 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2018. In Orlando, we're in the middle of the DevNet zone. Happened to have a panel of distinguished guests on the program. To my right, I have Dave Cope, who's with Cisco. To his right, Bob Krentler with Google Cloud. And down on the end, Lars Danaker, who's with SAP. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Nice to be here. All right, so Dave, we're going to start. Cloud's been a big discussion. You're the senior director of Cloud Market Development. I think I know why Google's here. We had Diane Green up on the main stage with Chuck Robbins yesterday. But before we get into it, what are you hearing from customers? When they think of Cloud, what does that mean and connect that with Cisco? No, it's, I mean, if you think about it, everything we hear about has something to do with Cloud today. And what's amazing is Cloud really is only nine to 10 years old. And we've seen it go through this sort of evolution from skepticism to debating about public and private to today, everyone realizing that it's all about hybrid Cloud, you know, being able to logically place different workloads in different environments. And so in almost everything we hear about it has something to do with that notion of hybrid Cloud. How do I secure those environments? How do I develop new applications? So it's really everywhere. All right, so Bob, you know, we've been watching Google since it entered the Cloud. Of course, we had a team at the Kubernetes show in Copenhagen just a month ago. We're excited to bring the cube to your Cloud show, Google Cloud Next this July in San Francisco. So, you know, we think we know a little bit about what Google's doing in Cloud, but from your, with the alliances side of things, tell us a little bit about your role, what you're hearing from your customers and partners when it comes to Cloud. Yeah, thanks again for the opportunity. So yeah, Google Cloud is everything from the undersea cables that Google uses to move data around the world all the way up through G Suite, right? And we developed this really cool hybrid Cloud partnership with Cisco kind of in response to some of the same problems that Google itself had to face. You know, largely we had to be able to securely and scalably deploy applications all around the world. And so customers are asking us, hey, how do I move to that world while not disrupting the infrastructure I already purchased? So how do I get the disruptive Cloud technologies without disrupting myself, right? And so what we developed with Cisco is this approach to meet you where you are as a developer or the customer that allows you to get the advantages of Cloud while maintaining the infrastructure you already purchased. And it's a great partnership with Cisco because of the security aspects that they bring, sales and support that Cisco brings as well as Google's technology in the Cloud. All right, so Lars, you're the only one that doesn't have Cloud in their title, so you're a big data architect. Look, you know, part of our team was here last week, the same building for SAP Sapphire last week. You know, remember when we first started theCUBE, it was the wave of mobile, but absolutely we hear SAP at every single one of the Cloud events that we go to. So from your role, how does Cloud fit into the story? So I don't have Cloud in my title, but big data in the title, and this is a great connection to the Cloud. Because what we are seeing with our customers is that they more and more move, let's say especially data that is regarded as big data into the Cloud. So that we have this combination of having enterprise data in your data center secure, but you still want to utilize what you have and capabilities in the Cloud. Like for example, machine learning with Google, or cheap storage that you can utilize with other Cloud vendors, so that you can basically store huge amounts of data inside of a secure store at the end. All right, great, I almost feel like we're going up the stack when we went to it. You know, Cisco, the infrastructure, you know, Google, certain pieces of an SAP really at the application. Can you bring us back to Lars as to how the SAP piece connects to Cisco? Yeah, so as I said, what we are observing is especially a need for this hybrid environments, right? That you have your central system still in your data centers, but you want to connect to Cloud environments, and you want to bring in principle the Cloud to your on-premise systems, that you have the best of both worlds. And this is also what SAP is basically about, to enable customers to do so, and to bring products out that actually go in the direction of hybrid Cloud and allow customers to go into more increasingly complex landscapes, but still manage them in a, let's say, sophisticated way. All right, Dave, you know, I think back when I think of Cisco in partnerships, you know, very rigorous programs out there. Spent many years looking at all the CVDs, which the Cisco validated designs. When we get into the Cloud world, Phil's thing is to how that partnership expands, and you know, what's similar, what's different. No, and I think, you know, if you look at the heritage of Cisco around networking and also infrastructure, but you're also seeing a huge evolution towards software. And so a lot of what we're doing in the Cloud has really software solutions, whether it be the Cisco Container Platform that actually works with the Cisco Google solution, and also works with SAP's data hub. And we ensure, we still, though, have the rigor of things like CVDs, so this software can be proven to run on infrastructure environments that Cisco provides, or provide customers a choice to run it on their own environment. And of course when it runs on Cisco infrastructure, it does have that CVD that gives customers and partners that confidence that it's already tested and that it works. Great, Bob, you know, Kubernetes Containers, something we heard about on stage, is that the main thing that Google and Cisco are partnering on to walk us through a little bit, some of the announcements what people might have missed? Yeah, so I think in general, our hybrid Cloud solution at Google is very, very strong. I think what we're doing with Cisco is the most important missing piece, which is to be able to deliver an on-prem experience that developers are comfortable with first and foremost, but also everyone behind the firewall essentially is very happy with. The security folks, the IT operations folks, I mentioned developers, and of course the line of business. So yes, we're investing heavily with Cisco to bring Kubernetes and containers on-prem, and we're really excited about the work we're doing with SAP in that space as well. We're also working with Cisco on an open-source initiative called Istio. Essentially, it helps you do networking between microservices and containers. It's in a declarative way, really nice. And then I think overall, just the overall partnership with Cisco is very, very strong. We've been very happy with Cisco for a very long time, and I think customers are really starting to kind of understand that this journey to the Cloud is not one-size-fits-all, and certainly there's a lot of work that you have in-flight. It's modernizing the existing application. That's one work stream, but at the same time, you want to move to more Cloud-native applications. And so we're really bringing that best of both worlds to the customer base. And I think too, we announced the relationship formerly last October, and it was really based on the fact that we had a shared vision that while everybody wants to use the Cloud, they didn't want to always have to think they had to refactor their applications or lift and shift, and there's definitely use cases to do that. But also, we had this vision that they wanted to be able to adopt the Cloud at their own pace, maybe give traditional applications a facelift with powerful services from people like Google, or maybe they wanted to use cool new development tools on the Cloud, like on Google Cloud, and that still have access to legacy systems. And so it really was a marriage of the best of both companies, sort of Cisco's traditional enterprise disciplines, sales and support, along with developer, cool technology, sort of the father of Kubernetes, and also very powerful Cloud services from Google. Yeah, I would just say right out of the gate, to make it really tangible, this is the way to do CICD for hybrid, period. And if you're a developer today learning, that's kind of what you know, you use Spinnaker and you deploy, that's what you're going to be able to do here. And I just really think that that's really strong message from Google. We're very, very big into open source, and that resonates with developers. And I think it really resonates with the buyers of Cisco gear. I mean, developers are expensive, you want to free them up to do, abstract things away, and that's what we're doing, abstract, abstract, abstract, until you can get more velocity out of all of your investments, whether that's people, infrastructure, or your own time. Just one last thought on that, is while we're talking a lot about Cloud Native, working with traditional systems, et cetera, applications need to feed on data. And so that's why it's really this perfect marriage with the data hub, because now whether you're aggregating data on-prem, or want to reach out to Google Cloud to get aggregated data, it really is the best of all worlds. Yeah, well, when we look at Cloud, Cloud really is much more of an operational model than it is a destination, and it's the data and the applications. Ultimately, that's what is the lifeblood of our business, that's what is important for our business. So, Lars, love your commentary on what you're hearing from the developer side, from customers as they're moving here. Just short, the data hub is basically a tool to manage those complex landscapes, and to get a holistic data landscape view on the entire data of your company. So it's a bridge between enterprise data and big data, if you want. And I think a little bit more than one year back, we were searching for a platform that allows us to deploy the data hub on-premise and in the Cloud. And that's what we found with Kubernetes, which is an awesome abstraction platform for us, because we don't need to take care now what is the native deployment, we just need to make sure that our application runs on Kubernetes. So that's why the data hub is running natively on Google Cloud Platform, and especially Google Kubernetes Engine, and it is running in the same way on-premise. And that's enabling us to provide, let's say, a tool that can manage those hybrid landscapes, the data landscape in such a way. And that's why for us, it's a perfect thing on the one hand side to have a stable platform with Google Kubernetes Engine in the Cloud, and then partner with Cisco to bring basically the Cisco Container Platform on-premise. So for us now, it means just we have, on all the different aspects, we have a way to deploy our software and then bring customers' value in the Cloud on-premise and in hybrid environments. Dave, I would love your commentary on, really how do customers get support for all of this? Because one of the challenges was, well, I build my temple for my application and then I need to test it out. And it took a long time. The old time it used to be, oh, yeah, 12, 18 months, no problem, throw a million bucks on it, it's great. Today, I need to move faster. We were talking about developers. If it's not up and running and proven in a few months, probably you failed and you better move on or we're going to look to some other group to do that. How is this dynamic change? Walk us through the partnership support, how do customers from the application all the way down be able to turn and get from partners like yourselves? Yeah, no, I mean, I think that, so the customers today want it all, right? They need to maintain investments, extend investments that they have in traditional systems, but they want to take advantage of these new, really cool technologies like microservices, like sort of data hub, data aggregation. And they don't want somebody knocking on their door and saying, hey, I'll sell you anything as long as you want to buy this. So I think Cisco, along with its partners, has evolved to a point to be able to align customer initiatives with solutions and it can never just be from one vendor. And so Cisco is working very hard to partner with people like Google and SAP to truly meet the needs of extending those traditional systems, but also accelerating their application development, using these new technologies and getting them all to work together. So it really is a new way to approach the market. Just a second is Dave. So for us, it was like, when we are talking on premise, we don't have to advantage like in the cloud. In the cloud we have Kubernetes as a managed service. So far we had to say, when we go on premise with the data hub, that the customer needs to provide us a Kubernetes cluster. And this is a major challenge because the adoption of Kubernetes in the customer side is a new technology, right? It's not that high. It's not trivial to do. Exactly, it's not trivial to do, to operate and things like that. And now we are providing a solution, a hybrid cloud solution, that is a turnkey solution so you can plug it into your rack, you push the power button, everything is up and running and you can use it. And that's a major step even in the direction of adoption of Kubernetes and a major step in adoption of hybrid cloud solutions. I would add, I mean, our engineering teams are working like side by side, right? So essentially you're our mutual customer here and from a provider point of view, like our engineers are working directly with Cisco's engineers to make sure that GKE is in sync with Cisco's deployment. And so as a customer, you can have confidence that those things are going to work. And you mentioned support earlier, Cisco's TAC will actually support the front end of this and we'll support them on the back end. They work directly with our engineering team already. And they really kind of go hand in hand with your point is that anytime you get truly a valuable solution today, I think it spans multiple companies and we really owe it to our customers to integrate those things together. But at the same time, they don't want to have to go necessarily to all three of our companies independently to get support or maybe to 10 other startups that might have components in it. And so as Cisco rolls this out, we're working with these companies to provide that single point of technical support. Yeah, I mean, I went to a session with Chuck Robbins last night for dinner and he said basically what all Cisco customers know is like, you know, Cisco generally gets things right, but when they do mess up, they will get in there and make it right immediately. And I think that that's what customers really, really love about Cisco. And that's what we love about the partnership. And that's super important in the enterprise market, right? It's especially important for enterprises. I mean, just imagine enterprise running their critical systems on this platform, then you need really someone who is there when there's a problem, right? And that's why this is a great partnership in all with all three parties. Absolutely. Last question, Bob, maybe we've got your event coming up in a couple of months. What should we be looking for from these partnerships going forward? Yeah, so speaking broadly about Google Cloud partnerships, certainly we do a lot with SAP, we do a lot with Cisco. I think Cisco's already signed on to be the top sponsor, one of the top sponsors of Google Cloud Next, thanks Dave. We'll be doing much more with Cisco. I think we're also going to do some stuff with developers and we're in the DevNet community here. You know, Cisco DevNet now has like 500,000 developers. We're totally, we totally love that and we're working on a couple things. So stay tuned for that. And I think from our partnership, we're looking forward to showing some really great customer wins and having customers who are really successful. And you know, like with Diane and Chuck, we're talking about really bringing kind of this cloud disruption, right? Disrupt in the business world, but keep your IT, you know, as an advantage, right? Make it so that your IT can help you win more as a business and we're going to try to deliver more of that with these guys. Dave, Bob and Lars, thank you so much for coming to talk about the partnership. Cube will be at Google Cloud Next in July in the future, so a bite for cloud, we better wear shades. So I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. Yeah. Ha, ha, ha.