 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. It's day three of three days of live coverage. Go to thecube.net, look at angle.com to get all the stories. And of course, I'm here with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon, my co-host for the week. Our next guest is Gary Harrison, head of technology services, Metzzi Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thanks you guys. It's good to be here. So, you're in the Cisco ecosystem, so Stu and I have been talking about this all week. Couple of big trends. Open, Cisco's opening up, you got DevNet success with developers. Cloud is a new architecture. Okay, intent-driven architectures are huge. Sounds like outcomes to me. So I hear a lot of these conversations about what's the outcome and then building a technology. So I want to get your thoughts on that. From your perspective, what does that mean to you? When you hear that intent networking, developer community, sounds a lot like a different Cisco. It's a different model. It's changing I think the way business processes are today and getting organizations to understand that process of capturing what they want the infrastructure intent and their application intent look like and then understanding how that drives different models for deploying services as well as the operations behind it. You guys do a lot of stuff with customers. I want you to take a minute to explain what you guys do, your company. What are some of the things that you guys get involved in? Where are you in the ecosystem? What kinds of projects are you engaging on? Okay, we're a professional services partner. We're a service-only integration partner with Cisco. So it's just through, we don't resell, we get to focus on purely customer success and we help enable the channel and the partners directly. And the focus is the enterprise cloud suite. So it's really around helping customers understand how to get the most out of those technologies, how to choose the right element of the cloud suite for the job. Gary, Gary, so you're at an interesting position to watch some of the transformations going on Cisco. We said the old way measuring Cisco was boxes and ports. The new way is software, it's open, it's those things. Since you're not one of the, you know, not in a derogatory, we're boxellers. You know, give us your viewpoint as to how Cisco's going through their transformation and how your customers are reacting to that. Yeah, so it's definitely a good shift towards the software elements of it. And we're seeing the strength of the software and the products that come out and the capabilities is rapidly changing. And you've seen the increase in the product suite recently, the number of the move towards analytics and other software to support operational life cycles as well as just the provisioning cycles. I think a challenge for the customers is a lot of complexity introduced, a lot of new tools out of the box out there. And the difficult question is always know how to best use each particular tool to get value for the business. Yeah, it's one of the big questions is it used to be, I really understood my network because I built it. I racked it, stacked it, wired it, configured it in the CLI. Today, a lot of the pieces of the network you're managing, you don't own. They're in the cloud, they're extending beyond, how do your services and solutions help customers get their arms around this kind of multi-cloud world? As far as the focus, I guess, is reducing that complexity. There's a lot you can do with the different software that's out there and really to try and step back from just the siloed tools and looking at the cloud stack as a whole. And starting small, starting simple, identifying those early use cases that will help drive cloud adoption in an organization and understanding how the software and the tools benefit them to do that. As you can just say, you can't see inside the software easily. If you're going to embed infrastructure as code, you need a way to make sure that as you build that code and those processes, you keep that visibility into what that software is meant to be doing for you. Gary, on that point, I want to just double down on that concept holistically. We hear that all week. We've heard from some Cisco executives as customers that it's a systems view almost. It's not the box view. What does that mean to the customer today and how far along are your customers in that mindset? Are they there? Are they kicking the tires? Because you've got to engage on real front line projects where there's outcomes involved and the plumbing's in place. So how do you get there without disrupting? That's the question we hear. But how do I get the holistic view without disrupting the business? What's your thoughts on customer's position on that? I think to get the holistic view, it's about the business needs, I think, embrace that and understanding it's about delivering applications and services now and the infrastructure is there to support that and not focus on these infrastructure centric models. And so that's the first journey is understanding what are the services that are important to the business and how those services are involved. And then I think the challenge we see from the customers is actually the attendee organizational and process challenges. The technology itself is not necessarily the all the complexity. It's how that aligns the organization. And so I think those early wins and those early outcomes are a organization that's aware of those challenges. I think I'm almost getting a little stepping stone. Get a little success. Don't take a big project. What's your take on road mapping in that? Because that's challenging. What are you seeing for success use cases that customers can take right out of the gate to get this intent thing going? What are some of the low hanging fruit opportunities? So one thing we focus on, I guess, is changing our engagement model with the customers and something we sort of, I guess, our pride ourselves on is where a lot more flexible and agile ourselves as a, in terms of delivering infrastructure services. So again, we try to communicate to customers, find use cases that deliver value and return on investment early and focus on delivering that sort of one use case. It doesn't matter what it is in the cloud stack, whether it's through automation of network infrastructure, orchestration of services on top of there, but pick a very clear use case and develop that first. And then once you understand how the technology stitched together end to end, you can then start to grow that inside the organization. Is there any use cases that pop out that you can just point to anecdotally that seem to be popular? There's a couple of different extremes. So ACI is a massive enabler at the moment. It's really, since SDN has come along, it's a catalyst to drive the rest of the cloud changed infrastructure. So there's some very specific use cases around automating that infrastructure. Not just what ACI does itself, but to create that automation layer on top of that. So people are deploying lots of infrastructure, so that's one of the specific use cases we see. Gary, I really like what you said about it. It's changing the engagement model because it used to be, I'm going to roll out a new application, okay, I need to figure out the plumbing. Now when I look at intent-based offerings there, it's really more about I'm building new applications and the network is a critical piece of it. It's actually helped me drive some of these new modern micro-architecture architectures there. You've got to, I'm sure, be talking to a little bit of a broader jobs inside the customer. How does that change your engagement? Who are the roles that you're talking to today? Well actually what's very fine is tools like CloudCenter. And for me, one of its strengths is it's finally an ability to tangibly capture intent in an application blueprint. And I find that's a good way to bring organizations together because now you have a focal point for your network and infrastructure or platforms teams and your application teams to come together. That provides a common language to talk about it. And that's one of the real strength we find to start having those conversations with those different teams within organizations. Gary, talk about the old way and new way. We always like to kind of break things down in a very simplistic way. And Chuck Robbins, the CEO on stage said, that's the old way, it looks like an architecture. Hey, firewall, I get that. And he's like, some people actually have this today. And he's kind of looking at the modern cloud, obviously the circle with all their different services. So kind of a Cisco plug. But from your standpoint, when you talk to customers, what was the older conversations that you can point to saying, we used to do it this way. This is what we would talk about. These are the meetings we would have. Now the shift is towards this. What's that, what's the old way? And what's it transforming into when you actually have those conversations? What is it like? So the big difference for me, infrastructure projects, they're very traditional, waterfall model, they work out what you want to buy, where you want to be, you put a project plan around that and deliver that. But in engagement we have today to say to people, all the importance is in the software. It's the services you're delivering on the software and the capability to develop in the software. And that's not something out of the box. It's very difficult to say where we don't want to be in six months or where we don't want to be in year. So again, the way we encourage and we engage with our customers is to put a roadmap together but to identify something in a much shorter term that you can deliver, start delivering something and then take a more agile approach around it to come back, review and re-plan again and look at what your priorities are. What's the role of the solution architect on this? Because a lot of things we're seeing and we're trying to kind of connect the dots here. Holistic roadmaps are interesting because you got to have a foundational architecture. What is the preferred kind of consistent theme that you're seeing around architectural decisions? Are there table stakes, are there certain things that are always going to be in flux? How do you view the big picture on the solution architect piece of it? Is there certain things that are must-haves, weight on this, what's your reaction to that? I think a solution, I think it's a challenging piece. I think it's probably where you see organizations are probably weaker as having a cloud solution architecture function. We still see infrastructure architecture, enterprise architecture, but that's solution architecture for the cloud model. I think that's actually more a challenging piece. I don't need any obvious answer on what for the customers we see, there's no common answers. That's a really hot area right now. Gary, one of the biggest challenges we see in multi-cloud is no two customers are alike, but through the customers that you're talking to, what are some of the common stumbling blocks or hurdles for really getting full value out of their solutions that you see from customers today? I think it's understanding the end-to-end lifecycle of a service. So we can do a lot with the multi-cloud capabilities in deploying internal infrastructure to external, but the processes have to be the same, security, compliance, these are the aspects that come in to add a lot of complexity. And also it's not just the way the applications, the infrastructure are built, patching life cycles, no post-deployment of virtual images, the way people then update and maintain them and that lifecycle around it. I think it's different in a virtualized world. In a containerized world, we see a lot more advancements around it and multi-cloud is easier. I think it's for people to take their legacy applications and try and move them into a cloud native scenario, which is a real challenge. Gary, pretend I'm a friend of yours and I come to you and say, hey Gary, I'm new to this whole intent-based networking thing. What is it? How would you describe it? What's your definition of, what is intent-based networking really mean? Well, there's two parts. One is to identify somewhere to capture what the definition of your applications and services are and what that means, and the infrastructure that lies underneath. I'm going to say a cloud center is one part of it. Other organizations may have other models, but it's rather than working to traditional high-level design, low-level design, we see all requirements analysis. Now capturing that intent is somewhere that's both software-consumable and can be software-defined. So you can use software to push the intent in there and you can consume it through software. And the next major bit of the puzzle is to provide that freedom to the infrastructure layers underneath so they get to decide how they implement that intent. And that's what gives you this multi-cloud freedom. How we're implemented in a public cloud can be different to how we're implemented in the private cloud. The tools, the processes, the infrastructure, the software I sit on can be different, but the outcome that's delivered is the same. Yeah, it's an interesting show. You mentioned SDN earlier. We see a lot of activity on software-defined data center, architectural things. And again, it's challenging. Not everything looks the same, but it's super important. Then we hear things like Google Cloud on stage and we hear Kubernetes, we hear Istio, which is a service mesh. So you start to see up at the stack the applications taking kind of almost a network services like mindset. I mean, microservices are basically have the same feel as networking, but it's more up higher in the stack. So you got some really interesting dynamics. You got the SDN thing going on and then you got in the middle of the stack and towards the application these cool microservices with Cloud Native. This is an opportunity for network engineers. I mean, how would you describe to the audience the opportunity for a network engineer or someone who's in the network game to take advantage of that, this new trend that's coming very fast? I was there, it's a different model of networking. And again, the good thing about containers is they do provide this very application-centric focus. Networking is now about providing a service for the application sits on there and container frameworks make that very obvious. So I'd say network engineers, it's a good place to understand that model and that ecosystem and then see how that can be applied to what we've done in virtualization. And as SDN comes along in a more traditional private cloud infrastructure on top of the data center infrastructure we have today, they take some of those models that we learn from things like container frameworks and how do we apply them to virtualization? That's a great point about the virtualization. It's almost a roadmap to how to understand the impact and interplay between the networks really is. Okay, final question for you is, you know, Cisco Live this just seems to be different. What's the vibe of the show? What's your, if you had someone who didn't come here that's watching say, hey, I missed it this year, I heard there's a lot of action. DevNet's got 500,000 developers. What's different about this year's Cisco Live? What's the most important story? Can you share your opinion on what's happening? I guess for us being in the DevNet Village, it is about the DevNet zone, the buzz we're seeing, the people, the types of questions we get asked to understand now that there's definitely a lot more interest in this development side of it. What's some of the questions you're getting? What are the hot topics if you stack ranked them? People just want to understand new trends in software, coding, how can I apply my coding skills to coding the network or where do I learn about that? And we get lots of questions as people pass the stands. Gary, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on and sharing your commentary here. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. All right, this live CUBE coverage, day three here at Cisco Live. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We're here breaking all the action down. We'll be back with more. Stay with us for day three coverage. We'll be right back after this short break.