 Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone live here. CUBE coverage in Barcelona, Spain. For Cisco Live 2018 Europe, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Stu Miniman. I'll go to all the events, extract the signal from the noise. Our next guest is Jose Decastra, CTO. Cognitive collaboration with Cisco, formerly with Tropo, which is an acquisition. Welcome to theCUBE. Great, thanks for having me. All right, so cognitive collaboration. What does that mean? Let's start with that one. I love that name. It's a bit of a mouthful, but yeah. I mean, there's a lot of talk about cognitive these days and really what it comes down to is, for the last 10 to 15 years, especially in the collaboration space, we've been focused on building tools. Tools that people can use to connect their employees and allow them to be productive over long distances. A lot of those features are pretty much table stakes nowadays, and so now we're looking at, what are the data assets that we have at Cisco that we can use to allow our customers to derive insights from the collaboration that's taking place that no one else can do? And so that's part of what my team's focused on. Take a step back, because what's interesting is that, as the world kind of becomes an evolution, Cisco's got a lot of tools. You got WebEx, which a lot of people use. You got the phone, people use sometimes mobile phone, and Cisco sells telephony thing, but most people on mobile, connecting via voids. You got online now, digital. How are you guys looking at that and how are you tying it together and how do you go to a customer that might have a little bit of Cisco and no Cisco over here? How do you integrate it in and what is the playbook to make that happen? What's the view? How do you just take us through that process? Yeah, yeah. Well, there were a couple of questions in there. First off, one of the strongest assets we have is our software, cloud, and hardware kind of vertically integrated strategy, right? I'll talk about integration strategies in a second, but especially in the collab space, if you look at WebEx, our telepresence portfolio, and now the Sparkboard, which is everywhere here at Cisco Live, which is great to see, our goal has been to make those kind of three prongs of the strategy work really well together. And we're not there yet, but we've got some stuff coming down the pipe over the next few months that are going to make those three products just be a delightful experience that just works for everybody. Once we get there, then there are a couple of ways that we can go. You mentioned WebEx earlier. WebEx is a great product. You'd be shocked at the number of meetings that are actually reported where no one actually goes and listens to the recordings. And what do you think that is? That's because no one wants to sit through an hour-long recording, right? Of the same meeting or that they were either in or another meeting. Or even if they missed it, no one wants to sit through an hour-long recording that they can't actually participate in, right? And so when we're talking about cognitive and some of the opportunities we see there, we're sitting, Cisco is sitting on literally billions of minutes of video and audio recordings that we can be doing a lot with. And so by applying machine learning techniques, face recognition, speaker summarization, meeting summarization, natural language processing, we can now begin to extract real semantic insights out of that data and then be able to surface that up either to the teams that had the meeting so they can go and kind of scrub through and digest an hour-long meeting in five minutes, or to like a CIO type who wants to be able to understand how are my teams actually working in practice? Not what the org chart tells you, but like how are my teams actually forming to actually get work done? I mean, that's from a data standpoint. You have behavioral data and you got contextual data. How do you guys do that? I mean, I could just envision that extracting those nuggets from the meetings through entity extraction or techniques like that. How do you do that? I mean, is it Cisco code? Do you guys use open source? What are some of the techniques that you guys are doing to kind of simplify and save time doing that? I mean, that's really valuable. Yeah, well, so, you know, we're not doing a lot of basic research in AI. There's some happening at the company, but the reality is that, you know, machine learning and deep learning especially has come leaps and bounds over the last 18 months to 24 months. And a lot of that research is happening elsewhere. Really what we're doing is taking kind of best of breed techniques, commonplace techniques and blending that with the data that we have. AI is all about data, full stop. And it's about the training sets that you can actually build around that. And so, we made a recent acquisition, a company called MindMelt that happened last year. And they had an amazing platform called Workbench where they are able to, with extremely high accuracy, be able to derive semantic insights from text using natural language processing techniques. And just about three months ago, we announced the first product that's going to be based on that asset that we acquired called Spark Assistant. And Spark Assistant is a digital assistant just like Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri, for example, but built for the enterprise with kind of Cisco security built behind it. So Amazon announced Transcribe, which is a service that reinvent where they basically take the audio and try to transcribe it. Is that something that like Workbench would do? I mean, because that, the text piece, sounds like that's a text thing. NLP works well for that. Workbench works off text. Audio and video extraction, any open source or technology you guys are using for that? Yeah, we're using a number of open source. We also have some partners in the area as well that are kind of unannounced, but coming soon. But there are a lot of key players there, right? Google has some technologies there, Amazon as well. And we're working with all of them. Because the reality is, if our customers have already made an investment in one of those companies, we want to be able to leverage that, feed that into our pipeline, and be able to derive insights from that. Yeah, I think back, I worked in Telcom back in the 90s and Cisco just totally transformed that market. Drove the VoIP transformation, the unified communications. John and I were at the Google show and the Amazon cloud shows last year, and Voice seems to be coming back into the present. We talk about the digital assistants. Where does Cisco fit into that whole discussion and how do you help that next wave? Yeah, well, so a couple ways. I talked about our hardware portfolio earlier. That is the single biggest asset that we have as Cisco in order to kind of penetrate this digital assistant, voice assistant market. We already have the hardware in place. For some of these other companies that kind of get into the conference room, they first have to convince IT facilities and everyone to kind of install this new thing. And that is an unknown quantity, right? For us, it's a software upgrade. And so that's what we're planning on doing with Spark Assistant is essentially roll this out to a huge swath of the portfolio, obviously with an opt-in controls and be able to deploy it there. The other thing that we're doing, and especially with the Spark board, you wouldn't know by looking at it, but the Spark board actually has 12 microphones built in behind the bezel. The Spark board. Or, Spark board, Spark. The Spark board. Spark board, okay. Yeah, you can actually check them out over there. Well, they're everywhere. Can you broadcast whiteboard sessions because that's what the cube needs. Yeah, it does whiteboard, yeah. And so Spark board actually has 12 microphones hidden behind the bezel. And with that, we're able to do high accuracy beam forming, which essentially trains in our technology, our microphones, on a single voice in the room, isolating them with crystal clear accuracy, yeah. All right, Jose, I need to poke at something in a first second. You talk about devices. We saw the phone just permeate from when BlackBerry and then the smartphone come into it. Amazon selling the Alexa products everywhere. And Google selling a lot of those, seeing lots of devices do that. So, I heard in the keynote yesterday, Rowan was talking about, oh, well, we're going to have the, you know, Glasses 3.0 and, you know, future type of there. So I wonder, I'm just, I see a software driver for what's there. And it sounds like you're saying, it's like, no, no, no, we've got the physical footprint and hardware, but it's a software angle and it sounds like that's a lot of what your group's doing. So, how do you make sure you're ready for all those pieces? That's right. And I don't mean to be dismissive around the software component, but let's face it, that's table stakes at this point. Like Cisco, we've spent the better part of the last decade getting good and transitioning the company to be a software company. The next stage in that evolution is to pivot, you know, we went from hardware to software. Now we're going from software to being a platform company in many ways. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry, so I love that. And what I've seen in your group, you know, it's the app economy, it's the API economy. I want to dig down a little further. It's your CTO type. The functions as a service or serverless is one of those real enabling pieces that you hear Google, Microsoft, Amazon talking about. Cisco in that environment, we've talked to them about Kubernetes and the likes, but I haven't heard anybody say, oh yeah, you know, this type of piece, serverless, we're there. We think it's a platform place. So I would think that would be a good space for Cisco to be. Yeah, I think so as well. And there's obviously a lot happening within the networking group to be able to kind of push workloads down to the edge in collab and especially just the nature of our customers. Like we try to be cloud agnostic, right? And unfortunately that sometimes leads to a less of a kind of Cisco on Cisco, like vertically integrated strategy as you would expect. But our customers appreciate that, because I mean, look, if they've already made an investment in Amazon or in Google Cloud or some on-premise equipment, you know, we've got to be able to meet them where they are today. We have to do that. I mean, that's table sticks, right? Otherwise you're vertically integrated Cisco. Okay, good point. So that's really important. You mentioned that you guys are transferred to a platform company. So that's awesome. Platforms have a lot of value. Question for you is, what are you optimizing the platform for? Obviously data is critical. That's a great strategy. Love that. What are you optimizing for in the platform using the data? Is it for user experience? Is it for better software functionality? All of the above, what specifically do you guys talk about when you say our platform is optimized for X? As an example, Facebook is optimized for selling ads. And they're kind of not happy about that now, but they made a lot of money. What are you guys optimizing for in the platform? Yeah, yeah. Well, so, you know, we've rolled out kind of this internal tagline within the company. And it may never see the light of day from a marketing perspective, but we think of ourselves as building the operating system for teams. And so that's really what our entire organization about 700 engineers are kind of with this laser focus around building products that organizations, teams essentially, which, you know, maybe anywhere from five people to 500 people can essentially run their organization within Spark and with our suite of products. And that's a shift in our thinking because if you look at the products predating Spark, even WebEx, which is a massively successful product, it's the tool. People view it as a tool. They don't think of it as a platform or anything more. And with Spark, you know, we're aiming to be the center, the hub, where work actually gets done. And our APIs and integration strategy is central to all of that, right? And people can get confused too. They think tool, they get their mind stuck on that, but WebEx is a great tool, okay? But it's throwing off great data that could help the platform, right? To your point about extracting value out of that unlocked, or that locked data. Yeah, and it's tough because, you know, Spark is, you know, one of the most secure messaging platforms and collaboration platforms that are out there and as a result, we've devised a very unique kind of end-to-end encryption strategy that blocks us out from actually accessing our customers' data. And as you would expect, that poses some challenges for us, right? That other competitors don't have. And so, you know, we've been working with the teams to figure out, like, how do we distribute our workloads so that we can derive insights from the data without ever seeing the data? It's pretty tricky for us. We want to talk to you certainly after the show because we have tons of video. Love to help unlock that video and audio. But I'd like to ask you more of a personal question or observational question, get your reaction to it. You guys doing some really complex things to be the operating system for teams is a lot of work and it's hard. Because you got tools, you're integrating tools, you got data as a foundational element of that and it's awesome, so I love the mission. The problem is you have people who use the tools who may or may not have insight into the platform. So the question for you is, what's going on in the collab group that people might not understand that you want to share? Because it's hard to tell the story of platform when you have people who use certain tools, more than others, maybe they vertically integrate them all. But there's a lot going on in your story here. What is the key thing that you'd like to say to illuminate the collab platform to the folks that may know one tool or another? Yeah, that's a good question. It's one I don't really get asked very often. I guess the first thing that people don't realize is how open it actually is. And we haven't done a great job outside of venues like this of promoting our developer program. But yeah, on developer.syscospark.com, I mean you can go there and there's countless resources on how you can essentially transform your business through collaboration with our platform very, very easily, right? And so people don't realize that today. I guess the other area that is often overlooked is people see Spark, for example, as Spark the app. And there have been some talks here at Cisco Live around something we call embedded collaboration, where we painstakingly have gone through the platform and taken out nuggets of the Spark application and allow those to be embedded inside third-party like line of business applications. A great example of that is the strategic alliance that we announced with Salesforce last year. You can, as a Salesforce company today, enable Spark within Salesforce and have a full-featured Spark experience without ever leaving Salesforce.com. No one else can say that, right? And that's because we've made a commitment to open this and say like, look, people may not ever actually download our app, but we want them to still have a great collaboration experience. And we do that by being an open platform and having all the APIs to go with that. That's awesome. Great, great, great, love the vision. I think it's awesome, very relevant. Here's the next question for you. So you've seen the success of Amazon Web Services in the cloud, and what's interesting is that it's been a building block approach. EC2, S3, and then next thing you know, you have a zillion services, Redshift, Kinesis. So we're seeing digital almost taking that same play, but I'm not saying digital cloud per se, but when you talk to a platform, cloud or wherever it's hosted doesn't matter. It's still a service. There's a trend towards having these digital services, almost similar to what people roll on Amazon, so EC2, S3. You guys have a variety of tools that can be services. The embedded model is a service. How do you guys envision that? Because digital is where the action is for collaboration. You guys are in the middle of it. How do you view the future of roadmap of digital services when you talk to a customer and trying to grok, how to invest, how to organize teams. They have to have a vision of this 20-mile stair. Digital services, how do you view that? What's your reaction? Look, it's a tough one, and it starts with just building a culture around just platform and the potential for platform economics. Cisco just, we don't have that muscle yet, right? I came from that world before I joined Cisco. I did a startup called Tropo, and in some of those early meetings with Rowan, I told Rowan, I said, look, you have an opportunity. Cisco has an opportunity to be the AWS of collaboration, the Amazon Web Services of collaboration. We have all the ingredients are there. I think, and I've spent the last two and a half years preaching that message to the rest of the Cisco community, the reality is, selling platform is hard. Amazon built a culture from the ground up, where that's what they know how to do. It's going to be a journey for Cisco. We're starting with the end user experience spark. You can download the app, it's great, it works, integrates with all of our hardware. We have open APIs to go from there to a decomposed set of services like you were describing. Again, we have all of the recipes. It's all about having the appetite from our sales force and from our partners to go and make that a reality. It's going to take some time. Also, the timing's in your favor too, evolution. You can't force something that people aren't ready for, right? So, operationalizing it for a customer is just going to take time. So, best move is just kind of ride the wave. You got DevNet crank in here. You got your stuff developing. Oh, and we're making moves. We're making moves. I mean, pretty soon, we have some customers we're working with, like in the telemedicine space in healthcare, in education, that are consuming our services and may not ever actually use our apps. That's a pure platform play. And so, it's already starting to happen. We're seeing the shift already take place. You guys got a great opportunity. Congratulations on great work. Love the vision, love the execution. Again, I think you guys are in a sweet spot in the marketplace. We think so too. Okay, Cube's in a sweet spot. We're in the DevNet zone right here. This is theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain for 2018 Cisco Live in Europe. Live coverage, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage from the action here in Barcelona after this short break.