 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2019. Here in Barcelona, Spain, I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante. Dave, myself, and John Furrier here, getting wall-to-wall coverage. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Dave Stanford, who's the customer experience of cloud product management at Cisco. Dave, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me here. All right, so we've been digging into the whole multi-cloud piece here, some real big announcements, a lot of the solutions talking about being anywhere. It's the bridge to possible here at the show. So, tell us exactly the customer experience there. Is this, you know, the GUI's, much more than that? You know, what's that encompass? We really want to put a whole wrapper around all these products and solutions from a service perspective. And that includes everything from advisory, really guiding our customers, how do I get there? We see all these products, and sometimes it's like, well, what do I use these for? So we want to guide them, help them adopt it, and then support it. Support's probably the most important piece with all these multiple solutions. Who can the customers call to get support for all of these? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, I've worked with Cisco, partnered with Cisco my entire career, and the last few years, boy, things are changing so fast. A year ago, you know, kind of open my eyes, and I said, oh, Cisco's moving to be a software company. You really see the movement. When I come to the show here, when I talk to people like the Cisco DNA platform solution, and all the things that customers need to change, bring us inside how you're helping customers with that change, the services, and everything that you're wrapping around there. Sure, so my role today is to develop the offers and scale them out and enable our other advanced services folks to deliver. But previously, I was delivering myself. So I understand the challenges that the customers have. So I know what they expect. They want the products to go out there and seamlessly work together. Now they do. There's APIs, there's connectivity, but we have to actually show them what they can do with them. You know, what are the use cases? And from our perspective, when a product's released, a CX offer or a service package should go out the door with that too. And Quick Starts are the biggest thing we have. Yeah, and actually one of the key things we talk about that move to software, hardware, it was interoperability, and how do all these things wire together? Exactly. Software, right, it needs to be seamless. It does. Platforms and solutions in there. So, you know, give us the critical eye. Look internally. How's Cisco doing? What's the feedback you're hearing from the teams and partners? I think we're on the right track. We're well ahead with some of the solutions we've released with Cisco Container Platform, Cisco Cloud Center Suite. The biggest thing we hear from customers, a lot of especially developers, application users, they don't care. They just want it to be up and running. So with our integrated solutions with things like the new Hyperflex 4.0, we build on top of that. They don't have to worry about connectivity to security or to load balancing, name the technology. They can bring it up, and we can actually have the software do exactly what it needs to do. So I've observed for decades the evolution in the services business. When I started in the business, it was all about break fix. Yes. Right, then you had large software projects and, you know, ERPs and business process, you know, re-engineering, a lot of consultative selling, the internet came in, a lot of e-commerce activity. How has the cloud changed the service role, the organization and how you go to market and scale? I think the biggest change with the cloud, it's no longer just break fix. Let me go and install it and figure it out. We really need to understand what our requirements are before we move to the cloud. We hear about speed, cost, performance, but there's a lot more thought that has to go into it. We have to look across the IT infrastructure. So that advisory up front, the guidance, that wasn't necessarily always there, that's the biggest change. Before we even think about using the product, we need to understand why we purchased this product. And so what do you need from the customer? I mean, you obviously need data and participation and buy-in from the customer. What do you need to be successful there? Really, from the customer, we need to know what are you trying to accomplish? What are the use cases? And we have a lot of common use cases we've seen. Security is always a concern. How do I securely connect to the cloud? How can I leverage Cisco software to do that? And it's not just about connecting to Cisco software, but how do we use Cisco software to do that connectivity? So it's over and over. We see this constant pattern of, I want to build a manager hybrid cloud, securely, multi-cloud network it, and take the complexity out of what we do there. As the demographics of your buyer changes, how do you service them differently? How do you create a customer experience that's more focused on the way they want to interact with you, whether it's Chad or, talk about that a little bit. So you're not really talking to the IT infrastructure person anymore. You're talking to the lines of business or the application developers. So you have to go in with the understanding of, I'm not going to go and say, we're going to refresh the hardware, we're going to do this, we're going to give you new switches, new routers. You start the conversation at the application level now. What types of applications do you have? Are they traditional? Do we have to refactor them? Can we just move them to the cloud? Then you go to the next level of, we understand this. Now let's get our hardware in place to support this, and then our infrastructure. Applications, that's the big shift. That's where the discussion is now. All right, so we've talked about some of the impact of cloud. We've been hearing about how AI and ML are getting infused into all the products, and that has to have a huge impact on how the customers interact and manage, and there's got to be a little bit of, the retraining that we talked about too. Definitely, I mean, that's probably the biggest challenge. Even hiring right now to find the right fit for cloud or for DevOps, AI, ML is the challenge. So you have to have a plan in place with this background. And what we've done within CX is we have a five tier model. So we start with the prerequisites. Where are you in this scale? We'll give you a rating based on what you have, but you really still have to train the folks. You have to give boot camps, cohorts, then code deliver on different engagements, but you still have to bring in folks with the right background. Even if it's network, route switch, you can train them, but you have to have that program in place to be able to ramp them up. Yeah, we always said one of the biggest strengths Cisco has, you've got those army of, Cisco certified, the CCIEs out there, CCNPs and the like out there. Now a lot of what they have to manage, it's either outside of their control, it's in the public cloud, or right, there's automation. I don't need to just get an alert and go do it. Wait, I need to make sure that the business rules are in place and the tool is going to take care of that. So help us understand what's the new role inside the customers that's got to change who you're negotiating with and who's involved in the conversations when you're putting the sessions together, as well as kind of the pre as well as the post deployment. Sure, I think the biggest difference is our customers now have customers before we just manage their IT infrastructure. A good example, we have a healthcare corporation in Canada. The clinics are basically the clients of the overall organization. They don't care how long it takes to spin, they want speed. They can't go to the IT department and say, give me a VM and then three weeks later, they give it up or they provision it. And then they'll go and say, well, this is too slow. Here's my credit card. I'm going to buy Amazon web services and provision it. Now we need to bring all of that together. So the route switch folks need to become multi-cloud architects. And when I talk about multi-cloud, they need to know everything up the stack, infrastructure, connectivity with the CSR, security with our cloud protect portfolio, and then the applications, not to mention the vast array of third-party solutions. Kubernetes is everywhere now. It's the de facto standard for containerization. This is really something that's come up over and over. And that's probably the biggest challenge to get our folks to look at the overall stack rather than one piece. Huge challenge. I mean, Hallmark of Cisco has always been partner-friendly, it's got to work with all the different infrastructure that's out there. Now you add in all the different clouds. Exactly. And it's not just a cloud, it's the entire cloud stack, all the APIs, I mean, your eyes bleed when you look at all the different APIs from Amazon data services even. Exactly. There are dozens and dozens of them. So how do you manage that challenge? You can't just throw bodies at it, right? So we leverage the tools that we have. Cisco Container Platform is a good example. We use it in-house, but it's the biggest thing we position to our customers in the cloud story because it's made deploying and managing containers or Kubernetes simple. Before CCP, my team would deploy open source Kubernetes, which worked great. It was complex to set up, but then you had to look at, I need a tool for monitoring. I need one for logging, for load balancing. You ended up with 10 different applications. Just, you thought you were moving to containers, but hey, there's much more to it. So now with CCP, it's all packaged, everything's simple to manage. So that's just the containers. And you mentioned governance before. I think this is a big thing. Cloud Center Suite, we can model our applications in there, deploy to any cloud endpoint. So we support over 15 clouds. And what my team does is bring this all together. So it's not just a service. We want to show you how you can automatically provision those clusters, then move it anywhere you want to go. Yeah, I wonder if you can put a point on that. The Cloud Center Suite, Cloud Center's been around for a while, but it really was a re-architecture. It's built cloud-native Kubernetes in there. But what is a customer is going to be like, oh wait, this isn't what I was used to in the past. Help us understand what it is for the future. Absolutely, I think Cloud Center's been around for a while. It's an amazing product. I took over this cloud portfolio and services about a year ago and I'd heard all about it, started to ramp up on it. Within four hours I couldn't believe this is really GUI-based, this is simple. So I can model the application and it's as simple as clicking deploy and I can push it to any cloud environment. And I think that's the biggest challenge it's always been how do I migrate my applications from the data center to the cloud or vice versa. And Cloud Center's made it so simple within two minutes you can actually migrate an application or deploy it. And they've added so many other features around cost and orchestration that it's every day I see customers starting to adopt Cloud Center Suite. I want to ask you about SwimLanes. Cisco's a product company. You R&D, you build products, you ship products. You're not a services company, but you have a large services organization. How do you, what's your SwimLanes relative to some of the big SIs? What's your relationship with them? Sure, so I'm really closely partnered with all of the engineering teams, but at the same time, the partner organization, the systems integrators, they're still partners, especially in the new CX organization. We want to drive the solutions out to our customers. So we were actually taking some of our partners, bringing them on board, ramping them up on our services and saying, hey, you know what? You go deliver it, we'll support you. There's not a competition. I think with CX now, we've combined everything together. The partners are just as important to us as, you know, the products that we sell. Will they private label those services, or? Yeah, absolutely. So our quick starts, for example, these smaller packages to turn up the solution stack quickly and drive adoption, we can hand that off to them. They can sell it themselves. Yeah, so you're open to that. And that drives their brand and their value, their intimacy with their customer. I mean, we have a big market. I mean, but still the partners can reach some different spaces that we wouldn't traditionally be able to get to on professional services. Yeah, and they have those relationships that, you know, it's, services has always been very local, you know, by nature, you know, the world's not just going to, we've talked about this, not just going to go to three clouds. I mean, services, people want to meet people and, you know, they're in the same neighborhood and there's trust and that just doesn't disappear over. You have to build that too. But you have to build the expertise before you get that trust. So Dave, a lot of customers here, you've been in meetings, giving presentations all week. Give us a little bit of, you know, what's the buzz at the show, what are some of the top conversations people are doing, they're planning for 2019, you know, big hurdles and, you know, big opportunities that people are excited for. So two common themes, security has come up over and over again. Customers who haven't moved to cloud, they're concerned, how do I connect? And can I really put this in the cloud or do I have to keep it in the data center? So we talk about how we can secure. And I'm sorry, are they concerned about security, compliance, governance, all the above? They are, I mean, one example yesterday, a customer said, I have a top secret application and my company is pushing me towards the cloud. Can I really put this top secret application in a container in a public cloud environment? So that's just one conversation. It's a concern of I don't own this anymore. I, you know, it's not my data center. So how do I secure the application? How do I make sure there's no type of interference with that app, any type of, you know, interjection into, to damage it, right? And then the other thing is, I see you're stacked. I see you have infrastructure. I see all the products. I don't think it's that simple to put together. It's great on a PowerPoint, but show me in the real world how this works together. And that's what we've been doing, showing these demos, how we can build everything. All right, so once you've shown them, walk through everything, they're feeling answered? They're feeling much better, but we go back to the whole CX Lifecycle advisory, implement, support. And that brings it all together. Yeah, and the top secret thing, you know, Google, you've been highlighting partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they've got specific clouds. We've been watching this, especially all the stuff happening at the government level, and been one of the great proof points about public cloud adoption. Definitely. All right, I want to give you the final word as people come away from Cisco Live 2019, when it comes to customer experience, what do you want them to understand? It's all about solutions, putting it together. So you see all these products. It's not that complex. CX, our partners can help you build it, scale it out, and really adopt it. All right, well, Dave Stanford, really appreciate you helping us understand the CX experience here. Definitely lots of opportunities here, cloud, AI, ML, putting all the solutions together. For Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here of Cisco Live 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE.