 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to the guys Cisco Live, introducing some new innovations, Stu and Dave around reinventing networking. Couple key themes, big announcements around ACI anywhere, application-centric infrastructure, hyper flex, and the new cloud center suite where they're doubling down on cloud, redefining the network. Stu, we've been here last year, been watching Cisco policy-based, intent-based networking. Cisco's tying it all together with new branding, the bridge to tomorrow. Your thoughts? Yeah, John, I actually, I like some of the new branding, the bridge to tomorrow. I've been critical of Cisco. Cisco always said, oh, well, networking's everywhere and it's really important. And it's like, well, okay, but where's the meat? Where's the detail behind this? They've done a number of acquisitions in this space. They're making sure that they understand where they are. They had some failures along the way. I mean, just to call a spade a spade, John, they are going to be a leader in multi-cloud is where they want to be, but they had some falters along in being a public cloud. The inter-cloud message that they had, they confused the service providers, they, we didn't understand how they played with the hyper scale players and now they're understanding where they sit. SD-WAN, critically important. Where they live in the data center and you know, interesting, we talk about the, do we care about the data center or do we care about where the data is centered? And of course, that is not in one place, but it is many places. We know customers today live in a multi-cloud world. How I get to my data, how I leverage my data is critically important and the networking and management is something that's critical across all those, so right, as you said, ACI and Hyperflex, the cloud center suite, I know is an area we're going to dig into a bunch this week because Cisco has an opportunity to play across these environments, but Cisco's been trying for a long time to be the manager of managers in these environments. I mean, I think back to things Dave Vellante and the Wikibon team and I have done for years talking about, you know, how do you manage in this heterogeneous world and it's just instead of multi-vendor, we're now talking multi-cloud. And you know what, everything's coming together. Dave, we've been covering Cisco, we're looking at the timing of the positioning. It seems to be coming together and around the rebranding, which by the way, I agree with Stu, I like it. The bridge tomorrow, it resonates with me, maybe because I'm from the Bay Area, but they're bridging two worlds, they're bridging on-premises and cloud together in a very seamless way, in an elegant way, architecturally, so the branding ties in with really much a rounding out of the portfolio, so a lot of storylines to follow. The new branding, Chuck Robbins getting his C-legs now as Cisco goes to the next level and clearly they see multi-cloud as their positioning because this has been Cisco's core positioning for many, many years, this idea of enabling other people to do innovation, whether it's applications and workloads, now they're connecting two worlds, your thoughts on the timing and their positions vis-a-vis the industry. Well, Cisco talked this morning in the keynote about another bridge. On one side of the network is users and devices, on the other side of the network are applications and data and we've talked for years about how the network is flattening and traffic's going east-west, et cetera, but inter-clouding, if you will, puts increased pressure on that and it's clearly Cisco's strategy to be the best at connecting whether it's on-prem and public clouds or between public clouds. Cisco's got to make the case that on our networks you're going to be higher performance and more secure and that's certainly what they're implying. They're also making a big transition from being a hardware company to a software company. When you listen to VMware talk about Cisco, they talk about, oh, they make the best hardware, the best switches and Cisco's like, they're talking software capabilities across the network, new architectures reinventing, you know, coming at it from the network which is obviously their strong point and it just really sets up an interesting competitive dynamic between Cisco, certainly VMware who's trying to do to networking and storage what it did to servers and now you've got IBM and Red Hat coming at it from applications and the development perspective. We're here in the DevNet zone and I think that's the other piece of the announcements that we're hearing today is developers can actually program with things like IoT and new use cases so pretty exciting times. Stu, story lines around the data center you made the comment, there was kind of a play on words on the keynote data is centered, so center dash ed, centered. So the data center concept is moving into data being centered, the value proposition. This has been interesting because if you look at what DevNet has spawned and DevNet create under Susie Wee's leadership, you saw the role of APIs. So if data moves around the network and that's the core competency of Cisco moving packets from point A to point B, adding automation, adding intelligence with intent-based networking and cloud enabling it on the other side, you got to have access to the data. The data's got to be traversing and inter-offering with multiple environments. This is now a architectural standard. Is Cisco from a product portfolio standpoint whether it's security analytics, cloud apps, management, IoT and networking, does it all come together, your thoughts? Yeah, so first of all, Cisco plays in a lot of these environments. We talk not just data center but when you talk about branch office, something Cisco's been doing a really long time and how do I network between all of those remote locations and my central location and my central location might not be the data center, it might be A or multiple public clouds out there. So Cisco's been attacking this back when optimization many years ago. SD-WAN really has taken that and much more super important when we talk about that this multi-cloud environment and how I get that connectivity, so they're there. And Cisco from the ground up has gone through a lot of rebuilds. So the cloud center suite that we talk about, microservices architecture built with Kubernetes into that API economy that we're talking about which is a lot of what we talk about here in the DevNet zone. So absolutely Cisco has, they're known in the space, they have a lot of the skills, they have a very broad platform of products out there. David Gechler this morning, he's just reeling off all the different areas they play to and saying, we've got like 6,000 people in the opening keynote. He's like, I came and looked at this room and I've got like four X the amount of engineers working on your networking security issues that we're here. It's like 24,000 people, it's an army. There's very few companies, outside of Google, Amazon and Microsoft that can call on that engineering strength and that's just the internal piece. What we love, we talked to Susie Wey and she's like, we've got 500,000 on our community platforms helping to build. IT, OT, IOT, all the network, all the security pieces. So Cisco is not new to a lot of these but is refocused on a lot of what they are doing. So the big news obviously is the ACI anywhere and HyperFlex anywhere and putting the data center connecting those two worlds, you got the cloud as well. So the role of hyper convergence is certainly key in this announcement here today. ACI application centric infrastructure is just code words for policy based intent based networking, all the stuff that Cisco is used to doing. Then when you connect it to the cloud, you've got data center, on-premises, cloud and then hyper convergence at the edge. This is the core, right? They got the edge, multiple environments. You got cloud and you got the data center and a legacy environment which is evolving. Those are all coming together. Stu, what is the, what, this is a cross domain challenge. Is Cisco prepared? David, love to get your comments on this as well. To be that cross domain vendor because multi-cloud truly will require data to be moving around policies to be automated and deployed across domains. This is a huge challenge. Yeah, I mean, John, it is challenging. And if you look at the hyper-converged infrastructure space where Cisco plays with HyperFlex, goes up against VMware, VSAN, Nutanix and the rest there, the people that sell that and build that, aren't necessarily the ones that really understand multi-cloud. And we've seen that space maturing for the last couple of years. Obviously Cisco's got a right to be at the table there and they're moving that direction but to the data center folks and they are data center folks that have done networking and storage and all that beast. Are they getting trained up and helping to help bridge to that multi-cloud environment? I think there's still a lot of work to go when I talk to the channel, when I talk to the people that are out there going to market on that. Well, that's the big challenge is how do you move the base? How do you get them from point A to point B without spending a billion dollars? You heard Gordon today stand up there and say, you got to change now. And he admitted, anytime somebody tells me I have to change, I kind of get defensive about it. But some of the things that I, well obviously this end-to-end architecture, they're in a position in theory anyway to do that. What choice do they have? A couple of things that struck me is they've got a new consumption model, a SaaS based consumption model. They also announced four validated designs for OT, for IoT apps, which that's good to see some actually meet on that bone. They got like utility substations and mining operations and fleet management. I mean, it's stuff that you wouldn't traditionally think about coming from a data center company. So they're making some moves that I think are substantive and necessary. Well, I took some notes there. I wanted to get your comments on this guys, because to me, this is the core news here, is that Cisco is truly trying to put that end-to-end architecture around cross domains. You're seeing their core data center business continue to be robust. That's their bread and butter. You got the edge that's developing nicely with IoT and enterprise edge and other places around campus. Then you get multi-class. You got the three-legged stool. Core data center, multi-cloud and edge. Does this address the industry's demand for apps changing, workloads being distributed, and then management across these multiple domains or multi-cloud, because you got to manage this stuff. So cost to ownership, these are now the table stakes. Your thoughts on those three areas, Stu. Core data center, multi-cloud and edge. Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about for the last year, the move from hardware to software is not an easy one. There are things they need to change for their product. They need to change how their field handles it, the whole, the compensation and how they support their channel is super challenging. At VMworld last year, we really highlighted how that inter-cloud networking, what a critical piece it was. I was so excited that the original vision of what NYSERA had pre-acquisition was starting to come out there, because VMware's coming after Cisco in that manner. Cisco, not like they're trying to create hypervisors, they're going to live in all those worlds, but there definitely is some conflict there and something I always look at. Cisco's got a gigantic ecosystem. They have hundreds of thousands of certified Cisco engineers and they've got a great ecosystem here. And a strong channel. And a strong channel. Right, they go to market partners as well as the technology partners and they're still strong. We're going to have on this week a lot of those players here, but that change is something that is tough to go through. And it's this journey that they're on. Well, this day brought up consumption. I want to dig into the consumption piece because how people consume the cloud obviously means they got to stand up the cloud too, multi-cloud. Cisco's clearly got Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Google seems to be a strategic partner as well as Amazon and Azure, but I think Google kind of feels like there's more strategic alliance there. I'm just speculating from my opinion. But if I'm a Cisco customer, it's pretty easy now to go multi-cloud. I don't need to do a lot of things differently. The question is, how do I manage it? What's the cost? How do I consume it? This is going to be critical, your thoughts. Well, so Cisco's claiming they're going to abstract that complexity and whatever APIs and software infrastructure or infrastructures of service that you're using, they're going to make that simplify that and allow you to have a single management console. So as I said before, they're coming at it from a networking perspective. You know, VMware is coming at it from the traditional hypervisor and trying to elbow its way into the networking and storage space. And then as I said, you've got other companies like IBM and Red Hat now coming at it from the application space and Kubernetes is obviously an important role there. I think personally, I think that networking is a right place, a good place to come from. The problem for customers is still going to be complexity because the cloud providers are going to have their own management framework. Obviously, vSphere is a big player here. Now you got Cisco at all and then a bunch of startups saying, hey, ours is even better. On the IBM Red Hat combination. Right, and so I don't foresee a day where you're going to have one single pane of glass we never had in this industry. It's always been nirvana. And so then it comes down to Cisco getting its fair share. I think Cisco's in a very good position to get its fair share for the reasons that Stu just mentioned. Stu, so I want to get your thoughts about we're in the DevNet zone. That's where theCUBE is. Our second year at Cisco Live will be at the North America show again this year. It's on the schedule, but the role of the developer, the role of infrastructure as code now is in place, actually happening within Cisco's customer base. So if you're a Cisco customer, you're looking at this saying, okay, I've been running the Cisco network, I have all the portfolio of services. What is the role of the network engineer? Is there a renaissance coming? We said this last year, I kind of see it happening here. The network is now the computer, network is the data. This is a great opportunity for Cisco. Your thoughts on the culture of the Cisco customer base and that vibe of infrastructure as code. Yeah, so John, I used to bristle a little bit when you said, well, we're going to turn all the network engineers and they're going to become coders. And I said, well, I know a lot of network engineers and some of them love and thrive that, but a lot of them, they're in the CLI, they're doing their thing. If you go walk around this DevNet zone, a lot of the stuff that's happening isn't networking. They are builders. This reminds me of going to AWS re-invent and talking about people, here are the tools and the skills that you need to have to be a builder. And absolutely, networking is a part of it. That management orchestration, security, all things that touch into the network, but it's not, oh, how do I manage my network switch better? Which was kind of the hardware focus view and maybe code this, but it really is how my building APIs, how my leveraging things. I've got IoT demos out there and it's networking is in there but it's not necessarily the thing. And so therefore you've got this wave of developers and builders. And John, we know that's the future is you need to be a builder. How can you create faster? Things like serverless or moving that direction where I don't need, it's less about the coding, it's more about my application, my data and my building. You bring up a great point, student. This is something that I always point to when I look at who's kind of BSing the marketplace in terms of speeds and feeds or announcements. When you see people actually coding and being enabled to do some great value, you start to see that's a good signal. And here in the DevNet zone, so four or five demos that were writing software and apps to take advantage of the hardware, take advantage of the network. So now the network is enabling through APIs to extend the data. This is kind of changing the concept of how packets would move around the network. So this is truly a tell sign in my opinion of the modern infrastructure. The question is Dave, how fast will the customers migrate to being true DevOps or infrastructure as code, customers writing apps, building new things to create that value? Well, I would say this, that of all the sort of traditional, large scale, column, whatever, legacy, enterprise, data setter companies, I think Cisco's the only one that I can really point to that has kind of got developers right. I mean, IBM, Blue Mix, Start, Stop. Remember the EMC code initiative? That was kind of a joke. And so Oracle owns Java and it still sort of struggles with developers. So I think Cisco got it right and I think the reason they got it right is because they're focused. I mean, that's what I do like about Cisco strategy and the reason why, you know, you obviously give them high chances is because they're really focused on that networking piece. They're not trying to be all things to all people, even though you could forecast that they're sort of headed in that direction, but they're starting from a position of strength. Well, you made a good point. The Success and Failure developer programs about creating an environment where it's compatible with how their expectations are, microservices, containers, these abstraction layers that they're used to dealing with create value. Developers love that. The other thing I would say is that as developers look at what they can do, the world's changed. It used to be the network used to dictate what can happen to applications. Now applications need to program the network. I think this was a shift we saw with DevNet Create and DevNet two years ago where they started moving from the command line interface to more of software abstractions or application interfaces where, say, hey, you know, let's just do more with the network. So applications now require programmability. This is the shift. It's upside down from what it was when the industry started. So this new bridge has to be application-centric. And to me, that's what I get out of the cloud announcement around multi-cloud. You're starting to see the portfolio up and down their stack, you know, from security. They've got StealthWatch, Tetration. That's SaaS, Analytics, AppDynamics, among other things, Data Center, Hyperflex, UCS, Nexus, all lined up. Cloud Center, Container Platform on multiple clouds, IoT, Kinetic, VEdge, Meraki, Cloud Services Router. This is now a portfolio. They got the products, too. Absolutely, John. Okay, guys, we're going to have a great day, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. You can get off here in Barcelona. Stay with us for more coverage here at Cisco Live. That's the queue. We'll be right back.