 Welcome back everyone, we are here at Cisco Live, day two of CUBE coverage, I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante, my co-host, extracting the signal from the noise, of course. It's our pop-up queue, we've got a small space, but we're doing whatever it takes to get the data. We've got a great guest here, keynote speaker, on stage, day two, J2 Patel, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco security and collaboration business units. J2, great to see you, friends of the CUBE alumni. Thanks for coming on, you're super busy. It's been a great couple of days, and thank you for having me. This is, it's great to have you folks here. Just love the Cisco positioning right now, it really hits, it's very Apple-esque, simplify, reminds me of that Steve Jobs video on the internet, when he took over Apple for the first time. We've got too many product lines, we've got to get it down, we're going to try a date back in, we're going to do things the old way, Apple. It feels like Cisco's simplifying everything, getting things tight, talking about customer outcomes and experiences. This is kind of a moment, I haven't seen this before at Cisco, and you're a big part of that, I want to say congratulations, but take a, tell us and explain what is the core motivation behind it? How does all come together? You know, the motivation is, by the way, Apple is a company that I personally admire quite a bit, and I think they're one of the greatest companies in the world, and so, you know, I inspire to be kind of learning from them all the time. And when you start thinking about our business, I mean, we are at an at scale business, but not only are we at scale in networking, we're at scale in security, we are at scale in collaboration, we're actually getting to be pretty significant in observability. So, the natural state of a business, if you leave it underdressed, is complexity. And so what you have to do is pull it together and make sure that you only get the things that are going to be pertinent to get, because the world's a noisy place, like Steve Jobs would say, right? And you need to make sure that you have the few things that you want to go and tell people about, so that it's memorable. And one of the things I've always found is, large companies make the mistake of making things be comprehensive rather than memorable. And memorable Trump's comprehensive all the time, when it comes to messaging to people, because if people can remember the few things that you do really, really well, that's better than you trying to go out and convey to them 100 things that you do that no one's going to remember any of by the end of it. Yeah, and networking security, a big part of this tagline, obviously networking, bulk of the business, greater than 50% of the revenue, core asset, install base, security, your division, looking good off the tee, as they say, in golf. I know you're another golfer. That's a shock, by the way. That was funny. But no, security, big opportunity you have there, and of course your collaboration. One thing about security is we are not time constrained. It's a large market, it's a very fractured market. There's no one who actually owns any kind of dominant share in the market. And truth be told, we were our innovation that slowed down for a while a few years ago. And I think we had to make sure that we did more to go out and kind of burst up the innovation. And about a year ago, we decided that we're going to launch this platform approach called Cisco Security Cloud. We've been working on that for about a year and a half prior to that. That's why I said in my keynote yesterday that I've been waiting for two and a half years to talk about this. Because it was an exciting moment, but once you have a platform, I think a lot of the hurdles that people face today in security actually get addressed. Because the challenges people have right now is on average 50 to 70 of these products, that's 50 to 70 policy engines, is total of like over 3,500 vendors in the space. And so it's just not tenable. And the attackers are getting more sophisticated. They're getting more coordinated. And our defenses are getting more isolated because of the point solutions. And that just doesn't make any sense. It should be the other way around. And so we figured we'd be able to help here. And we launched it a year ago and there was a lot of enthusiasm about the vision, but a cautious level of optimism about our ability to execute. And hopefully at this point, it's clear that we launched XDR at RSA. We launched Secure Access and Multicloud Defense and generative AI capabilities and on and on. And we've now got a very complete portfolio of security that's fully integrated, that ties to the Cisco Networking Cloud. And our best days are yet to come and you'll start to see our momentum of innovation. This is not like this is a one and done thing. Our momentum will continue to keep accelerating over the course of the next few quarters. So what's the memorable pitch to customers and security? Is it a consolidation play? Is it consolidation of security plus networking? What's that memorable? Where security meets the network, Cisco will shine. And we need to make sure that we are, the Cisco networking cloud and the security cloud are going to be loosely coupled but tightly integrated. You don't have to buy Cisco networking in order to buy Cisco security or vice versa. But the two of them will work amazingly well together. But we will be open and we'll have an ecosystem and we'll work with others in the market. And that's actually pretty important to make sure that we recognize we're doing that across all our businesses. And that's a strategic decision that we made that we cannot be a walled garden. We have to make sure that we're open and integrated with everything else in the market. No executive would ever say they're not best of breed. So that notwithstanding, it's very hard for a company with the comprehensive portfolio of a Cisco to be as best of breed as somebody who only does one thing and that's all they do. Okay, so my question is, do you have to be best of breed in all the categories or is it more important to have a platform approach that you can go in with a consolidated story? Look, you're not going to be the best in the world at 3,500 kind of point solutions, right? But there will be some that we have to be really, really good. And then there are going to be others where we're going to be world-class. And so let me give you an example. Our secure access solution, it'll be the best in the market. Hands down, like you're not going to have, there's no one else in the market today that does a single experience for employees and contractors, for accessing applications that are in the cloud and the private data center, for accessing applications from home and at work in exactly the same experience. Even some of our competitors, they'll have a private access solution and that's a different stack from a public access solution. That's not what we're doing. We're doing one experience for all the people regardless of where they are and how they go out and access it. If you look at multi-cloud defense, that's not just best of breed. We're the first to market of any kind of at-scale provider. These are not like, oh, these are kind of tier two or tier three solutions. Not only are they the best, in some cases they're the only one on an at-scale basis. If you look at what we're doing with generative AI with policy engine and what we're doing with the SOC assistant, like no one else has announced a policy engine for firewall where you have six million rules that you need to go out and manage that you can do in a conversational AI kind of mode. And we're the first ones to come out with it. So we will do certain things really, really well and the big advantage will be those will integrate with the platform and that the integration capability along with the excellence on the product is what we'll actually be able to. And then, by the way, the reason we're going to be excellent on the platform is our telemetry is so potent. We have network telemetry with the net flow data, endpoint to endpoint net flow. And these are not things that in security you have to operate a machine scale. You can't just operate a human scale. All right, I've sold you, best of breed. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Of course. Good answer. I love the line, it's connected, it's protected. Another memorable tagline there. Let's shift to AI. You were kind of hinting at it with the generative AI. I know that's something that you're very close to. You feel passionate about network of security is going to be embedded in all aspects of Cisco, products and services. And AI will probably be too in all the different divisions. What's your vision of AI? How do you see it? How are you framing it? What's the, if it's a puzzle, what's the corners look like? We don't have to get all the puzzle pieces. But what's your thinking around it? How are you going to use it? How are you going to integrate with it? How are you going to build on it? What's your vision for AI? So I will say that where we are right now it will be categorically one of the most profound shifts that humans will experience. Not just in our lifetime, but in the history of humanity. And it's going to be larger than the internet. I think it's going to be larger than the mobile revolution. And it's going to use all of those underlying components as to stand on top of. But it's going to be the thing that actually fundamentally changes the world. Now there's going to be a huge upside to it. Phenomenal upside. We saw some examples today in the keynote about some of the upsides. And yesterday. But there's going to be a pretty high risk of a downside as well. And we have to be very responsible on how we kind of go out and address this. We've been working on predictive AI for many, many years and spent billions on that. And that actually really helps us in actually taking advantage of generative AI. So for example, in meetings, the fact that we actually invested so much in speech and everything starts in meetings with speech and moving that to text will really help our generative cause. Because otherwise you wouldn't have been as good on the accuracy of translating speech to text and then being able to do something as instructions with the AI engine. So we will be able to take all the, have all the advantage of been working on this for a while. But you will see that there's going to be, we will be the most kind of intentional AI powered platform for security and for collaboration and for all the other areas, networking observability on the planet. This is a big area of strategic importance for us. We will be very responsible. We have a set of data that allows us to be very unique because what's happening in AI is, if you look at open AI, that's great for generic data. But if I go to open AI and say, tell me about what I missed this morning in my meetings, they're not going to know what to tell you on that front. That requires custom data. And so that's what we'll be able to make sure that we can use to provide our customers along with a layer of security. So I personally feel like there's, it's going to be one of our top priorities and we will surprise the market on a regular basis on the kind of things that we'll be able to do with it. So an extra plus, network plus security plus AI. That's coming. AI is the core fabric of everything we do. I think the market's going to surprise the market. It's kind of what we were hinting about yesterday in the private session. You said something this morning, human potential is not unevenly spread across the planet. And I infer from that, wow, you're going to put Opportunity is unevenly distributed, but human potential is not. But human potential is not, right. And so you give AI to people across the planet, they're going to surprise you. They will. And I think what will also end up happening is, I think there's two narratives for AI right now. One is automate out the humans. We don't believe that that's actually the right way to do it. And that's not because it can't be done. It's because I don't think it's right for humanity to do it that way. What is better is augmenting the human so that the dexterity of every human goes up a few notches, you know. And that's what we want to try to do as we move forward. And every single decision we'll make from a product standpoint, we'll be to augment a human with an assistant so that they actually have a coach, a partner to go out and help them with this. And the role of data is interesting in all of this. It's super, it's everything. It's fundamental. Because the models are commoditized. Like, you know, you had GPT, but now you've got Google, you've got Anthropic, there's going to be multiple models that are there. It's not the models that are, and you will have specialized models built on top of those foundational models, but it's the data that's the secret sauce. You talked this morning about a couple things. You said that you got NVIDIA chips in the devices, right? For the past eight years. And so I'm curious as to what you're doing with those NVIDIA chips, let's start there. So all of our AI capability that we have, we've taken a lot of that capability and moved it to the hardware layer. And we wouldn't have been able to move it to the hardware layer if we didn't have GPUs in our devices. And so for example, when you have noise removal, noise removal doesn't happen just on your laptop. It happens in the conference room equipment. It doesn't happen just in software. It's actually happening on the hardware. What's the implication of that? Well, when we integrate with Microsoft Teams, they can benefit from our AI capability. So when we have noise removal, when we have video, you know, people focus or any of the capabilities that we were talking about. Over time, those will actually benefit, not just us, but the entire ecosystem. And that's a pretty consequential advantage that we had because we made the right strategic call eight years ago and didn't try to go out and just nickel and dime and saying, let's not put that in. We said, let's make sure our device that are equipped with AI, so that they're speech-based, they actually have a lot of intelligence in them on audio, on video, on analytics. They can act as a sensor. And those things make a meaningful difference and literally every company right now, as they're thinking about their conference rooms and offices and workspaces, we ought to think about how they use these technologies to enhance not just what they're doing with Webex, but also what they're doing with the others in the market. Yeah, you're talking about four vectors, audio intelligence, video intelligence, natural language understanding and analytics and insight. You take good notes. Yeah, well, you made it easy. But those are the four vectors of AI in terms of your framework, right? In terms of how you think about it within collaboration. Those are the four areas in collaboration. Yeah, in collaboration. We're talking only about collaboration. I understand that. And on security, there's a different kind of framework that we use because not everything can be applied uniformly across. So yesterday you had the best demo because you had the orchestra and you talked about basically how an orchestra playing together, what that sounds like. And then you gave an example of what the security industry sounds like and it was a mess. Yeah. Okay, so that was very powerful. Today you had the best demo because you made the point that when you're in a meeting for an hour and a half or two hours, it really gets boring. And you made it interesting like a cinematic experience. So what was behind there? I asked John, I said, how are they doing this? He goes, they got robo cams. I'm like, how many? He goes, I don't know, let's ask you two. So we walked into that one. We're totally nerding out on the demo. I don't know where you can find that demo, but it's very cool. You're in a meeting and the cameras are getting closeups. You're watching people move. They're following people. So how did you do that? What's that look like if I walk in that conversation? It's a combination of a multitude of things that come together and it's converged in multiple things. One, we actually have multiple cameras in a room. Two, we actually have audio sensors that show the proximity of the person from the microphone and what camera they might actually be the best angle for. And so when you are going a certain way and as a result it knows that the camera is in this direction. So that's the camera that gets focused on. And then what we have is an AI engine in our, because of the GPUs we have in our devices they're able to go out and do the compute to process and say in real time I'm going to be able to make sure that I actually create these different angle shots and compose it like it's a dynamic movie. And you now feel like you're sitting in a meeting but you're actually watching a movie and it feels more like a story. One of the things that we don't do as well in the tech industries we don't tell great stories. And if every meeting became a story think of how powerful that would be. If every pixel that you put on a screen was intentionally put rather than accidentally put think of how powerful that would be. That's what we'd like to do. It's like NFL replay in a conference room. I mean, that kind of angle is amazing. I like how you zoomed in on the ISOs too. Yeah. This is what we would love that theCUBE to have. Engaging. You know, soon. We'd love to get that software. My question for you on the Webex side is Web, Webex the name is more than Webex as a video conferencing system. It's a platform. You got telepresence DNA. You need for some of your guys as well here on theCUBE. There's a lot going on in that group collaboration. It's not just Webex. Absolutely. And I would even say that name might look at that name but like, I don't want to bring that up here but Webex, I know what Webex is. It's a video conferencing thing. I click on buttons. I do a meeting. I'm gone. There's more than that going on in collaboration. It's actually, by the way, John, it was something that we contemplated quite a bit. Do we keep the name? Do we change the name? Right? Because there's a certain perception that people have of Webex which is it's my granddad's Webex and that's not what this is as you folks have seen it actually. Our NPS score has gone from like 22 to in the mid-60s over the course of the past two and a half, three years. Right? And so it's one of the best illustrations of, I am so proud of what that team has done over the past three years. It's probably one of the highlights of my career. And so when you start looking at that, you go, what does the platform consist of? The first thing we had to do was build a platform so that every single other capability could be added to the platform. And so once we built the platform, we made a bunch of acquisitions. And we built a bunch of organic capability and every single one of those things got standardized with the design language so they all looked and felt the same and they became part of a platform that's being managed by a single administrative console which, by the way, I think is one of the best in the industry. If you look at our Control Hub console, it manages hardware, it manages software on every aspect. And so what we have as part of the platform is a WebEx suite and contact center. On the suite you have calling, messaging, meetings, polling, Q&A events, whiteboarding, async video. All of these things pulled together that work fluidly with one another. And on the suite side, on the contact center side, it's digital communications. I'm putting in a chat request on the website for human communications. We actually go out and take care of the entirety of the spectrum. And every feature you add, the beauty of the platform is this. If we build noise cancellation, we started with meetings. Then we added that to calling. Then from calling, it went into contact center. So one feature that we added now is part of, is being used by hundreds of millions of people in multiple different use cases. No one else has that scale to be able to do that in this industry. Yes, so you've been on a couple of times. We had you on at MWC, John had you on at RSA. He and I were talking and I was like, you know, it's interesting because we talked about security, you talked about security at RSA, we're talking about collaboration here. And I asked John, it's like, it's kind of interesting the organization and G2 runs collab and security. And his answer was, because he's a platform guy. That's why. Is that the right answer? That is the right answer. Well, it's not just a platform guy because networking is a platform as well. What we wanted to do was align by business model. And we said, okay, the platform is going to include as a service capabilities. And my background is all SaaS. Yeah, okay. And so I said, so Chachak felt like if someone's built a platform that has as a service experience, that actually it really geeks out in the collab and the user experience side and has also built products on the security side in his past life, that seems like a good organization to pull together. What we did not know at the time is the synergy between these two organizations would be way higher than what we thought it would be. So now. That surprised you. Yeah, so now, for example, we have our AI roundups and security and collab team will get together and we'll actually jam on the ideas. And one team learns from the other and we actually moderate those together and those tend to be a lot of fun. And I did not think that would be that collaborative when I first took it on. I thought they'd be like a holding company. You'd have two different. It's like drafting a talented player and then building the offense around that individual, right? I mean, you see that all the time. Well, I mean, that's the whole thing about platforms. You know, I say platform guy because platforms are systems and they have consequences. So I think one of the things that I like about your thinking here and Cisco at large is when you have enabling platforms, you're enabling something. And that's where people can build. You can build your own apps and developers could come in. That's why we were asking all your executives, what's the developer strategy? Where's the cloud native? Where's the microservices? Where's the containers? We're a newly modern super cloud apps or we call super apps coming because you're going to have all this wealth of data. You could be enabling, unlocking value opportunities for just harvesting the data, the network layer or harvesting data on what happened in the meeting. Like your meeting Catch Me Up service that you launched today. So many, I think more is going to come. So the persona side, we actually, on the security side, we've served four personas. The end user, the IT administrator and the security practitioner, the sock analyst who's actually looking at the breaches and the developer. And we need to make sure that we actually serve all those personas effectively because to your point, John, that end-to-end way of looking at security is really important and looking at connectivity is really important because if you just look at a siloed way of I'm going to just serve this persona, well then you actually have once again an isolated set of defenses within a platform. So we need to make sure that the beauty of the platform is you've got telemetry across multiple control points that you can correlate. That's what does not exist in the market when you have point solutions. If I have an email solution, which is where 80% of the threats and ransomware starts from, that email solution needs to correlate across the web when it traverses to the web and the endpoint and the network and be able to say this behavior on email and this behavior on the endpoint is showing me that this is anomalous data and not just legitimate activity that's going on because it's going to get harder to decipher that within the age of AI. So no lack of TAM in that market. How do you get that business growing faster? I think we had to first make sure that we built a platform that was a credible platform that was tied with a great experience for the users and for IT. And that's what we announced over here and then over the course of the next few quarters and next few years, what you'll see is we got to grow not just as fast as the market, we got to grow faster than the market. Let's be clear, we were not growing faster than the market because we had not executed as well on some of the pieces on the product side. Now that we feel really, really good about that piece of it, the revenue is a byproduct. It's an obvious outcome when you actually fix the inputs. Then you got to gain share. Yeah, and we have to gain share and the way I think about it is, have you read the book, The Score Takes Care of Itself? No. No, it's a book written by Bill Walsh, I'm not a huge football guy, but it's a book written by Bill Walsh that talks about focus on the inputs and then the outputs will take care of itself. Revenue in my mind is an output. We got to build great products that people love, that they talk to their friends and families about and we got to make sure that we have at scale distribution for those products. If those things happen with great customer success at the end of it, the revenue will show up. And the strategy is simplifying, unification, all part of the platform play. Great stuff, great to have you super busy with customers and make time for theCUBE and appreciate your support. I'll give you the final word, take the last minute to share with the audience what they should walk away with from Cisco Live this year, what's your message that you would like to share? You know, the message I would like to share is that we are in, we are a very mission-driven company and our mission is to power an inclusive future for all. And what that means is we need to make sure that there's some core human rights that get protected. One of the core human rights in our mind is connectivity, one of them is security, one of them is privacy, right? And connectivity includes not just the physical connection through a network but also the communication that you do over there and the collaboration that happens. We believe that's a core human right because that allows anyone in the world to be able to access opportunity at global scale. You have to do that while you're keeping people safe and you have to make sure you honor their privacy. And so these are the three things that we think about very deeply. And I hope that our customers, the customers who prioritize that, you ought to at least make sure that you take a look at the products and don't judge the products based on past sins, judge it based on current state and the future vision. And the bridge to the future is the platform play. This is good. We are a platform company. They work for security and AI infused throughout. Chichu, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Day two here, CUBE coverage, Sean Furrier, Dave Vellante. Analysts breaking down all the action, talking to the leaders of the company, customers and influencers and all the other analysts here getting the action, sharing that with you and our pop-up queue will be right back after this short break.