 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hi, welcome back to Cisco Live from sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Marn with Dave Vellante and Dave and I are joined by a couple of guests from DXC to my right. We've got Jake Sager, principal client executive, TMT, tech, media, telecom. Jake, great to have you on the program. Thank you. We're broadcasting from the sun. And Randy Redmond, the director of security services product management. Randy, welcome. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. So we're in the DevNet zone. You can imagine all of the exciting conversations going on behind us here. Guys, I just noticed that DXC, you guys have been around for a couple of years, IT services company with 25 billion annual revenue. But you guys were just named, I think this is this morning, number three on CRN's 2019 solution provider list up from number 10 last year. Pretty good momentum. Jake, we'll start with you. What do you see in feet on the street in the market with respect to digital transformation? What are customers pains and how is DXC helping knock him out of the park? Well, I think, you know, DXC has a long legacy history, over 60 years of business together from CSC, EDS. And obviously HP heritage. So they've kind of seen it all and seen the business transform from a highly, you know, on the ground business to now a lot of things in the cloud. With that, obviously customers are looking to do business in different ways. There's a lot of digital disruptors out there. So they're looking to find the new solution that's going to shade off the competition, kind of skirt it, find the newest best thing before they can and find customer driven solutions rather than just cost driven solutions and other things like that. So what do you say customer driven solutions? Let's dig into that a little bit more. What does that mean and how is it actually, how does it manifest? Well, I think the customer can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people. In retail, it can be somebody walking into your store and banking, it can be somebody using an app. But what does that end consumer want? What's going to make their life easier and make them go to you versus another company? And that's really what companies need to be looking at. There's no one answer to anything, but it's a lot of thought led leadership to try to come up with something brand new that is not going to be disrupted by the next Airbnb or Uber. So you're a CEO, Mike Lowry talks a lot about digital transformation. Randy, you're in the security side of things. So we're going to dig into that a little bit. But in terms of the evolution of digital transformation generally and specifically how people are rethinking security as a result because we often say, what's the difference between a business and a digital business? Well, it's how they use data. Okay, well, and that opens up a whole can of worms on security. So what are you seeing in terms of the evolution of the so-called digital transformation, but specifically how it's affecting their posture towards security? Yeah, no, absolutely, because in a digital environment, customers are completely rethinking both how their infrastructure is deployed and how their applications are deployed. And so really it's opening up whole new avenues for security threats to enter their environment. At the same time, there are so many individual security technologies. And customers are really struggling with what are the right technology choices to make and then more importantly, how to operate them effectively, how to implement appropriate security policies, how to actually monitor effectively for threats across the environment. So digital transformation is changing their business environment, but it's really completely opening up the sphere on the security side of the house. So Jake, we were talking and I had asked you what your favorite topics are. You said smart city IoT and connected cars. Sounds like a security nightmare, but it's an opportunity as well for you guys. So you go in, what's the customer conversation like? I mean, pick one or all three if you can generalize in terms of, I mean, these are all new things, right? It's the Wild West right now. What's customers mindset? Like you said, they don't want to get disrupted. They're looking at new opportunities. What are they looking at? How are you guys helping them? Well, it depends industry by industry. When it comes to healthcare, we can help with remote telemedicine, operating medical equipment remotely. But again, that's going to bring in a whole bunch of new security threats, which Randy's going to be more than equipped to talk about. But I think securing that is really a big problem. When you start talking about massive IoT, you're talking about thousands and thousands of sensors out there in a smart city or an oil mining gas utility like they were talking about earlier today. You're talking about tons of different entry points, lots of different vulnerabilities. So that's definitely a huge issue for them. It's also a ton of new data that they don't know how to manage, that they don't know how to make sense out of through artificial intelligence or other means. So for a company like us that really has strengths and security, artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well as a strong background of data center, data lake management, helping them kind of figure out what data to use and how to use it most effectively. That's really where we shine. Because we're not necessarily the company providing the hardware, we're not the company writing the software. But we're really the glue that integrates it all together and brings all those multi-solutions together. Because in IoT, it's an ecosystem, it's not solution in a box, right? Let's dig into the smart city concept. It's so fascinating. I've read up on Las Vegas, the city of Las Vegas, which has been on theCUBE, been a lot to really transform that city. But to your point, Jake, about data, I think Chuck Robbins said this morning in the keynote that organizations are only really getting insight from less than 1% of their data. It must be one of those, where do we start? You're talking about working with municipalities on becoming smart cities and being able to apply some of your expertise in AI. Where do you start that conversation? Well, I mean, the terms over abused, I think data is a new oil, right? So if you don't know which data you're getting it from and you're only getting 10%, you're not doing a very good job as an oil producer, right? So our company's very good at identifying where the data is, because a lot of times that's half the problem, it's finding where that data resides, getting it into a place where you can actually ingest it and then actually analyze it and get something useful out of it. Companies typically don't know where all their data is. They don't know how to analyze it and they definitely don't know how to turn it into something useful. So that's something DXC does across the board. What about the partnership with Cisco? So Cisco, obviously, it's got the networks, it's got packets flying around, it's got to secure those. What's the partnership like? Are you leveraging your products? I'm sure you are, you guys use everybody's products, but what's the partnership like and what specifically are you doing in the security area, Randy? Yeah, so in terms of the partnership with Cisco, we're certainly looking in several areas, frankly, because we're looking with our clients at a solution-led approach, right? And that's one of the things that we like with Cisco is the broad portfolio meshes with our broad portfolio. So certainly key areas of focus for us right now are in the unified communication space and how we're helping with collaboration for our clients, but also in the security area, technologies such as Cisco Stealth Watch, which is helping provide more visibility to what's happening in networks today, because more and more our view is that security, as we were just talking about, even in the IoT space, becomes more of an analytics exercise. It's less about really being able to detect what you already know, it's really about being able to drive detection from the unknown, and so the more data that we can get, the more visibility into network environments, the better. How do you work with Cisco? 25% of Cisco's revenue is they call it services. So where do they leave off? I mean, they're a product company. You guys are a services firm, but they have services. Rick, how do you interact with them? They don't compete, I presume, at least there's maybe some overlap, but where do they leave off when you guys pick up? Yeah, so certainly we're not competing with Cisco from a services perspective. We're certainly relying on Cisco services for hardware and professional support around their technology. We're really there to provide overall solution design, architecture installation, and we'll leverage Cisco professional services where that's appropriate, and then we provide managed services on the backend as well. So you're saying their role is to make sure it's architected properly and it's working in the way it's promised. Your role is to, let me say it my way, and you can correctly, is help the customer figure out how to apply those technologies to create business value. Well, exactly, and also typically in a client solution, Cisco may be one of several technologies that are involved in a broader solution set. You got to make it all work together. And so part of our role is to act as that integrator to bring the core Cisco elements with DXC services. So your job's getting harder and harder and harder. Totally it is, from a security perspective. As a consumer, things are getting easier, right? Oh yeah, Google, Facebook, Instagram, it's so easy, but the backend with cloud and DevOps, the pace of change, how have you seen that affect your business? How are you dealing with that rapid change? Yeah, so I think that from a couple of perspectives there, one is that it's changing how we go about the process in terms of developing services and capabilities for our clients. Just as Agile has taken over actually in the application space, it's really driving how we think about actually developing offerings now around getting technology out into the market more quickly, evolving and growing capability from there. And so really it's all about how we get proof of value for our clients quickly by getting technology into their hands as quickly as possible. So let's talk about some of these waves of innovation Cisco was talking about this morning, talking about this explosion of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, being able to have this access that works really well indoors, outdoors, how that's changing even consumer demand. What opportunities, and Jake I'll start with you, what opportunities are some of the things that Cisco was talking about with respect to connectivity, AI with GPUs being everywhere, edge, mobile, architectures becoming so amorphous, opportunity for DXC to help customers really not just integrate the technologies, but to excel and accelerate themselves to define new services, new business models. What's your differentiation point there? I mean our main differentiation point from DXC is agnostic to the technology. We really specialize in being vendor agnostic, finding the best of breed companies out there and integrating it into our portfolio and offering it to our clients. If our client wants Azure, we're not going to try to sell them on Google Cloud. If they want one or the other, we're going to be hand in hand with the customer either way. With these new technologies that come around, it's just going to open the doors for so many new types of business, so many more disruptive businesses. No matter what comes along, our goal is to have that portfolio in hand which Cisco rounds out to be able to offer to our, we have over 6,000 enterprise clients. So we need to be able to manage every shape, size, variety, industry, anything you can think of. What's the trend? Is the trend, yeah, we want Azure, you say, okay, we'll make it work for you, or is the trend like, you guys figure it out. We're not sure what the right fit is. How much of that is going on? I'd say you probably see 50-50. We're seeing a lot of that. Certainly as clients are migrating applications to the cloud, they may be starting with a particular cloud platform, but clients are really, frankly, fairly agnostic in terms of the cloud platform they're migrating to. They're taking advantage of more and more SaaS applications. So one of the trends that we're definitely seeing is how to address client security concerns in a hybrid cloud environment because that's more and more what we expect the future to be, even if clients are focusing on a particular cloud platform as their starting point today. So as data is traversing the network and one of the things that I heard this morning from Chuck Robbins keynote was that the common denominator as all of these changes and waves of innovation are coming is the network. Data is traversing the network. Given that is a given and there's only going to be more and more data and more connected devices, more mobile data traffic. Randy, a question for you, how can DXC, how can you help customers leverage your expertise and say security in AI as you mentioned to extract more value from their data and allow them to become far more secure as it's no longer acceptable. You can't just simply put a firewall around a perimeter that has so many amorphous points. Yeah, no absolutely. And as we mentioned with all of the data that's available today, it really becomes more of an analytics problem. And one of the investments that DXC is making is specifically in our security platform that allows us to ingest data from pretty much any infrastructure data source and be able to leverage capabilities to provide analytics, machine learning and automation on top of that to help clients leverage the power of the data and specifically from a security perspective not just drive detection because that's interesting. The question I get from clients is well now what I do about it. And we're leveraging the investment in our platform automation is actually to begin to take automated actions on behalf of our clients in order to solve security problems. Excellent guys, well thank you so much Jake and Randy for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me about what you guys are doing at DXC. Next time we'll have to talk about connected cars. Sure, thank you. All right. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live in sunny San Diego. Thanks for watching.