 Hello, welcome everyone back to theCUBE live here at Cisco Live in Mandalay Bay. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's new platform renouncements, a ton of new excitements that clouds are coming together. You got the network cloud, you got the collaboration cloud. Screwed it out, not yet the collaboration. We're going to get into that in a second. I'm John with my co-host Dave Vellante. 13 years covering Cisco, John McConn is here, senior vice president and general manager of all things collaboration. Great to have you on. Welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm a CUBE alumni distinguished member of our team's class inner circle. Pretty much everyone on the management team except for Chuck Robbins is a CUBE alumni. We're going to work on that. We'll get them on. We'll get them on Tuck Golf all day. Golf they'll do it, yes. Thanks for coming on. So top really important topic, collaboration. So the news yesterday with Apple, the headset, new form factors. You got video there, you got data. That's, they didn't call it metaverse. They didn't even call it mixed reality. They were like spatial computing. You got video, you got the hybrid, you got web backs, all kinds of things under your preview, telepresence. The whole world has shifted. Yes. And you're holding the wheel of the ship. What's the update? Tell us what's happening. What's the big story? Yeah, this is an exciting time for collaboration. It actually has been for the last three years. We all went home a few years ago and now we figured out how to work when everybody was remote. We all became this little box in that five by five grid. But as we kind of get used to this new world, which is hybrid, the experiences are changing again. Every interaction now has remote people. Some of us are back in the conference rooms. Some of us, not so much. So we are very focused on building these hybrid experiences. And because we build both software and hardware, we are able to deliver some very, very interesting experiences. And that's what we are announcing this week across our software and hardware portfolio. And it's an exciting time to be in collaboration. Tell us more. What are you announcing that you can share? You know, you got some other announcements coming tomorrow that you can't share, but you'll stay tuned for that. Yeah, definitely tune in tomorrow. Exciting announcement tomorrow. So with our software, one of the things that we've been focused on is how does our software behave? How can we make it better when you have both remote and in-person participants? So in our conference rooms, for example, increasingly every meeting has remote participants. So we are announcing a new feature called cinematic meanings, which we introduced a little bit earlier last year. We're going to use artificial intelligence to direct what a director would do. Imagine if they were directing a meeting. What would they do? You know, if I'm walking around, they'd cut to a better shot. Or if I get too close to you, it would actually include both of us in the same shot. So think of it as an AI director that's coming to our conference room meetings because that will allow the remote participants to follow along much better. So cinematic meanings, that's one of the features we're announcing. The other area we're focused on is we've got partnerships that we are announcing with audio manufacturers. Last year we announced partnerships with Mercedes and Ford. We are taking that further. We're going to integrate with Harman, which is a car manufacturer or car technology provider for car manufacturers. That'll allow video experiences from within cars, obviously when the cars are stationary, or it'll switch to audio when the car is moving. So meanings now coming to various car platforms so that you can take your meaning from the car because sometimes we do. Hey, with self-driving, you might as well just do a meeting right there on the spot. Yeah, if the car's driving itself then why not just take a meeting, the next meeting from the car. So cinematic meetings is interesting because I've noticed as people come back to the office, when you're in a call with them, it's really awkward, right? They've got some camera up here, they've got their laptops out, they're not sure whether or not they should go from the camera, and you're looking down, the sound is not great. So these are the problems that you're working on. Usually from a conference room, especially if you're remote, you have a static view of the speaker, or maybe you can see one of you and you can't see the person in the back. If you stand up and walk then you're lost, right? And so the idea there was, what would a Hollywood director do if they were directing the meeting? And today AI is allowing us to do that with software, especially if you have multiple cameras in the room. And increasingly, you know, we are all walking in these rooms with a laptop which has a camera on it. So we over time start to use multiple cameras for all the available cameras in the room. And in terms of the auto deals that you have, you know, we all take calls in the car, right? And usually you go off camera, sometimes you put it on, but it's terrible. Is there, have you thought about, okay, actually maybe I could have the camera on the driver, right, give it a little vibe there so that they feel like they're, but is that, or is that like not cool because it encourages them to look at what's being shared or? Yeah, I think safety is actually a very important reason why we are doing this. Because what we found was, in the absence of a more integrated application, people were fumbling through their phones. They were trying to take these calls from their phones. Yes, you had Bluetooth, but it was still a little bit of a safety concern. So, and then the second thing that's happened is increasingly these cars are actually technology platforms themselves. They are much better connected. They have a decent size screen. So what we've done is taken the pain of joining a meeting out. So it's calendar of where it can join the meeting. But when you are moving, video is a distraction, so it's going to be off. You're just an audio. But if you are stationary, waiting for my daughter's tennis game to finish, you can switch to video and see the presentation if you want, but for safety reasons. So voice activated to start a meeting? Voice obviously, or you can just touch many of these. One touch. One touch. As opposed to, where's the calendar? So you don't have to enter the passcode and all that crazy stuff when you're in the meeting. And that way you're taking the stress out of the meeting too. The other thing we'll do is we'll also make it easy to kind of move meetings. You know, sometimes you're joining from your phone, you're trying to switch. You end up in the meeting twice, sort of removing that stress when you are on the road. But we are doing it across all platforms. Chuck Robbins was telling us on the analyst executive Q and A that you guys rewrote WebEx, all platformized and now you have a lot of different things. So I'd love to hear what that is about. And then two, my second question is that you have a very hard job in observing the space and knowing Cisco for all these years. It's not just like enterprise you're targeting. You're targeting many verticals. It's very horizontal. I see cars over there. I see stadiums. I see you guys are media trucks. So you got media entertainment, FinTech, many verticals. Are there differences on the verticals and how do you handle that horizontal scale that you need? Obviously get the network underneath you, but like, it's not just like one thing. You got to like, what's your... Yeah, I think the key to that is having a platform under the hood. So one of the things that, and that's what Chuck was talking about, we've spent a lot of energy building out a collaboration platform. It's not just a video platform. It does video, it does audio, it does transcription and translation, but we've built those services into the platform. So it now allows us to build newer kinds of solutions for different kinds of form factors, whether it's the car or the laptop or the phone, but also for different kinds of verticals. So a hospital, for example, or a doctor, increasingly they're using video to interact. They use our platform. So they're able to take the fact that the platform has the ability to deliver video inside a web app and embed that into a hospital website or a doctor's website. So we've built a platform that's built for audio, video, things like transcribing, you know, spoken text, removing background noise, and that is now allowing us to deliver different kinds of solutions. One of the things I see with Morocco has been a great success for Cisco is that it's got this enablement to it because platforms should be enabling, right? Yes. Enabling value on top of the platform. So I think you know where this next question's going. What apps are going to sit on top of the platform? Obviously you've got WebEx as an app on the platform. Is there new kinds of apps coming out that are super apps that are from super clouds like you guys have now? Or is there thinking around developers? I mean, I'm just thinking with theCUBE, I'd love to develop on top of Cisco, but can I, like, is there like an API? Can I code? What's your strategy in thinking around extensibility of that platform? That is the primary value of building out a platform because we can build so many of these use cases ourselves, but ultimately it's about enabling others to build that. So we already have a rich ecosystem, developer.webex.com, you can go and actually consume this platform using APIs. So you could very quickly build a little web page which has a WebEx video exchange embedded in there or a phone call or sending of messages. So our platform enables that through APIs and we have lots of applications that are already on the platform today. In fact, you can also integrate those applications into our user interface. While I'm in a WebEx meeting, you could actually take the audio in the video and in your case, particularly, you could have special effects or you could be transcribing that and recognizing sentiment. So we have an application that one of our partners has built which is used for sales calls. It's giving you hints on, oh, maybe this conversation is not going so well. His attitude is ready to buy. His facial expressions are excited. Close, close. Close. Close the deal. What's the story with Audi, they're coming on later. What's the scoop there, the news? What should we ask them? Yeah, so we've got, the partnership is actually with Harman which is one of the technology integrators that many car manufacturers use, including Audi. And because we've done that integration with Harman, that'll now be available in the, you know, Audi cars going forward. So that's a great addition to the integration that we've built. You're an Audi driver. I've been Audi, yeah, loyal driver again. Love Audi. Love the speakers, love the interaction. I don't like how they turn off car play when I can't do face times to my daughters while driving. I like to do face times while driving. It's all about safety. I know I'm in safety. I'm not texting and driving, I'm face timing. So it's like, they put the thing right there. But I mean, this comes back down to immersion experience. Like the windows could maybe be a monitor someday. I mean, the goggles saying with Apple yesterday really kind of opened my mind to the fact that the content, the consumption environments are changing. Certainly you have different like footprints. Yes. Media entertainment, stadium environments, but the software, the users. Yes. That is going to have more environments. So I'm just thinking like, what does that mean for collaboration? Yeah, so that is a new form factor is how we think of it, which will require its own user interfaces to interact. But collaboration is going to be expected on all of these platforms. So we see that as a, Apple's always been fantastic at building amazing experiences, solving some of the hardest problems. So we see that as a platform and expect that we will continue to support all platforms including the new ones from Apple. Final question, what's your North Star? What's your go-to-market plans right now? What are you, take a minute to explain what you're working on and what the focus is. Yeah, so there's a few things you are focused on. So one is companies are increasingly on the hardware side. I know you're speaking to Snorri Kejbu. We are focused, companies are trying to figure out what their campus looks like, right? It may be smaller, smaller footprint, but it's going to look very different. So we are in the unique position with both our collaboration, networking portfolio to help our customers redesign that new campus. So that's a big go-to-market focus. And the second area is, when you think about collaboration, it's not just meetings and messaging that gets the attention, but it's good old-fashioned phone calls. It is large events, it's broadcast like this. So we've built tools that allow for all of that on the platform. So customers are increasingly thinking about what their collaboration platform looks like, and that's a big go-to-market focus to that point. They want it fast, they want low latency, they want crisp screen, good audio. They want everything. On touch. Do you have a great time? We certainly do a follow-up. I wanted to follow this trend because I think that the shift in developer action, open source, large language models, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'd love to be back and look forward to some more announcements tomorrow. Yeah, good luck tomorrow. Thank you. Stay tuned, big announcement for Genitive AI with Collaboration Group at Cisco. I think I got to think ahead of what it might be. I think it's big, so stay tuned. More CUBE after this short break. Stay with us. CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas, for Cisco Live, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Industry analysts breaking all down all the action. Thanks for watching.