 Hello and welcome back to the live coverage here at Cisco Live, this is theCUBE. John and Dave hosts, bringing you day two coverage. Dave, great to be here. We've been covering Cisco for 13 years, day two keynotes, keynote analysis. Last night we had the analyst reception where we met all the execs, saw the CEO and staff, had a chance to meet Chuck and Robbins and talk with them, as well as the leadership team of Cisco. And we got a little taste of what is going to come today in the keynote with the generative AI, workplace of the future, surprise comedian guest at the end, which I thought was great. But also the CSO, chief security officer of the NFL was on stage, G2 Patel, Jonathan Davidson. We didn't see Liz, Tony on there, but we saw the other two execs. Keynote review, what's your take? Well, so we mused yesterday as to whether or not Cisco had the potential to 5x its valuation over the next, you know, end number of years, call it 10 years. And whether or not AI and generative AI and large language models could be the opportunity for them to do that. We got a little glimpse today of what they're doing with AI, with hybrid work. And I saw some very cool things. I don't think I saw the next big thing. And my takeaway from today was that Cisco was going to continue to execute, they're going to continue to grow, they're going to continue to do well, and they're going to make solid bets that will lead to good, and I don't mean this as a pejorative, incremental improvements. I don't see anything radical in there. Now, again, I think they're trying to figure that out. I feel like the leadership team believes that they have an opportunity that is unique in the industry because of their presence. And they just haven't sort of unveiled, or even for themselves, figured out, okay, what is that thing? And it could come from anywhere. It could come from somebody in the front lines, somebody overseas out of the Liz's division that we can't figure out. We can't remember the name, the out shift division, right? The out shift, which is the incubation engine of Cisco, could come out of that. I love that area. Yeah, absolutely. And then, I mean, the highlight for me was Gaffigan. Jim Gaffigan, he was hilarious. I mean, that guy came out, he told a bunch of dad jokes, kid jokes. He's just really good. He aligned with a demographic for sure. Oh yeah. Mostly male network operators. Yeah, he says, I look around this audience and I see a bunch of old guys. And it was pretty true. Now, given that the keynote, I thought a couple themes jumped out. I mean, Jonathan Davidson laid out unified experiences, build bridges. Clearly, they're going for this simplicity theme as we reported yesterday, but this idea of unification, not new to Cisco. They used to have unified as part of their compute model. Remember that unified compute? They tried to bring hyperconverge all that together under a unified umbrella. Here, they're thinking bigger. Unified platforms. So that was a big part of it. And they also brought execs up on stage. Thousand Eye founder was still with the company. And that's a real tell sign when you have the founder of Thousand Eye still with Cisco. Normally founders, when they sell to companies, they quit. Yep, they go start another company. They start another company. To compete with the last company. Thousand Eye is one of the best acquisition Cisco's done. Meraki as well. Founders still around. Always a great sign of health. Yeah. Yeah, so, and then, you know, again, big team was hybrid work. Gigi Patel talked about four key vectors. Audio, where they're using AI. Audio intelligence. And basically, their premise, which is I think the right one is, if you don't have good sound, you don't have any kind of interaction. We know this from theCUBE. You sound, you're dead. Audio is everything. Right. And then the second was video intelligence, which I thought was very interesting. They showed a demo. And it's so true. When you're in an hour and a half or a two hour meeting, and you got the same exact pains that people may be getting up, you know, leaving the room, coming back, getting a drink or whatever. But the same static pains, it gets really boring. So what he showed is a demo where the people in the room, the camera would follow them. You were saying it was RoboCam. So we, I'd like to ask Gigi how many cams they were actually using in that demo. But it was a really interactive experience, almost like you were watching a movie. So audio intelligence, video intelligence. Third was natural language understanding. So NLP, presumably to do real time translations, which is pretty powerful. And I've seen that go really well actually. And you go back and you can look at the transcript or identify things you missed or maybe you were checking a quick email and putting out a fire and you got to go back and watch. And then the last one was analytics and insight. So basically it's the telepresence and he also talked about the Apple deal. And they're not being really... He basically blew right over that. Yeah, they're not really saying much about it, but we think they're inside that mask, right? Inside the eyeglass. I have sources that tell me that Apple has done a deal with Cisco. Again, not fully confirmed. A little bit. So put that out there. It's not a rumor, but it's pretty much good source. That Cisco's technology, not WebEx, the telepresence, they got some deep technology, wave form technology, all kinds of cool shit, is going to be embedded in the display of Apple vision. Okay, now we know Apple. I know Apple really well. They're tight on messaging. They don't let people do testimonials. So J2 kind of fumbled by just mentioning it. He didn't fumble, but I'd say that he mentioned it, but he couched it almost like a lawyer. But he didn't want to screw it up. He didn't want to screw a wording. And he just said, Apple vision, we're going to be working with him. We really love the products. And then next, WebEx. He didn't really, he kind of announced it, but he didn't do anything. Yeah, well, so let's talk about that a little bit. So a couple of things too, I want to add to that. One is NVIDIA. He said they have NVIDIA in all their devices. And I'd like to understand where they're using them. For instance, Apple uses a GPUs inside of the iPhone, but my understanding is from my sources that it's just for the screen, for the screen interactions to make that as real time as possible. They're not using it for other purposes yet anyway. And so similarly, I wonder exactly which technologies are inside that Apple headset, those goggles. And so, but the fact that it's Cisco says a lot in terms of, you know, their ability to deal with, you know, things like latency and just, you know, good user experiences. So, but he's probably not going to talk about it because he can't. You know, the other thing I liked about the product description was he did a lot of product stuff, but also he had a business model innovation. That was that they're building natively on teams in Office 365s. And what they're doing is they're building the native team's functionality inside WebEx. So rather than trying to compete with teams, they're going to go compatible with teams and be follower. So, and they also point out the business model. So for teams, you got to pick extra for calling, extra async video, extra for webinars, extra for events, extra for polling. And the team's paper cuts. And they're right about that. And so that, and that's going to increase the cost of 64 bucks as high as $64 per user where WebEx is 11, you get all that same cost. So I thought that was notable. The true cost of hybrid work, he called it. I think the other thing, John, that I would point out is sort of doubling down on something that you said yesterday, like why is G2 Patel heading up both collaboration and security? And I think your answer was right on. It's because he's a platform guy. He knows platforms. And Cisco's in the process of moving from a product culture to a platform culture, from push the next feature to let the ecosystem and the customers guide us as to what features we want to enable on the platform. That's a different mindset, different thinking. And it really, I mean, the mindset can't be understated, right? It's like culture. You know, when you've been so successful, a company like Cisco with a sort of selling boxes, selling ports for years, and I know they're beyond that, but still at the end of the day, they make 50% of their revenues from networking gear. So to get the whole company thinking about platforms is a challenge. Antonio Neary has this challenge at HPE. Michael Dell and Jeff Clark and Chuck Whitten at Dell Technologies have this challenge. You know, it's easier for software companies. I mean, Oracle went through that and obviously has been pretty successful. Snowflake is another example. Databricks is doing it as well. These are platform, the Mongo. They're not ISVs, they're platform companies. And the platform trend is going to continue to happen with tools building on top, but the platforms is an enabling technology. They have to enable on top of it. And what I saw today from Jade Tupetel was the fact that they have things like a generative AI working. They're getting things going. So you're starting to see more and more of that. And of course, my favorite point of the keynote was the NFL CSO, she said, quote, physical and cyber security is converged. That's the way they look at it. And I think that's a new normal. That is going to be absolutely a thing. So no point solutions. Security market's not there. And that's the way it is. Yeah, yeah, speaking of security, I mean, it's a little kerfuffle on Twitter with key towns and if you're out there, you know, Cisco unquestionably is a player in security. It's a, you know, multi-billion, four billion dollar business, let's call it. But in fairness, you know, it's not growing that fast, growing to 2% last quarter. And that should grow faster. And that's why I think G2 brought in Tom Gillis to really help drive that business. But to your point, they got to bring security and networking together and that's going to give them a significant advantage. All right, day two of theCUBE, more action here at theCUBE. Pop-UpCube, that's what we do when we can't get space. We will do whatever it takes to get the story. Pop-UpCube, the big full set, one-on-ones. We want to get the data and share that with you. Go to siliconangle.com, cube.net. That's where the action is. We'll be back with more after this short break from Las Vegas.