability goes down to the SMB. But if you asked me what is the conversation on everyone's, on the tip of their tongue, it is cloud. How are you addressing cloud? And we've done that a number of ways. One is we take the backup data, we'll tier it into cloud. We'll recover workloads in cloud. It's not so much a lift and shift. You know what's interesting is the cloud is not a charity. If you just take what you had on premises and move it into the cloud, there's merge-in layered in there, right? But for some use cases, disaster recovery, business continuity, you want to be able to turn it on in cloud and then after it's in cloud of course, then you need to protect it. And so we've been addressing all of those capabilities within the Veeam portfolio. >> Do you think there's going to be a backlash? I mean you don't see it in the numbers. You see, you know, AWS's growth and I'm not talking about repatriation but the cloud as a target is just another piece of infrastructure, even though it's kind of virtual, that I have to manage. I mean it does add complexity in that sense. So do you think there'll be, there's maybe somewhat over-enthusiasm now or do you see this as an unstoppable trend? >> I believe that cloud is a tool in the toolbox and it's both the smallest, most precise tool and also the largest tool and everything in between. What I mean by that is this isn't just a lift and shift and move it over to the cloud. It's how do I leverage the cloud to extend my data center? I actually, a lot of people talk about multi-cloud, I actually think that the era is really hybrid cloud. It's how do I extend what I have on premises into the cloud? And we're only now really being pragmatic about how to leverage it. The people that jumped in, all in and said, "I'm going all to cloud," those are the ones that you're seeing a bit of buyers remorse but those that are a lot more pragmatic, they're now saying, "How do I deliver business outcomes?" Because it's not about cloud, it's actually about business outcomes, right? Focus on the services. How do I deliver business outcomes that are improved by leveraging aspects of the cloud? >> Yes. So Danny, I know you've talked to our team. You know, we look at the environment and customers today, they have multi-cloud. But the strategy has been well, I've got some stuff here and I use that service here and wait, I need to spin that stuff over here. We've almost remade multi-vendor into multi-cloud. >> Yes. >> So the goal we've been looking for is the solution should be more than just the sum of the parts. Veeam sits in an interesting layer to help customers leverage that and get value out of their data across all of those environments. So you know, do we see that as a viable future that is not just the state that we're in but be able to get more value out of those pieces in the near future? >> Yeah, so I'm obviously biased 'cause I work for Veeam but I think we sit at the intersection of all of this because what we do is we take services, we take workloads and we make them portable. I can take something from on premises, I can put it in cloud A, I can put it in cloud B, I can take it back on premises, I can move it to a private cloud provider. So we have the ability to be completely flexible and agnostic as to where it lands and the reason why that's important, people don't go out and say "I'm going to put 50% "of my workload in this cloud or this cloud." They say, "I need a data center in this geography" or "I need a data center that has this kind of service." So the reason they end up in multi-cloud is not because of a multi-cloud strategy but because they have a business need that is met by that infrastructure and we allow the portability, the flexibility to move the workloads as the business needs. >> So we have some data here. I want to dig into it a little bit. Can you share with us some of the fun facts? Like when, maybe the timeline of your relationship with Cisco, some of the things you've done. Walk us through that, Danny. >> So, we partnered with, we've had a longstanding relationship with Cisco. Officially we went on their Global Price List like I said, 18 months ago. Since then, 300 and, earlier this week, 359 transactions. But almost a transact, two transactions every three days and we have a great go-to-market program with them right now, so we do a lot of joint activities, both in the channel as well as between. We fund heads with them and vice versa. >> Who's your favorite partner? No, you don't have to answer that. >> We have, we have a lot of partners. They're all of my favorite children. >> So we're hearing kind of this land and expand strategy. We've heard that from many other companies. But it's actually happening inside of or within the Veeam ecosystem and what I heard here was you're selling with Cisco and then people are coming back and buying more Cisco. So that's part of land and expand but another dimension of land and expand is you sell it to an organization. Not only do they buy more but other parts of the organization, you sort of fan out horizontally. How much of that is happening? >> It's happening quite a bit. I would say the most significant expansion right now is actually at a line of business level and so you'll have multiple lines of business and then they will begin to coalesce together and say "Okay, let's supply a central policy to that." So that's what we're seeing. What we do know is that 35% of Cisco customers that are joint Veeam and Cisco customers, they'll come back within the next 12 months and they'll buy more Veeam and more Cisco gear. >> Okay last question, why Veeam? You got a lot of competitors obviously in this market. You and I have talked about that a lot. You got, Cisco has made an investment in one of them. Why Veeam? >> So, simple, reliable, flexible and the flexible is probably the key to all of this because we don't lock people in. We don't lock them into our hardware, we don't lock them into a specific cloud, we don't lock them into any one of our children if you will, we love them all equally and that flexibility, future proofing the organization is a huge deciding point for the organizations. Because they don't know what the landscape's going to look like two, three years from now. Is this still going to be your partner or is it not? So having an organization that will partner with you, that will be flexible in, and this isn't just flexibility at a technology level, it's also at a business level. Licensing, for example. Flexibility to move licenses from physical systems to virtual systems to cloud systems to back again. They want to partner with someone that has that flexibility. >> Danny, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Yes, likewise. >> Okay, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin from Cisco Live in San Diego 2019. 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(upbeat music) >> Male Voiceover: Live, from San Diego, California it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live US 2019 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are day one of our coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. We're going to be here for three days of coverage but a great day so far and we're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni Kent Christensen the Practice Director from Insight with the Cloud & Data Center at Transformation Group. Kent, welcome back! >> Thank you. It's been a little while. >> It has been a little while. So give our audience a little overview of Insight your partnership with Cisco and some of the history of how you got to Insight. >> Yeah so you remember us as Data Link we were a smaller company than we are now. Focusing on Cloud and data center transformation. We've talked at Dell events, CFC events things like that. But we were a Cisco partner for about 10 years and recently we were acquired and we did what the name sounds like, Cloud and data center transformation. We've talked about Cloud on the channel and all these other things. Insight acquired us. Insight has kind of four major service solution sets if you would. Some people look at them as a supply chain company and it's a great, large supply chain company. Microsoft's largest global partner. Some people understand it for the device and use the devices that's called Connective Workforce. Each of these are pretty big businesses you know, compared to where we are. What was Data Link is now what's called Cloud and Data Center Transformation. So we're helping people with the journey to the Cloud and the Hybrid Cloud and all that other stuff. And Cisco is right dead center in the middle of that and then the fourth one is really exciting. It's called Data and Digital Innovation and that's a couple of companies. Blue Metal, Cardinal etc. Again, a thousand people. Microsoft ILT and AI partner of the year. So all of that is a pretty large channel organization if you would. >> That's great stuff Kent. We love to talk to the channel as the folks in Wall Street do. It like you know, we do a channel check. Okay, You know, Cisco's got a few areas that have you know, stronger growth in the market over all. Security's doing well, a few other spaces on that are you know growing faster over all than the market and helping >> Kent: Absolutely >> grow where Cisco's going, so give us the reality. What's happening with your customers? What's driving you know the most growth in your business and you know, where is Cisco kind of leading the pack? >> So we're doing really well with Cisco and I don't know if it's because we're helping clients build solutions that truly lead to business outcomes. We're not order takers. So we're actually moving up we're now Cisco's fourth largest partner. We're growing well high single digits growth which is pretty phenomenal on such a big number. We're talking a billion dollars now in growing that level and there's a number of reasons. You know, some of it is there's a lot of great technology we can get into some of those. We see the economy as being pretty good not bad yet. You know everybody's worried about what might happen. You mentioned security, we can get into a little bit of that. That's driving a lot of network refresh and stuff like that. You know and a little bit of intra-company you know that word getting our stuff together so this large company with 15000 customers acquires a company with 2000 customers and now we're getting introduced into the 15000 with less friction. So that's helping us and that's helping our Cisco Business. >> Lisa: See here we are at Cisco Live. The thirtieth time that they had done a customer partner event. The network has not only changed dramatically since their first event in '89 which was called Networkers I believe. >> KENT: Yeah. >> But networking technology has also massively changed you mentioned security. And now in this multi-cloud world no longer can you just put a firewall around a data center right? Obviously that doesn't work. We have this core Cloud edge very amorphous environments. Proliferation of mobile, of mobile data traversing the networks. Talk to us about when you're talking with customers who need to transform their data centers where do you start from a networking conversation perspective? Where automation comes in, where security comes in? >> You know, a lot of the Cloud native transformation tends to be the edge of the network. You know conversion, infrastructure, stuff like that that's on the edge. The network security guys which I'm not, you know, I work with them very closely but we almost separate ourselves out from a data center networking and security. But security's end to end to your point, right? I've got software to find access. I've got mobile access points. I've got you know, Tetration. I've got all of these products that are helping people that in the past they were just patching holes in the dyke. You know, hey this happened let's put this software product in. This happened, let's put this in. We actually built a security practice like the last 3 or 4 years ago, it's growing. You know the number of people that are, whether it's regulation, compliance, you know. "I got some real problem. I think I've got a problem and I don't know what it is." Our ability to come back and sit down and say let's evaluate what your situation is. So I was talking to the networking guys and said wow. Enterprise networking's up, way up. What's driving that, the need to transform or is that, you know what is it? And they're like a lot of times it's something along security that's making them step back and re-evaluate and then sometimes that translates into an entire network refresh. >> Stu: So Kent you mentioned Cisco Tetration and that's one I've heard a number of times having some growth. What else, what are some of the you know hot products out there in your customer base? >> ISE, Software to Find, SD Wan, SD Access. >> Stu: Yeah, so one of the things I just want to understand Cisco actually has a few solutions in some of those areas. Any specific products that you call out or you know or that'd be mentioned? >> Kent: In the enterprise networking I wouldn't go through each and every individual one. I think, this is my view as the laymen right? 'Cause I'm the data center guy and here's the security guy and here's the networking guy. I think when Cisco started acquiring all these security companies 3 years ago and you know watched it and it looked like a patchwork quilt and said this stuff doesn't fit together? Now it fits together that story is really solid. And so we've got clients that had the luxury of either saying I'm going to do a refresh because I don't want to keep plugging holes and maybe my technology was ready for it anyway. And there's a lot of reasons to refresh right? My technology's due. Digital transformation, I need to get my network ready for IoT etc. But I keep hearing security over and over right? I've got compliance and regulations and all of this other stuff. >> Yeah but in your core space the data center world and any products that are kind of leading the charge right now? >> You know one of the things that's happening in data center from a Cisco perspective 'cause they're babies right? Ten years old in data center. They didn't really have data center before that. And we were there at the beginning and that's really how CDCT built our data center practice so you know when you talk multi-cloud at the end of the day even if I'm Cloud first I'm going to end up with some of these mission-critical workloads. They might be boring but they're running the company. They're not the innovative Dev-Ops, IoT, AI thing that seems cool. They're running the company and that's still a converged or a hyper-converged play. And some of those you know there's a lot of opportunities we've been talking about all day with the Cisco BU's. Some of those are ready for refresh right so there's a great opportunity to just to go in and say okay what's next? You know, we've added you know the latest server technology. We've added all these things in the server technology. Obviously all flash and the storage technologies and all of that so that's huge. And then you know Cisco continues to innovate in data center solutions with things like HyperFlex which we've talked a little bit about. And it started off a little slow because again just like they were in servers why are they here? Why are they in hyper-converge? So I get it. And now that product is fully improved and improved and improved and we're seeing tremendous growth there and I think the luxury they have on a data center solution is that some of the other guys have to do a or. "Hey, I'm the leading hyper-converge technology but it's me or everybody else." Right? And then Cisco's an end that I can connect those things together. >> So let's talk about some customer examples you can feel free to anonymize these. I'm seeing a smile on your face. When you come into an organization whether it's a 100 year old bank or it's a born of the Cloud or maybe a smaller more nimble organization that needs to undergo transformation data center transformation. What is the conversation like with respect to helping them take all of these disparate presumably disparate solutions? Whether they're 10-15 different security solutions. How does Insight come in and help them I don't want to say integrate but almost plug these things in together to extract value and help them make sure that what they're implementing from a technology perspective is necessary and also an accelerator of their business? >> Yeah, there's a lot there. So we have this... A year ago everybody wanted to talk about Cloud and then you had the security guys but now you have a lot of change agents with transformation in their title right? And so we have this belief. You're not going to digitally transform. Now there are people that are born digital but companies that were buying Cisco 10 years ago need to go through a digital transformation and you can't go through a digital transformation until you have a data center transformation or an IT transformation. So we've done studies. What slows people down? What makes these fail? Legacy stuff, security concerns I mean these are the top 3 things right. Budget. I was just running the company. And so we start there. Where do you want to get to? And then most of it is let's understand what you have. What your objectives are as an organization. "I want to get to this. I want to get to that." Well before we start talking about technologies. It's very, it's very services oriented. I can't just go in there and throw you a bomb and say this is going to fix your problem 'cause everybody's different. So it is very custom and very services oriented. >> Lisa: But you're saying... >> Stu: I was just going to say it's a pattern I've seen quite a bit for the last couple of years. Step 1 is modernize the platform and then step 2 you can worry about your data and application story on top of that in that multi-cloud world that you live in. >> And step 1 admit you have a problem. >> Yeah. >> (Lisa laughs) >> So we actually did a study you know we do this and we're like. Why does everybody keep stalling why have we been stuck in this nobody's refreshing things and stuff like that? Well there's a lot of new technology they don't get it. But you know do you want to digitally transform? Understand what you need to do. But we ask questions like rate your IT infrastructure just rate it B-minus. Across a lot of large companies that was the grade they gave themselves. So there's a lot of opportunity to say: Okay where do you want to be and where do we start? >> Yeah, 90 percent of people think they are above average drivers. So... >> Drivers? But they think they have a B-Minus in IT infrastructure and it's like Do you consider that a problem? >> Yeah. >> So once you as we wrap here in the next minute or so. Once you get them to admit yeah there's problems here that Insight and other partners come in and improve. Data center transformation, modernizing that infrastructure but it's got to be concurrent with starting to modernize and transform other areas right? >> Absolutely. So you know there's so many places you could start. Sometimes you just go and say well what's your appetite? Every once in a while you get somebody who's ready to go through an entire transformational process. You know 20 million dollars or more of whatever and we get those opportunities those are awesome. Now we get to start back and figure out where you want to be and how to get there most efficiently. A lot of people have to pick and choose. You know, what's your concern right now? And so we'll help them figure that out and again it could be security it could be you know how many people... We have over a thousand enterprise customers running Sequel 2008. That's a problem right? Because that's end of support within a year. That's a problem that's an opportunity. You know so they are still trying to figure out these things. And then a picture of where I want to get to. Which we've kind of always said and that's where that Digital Innovation Group they've got all these AI projects and as we sit here and talk about those things that are kind of born in the Cloud but they're coming towards the infrastructure. It was easy to get a GPU in the Cloud but I'm going to have to start... And so we have actually have all the latest Cisco technology and storage technology of AI stuff in our labs and stuff like that so there's a lot going on. Our CEO would say "It's a really exciting time to be in this business." >> It sounds like it! I wish we had more time to start digging through that but you'll have to come back Kent. >> Okay. >> Alright thanks for joining us. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> With Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live. Day 1 of our coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. Thanks for watching.

>> Voiceover: Live from San Diego, California. It's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019, brought to you by Cisco, and its EcoSystem Partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego, day two here, of Cisco Live 2019, I'm Dave Villante with my co-host Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also here. You're watching the Cube, the leader live tech coverage, we're here in the DevNet zone, which is a very happenin' place, and all the action is here the CCIE folks are getting trained up on how to do Infrastructure as Code. Terry Ramos is here, he's the Vice President of Alliances, at Cohesity, hot company, achieving escape velocity. Terry great to have you on. Good to see you again. >> Great to be here, really enjoy it. >> So Cisco is a big partner of yours, perhaps the biggest I know you don't like to say that, you love all your partners like you love your kids, but clearly a lot of good action going on with you guys. Talk about the partnership, where it started, how it's evolved. >> Sure so first off a little bit about Cohesity, I think would be helpful right, we're in the data management space, really helping customers with their data management, and how do they deal with the problem of mass data fragmentation, right if you think about the traditional data silos that enterprises have, we really take and level that out into one platform, our platform, and really allows customers to get the most out of their data. If we talk about the partnership with Cisco, it's actually a really good partnership. They have been an investor with us, both series C and D rounds. We recently, about three months ago announced that we were on the price book, so now a customer has the ability to go buy a Cisco UCS, Hyperflex, and Cohesity, as a cohesive bundle to solve their problems, right, to really help them grow. And then we are working on some new things, like Cisco Solutions Plus Support, where customers has a single call place, where they get all their support needs addressed. >> That's huge Stu, I remember when the, remember the Vblock when it first came out. It's a V support, I forget how many VMs, like thousands and thousands of VMs, and I just have one question, how do you back it up? And they went, and they were staring at their feet, so the fact that now you're bundled in to UCS HyperFlex, and that's part of the SKU, or its a different SKU or? >> Terry: Yeah they're all different SKUs, but it is bundled together. >> Yeah, so it's all integrated? It's a check box item, right okay? >> What we did was came up with the CVD, validated design so customers can get a validated design that says HyerFlex, UCS, Cohesity, here's how to deploy it, here's the best use cases, and they can actually go buy that, then it's a bundled solution. >> Terry brings us inside a little bit that go to market, because it's one thing to be partnered with CBDs, they're great but Cisco as you know hundred of these, if not more, but you know when you've got access to that Cisco channel out there, people that are transforming data centers, they talked about conversion infrastructure, hyper conversion infrastructure, Cisco UCS, tip of the spear for Cisco in that Data Center world, what does it mean to be that oh hey you know that whole channel, they are going to help get paid on that not just say oh yeah yeah that works. >> Yeah, I think that there's a few things for the channel for us, one is just Cisco's team themselves right, they don't have a backup solution so we are really the next gen backup and that's really helped them out. When we talk about Channel as well Channel partners are looking for a solution that differentiates them from everybody else. So we are a high touch sales team, but we are a hundred percent channel so working with the channel, giving them new ways actually to go out a sell the solution. >> So lets talk a little bit about backup, data protection, data insurance you know sort of we're trying to pass between, all right, what's the marketing and what's the reality for customers, so we remember the VM where Ascendancy days, it caused people to really have to rethink their backup and their data protection. What's driving it now? Why are so many customers kind of reassessing their backup approach and their overall data protection and data management? >> Yeah, I think it's the best analogy to last one is data management right, everybody has thought of data protection, it's just protecting your data. Backup and recovery. What we've done is really looked at it as it's data, you should be able to use your data however you want to. So, yeah we made do data protection on the platform, but then we do tests that, we do file shares, we do things like that, and we make it this cohesive data management platform, where customers get various use cases, but then they can look at their entire dataset, and that is really the key anymore. And when you talk about the data protection as it was, it was very silo. You data protect one set of systems, and data protect the next, and data protect the next. They never talked you couldn't do management across them. >> Dave: Okay so. >> Yeah yeah Terry. So I love when you're talking about the silos there, back in Barcelona we heard Cisco talking about HyperFlex anywhere, and some of the concerns of us have is, is multi-cloud the new multi vendor, and oh my gosh have I just created a whole bunch of silos that are just outside of my data center, like I used to do inside my data center. How's Cohesity helping to solve that solution for people from your. >> Yeah I think that's a interesting one. Cloud is really come along, right? Everybody thought we'll see what cloud does, it's really come a long way and people are using multi-cloud, so they are doing cloud on prem. Then they're archiving out to public cloud providers, and they're archiving out to other silos where they, or other data services where they have it, and that's really been the approach lately, is you can't just have your data in one location, you're going to move it out to the Cloud, you're going to store it on UCS and HyperFlex, and Cohesity. And again its how do you use that data, so that's the key is really that. But it is a cloud world for sure, where you're doing On-prem Cloud and Public Cloud. >> So today a lot of that focus, correct me it I am wrong, is infrastructure as a service? >> Yes >> Whether it's AWS, Google, you know Azure. Do you, have you started to think about, or are customers and partners asking you to think about, all the protecting all the data in SAS, is that something that's sort of on the road map are you hearing that for customers, or to is it still early for that? >> No I think that actually a great use case, if you talk about I'll just pick on one, Office 365 right, if you think about what they really provide it's availability right it's not backup so, if you need to back a year and get that critical email that you need for whatever reason, that's really not what they're doing. They're making sure it's up and running, and available to the users. So data protection for SAS apps is actually a new use case that I think is enormous. >> Okay so take Office 365 as an example, is that something you can protect today, or is that kind on the road map? >> That's something we can do today. >> So explain to our audience, why if I am using Office 365 which is in the Cloud, isn't Microsoft going to take care of that for me, why do I need Cohesity explain? >> Yeah, I think it is really comes down to that, it's they're really providing availability, yeah they have some backup services, but even if they do it's not tying into your overall data management solution. And so backing up O-365 gives you access to all that data as well, so you can do algorithms on it, analytics all those things once it's part of the bigger platform. >> And you probably have more facile recovery, which is, backup is one thing, recovery Stu. >> Is a everything. >> There you go. >> It is. (laugh) >> Terry talk to us about your customers, how about any big you know Cisco joint customers that you can talk about but would love to hear some of the latest from your customers? >> Yeah I think when we started this partnership awhile ago, what we really focused on Cohesity on UCS, and we got some traction there. When we went on the price sheet that really changed, things because the customers are now able to buy on a single price sheet. When you talk about the large customers it's been incredible the last three, four months, the numbers of joint customers that we've been in, and Cisco's been in, and its enterprise customers, it's the fortune five hundred customers that we're going after. A customer that's here later today, Quantium is a great use case. They're data analytics, they're AI, and they're providing a lot of information to customers on supply chain. And he's here later today on the CUBE, and it's a really great use case to what they are doing with it. >> Yeah we're excited to talk to him so lets do a little prep for him, what, tell us about Quantium, what do you know about them so we, gives us the bumper sticker so we're ready for the interview. >> Craig will do a much better job of it, but my understanding is they're looking at data, supply chain data, when to get customers in, when they should have product there, propensity to buy, all of those things, and they are doing all that for very large enterprise customers, and then they're using us to data protect all that they do. >> So, so the reason I asked that is I wanted to double click on that, because you've been stressing Terry, that it's not just backup. It's this notion of data management. You can do Analytics, you can do other things. So when you, lets generalize and lets not make it specific to Quantium, we'll talk to them later, but what specifically are customers doing beyond backup? What kind of analytics are they doing? How is affecting their business? What kind of outcomes are they trying to drive? >> Yeah I think it's a great question, we did something about four months ago, where we replaced released the market place. So now we've gotten all this data from data protection, file shares, test-dev, cloud as we talked about. So we've got this platform with all this data on top of it, and now partners can come in and write apps on top to do all sorts of things with that data. So think of being able to spin up a VM in our platform, do some Analytics on it, looking at it for any number of things, and then destroy it right, destroy the backup copy not the backup the copy that's made, and then be able to go to the next one, and really get deep into what data is on there, how can I use that data, how can I use that data across various applications? >> Are you seeing, I've sort have always thought the corpus, the backup corpus could be used in a security context, not you know, not to compete with Palo Alto Networks but specifically to assess exposure to things like Ransomware. If you see some anomalous behavior 'cause stuff when it goes bad it goes bad quickly these days, so are you seeing those types of use cases emerging? >> Absolutely, ransomware is actually a really big use case for us right now, where customers are wanting data protection to ensure Ransomware's not happening, and if they do get hit how do we make sure to restart quickly. Give you another example is we have a ClamAV so we can spin up a VM and check it for anitivirus. Right in their data protection mode so not without, not touching the production systems but touching the systems that are already backed up. >> I think you guys recently made an acquisition of a Manas Data which if I recall correctly was a specialized, sort of data protection company focused on things like, NoSQL and maybe Hadoop and so forth, so that's cool. We had those guys on in New York City last fall. And then, so I like that, building out the portfolio. My question is around containers, and all this cloud native stuff going on we're in the DevNet zone so a lot DevOps action, data protection for containers are you, your customers and your partners are they sort of pushing you in that direction, how are you responding? >> Yeah I think when you talk about cloud in general right, there's been a huge amount of VMs that are there, containers are there as well so yeah customers are absolutely talking about containers. Our market place is a container based market place, so containers are absolutely a big thing for us. >> So what else can you share with us about you know conversations that you're having with customers and partners at the show? What are the, what's the narrative like? What are some of the big concerns, maybe that again either customers or partners have? >> Yeah I don't want to sound like a broken record but I think the biggest thing we hear always is the data silos, right? It's really breaking down those silos, getting rid of the old legacy silos where you can't use the data how you want to, where you can't run analytics across the data. That is the number one talk track that customers tell us. >> So how does that fit in, you know the old buzz word of digital transformation, but we always say the difference between a business and a digital business is how they use data. And if you think about how a traditional business looks at it's data, well that data's all in silos as you pointed out and there's something in the middle like a business process or a bottling plant or... >> That's right. >> manufacturing facility, but the data's all dispersed in silos, are you seeing people, as at least as part of their digital transformation, leveraging you guys to put that data in at least in a logical place that they can do those analytics and maybe you could add some color to that scenario. >> Yeah, for sure, I mean the data from I'll give you a great example. The CBD we just did with Cisco, the updated one has Edge. So now when you're talking about plants and branch offices and those things, now we can bring that data back in to the central core as well, do analytics on it, and then push it to other offices for updated information. So absolutely, it is a big use case of, it's not just looking at that core central data center. How do you get that data from your other offices, from your retail locations, from your manufacturing plants. >> Final thoughts. San Diego, good venue you know great weather. >> Beautiful. >> Cisco Live. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Put a bumper sticker on it. >> I'm impressed with Cisco Live. I haven't been here in several years. It's an impressive show, 26 thousand people, great, beautiful weather, great convention center. Just a great place to be right now. >> All right and we're bring it all to you live from the CUBE. Thank you Terry for coming on. Dave Villante, for Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also here. Day two, Cisco Live, 2019. You're watching the CUBE, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Host: Live from San Diego, California, it's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back to the CUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, covering day one of Cisco Live from sunny San Diego. We're pleased to welcome back a couple of our alumni. To my right Eric Herzog, CMO of IBM Storage. Eric it's always great to have you. >> Great. >> And you fashion choices on the CUBE. >> Always wear a Hawaiian shirt for the CUBE. >> I know, it's a thing. And we've also got Evaristus Mainsah, General Manager of IBM Cloud Private Ecosystem. Evaristus it's great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you very much, delighted to be here. >> So guys here we are, we're in the dove nut zone. Lots of collaboration, lots of conversations day one of Cisco Live. But this events been around for 30 years. Long time, I think Chuck Robins said this morning what also turned 30 this year is Tetris. Anybody a big fan of Tetris? So, so much progress, so much change. I know you've seen a lot of it. Eric lets start with you. The global economy, what are the impacts it's having on IT? >> Well I'd say the number one thing is everyone is recognized the most valuable asset is data. It's not gold, it's not silver, it's not plutonium and it definitely isn't oil, it's all about data. And whether it be a global Fortune 500, a midsize company or Herzogs Bar & Grill, data is your most valuable asset. So at IBM Storage, what we've done is making sure that our focus is on being data-driven. It's all about solutions, it's not about speeds and feeds. Of course, having done this for 35 years I could have whacked poetically on speeds and feeds. And even if you have some speeds and feeds that Stu may not even remember anymore. That said, it's really about data, it's not about storage speeds and feeds. How really storage is that critical foundation for applications, workloads and use cases. And that's what's most important. >> Yeah, so Eric, when they rolled out on stage this morning that 30 year old box with ribbon cable, yeah, that predated a little bit when I was looking at IT. But, I remember when I started in IT, when we talked about security, the main thing was lock the door of the cabinet that everything was in there, because it was kind of self-contained. Security's gone through a few changes in the last you know 20 25 years though. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that kind of security resiliency. Obviously, something that's impacted the network for a long time, something that IBM sees front and center. >> What I think the big deal is what most people think when they think of security, is I got to buy security software. So I got to call up IBM Security or RSA or the Intel Security Division and buy some security software. And while that's great the reality is as many people have written about, in fact Wikibon SiliconANGLE's written about it. Close to 98% of all enterprises, and I mean big enterprises now are going to get to be broken into. And you've seen this all over the news. So the key thing is once they're inside, storage can help you with a cyber resiliency play. And at IBM Storage whether that be data at rest encryption. Whether that be malware or ransomware protection. We put together a whole set of technology that when the bad guys in the house they can't steal the TV. Because we've locked it down. It's almost as if it was in a safe. Maybe it's almost like the cloak in science fiction where you can't even see the Romulan ship, because it's cloaked. Well guess what, that's what IBM storage can do for your data and it is your most valuable asset. So critical to cyber resiliency. >> So helping customers go from reactive to this expectation breach has happened very very frequently every few seconds to being proactive? >> Yeah, I mean. >> Eventually predictive? >> Well what we do is for example with our Spectrum Protect software. When there's a malware or ransomware attack, what happens is they always go after you're secondary data sets first. I know that sounds weird but they go after your backups, your snapshots and your replicas. 'Cause when they attack your primary data, if they've you can just recover from a backup they can't hold you for $10 million of ransom. So our Spectrum Protect software for example, when it sees anomalous activity in backup data sets, sends an email on a warning out to all the admins and says you have weird activity going on, you might want to check it out and that way you would know. Because secondarity is attacked first in a cyber resiliency strategy. >> You know, the other thing we're seeing a lot is just the scope of what's happening in IT. When you talk about things like scale and you talk about you know edge computing and so much change going on. There's got to be AI in there or machine learning to help us because humans alone can't keep up with what's going on here. Tell us a little bit about that Eric. >> So Big data and AI is like the hot topic right now. Cyber resiliency is important 'cause people obviously have been buying security software for a while. So it's more what we do is really an adjunct to that. In the case of Big data and AI, it's a brand new open field. Everyone is looking for solutions in both of those spaces. We have created a complete set of data infrastructure we've called the AI pipeline. It involves not only physical storage arrays but a whole bunch of software. In fact our Spectrum Discover software which allows you to create metadata catalogs about file and object data is being expanded. And we already publicly said this in the second half To include EMC and Netapp and AWS, not just IBM Storage. So it's a critical thing, you've got to make sure the other thing is when you're using AI. Let's say you're going to use AI to run a factory. If the storage goes down, those robots aren't working. So storage is that critical underlying foundation. A in a Big data network load to be able to have this pipeline to get the data. But if you don't have the resiliency, the performance and the availability of the underlying storage everything shuts down if the storage fails. 'Cause the AI software won't run. So that's how we see fitting in to their both the critical foundation also this AI data pipeline with all of our software. >> So before we get in to this Cisco partnership with Evaristus, it's one more question Eric for you. As Chief Marketing Officer, you talk about the customers all of the time. In that example that you just gave about the criticality of storage for AI where are you having conversations within customer organizations. Is it at the level of the storage girls and guys or has it gone up to lines of business to executives. >> Yeah so, from an AI perspective it runs a gamut. It could be sometimes the storage people. Sometimes the infrastructure people. A lot of times it's actually in the line of business or at the data scientist level. On the Big data side it's a little bit more mature so people know they need to do analytics versus AI. And so when you look at it from that perspective on that side it's often the storage guy but it's also the data scientist as well. So that's who we talk to to get things rolling. And it's not, we don't just talk to the storage admin for either of them, because they're both so new and they have such a big impact on the data scientists and the analytic engine committees inside of those giant enterprises. >> I can imagine eventually maybe question for you. Of that conversation elevating it up to the sweet sweet. Because if you can't access the data, if it can't be protected, what good is it? Right, it's really, to say it's the lifeblood is a silly thing, but we say it all the time. But it's critical, it's table stakes. >> Well one of the things that's interesting is I just got my Fortune 500 magazine at home, that had the Fortune 500 list in it. And there was an interesting article on AI and the enterprise. And they did a survey according to Fortune magazine, 50% of the CIO's that are in the Fortune 500 said they're using AI and Big data of some type. So it's sweeping the world. And it started of course in HPC in the academics. But now it's going into all enterprises of all types. >> Alright so we've talked a few years about the Versastack Partnership. But the last year or so we've really been talking about where Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud fit in to this. We talked a little bit at IBM Think. Evaristus we talked at another show about some of the IBM Cloud Private. Give us the update where we are with customers and how that fits, Eric lets start with you and Evaristus just go into the partnership. >> Sure from a storage version perspective, we've been talking about a Hybrid multi-cloud now for several years. And in fact I did a presentation two years ago at Cisco Live on Hybrid cloud using Versastack. Today I gave one on the data driven enterprise and why hybrid multi-cloud is important to use. So that was the 30 minutes presentation I did today. So I think the key thing is we make sure that we A our Hybrid it's not going to all public or all private. And we can move data seamlessly back and forth. And then also multi-cloud. When you look at enterprise shops, they're not just going to use IBM Cloud. I wish they would I'm an IBM shareholder but they're not. They use IBM, they're going to use ABS, they're going to use Amazon and in many cases they're going to use some smaller cloud provider. So we make sure that we can move data around across any multi-cloud of various different providers to accompany. But also Hybrid cloud as well. >> So the status talk to use about you know from a partnership Cisco IBM Cloud Private perspective, what's going on there Evaristus? >> Well Thank you very much. Well IBM and Cisco have been partners for a long long time. And what we are doing now is given the realities, the fact that those clients have found themselves in a multi-cloud environment, >> Hybrid multi-cloud environment. What we can do to help clients so they can develop they can test, they can manage the applications in a consistent manner, whether they are on prime or in the cloud. And there are a couple of initiatives that we are announcing. One of them is that IBM Cloud Private is going to run on Hyperflex, so Cisco's Hyperflex. As well as hyperflex, hyper-conversed infrastructure. What it means is a client who currently has hyperflex can have IBM Cloud Private on it. Which effectively means they have themselves a Private Cloud environment that also connects to other public cloud environments and allows you to really begin to work within a Hybrid cloud environment the way that most clients need to. The second initiative is that we will have ACI pods or V pods, virtual ACI, running in the IBM public cloud. Which basically means that again, Cisco customers, ACI Network customers who currently use the produce on Prime will be able to use exactly you know the same control pane to manage their deployments and to manage their security preferences on Prime as they do in the cloud. And this again surrounding the Public Cloud is running on bare metal on the IBM Cloud. >> Alright, Evaristus can you bring us inside a little bit the applications you know. Eric talked about you know data we know is so important. Really it's the applications that are driving that. It's where we're seeing the most change in customers, as to how they're moving or building new applications. And in Hyber cloud it's one of the biggest questions for customers is what do they do with that application portfolio? >> Yes so what we're seeing is clearly because you know. Clients have now lots of different Public clouds. They also have Private clouds to deal with them. They have lots of applications that are currently that need to move right. We believe 20% of those applications have moved, the remaining 80% are still on Prime. And so the trend that we are really seeing is applications moving to the cloud. And the two ways of doing it you could do this by simply lifting and shifting on VM, you get the contraction benefit of your stack right. So you can some cost impacts. But the really interesting way that you see lots of clients moving is modernizing the applications. Because the real valued driver with infinite cloud is not so much cost as innovation. And when you convert those applications into Microsoft this is the right and let me run them in containers it gives them plenty of flexibility. And wasting lots of clients that want to use IBM Cloud Private as a platform to enable that modernization journey. >> So as every industry is living in this Hybrid multi-cloud world for many reasons. But it sounds like to me is that the IBM Cisco relationship is deepening as a result to enable these organizations that are in these very amorphous environments. You know as we see the explosion of Edge and Mobile, that's what it sounds like to me. Is that this long standing partnership is getting deeper and maybe a stronger foundation. To help customers not just live in this Hybrid multi-cloud world but be successful so that their businesses gain competitive advantage. They can identify new products and services and revenue streams. >> Yeah, I think multi-cloud and Hybrid cloud actually requires partnerships. Because as Eric said later on of course you like everybody to be on the IBM Cloud and it's a great cloud. But we recognize that many clients who have a variety of different plights to deal with. They have a variety of different infrastructures. And that's why when you look at IBM Cloud Private which is you know our offering that really enables that Hybrid cloud. It is designed to managed that. So It is multi-model, so if you want to run it as a VM you can, you want to run your containers, you can run serverless, you can run them bare metal. But also, it supports a range of different infrastructure. So not only does it run on Z, it runs on power, it runs on Spectrum Storage. We announce running now on Hyperflex. It also runs on other peoples Public clouds. It runs on Azure, it runs on Amazon web services, it runs on Google Cloud platform, it runs on the IBM Cloud. And the intent here is to enable clients to basically manage and work with that infrastructure as if it was one. The way that Stu said in the data center where you locked everything up. Well it's not like that anymore. But the most that we can do is to enable clients to treat all of that infrastructure as one. And that's what sort of aim to do with our platforms. >> Alright, I guess last question I'd like to get both of your comments on. Is your advice for customers, you know, customers have that they have a lot of you know existing things that they have to deal with, that they're looking to modernize. What advice do you give them? Where do you start them you know I guess you know one of the things you're starting where they are. But you know what are some of the first steps and recommendations that you have for customers today? >> We have a process that works really well, which is called the IBM Garage. Which is effectively a way that we used to co-create with our clients to solve the immediate problems. So a client for example, who is looking at app modernization but isn't sure where to start, which app. What we do is we get their teams together with our teams line of business together with IT and our teams and we spend a couple of days in a design thinking workshop to identify a minimum viable product. Which is something that solves a problem not big enough that it will take forever, but big enough to matter. Then we get our teams to work side-by-side, we code it, we test it, we deploy it, we'll run it in the IBM Cloud. We manage it, at like in one week sprints. And then you spend another few days at the end of week four or five to do a see retrospective to see whether it solved the problem as you expected. And if it did, you pick the next piece of work to continue your journey. So before you know, five weeks in, you have your first application modernized. Or you have your first cloud negative ready. >> Now from a storage perspective it's a little bit easier. We supported storage on bare metal. We supported storage in all the virtual environments. KVM, OVM, obviously VM we're in Hyper V. And now, we've been supporting containers for over two years. So we say is leave no data behind. If certain data needs to stay on bare metal, that's fine we can support that. But we can also transparently migrate data back and forth between the various tiers of container-based virtualization-based or the old style bare metal. So from our perspective, we help them move data around where they need it. And if they're still running in a hybridized world in this case, containers, virtual and bare metal that's fine. If they just go containers that's fine. If they just go virtual it's fine. So for us, because of what we've been supporting now for several years, we can help them on that journey. And traverse from any one of those three layers, which is where data sits in today's data centers and cloud environments. >> So overall a lot of collaboration, a lot of customer choice. Gentlemen, Thank you for joining Stu and me the program this afternoon, great to have you back. >> Thank you >> Great, Thank you. Glad to be on the CUBE. >> Oooh our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE, live from day one of our coverage on Cisco Live. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)

live from Miami Beach Florida Biman 2019 brought to you by beam hi everybody welcome back to Miami I'm Dave Volante and this is day two of veeam on 2019 we're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel in beautiful sunny Miami a lot of swanky people a lot of big boats parties going on last night of course it's v-mon so you know there's a lot of fun this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage Allen Stern is here he's that technical solutions architect at Cisco really what that means is he's an evangelist the cube alam al and good to see you again great to see you again david coming on so yeah this is quite a venue as always Vemma action going on a lot of customers here 2,000 plus people so let's get into it hey Cisco we're gonna be at Cisco live in a couple weeks really excited about that it's gonna be a great show in San Diego absolutely another awesome venue we were in Barcelona earlier this year to do Cisco so we you know we love the circuit it's a great customer show I want to start with something that we talked about in Barcelona which is Cisco really as it evolves into the multi cloud world is is making the case that it's networks are more secure higher performance and more cost effective than anybody out there and it's in a good position to do that now we're gonna talk deep about infrastructure but I want to start there and just get your take on that sort of overall challenge to Cisco well it's not really a challenge it's an opportunity for us because we look at the cloud is this great opportunity you still have to have networking within your cloud provider you've still got to do all the things you do on your on-prem datacenter you just have to do it in somebody else's data center and what we've done is we wanted to simplify that operation so the way you deploy Cisco ACI on Prem you deploy it the same way in the cloud provider you're using the same interface and yeah on the backend we're doing different things because we're interfacing with their networking api's but to the end-user they don't have to know each cloud providers interface they just have to know Cisco and they know that it'll be configured correctly and if we think about what happens with a lot of the threats and attacks that occur in networks what's one of the easiest ways to get attacked it's a misconfigured network a firewall port that's left open but if you're doing it the same way every time regardless of where you're doing it that makes it a lot easier and reduces the the chance that you're going to make a mistake yeah and you guys can do the deep packet inspection you've got a lot of experience around that you're driving a lot of analytics and obviously machine intelligence is going to come into play and so but you've been able to go back to what you just said so give me an example so you guys have announced a multi cloud strategy is support basically you're essentially describing what we talked about on the cube all the time is bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is so whether it's on Prem in the public cloud supporting hybrid so you're saying for example if you've got a customer who's running on AWS and using you know heavily using AWS primitives and api's you make that transparent to the user is that correct absolutely okay and so it sounds like magic but it's a lot of hard work I'm sure a lot of software it is a lot of hard work from a lot of really smart people inside of Cisco that are we have some amazing developers now your your sweet spot is the infrastructure side of the business so UCS and and and obviously the partnership with Vemma which we'll get into but what's your swimlane so my swimlane really is our software-defined storage partners and our data protection partners and when when I started on this role a few years ago they seemed very very much separate and now what we're seeing is they're coming very much together because what are we what are customers looking to get away from tape what do they need large amounts of storage because we've seen this explosion of data we talked about it last year and we're seeing terms like yottabyte and branagh byte and I remember when I first saw branagh byte I was like is this something you know somebody watched too many episodes of The Flintstones but no it's it's a real term a yottabyte is a thousand exabytes and a branagh byte is a thousand yottabytes so data is growing at multiple orders of magnitude on a regular basis and we've got to store it differently than we have in the past if somebody sent me a stat and no just would you just reminded me of it Allen a couple months ago and I got to go back and research it but if anybody out there knows the stat it was astounding to me it said by by like 2025 or 2022 there's gonna be more bytes of data created or stored than there are stars in the universe now that just blew my mind and we could do the math and figure that out but I gotta go back and check out the link but to your point the the growth curve it's it's nonlinear you know used to be Moore's law and now their curve is is reshaping so when everybody talks about digital transformation they're what they're really talking about is making their business digital which is all about data and you talk about getting away from tape you can't have a bit digital business that runs on tape you could save tape you know for deep archive and stick it in the iron mountain or whatever but you can't recover yeah right now keep your business running 24/7 so to your point about those worlds coming together that really underscores it so what's your role in supporting digital business strategies and keeping businesses up and doing fast recovery and your partnership with Veen so we provide great platforms for folks like beam and the object storage vendor so beam now has fantastic integration with the s3 interface that many of these object providers allow cisco has very deep platforms you know we've got a 4u box that can hold 768 terabytes of data and if you think about how much data that is you know two of these units it's a petabyte and a half of data I mean that's a fantastic amount of data it's online it's available to them if they need to restore it they can do it quickly because each of those nodes has 160 gigabits per second of network connectivity but more importantly if they want to use some of this data it's available to them right on the platform they don't have to pull back the tape restore from tape and hope they got the right one it's about data management really yeah you're talking about all these fights and yottabytes and exabytes and and the growth of storage are you seeing a really a big a big wave a trend toward the petabyte data center yeah absolutely I mean it used to be petabytes where the purview of only the fortune 500 maybe and now we're seeing it really across the board as companies yeah we're digital hoarders and you look at my laptop I've got emails from 10 years ago I've got pictures of everything from forever companies are no different because we're there looking at data and saying I've got this data I'm not sure if it's valuable today but it may be worth something tomorrow let me hold on to it but their ability to access it and use it that's going to be the critical piece because you know it's like an oversized storage unit you stuff it full of stuff you're not really sure what's in there and if you have to find that one little widget that's in there forget it as the tools get better to go find the data within the bit bucket I mean that's where the real value is coming so we could go a little journey down memory lane and talk about the Cisco strategy and how its evolved I remember when you started you know it would ucs and I was like wow that's Cisco's getting into servers and kind of didn't really understand it until I dug into it and you guys obviously we're trying to change the game with converged infrastructure and you had some partnerships to do that but I remember one of my first questions was you had like a zillion VMs that you can run on on this this block yep and I said how do you protect that and they're really at the time it was like 2009 it was like well we could kind of bolt on and that's the way backup was back then fast forward to 2019 it seems like data protection is much more of an integrated component of people's digital strategy so one of you could talk about that a little bit and how your strategy has evolved yeah and and it absolutely is because we're not just talking about data protection anymore if you look at the capabilities of folks like beam it's really about data management it's not just hey back it up put it over in the vault and forget about it never use it again it's back it up put it in the vault and if you need it I can bring it back really quickly I can use it to test data with I can use it to scan for malware so I'm not reintroducing an infection after I've cleaned it out so a lot of ways to use it and in Cisco's providing the platforms to do that the days of the old monolithic storage arrays they're still going to be here but the world for them is shrinking because you think about what do they do they're the last bastion of vertically integrated systems we saw storage you know the mainframe still here but the world for it shrunk as we had x86 systems with the operating system of choice so we're seeing the same thing happening with storage customers are just they want to be able to use all this data that's out there and in my career I've observed it's always been about recovery like when something goes wrong how do you recover that that's always the killer question right and and so but now it's even more complicated because of Eames messaging this week has been fast recovery they announced a bunch of stuff that you could recover you know directly from backup don't have to go to a replicated you know set of data and so the compression that the time to recover has really compressed so have you seen that how are you guys responding to that you know both technically and just from a business standpoint it's a great question you and I have enough gray hair to remember the days of planned downtime that's going on yeah so now it's how do we build a platform they're going to enable the software side of the recovery but if the platform isn't capable of keeping up with the software then you've got a disconnect so you've got to have disk systems disk up systems that are capable of keeping up you've got to have networking you've got to have a completely integrated system that not only do we look at it and go okay well this software should work here we know that it does and we do cisco validated designs with folks like beam to make sure that the customers don't have to turn all the different nerd knobs to make sure they're going to get the optimal performance because at the end of the day they don't have time for that that's not their area of expertise and we want to make sure that they've got the always-on enterprise so I'd love to talk about the the horses on the track of the competitive landscape and I especially want to explore a little bit with you Alan the multi cloud you know some people don't like that term III think it's fine a hybrid you know to me is different than multi cloud I've argued that multi cloud has largely been a system of multi bender where people just line a business shadow IT and then all of a sudden you have these multiple clouds and Sasa's and but increasingly now organizations organizations saying ok CIOs get a handle on this okay so multi-cloud strategies have started to come into play Cisco announced in February I believe at Cisco live Barcelona a big push into multi-cloud you certainly see Dell EMC talking about it Google announced you know certainly Microsoft is there you guys have partnerships you were onstage David Koechner was at Google next cloud next so it's at Red Hat IBM's acquisition of Red Hat so you you have all these interesting you know cooperative to a petition and and and and people companies going after this multi cloud so question how do you see the multi cloud opportunity what's Cisco's strategy with regard to that obviously you're coming at it from a standpoint of network and infrastructure strength but I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit and sort of summarize the opportunity and what your strategy is sure so I want to go back to a quote a famous quote by John Chambers he said we were plumbers for the network and being a plumber is an honorable profession and I think while we've certainly expanded beyond that we still do that whether you know you're talking about multi cloud strategies well you still got to connect to all of these different clouds whether it's you know infrastructure or as a service you've still got to connect to it so that it works efficiently for your enterprise we want to make sure that we enable that technology that we're giving the customers what they need from that technology and there's still room for for on-prem it's not like any of this is going away it's select whatever feature is best for that particular customer so you know if there's an as a service provider that does customer CRM better than anybody else by all means go use them and we'll help you connect to them help you secure it and with partners we may help you back up if it's email you know without saying who it is we know who it is but you've still got to back that up where are you going to back it up how are you going to have the networking how are you going to have security so Cisco provides all of that enabling technology to make sure that you've got the enterprise that's secure and you can connect all of them so it operates seamlessly for you as as your multi virtualized enterprise well and so cisco has always been a a partner friendly organization you've stressed optionality every one of those companies I mentioned is a partner of yours as well and you know it's like Joe Tucci said hey sometimes we compete sometimes we partner at the end of the day it's the customers going to decide right so if I understand you correctly just from a from a control playing standpoint you've got software technology that that your customers can use if a customer wants to use a VMware control plane you'll you'll play there or some other you know third party that's the strategy correct and but at the same time you're investing in your own IP to build the best control plane and other I guess you know network capabilities data playing infrastructure as possible yeah we wanted we're gonna leverage you know their infrastructure because in some ways they're ubiquitous but there's things that they don't do you know network analytics we do that better than anybody else with you know products like tetration also performs some security functions we have stealth watch you know at the branch you want to make sure that nefarious things aren't happening on your network that without you knowing it so we want to enable that visibility and allow the customers to take action so it's not just enabling the technologies it's protecting the technologies as well so I think a lot of it is things that these other infrastructure providers aren't doing or they're not doing well we can do well because of our history because of our continued investment in all of these areas you know Cisco we have a lot of money to spend on R&D and we spend it well to other areas I want to absolutely you get great engineers and also you do you do acquisitions pretty well but to other areas you want to cover that we haven't touched upon that much hyper-converged you know you said you guys kind of started the converged infrastructure or at least the modern era and then hyper-converged comes in you've got to play there and I want to talk about the edge but let's start with HCI so HCI we've got a fantastic platform in Cisco hyperflex we've continued to evolve it you know we have spinning disks we have all flash we have nvme we've got hybrid so whatever the customers performance needs are we're there with them and if as we look at it this is about simplifying and collapsing the infrastructure that's what converged infrastructure did we went out partnered with some leading companies in the storage space at the time and said how do we make this easier for customers consume we reel it into the data center they turn it on they move their workloads to it well now we've seen this cost model in in technology shift towards hyper-converged where it's x86 servers running the storage and the compute together and you wheel it in you move your workloads to it and you grow it in very nice easy to consume increments and it just it just works and that's coupled with our management plan and and I can never overemphasize that when you look at how we manage hyperflex how it plugs into our new inter-site product which is a cloud offering to let you manage the the infrastructure anywhere inter-site will help you deploy the hyper-converged infrastructure so we continue to focus on making this easy to consume well so now that leads me to your tagline the anywhere data center which which I want to ask you about the edge IOT I know it's not your area of expertise but I love what what the dev net group has done with infrastructure is code I see all these CC II's gettin retrained and and coming up with really some amazing use cases I mean I saw one at Cisco live in Barcelona you know basically an edge case in a police vehicle with some with some cisco HCI infrastructure it was unreal and just collecting data at the edge which is critical but so what's your strategy with the edge what do you see as the opportunity there so we've got you the hard part is always defining the edge is the edge the branch is it my home office is it a telephone pole but well where the answer is yes yes and yes right absolutely so at some of the edge we've got the Cisco hyper flex edge device which is a two node hyper flex cluster we've got small servers that fit into our routers for collecting edge data there so really the idea is meet the data where it is and to the degree that we can let's help process it there because you can't always bring all the data back yeah and what I like about Cisco strategies to sort of set the context there's many infrastructure providers I would observe are trying to take a top-down approach to say okay we've got this box we're gonna go put it on the edge and you guys do that too but what I really like about of your approach is that your box is programmable so I can develop applications at the edge I can do that with a cloud provider if I want to I can do that directly using you know Cisco api's and so I think that gives you guys an advantage and obviously your networking estate you know helps as well Alan great to have you back in the cube thanks so much and give you the last word on v-mon 2019 you know it's a great show we love being here beam is a fantastic partner we're doing some really innovative things and you know it's just it's wonderful to be here I'm almost speechless yeah so the cube is here all day today we got keynotes now coming up so we're going to come back after those keynotes of course Veeam has its big customer party tonight the bean parties are renowned always a lot of fun always great food and then always some kind of interesting twist so Alan thanks again for coming on the cube great to see you pleasure I keep it right there buddy we'll be back right after this short break I'm Dave Volante you're watching the cube from v-mon 2019

(upbeat jazz music) >> Woman: From our studio's, in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a CUBE conversation. >> John: Hello and welcome to this CUBE conversation here, exclusive coverage of Google Next 2019. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Big Google Cisco news, we're here with KD who's the vice president of the data center for compute for Cisco and Kip Compton, senior vice president of Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. Guys, welcome to this exclusive CUBE conversation. Thanks for spending the time. >> KD: Great to be here. >> So Google Next, obviously, showing the way that enterprises are now quickly moving to the cloud. Not just moving to the cloud, the cloud is part of the plan for the enterprise. Google Cloud clearly coming out with a whole new set of systems, set of software, set of relationships. Google Anthos is the big story, the platform. You guys have had a relationship previously announced with Google, your role in joint an engineering integrations. Talk about the relationship with Cisco and Google. What's the news? What's the big deal here? >> Kip: Yeah, no we're really excited. I mean as you mentioned, we've been working with Google Cloud since 2017 on hybrid and Multicloud Kubernetes technologies. We're really excited about what we're able to announce today, with Google Cloud, around Google Cloud's new Anthos system. And we're gonna be doing a lot of different integrations that really bring a lot of what we've learned through our joint work with them over the last few years, and we think that the degree of integration across our Data Center Portfolio and also our Networking and Security Portfolios, ultimately give customers one of the most secure and flexible Multicloud and hybrid architectures. >> One of the things we're seeing in the market place, I want to get your reactions to this Kip because I think this speaks to what's going on here at Google Next and the industry, is that the company's that actually get on the Cloud wave truly, not just say they're doing Cloud, but ride the wave of the enterprise Cloud, which is here. Multicloud is big conversation. Hybrids and implementation of that. Cloud is big part of it, the data center certainly isn't going away. Seeing a whole new huge wave. You guys have been big behind this at Cisco. You saw what the results are with Microsoft. Their stock has gone from where it was really low to really high because they were committed to the Cloud. How committed is Cisco to this Cloud Wave, what specifically are you guys bringing to the table for Enterprises? >> Oh we're very committed. We see it as the seminal IT transformation of our time, and clearly on of the most important topics in our discussions with CIO's across our customer base. And what we're seeing is, really not as much enterprises moving to the Cloud as much as enterprises extending or expanding into the Cloud. And their on-prem infrastructures, including our data centers as you mentioned, certainly aren't going away, and their really looking to incorporate Cloud into a complete system that enables them to run their business and their looking for agility and speed to deliver new experiences to their employees and to their customers. So we're really excited about that and we think sorta this Multicloud approaches is absolutely critical and its one of the things that Google Cloud and Cisco are aligned on. >> I'd like to get this couple talk tracks. One is the application area of Multicloud and Hybrid but first lets unpack the news of what's going on with Cisco and Google. Obviously Anthos is the new system, essentially its just the Cloud platform but that's what they're calling it, Googles anthem. How is Cisco integrating into this? Cause you guys had great integration points before Containers was a big bet that you guys had made. >> Kip: That's right. >> You certainly have, under the covers we learned at Cisco Live in Barcelona around what's going on with HyperFlex and ACI program ability, DevNet developer program going on. So good stuff going on at Cisco. What does this connect in with Google because ya got containers, you guys have been very full throttle on Kubernetes. Containers, Kubernetes, where does this all fit? How should your customers understand the relationship of how Cisco fits with Google Cloud? What's the integration? >> So let me start with, and backing it with the higher level, right? Philosophically we've been talking about Multicloud for a long time. And Google has a very different and unique view of how Cloud should be architected. They've gone 'round the open source Kubernetes Path. They've embraced Multicloud much more so then we would've expected. That's the underpinning of the relationship. Now you bring to that our deep expertise with serving Enterprise IT and our knowledge of what Enterprise IT really needs to productize some of these innovations that are born elsewhere. You get those two ingredients together and you have a powerful solution that democratizes some of the innovations that's born in the Cloud or born elsewhere. So what we've done here with Anthos, with Google HyperFlex, oh with Cisco's HyperFlex, with our Security Portfolio, our Networking Portfolio is created a mechanism for Enterprise ID to serve their constituent developers who are wanting to embrace Containers, readily packaged and easily consumable solution that they can deploy really easily. >> One of the things we're hearing is that this, the difference between moving to the Cloud versus expanding to and with the Cloud, and two kind of areas pop up. Operational's, operations, and developers. >> Kip: Yep. >> People that operate IT mention IT Democratizing IT, certainly with automation scale Cloud's a great win there. But you gotta operate it at that level at the same time serve developers, so it seems that we're hearing from customers its complicated, you got open source, you got developers who are pushing code everyday, and then you gotta run it over and over networks which have security challenges that you need to be managing everyday. Its a hardcore op's problem meets frictionalist development. >> Yeah so lets talk about both of these pieces. What do developers want? They want the latest framework. They want to embrace some of the new, the latest and greatest libraries out there. They want to get on the cutting edge of the stuff. Its great to experiment with open source, its really really hard to productize it. That's what we're bringing to the table here. With Anthos delivering a manage service with Cisco's deep expertise and taking complex technologies, packaging it, creating validated architectures that can work in an enterprise, it takes that complexity out of it. Secondly when you have a enterprise ID operator, lets talk about the complexities there, right? You've gotta tame this wild wild west of open source. You can't have drops every day. You can't have things changing every, you need a certain level of predictability. You need the infrastructure to slot in to a management framework that exists in the dollar center. It needs to slot into a sparing mechanism, to a workflow that exists. On top of that, you've got security and networking on multiple levels right? You've got physical networking, you've got container networking, you've got software define networking, you've got application level networking. Each layer has complexity around policy and intent that needs to marry across those layers. Well, you could try to stitch it together with products from different vendors but its gonna be a hot stinking mess pretty soon. Driving consistency dry across those layers from a vendor who can work in the data center, who can work across the layers of networking, who can work with security, we've got that product set. Between ACI Stealthwatch Cloud providing the security and networking pieces, our container networking expertise, HyperFlex as a hyper converge infrastructure appliance that can be delivered to IT, stood up, its scale out, its easy to deploy. Provides the underpinning for running Anthos and then, now you've got a smooth simple solution that IT can take to its developer and say Hey you know what? You wanna do containers? I've got a solution for you. >> And I think one of the things that's great about that is, you know just as enterprise's are extending into the Cloud so is Cisco. So a lot of the capabilities that KD was just talking about are things that we can deliver for our customers in our data centers but then also in the Cloud. With things like ACI Anywhere. Bringing that ACI Policy framework that they have on-prem into the Cloud, and across multiple Clouds that they get that consistency. The same with Stealthwatch Cloud. We can give them a common security model across their on-prem workloads and multiple public Cloud workload areas. So, we think its a great compliment to what Google's doing with Anthos and that's one of the reasons that we're partners. >> Kip I want to get your thoughts on this, because one of the things we've seen over the past years is that Public Cloud was a great green field, people, you know born in the Cloud no problem. (Kip laughs) And Enterprise would want to put workloads in the Cloud and kind of eliminate some of the compute pieces and some benefits that they could put in the cloud have been great. But the data center never went away, and they're a large enterprise. It's never going away. >> Kip: Yep. >> As we're seeing. But its changing. How should your customers be thinking about the evolution of the data center? Because certainly computes become commodity, okay need some Cloud from compute. Google's got some stuff there, but the network still needs to move packets around. You still got to store stuff, you still need security. They may not be a perimeter, but you still have the nuts and bolts of networking, software, these roles need to be taking place, how should these customers be thinking about Cloud, compute, integration on data primus? >> That is a great point and what we've seen is actually Cloud makes the network even more important, right? So when you have workloads and staff services in the Cloud that you rely on for your business suddenly the reliability and the performance and latency of your networks more important in many ways than it was before, and so that's something any of our customers have seen, its driving a lot of interest and offerings like SD-WAN from Cisco. But to your point on the data center side, we're seeing people modernize their data centers, and their looking to take a lot of the simplicity and agility that they see in a Public Cloud and bring it home, if you will, into the data center. Cause there are lots of reasons why data centers aren't going away. And I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing HyperFlex take off so much is it really simplifies multiple different layers and actually multiple different types of technology, storage, compute, and networking together into a sort of a very simple solution that gives them that agility, and that's why its the center piece of many of our partnerships with the Public Cloud players including Anthos. Because it really provides a Cloud like workload hosting capability on-prem. >> So the news here is that you guys are expanding your relationship with Google. What does it mean? Can you guys summarize the impact to your customers and the industry? >> Well I think that, I mean the impact for our customers is that you've two leaders working together, and in fact they're two leaders who believe in open technology and in a Multicloud approach. And we believe that both of those are fundamentally more aligned with our customers and the market than other approaches and so we're really excited about that and what it means for our customers in the future. You know and we are expanding the relationship, I mean there's not only what we're doing with Google Cloud's Anthos but also associated advances we've made about expanding our collaboration actually in the collaboration area with our Webex capabilities as well as Google Swed. So we're really excited about all of this and what we can enable together for our customers. >> You guys have a great opportunity, I always say latency is important and with low latency, moving stuff around and that's your wheelhouse. KD, talk about the relationship expanding with Google, what specifically is going on? Lets get down and dirty, is it tighter integration? Is it policy? Is it extending HyperFlex into Google? Google coming in? What's actually happening in the relationship that's expanding? >> So let me describe it in three ways. And we've talked a little bit about this already. The first is, how do we drive Cloud like simplicity on-prem? So what we've taken is HyperFlex, which is a scale out appliance, dead simple, easy to manage. We've integrated that with Anthos. Which means that now you've got not only a hyper conversion appliance that you can run workloads on, you can deliver to your developers Kubernetes eco system and tool set that is best in class, comes from Google, its managed from the Cloud and its not only the Kubernetes piece of it you can deliver the silver smash pieces of it, lot of the other pieces that come as part of that Anthos relationship. Then we've taken that and said well to be Enterprise grade, you've gotta makes sure the networking is Enterprise grade at every single layer, whether that is at the physical layer, container layers, fortune machine layer, at the software define networking layer, or in the service layer. We've been working with the teams on both sides, we've been working together to develop that solution and bring back the market for our customers. The third piece of this is to integrate security, right? So Stealthwatch Cloud was mentioned, we're working with the other pieces of our portfolio to integrate security across these offerings to make sure those flows are as secure as can be possible and if we detect anomalies, we flag them. The second big theme is driving this from the Cloud, right? So between Anthos, which is driving the Kubernetes and RAM from the Cloud our SD-WAN technology, Cisco's SD-WAN technology driven from the Cloud being able to terminate those VPN's at the end location. Whether that be a data center, whether that be an edge location and being able to do that seamlessly driven from the Cloud. Innerside, which takes the management of that infrastructure, drives it from the Cloud. Again a Cisco innovation, first in the industry. All of these marry together with driving this infrastructure from the Cloud, and what did it do for our eventual customers? Well it gave them, now a data center environment that has no boundaries. You've got an on-prem data center that's expanding into the Cloud. You can build an application in one place, deploy it in another, have it communicate with another application in the Cloud and suddenly you've kinda demolished those boundaries between data center and the Cloud, between the data center and the edge, and it all becomes a continuum and no other company other than Cisco can do something like that. >> So if I hear you saying, what you're saying is you're bringing the software and security capabilities of Cisco in the data center and around campus et cetera, and SD-WAN to Google Cloud. So the customer experience would be Cisco customer can deploy Google Cloud and Google Cloud runs best on Cisco. That's kinda, is that kind of the guiding principles here to this deal? Is that you're integrating in a deep meaningful way where its plug and play? Google Cloud meets Cisco infrastructure? >> Well we certainly think that with the work that we've done and the integrations that we're doing, that Cisco infrastructure including software capabilities like Stealthwatch Cloud will absolutely be the best way for any customer who wants to adopt Google Cloud's Anthos, to consume it, and to have really the best experience in terms of some of the integration simplicity that KD talked about but also frankly security's very important and being able to bring that consistent security model across Google Cloud, the workloads running there, as well as on-prem through things like Stealthwatch Cloud we think will be very compelling for our customers, and somewhat unique in the marketplace. >> You know one of the things that interesting, TK the new CEO of Google, and I had this question to Diane Green she had enterprise try ops of VM wear, Google's been hiring a lot of strong enterprise people lately and you can see the transformation and we've interviewed a lot of them, I have personally. They're good people, they're smart, and they know what they're doing. But Google still gets dinged for not having those enterprise chops because you just can't have a trajectory of those economy of scales over night, you can't just buy your way into the enterprise. You got to earn it, there's a certain track record, it seems like Google's getting a lot with you guys here. They're bringing Cloud to the table for sure for your customer base but you're bringing, Cisco complete customer footprint to Google Cloud. That seems to be a great opportunity for Google. >> Well I mean I think its a great opportunity for both of us. I mean because we're also bringing a fantastic open Multicloud hybrid solution to our customer base. So I think there's a great opportunity for our customers and we really focus on at the end of the day our customers and what do we do to make them more successful and we think that what we're doing with Google will contribute to that. >> KD talk about, real quickly summarize what's the benefits to the customers? Customers watching the announcements, seeing all the hype and all the buzz on this Google Next, this relationship with Cisco and Google, what's the bottom line for the customer? They're dealing with complexity. What are you guys solving, what the big take away for your customers? >> So its three things. First of all, we've taken the complexity out of the equation, right? We've taken all the complexity around networking, around security, around bridging to multiple Clouds, packaged it in a scale out appliance delivered in an enterprise consistent way. And for them, that's what they want. They want that simplicity of deployment of these next gen technologies, and the second thing is as IT serves their customers, the developers in house, they're able to serve those customers much better with these latest generation technologies and frameworks, whether its Containers, Kubernetes, HDL, some of these pieces that are part of the Anthos solution. They're able to develop that, deliver it back to their internal stakeholders and do it in a way that they control, they feel comfortable with, they feel their secure, and the networking works and they can stand behind it without having to choose or have doubts on whether they should embrace this or not. At the end of the day, customers want to do the right things to develop fast. To be nimble, to act, and to do the latest and greatest and we're taking all those hurtles out of the equations. >> Its about developers. >> It is. >> Running software on secure environments for the enterprise. Guys that's awesome news. Google Next obviously gonna be great conversations. While I have you here I wanna get to a couple talk tracks that are I important around the theme's recovering around Google Next and certainly challenges and opportunities for enterprises that is the application area, Multicloud, and Hybrid Cloud. So lets start with application. You guys are enabling this application revolution, that's the sound bites we hear at your events and certainly that's been something that you guys been publicly talking about. What does that mean for the marketplace? Because certain everyone's developing applications now, (Kip laughs) you got mobile apps, you got block chain apps, we got all kinds of new apps coming out all the time. Software's not going away its a renaissance, its happening. (Kip laughs) How is the application revolution taking shape? How is and what's Cisco's roll in it? >> Sure, I mean our role is to enable that. And that really comes from the fact that we understand that the only reason anyone builds any kind of infrastructure is ultimately to deliver applications and the experiences that applications enable. And so that's why, you know, we pioneered ACI is Application Centric Infrastructure. We pioneered that and start focusing on the implications of applications in the infrastructure any years ago. You know, we think about that and the experience that we can deliver at each layer in the infrastructure and KD talked a little bit about how important it is to integrate those layers but then we also bring tools like AppDynamics. Which really gives our customers the ability to measure the performance of their applications, understand the experience that they're delivering with customers and then actually understand how each piece of the infrastructure is contributing to and affecting that performance and that's a great example of something that customers really wanna be able to do across on-prem and multiple Clouds. They really need to understand that entire thing and so I think something like App D exemplifies our focus on the application. >> Its interesting storage and compute used to be the bottle necks in developers having to stand that up. Cloud solved that problem. >> Kip: That's right. >> Stu Miniman and I always talk about on theCUBE networking's the bottle neck. Now with ACI, you guys are solving that problem, you're making it much more robust and programmable. >> It is. >> This is a key part for application developers because all that policy work can be now automated away. Is that kinda part of that enablement? >> It sure is. I mean if you look at what's happening to applications, they're becoming more consumerized, they're becoming more connected. Whether its micro services, its not just one monolithic application anymore, its all of these applications talking to each other. And they need to become more secure. You need to know what happens, who can talk to whom. Which part of the application can be accessed from where. To deliver that, when my customer tell me listen you deliver the data center, you deliver security, you deliver networking, you deliver multicloud, you've got AppDynamics. Who else can bring this together? And that's what we do. Whether its ACI that specifies policy and does that programmable, delivers that programmable framework for networking, whether its our technologies like titration, like AppDynamics as Kip mentioned. All of these integrate together to deliver the end experience that customers want which is if my application's slow, tell me where, what's happening and help me deliver this application that is not a monolith anymore its all of these bits and pieces that talk to each other. Some of these bits and pieces will reside in the Cloud, a lot of them will be on-prem, some of them will be on the edge. But it all needs to work together-- >> And developers don't care about that they just care about do I get the resources do I need, And you guys kinda take care of all the heavy lifting underneath the covers. >> Yeah and we do that in a modern programmable way. Which is the big change. We do it in intent based way. Which means we let the developers describe the intent and we control that via policy. At multiple levels. >> And that's good for the enterprises, they want to invest more in developing, building applications. Okay track number two, talk track number two Multicloud. its interesting, during the hype cycle of Hybrid Cloud which was a while, I think now people realize Hybrid Cloud is an implementation thing and so its beyond hype now getting into reality. Multicloud never had a hype cycle because people generally woke up one day and said yeah I got multiple Clouds. I'm using this over here, so it wasn't like a, there was no real socialization around the concept of Multicloud they got it right away. They can see it, >> Yep. >> They know what they're paying for. So Multicloud has been a big part of your strategy at Cisco and certainly plays well into what's happening at Google Next. What's going on with Multicloud? Why's the relation with Google important? And where do you guys see Multicloud going from a Cisco perspective? >> Sure enough, I think you're right. The latest data we saw, or have, is 94 percent of enterprises are using or expect to use multiple Clouds and I think those surveys have probably more than six points of potential error so I think for all intensive purposes its 100 percent. (John and KD laughing) I've not met a customer who's unique Cloud, if that's a thing. And so you're right, its an incredibly authentic trend compared with some of these things that seem to be hype. I think what's happening though is the definition of what a Multicloud solution is is shifting. So I think we start out as you said, with a realization, oh wait a second we're all Multicloud this really is a thing and there's a set of problems to solve. I think you're seeing players get more and more sophisticated in how they solve those problems. And what we're seeing is its solving those problems is not about homogenizing all the Clouds and making them all the same because one of the reasons people are using multiple Clouds is to get to the unique capabilities that's in each Cloud. So I think early on there were some approaches where they said okay well we're gonna put down like a layer across all these Clouds and try to make them all look the same. That doesn't really achieve the point. The point is Google has unique capabilities in Google Cloud, certainly the tenser flow capabilities are one that people point to. AWS has unique capabilities as well and so does Dajour. And so customers wanna access all of that innovation. So that kind of answers your question of why is this relationship important to us, its for us to meet our customers needs, we need to have great relationships, partnerships, and integrations with the Clouds that are important to our customers. >> Which is all the Clouds. >> And we know that Google Cloud is important. >> Well not just Google Cloud, which I think in this relationship's got my attention because you're creating a deep relationship with them on a development side. Providing your expertise on the network and other area's you're experts at but you also have to work with other Clouds because, >> That's right we do. >> You're connecting Clouds, that's the-- >> And in fact we do. I mean we have, solutions for Hybrid with AWS and Dejour already launched in the marketplace. So we work with all of them, and what our roll, we see really is to make this simpler for our customers. So there are things like networking and security, application performance management with things like AppDynamics as well as some aspects of management that our customers consistently tell us can you just make this the same? Like these are not the area's of differentiation or unique capabilities. These are area's of friction and complexity and if you can give me a networking framework, whether its SD-WAN or ACI Anywhere that helps me connect those Clouds and manage policy in a consistent way or you can give me application performance the same over these things or security the same over these things, that's gonna make my life easier its gonna be lower friction and I'm expecting it, since your Cisco, you'll be able to integrate with my own Prime environment. >> Yeah, so then we went from hard to simple and easy, is a good business model. >> Kip: Absolutely. >> You guys have done that in the past and you certainly have the, from routing, everything up to switches and storage. KD, but talk about the complexity, because this is where it sounds complex on paper but when you actually unpack the technologies involved, you know in different Cloud suppliers, different technologies and tools. Throw in open sources into the mix is even more complex. So Multicloud, although sounds like a simple reality, the complexities pretty significant. Can you just share your thoughts on that? >> It is, and that's what we excel. We excel, I think complexity and distilling it down and making it simple. One other thing that we've done is, because each Cloud is unique and brings some unique capabilities, we've worked with those vendors along those dimension's that they're really really passionate about and strong end. So for example, with Google we've worked on the container front. They are, maybe one of the pioneers in that space, they've certainly delivered a lot of technologies into that domain. We've worked with them on the Kubeflow front on the AI front, in fact we are one of the biggest contributors to the open source projects on Kubeflow. And we've taken those technologies and then created a simple way for enterprise IT to consume them. So what we've done with Anthos, with Google, takes those technologies, takes our networking constructs, whether its ACI Anywhere, whether its other networking pieces on different parts of it, whether its SD-WAN and so forth. And it creates that environment which makes an enterprise IT feel comfortable with embracing these technologies. >> You said you're contributing to Kubeflow. A lot of people don't look at Cisco and would instantly come to the reaction that you guys are heavily contributing into open source. Can you just share, you know, the level of commitment you guys are making to open source? Just get that out there, and why? Why are you doing it? >> Yeah. For us, some of these technologies are really in need for incubation and nurturing, right? So Kubeflow is early, its really promising technology. People, in fact there's a lot of buzz about AI-- >> In your contributing to Kubeflow, significantly? >> Yes, yeah. >> Cisco? >> We're number three contributor actually. Behind Google. >> Okay so you're up there? You're up at the top of the list? >> Yeah one of the top three. >> Top of the list. >> And why? Is this getting more collaborative? More Multicloud fabric-- >> Well I mean, again it comes back to our customers. We think Kubeflow is a really interesting framework for AI and ML and we've seen our customers that workload type is becoming more and more important to them. So we're supporting that because its something we think will help our customers. In fact, Kubeflow figures into how we think about Hybrid and Multicloud with Google and the Anthos system in terms of giving customers the ability to run those workloads in Google Cloud with TPU's or on-prem with some of the incredible appliances that we've delivered in the data centers using GPU's to accelerate these workings. >> And it also certainly is compatible with the whole Multicloud mission as well-- >> Exactly, yeah. >> That's right. >> So you'll see us, we're committed to open source but that commitment comes through the lens of what we think our customers need and want. So it really again it comes back to the customer for us, and so you'll see us very active in open source areas. Sometimes, I think to your point, we should be louder about that. Talk more about that but we're really there to help our customers. DevNet, DevNet Create that Susie Wee's been working on has been a great success. I mean we've witnessed it first hand, seeing it at the Cisco Live packed house. >> In Barcelona. >> You've got developers developing on the network its a really big shift. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's a positive shift. >> Well its a huge shift, I think its natural as you see Cisco shifting more and more towards software you see much much more developer engagement and we're thrilled with the way DevNet has grown. >> Yeah, and networking guys in your target audience gravitates easily to software it seems to be a nice fit. So good stuff there. Third talk track, Hybrid. You guys have deep bench of tech and people on network security, networking security, data center, and all the things involved in the years and years of enterprise evolution. Whether its infrastructure and all the way through the facilities, lot of expertise. Now Hybrid comes onto the scene. Went through the little hype cycle, people now get it, you gotta operate across Clouds on-prem to the Cloud and now multiple Clouds so what's the current state of Cisco-Google relationship with Hybrid? How is that fitting in, Google Next and beyond? >> So let me tease that in the context of some history, right? So if we go back, say 10 years, virtualization was the bad word of the day. Things were getting virtualized. We created the best data center infrastructure for virtualization in our UCS platforms. Completely programmable infrastructure's code, a very programmable environment that can back a lot of density of virtual machines, right? Roll forward three or four years, storage and compute were getting unwieldily. There was complexity there to be solved. We created the category of converge infrastructure, became the leader of that category whether we work with DMC and other players. Roll forward another four or five years we got into the hyper conversion infrastructure space with the most performant ACI appliance on the market anywhere. And most performant, most consistent, deeply engineered across all the stacks. Can took that complexity, took our learnings and DNA networking and married it together to create something unique for the industry. Now you think, do other domains come together? Now its the Cloud and on-prem. And if that comes together we see similar kinds of complexity. Complexity in security, complexity in networking, complexity in policy and enforcement across layers. Complexity, frankly in management, and how do you make that management much more simple and consumerized? We're taking that complexity and distilling it down into developing a very simple appliance. So what we're trying to deliver to the customer is a simple appliance that they can stand and procure and set up much in the way that they're used to but now the appliance is scale out. Its much more Cloud like. Its managed from the Cloud. So its got that consumer modern feel to it. Now you can deliver on this a container environment, a container development environment, for your developer stakeholders. You can deliver security that's plumed through and across multiple layers, networking that's plumed through and across multiple layers, at the end of the day we've taken those boundaries between Cloud and data center and blown them away. >> And you've merged operational constructs of the old data center operations to Cloud like operations, >> Yeah. >> Everything's just a service, you got Microservices coming, so you didn't really lose anything, you'd mentioned democratizing IT earlier, you guys are bringing the HyperFlex to ACI to the table so you now can let customers run, is that right? Am I getting it right? >> That's right. Its all about how do you take new interesting technologies that are developed somewhere, that may have complexity because its open source and exchanging all the time or it may have complexity because it was not been for a different environment, not for the on-prem environment. How do you take that innovation and democratize it so that everybody, all of the 100's of thousands and millions of enterprise customers can use it and feel comfortable using it and feel comfortable actually embracing it in a way that gives them the security, gives them the networking that's needed and gives them a way that they can serve their internal stakeholders very easily. >> Guys thanks for taking the time for this awesome conversation. One final question, gettin you both to weigh in on, here at Google Next 2019, we're in 2019. Cloud's going a whole other level here. What's the most important story that customers should pay attention to with respect to expanding into the Cloud, taking advantage of the growing developer ecosystem as open source continues to go to the next level. What's the most important thing happening around Google Next and the industry with respect to Cloud and for the enterprise? >> Well I think certainly here at Google Next the Google Cloud's Anthos announcement is going to be of tremendous interest to enterprises cause as you said they are extending into the Cloud and this is another great option for enterprises who are looking to do that. >> Yeah and as I look at it suddenly IT has a set of new options. They used to be able to pick networking and compute and storage, now they can pick Kubeflow for AI or they can pick Kubernetes for container development, Anthos for an on-prem version. They're shopping list has suddenly gone up. We're trying to keep that simple and organized for them so that they can pick the best ingredients they can and build the best infrastructure they can, they can do it. >> Guys thanks so much. Kip Compton senior vice president Cloud Platform and Solutions Group and KD vice president of the Data Center compute group for Cisco. Its been exclusive CUBE conversation around the Google-Cisco big news at Google Next 2019 and I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat jazz music)

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-hosts. Stu Miniman, John Furrier has been here all week. Day three coverage of Cisco Live!, Barcelona. Cisco Live EMEA, and R. We learned the other day, add R for Russia. Kaustubh Das is back. KD is the vice president of product management for data center at Cisco and he's joined by Kevin Egan who is the director of the computer systems group for data center. Also from Cisco, gents, good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> KD, Data center was a real focus of the announcements this week. The data center is exploding to a lot of different places. What's going on in the group? >> It's been a terrific weekend, you're right. Data center was a core of a lot of the announcements this week, and as we kicked off the key note with this concept that the data center is no longer centered. It's really, the data moves to the edges, the data center is moving to the edges. We had a lot of announcements around Hyperflex, Hyperflex anywhere, this product that we've been innovating on like monsters. Within a very short time, gone from a brand-new product on the market to a magic quarter liter with Gartner, and really kind of doing a lot of industry firsts with that. That's been a big focus. We had a lot of announcements with our technology partners, because we not only innovate within Cisco, but we work with Pure and NetApp and Citrix and Intel Optane and Nvidia to bring products to the market that get the richness of their innovation and our innovation together. The other big focus has been all about programmability. As the world becomes much more programmable, focus devops automation, it's been around Intersight and programmability and taking that to the next level. >> Interesting. So of course we always talk about shipping five megabytes of code as opposed to shipping petabytes through a straw into the god box. But so Kevin, programmability's a key theme here, of course we're in the devnet zone. We had Susie Wee on yesterday and she was just talking about the evolution of Cisco infrastructure and how early on you guys made the decision. Let's make all this stuff programmable. And that was sort of a game changer, your thoughts. >> Yeah, no it's been amazing. The growth of just Cisco devnet right? We've got half a million developers now developing against our SDKs, our devops, our opportunities all across our Cisco platforms. We've got thousands of Cisco resources doing work on that, producing those libraries, producing that, those sample sets of code and contributing to the communities. And today our customers are using it in a way that they've never really done. Previously it was a sort of a fix because vendor tools weren't getting it done. And now they're using these automation tools to really do every day tasks out to the mass, to reduce the complexity for their teams and reduce the burden. And then of course to have that repeatability and that security and that compliance aspect and it's been amazing the explosion. >> Yeah. The simplicity reminds me back you know the earliest days of UCS, you know UCS was built for that wave of virtualization and as KD has talked with us this week already about some of the partnerships that you've built. The wave of converged infrastructure, UCS really dominated in that marketplace, but here now we talk about AI with some of your partners, you talk about programmability, it's like that's not the Cisco UCS that I remember launching. So maybe give us the updates specifically that was announced this week. Where the platform has gone in more recent days. >> So I can start maybe, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> UCS came up with this concept of everything needs to be programmable, everything needs to be an API. And maybe we were a little ahead of our time, we conceived of this in 2007, got the product out in 09 and really from the very genesis of the program, of the UCS program, it's been a programmable platform, it's been everything's an API. The UI makes calls to the API, our SDKs make calls to the APIs. So that's been the core platform and in some ways it feels like the industry is coming to where we thought it would come to a little bit earlier. So they, this whole concept of infrastructure's code, softly defined what do we want to call it, this was core and germane to the product itself. What we've done lately is, it's taken that policy that we're encapsulated and taken out all of the silver into the fabric for scalability, we've taken that now into the cloud. And what that does is it leads to that velocity of innovation becoming even higher, the ability to create new and unique use cases becomes higher, the ability to conceive it becomes higher. And all of that coupled with where IT is going, which is becoming much more devops, much more around automation. I think those forces are coupling together to create some really unique use cases. >> You said, you gestured take it into the cloud, which is interesting, pointing. What does that mean? Taking it into the cloud? >> So let's speed back a little bit. So what we start off with was listen, a silver's a box, we need to abstract the silver, the personality of the silver out of that box into policy, put it in the fabric. And that allows us to really scale that and give the box different personalities depending upon the workload. What we've done is, we've launched a product called Intersight. Intersight takes that policy and makes it a SAS service, management of the service we want to call it. So now as data moves everywhere, as data centers move everywhere, as our applications no longer become monolithic but become these combinations of little applications communicating across data centers, it allows us to have a centralized dashboard for our infrastructure that we can access, because it's in the cloud, from anywhere. And because it's in the cloud it can kind of get, get that innovation wheel turning much faster. It's just been game changing, and obviously there's other things that can happen once you do that. You can have proactive guidance coming down from the cloud, you can have golden images come down from the cloud, you can do workload specific settings. So there's a lot of new areas that it opens up once you, >> Analytics, right? >> Analytics. >> Machine intelligence. >> So we've got the takeover happening in the devnet zone right now, so focus on the data center, everybody's got t shirts and I think it says Hyperflex on them, big announcement this week about Hyperflex anywhere. Kevin you know I think that when people heard HCI, they often picture a box, or it's a group of boxes it's in a rack, it's all that and everything, and the thing is as an analyst I was poking at it, it's like "well we virtualized a lot of the stuff "and we put it in a new form factor." That's great to modernize the platform but how do we make it cloud native, how does it fit into a hybrid and multi cloud world, and it feels like we're reaching that point now. So help us connect the dots as to how, what HCI was fits into this hybrid and multi cloud world today. >> Absolutely. I mean, HCI when it came out was an alternative to SAN, I mean it was an alternative and it was touting simplicity, touting you know grow with your applications. But really now, with the multi cloud instances that our customers are looking at, they have to have a way to deploy those, a way to connect to those remotely, manage those, monitor those, actually connect that back to the core so that you can take advantage of the analytics that are running at the core and make real time recommendations, make real time adjustments for services and those type of, you know that connectivity is really what we mean by Hyperflex anywhere. It's the evolution of how you deploy, how you manage, and then of course that day two, day five, day one hundred where you're actually making that experience simple for the customers. >> Help us understand exactly, is this, do I just have the backup image in a public cloud, do I actually have similar software stacks, what's the expanse? >> Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think it's three different vectors that we're doing. So we want as we modernize, and as our customers modernize, they're looking for a much more cloud-like limber, elastic platform. That's the first vector, that's what HCI has done, that's what we've done. And we've actually done it on steroids because we've taken that code-designed hardware and software much like the public cloud guys are doing, but we control that and we can give that to our enterprise customers and our enterprise grade resilient infrastructure. The first thing is that, the second piece of it is what our customers and really our developers and the customers are wanting to do, is to create in one place and deploy in another. So create on the private cloud, deploy in the public cloud, or create in the public cloud, deploy in the private cloud, or actually have an application that bridges the two. So having a homogenous development environment whether it's, and a lot of this is around the container frameworks, whether it's on the public cloud, private cloud. That's key, and what we've done with Hyperflex, and the integrations we've got with our container platform, with open shift, with cloud center, which was again a big announcement this week. That's that second vector, is being able to port applications, develop one place, deploy any place. And the third piece is what we've been talking about all through this segment, which is the ability to now have the cloud drive your infrastructure. Everything's connected, everything's analyzed in the cloud, there's telemetry, there's proactive guidance, there's a common dashboard there's centralized monitoring, there's the ability to deploy, like we did in the key note demonstrating in the key note, multiple different sides spread out across the world, from a cental location. I think that's game changing. >> I'd like to get your take on differentiation. Obviously you guys are biased. Cisco's different, it's better. But I want to hear why. So relative to other infrastructure players, are you, in your words, however you want to describe it more cloud like more programmable, where's the differentiation? >> Go ahead and I'll later on. >> Yeah sure. So basically we started with a foundation of UCS and that foundation, virtualize compute bare metal compute, and of course now hyper-converge, and the reason that it allows us to do things, allows us to Hyperflex anywhere, allows us to have that cloud-based model is because we built that infrastructure around the API from day one. When we started this, that programmatic infrastructure, we were talking to customers, it was stateless it was desired state config, they didn't know what we were talking about. I mean, they had no idea when this came out. But that's the foundation that really allows us to drive the API integrations to our app layers, which is what KD was talking about, and then of course from there to our multi cloud integrations and that's really the foundation that laid, that we laid early on. And that's why all of our UCS platform really enables this cloud integration. >> Yeah, I mean the way I look at it is nobody else has a fully API driven infrastructure. Everything's an API for us, we don't expose APIs after the fact, it is built around, it's an API first infrastructure. And everything is built around them. Whether it's our STKs, our integrations with you know Pop and then Ansible, and those kind of tool sets, our integration with other tool sets that people use. It's all driven through that. The second thing that is different is, we have an emulator, so we can allow our customers to really time travel through the whole process of deployment. I mean, our customers can deploy the infrastructure before the infrastructure hits the loading dock because they can download the UCS emulator. They can actually configure, deploy, build the whole policy on our management platform, test it out, do the what ifs on the emulator. When the equipment shows up, we're ready to go, we are in business, nobody else can do that. And the final thing which is, aside from all of the cloud connected pieces I've talked about, the breadth of Cisco's portfolio spanning from all of our networking assets, our SD WAN assets, our security assets, our collaboration assets, our cloud assets, that breadth gets us to implement use cases for our customers that are just, it's just impossible for anybody else to do. >> We've heard lots of proof points here in the devnote zone specifically from programmability and the automation. I've talked to some service providers here at the show, we've also heard about the journey that enterprise customers are going through to kind of understand that space and learn places here like this. Kevin, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of customers here, maybe if you have examples as to you know the exemplars of who're doing this well, and what people can learn from customers like that. >> Yeah, I mean it's amazing right. In just devnet alone we've got sessions on UCS with Python, STKs, UCS with Powertool, how to integrate with Ansible, these are just becoming common terms, common household terms for our customers. As you go up to enterprise customers, service provider customers, they're using these tools in a day to day manner to do the automation on top of, to really deploy and manage their apps, right, and the way that, I mean, it's exciting, we have customers from all segments of all industry, and they really they use these programmatic, KD's simple example of platform emulator, you don't realize how powerful that is, where you can set that same exact state machine that's in your UCS, you can put it on your laptop, set up all your policies, and then when that gear hits the dock, you are up in hours. Literally we have very large e-commerce sites, they do this, thousands of servers hit it, and in a matter of hours, they've applied those policies and they're up and running. Python, we've got Python, Ruby, Powertool, software developer kits, we've got devops that sit on those, and Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and these are just the automation so if you want to do it yourself, we've got the world class API, nobody else gives you that programmatic API. That's how we built our foundation. If you want Cisco to call those APIs, we have Intersight and we'll make those calls for you. If you just want to do some simple scripting, Powertool. You can automate certain processes, it doesn't have to be the whole end to end. You know you can use all these, it's basically choice to really, what your applications are demanding and what your customers are demanding. >> That's a strong story, one of breadth and depth. We're out of time, but KD I wonder if you could sort of put a bow on Cisco Live! Europe this year, big takeaways from your point of view. >> Listen, we've been innovating like monsters and it's such a terrific week for us to come here, to really touch and feel and listen to our customers and see the delight on their faces as we show them what we've been doing. And this part of the show, day three the devnet takeover, this is where it gets really really real, because now we get to go down to the depths of looking at those APIs, looking at those use cases, getting people to play around with them. So it's just been terrific, I love it. >> I love it too, we're the interview monsters this week. So guys thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cicso Live! In Barcelona. Be right back. (upbeat electronic outro)