 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. Welcome back, this is Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. Happy to welcome to the program, welcome back to the program first, Vinu Thomas, who's the CTO of Presidio, and welcome to the program for the first time, Brad Hizinski, who's a general manager with Intel. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu for having us. All right, so we're about the midway point to the show. It actually been many years since I'd been at Cisco Live, 26,000 people here, seeing a large transformation in what's going on from Cisco, still dominant in the network space, but talk a lot about cloud. We're here in the DevNet zone, where one of the big news pieces was 500,000 developers registered on the platform here. What's your take on the show so far? Yeah, I mean, Presidio has been a long-term partner with Cisco. We've been a golden master partner for the longest time. As Cisco started to really transition into the software-defined world, Presidio started investing along with Cisco. So back at the DevNet zone, you'll find that Presidio has a number of showcase items about DevOps, especially on things like Cat9k and Hyperflex. So we are excited on this partnership with Cisco and with Intel and what we are trying to do, so good times. Yeah, Brad, same for you. So absolutely, I think this is my fifth Cisco live and seeing the evolution of Cisco as they traverse from becoming a hardware-centric company into a company that's truly evolving around software and services and capabilities as the world becomes more complicated, they're truly innovating in ways to create the business outcomes that customers are looking for in these complicated environments. And as Intel, it's been really exciting because we transform it to a data-centric company. We talk a lot about that. The Intel technology has been the underpainting of many of the Cisco technologies that are continuing them down this path. And of course, our great partnership with Presidio, it just, it's a great triangulation effect and it's great to see at Cisco live. Venue, change isn't always easy. I think back actually, I've worked a long time on the vendor side and when Cisco came out with UCS and started doing things like VBlock, there were some folks at Presidio who were like, we make a lot of money racking, stacking, cabling, these solutions. Converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure, cloud solutions. Talk a little bit about the partnership, how Presidio's been helping to expand and mature with these offerings. Yeah, you know, the whole digital transformation is the one that's driving this move from legacy three-tier architecture into conversion to hyper-converge into multi-cloud. And what we've realized along this journey is we had to transform ourselves. So we went from saying, you know, we wanted to be the number one digital transformation solutions provider building secure digital infrastructure in a multi-cloud world. And for us to be in a position to put that vision into execution, we had to really partner with Cisco, partner with companies like VMware and VBlock and obviously the other providers from the hyper-converged space and also with Intel to really try and take our ability to not just rack and stack, but to design solutions. So we created what we call as Presidio Data Center solution set where we bring all this together. We're able to do some custom modification on these things. And we had to do that because that's what our customers were asking us for. And then wrap that around with managed services so we can essentially offer a true platform as a service. Yeah, I'd love to hear from your viewpoint. What are your customers saying to you when, you know, they say, I've got a cloud strategy or I'm building my cloud strategy. What does that mean to them? What's important to them? And you know, I'm sure you've got solutions that fit. Yeah, we've seen a slight change. It used to be that it was a cloud-first strategy. And now I would kind of call it as a cloud-right strategy which is let me choose the right cloud for the right type of workload, make sure that I have an optimized workload placement in which cloud. And one of the value ads that we bring is we can evaluate all those workloads and applications and your use cases like your data center and then recommend to you in partnership with Cisco and Intel what is the right placement for your workload. Now when you look at what is coming up in the future is, you know, the world is getting into containers and you look at Cisco's strategy with containers, you know, their Cisco container platform, what they're doing with Google. Presidio is right in the center of that along with Intel where we are building solutions in a multi-cloud fashion. So Hyperflex for the on-prem, running on top of Hyperflex is a Cisco container platform. And then we are able to then take that and merge that with Google Cloud. That's what customers want. They want that flexibility to say if this is the workload that needs to be on-prem, great. If this is something that I need to move as my applications get container rights, that's what they want to go to. Brad, I mean, you've got a large team playing in all of these environments. I remember, you know, optimizations for virtualization back in the day. When I was first learning about containers Intel Developer Forum was one of the places I went to go learn about this. But build on what Vinu was saying as to, you know, where your teams are making bets and helping to, you know, optimize and build solutions for customers. No, absolutely. I think Vinu said it very well. Especially if you auger in on the world of cloud. One of the challenges I think enterprise customers have really had is it's about clouds economics. I think that's basically the underpainting of what Vinu was talking about is that the economies of scale and capability of the large public cloud service providers have caused most enterprise customers to pause. So I think what customers are really looking for is how do I deploy applications with scalability, with ease of deployment, while having policy around security, networking, compute storage, et cetera. And then move the applications around the data center. What Intel does is we work very closely with Cisco as they're designing a lot of these platforms. Hyperflex as an example is, you know, utilizing, best utilizing some of the underpinnings of the C compiler or whether it's the ISL instruction set, the storage acceleration libraries which are part of the CPU telemetry in which they can take the code from SpringPath and really fine tune it to get the best performance. And then by the time Presidio gets it in-house, they further fine tune it for the customer needs. And so it's just a great triangulation. And then we want to scale when Cisco scales in the market Intel wins across the entire stack of compute network and storage. So therefore, it's very, very, we're all in the same boat row in the same direction. It's a very good point to the partnership. Yes, it's so funny because so much of this wave, we talk a lot about simplicity. And it's like, oh, well, HCI and public cloud, we're going to make it really simple. It's going to be heterogeneous. Some people are like, oh, remember it was white box and nothing fancy. It's like underneath the covers, there's a lot that goes in to make sure that it's, I say we're in a world of hyper-optimization because there's a lot of things that have to, to talk a little bit about that. So a perfect example of that is what we built in partnership with Intel and Cisco is a Presidio data center solution set. So the challenge our customers were having is, yeah, it's great to get a hyper-converge but the hyper-converge has to plug into something. It has to be on a rack. It has to be, power cooling has to be measured. We have to get telemetry data using Intel CPU. So what we decided to do was we built a custom-based solution, call it a cloud in a box with hyper-converged, with the networking gear in it, with advanced software solutions, with power cooling and we wrapped around our professional services and managed services. And what we also helped our customers to do is if they decided that they want to consume this as a service in an RPEX model, we could do that. If they wanted to do it in a CAPEX, we could do that. So we made it very flexible because it's not just about hyper-converge. Hyper-converge has to connect. Hyper-converge has to be load balanced. Then there's a possibility that you want to connect to a GCP or an AWS. So there was a lot of things that we could do with that. Yeah, Brad, we talk about customers want to have a similar operating model, whether it's in their data center or outside of their environment. I think Intel at the bottom layer helps, but how do you help make sure there's flexibility as customers choose all of their various solutions in a multi-cloud world? Well, first and foremost, I think that has a lot to do with we have a significant partnership with most of the public cloud service providers. It's no secret that, whether it's GCP, it's AWS, or it's Azure, or even Baidu Ali Baba Tencent, that these data centers are built upon Intel technologies. And then as you get back into the on-prem data center at the enterprise, the close work we do with Cisco and with partners like Presidio, I'll give you a perfect example is, when you look at one of the strengths Cisco has had traditionally over the years, it's this developer community. And it was the developer community what seems to have been born in networking, the networking space, and it's really created scale for Cisco. Well, as you look at the nascent technologies, there's two things we see. One is application developers inside of the enterprise IT don't have a simple way to build applications. So they go do a swipe on AWS, start an instantiation and write an application. But with things like OpenShift and working with Cisco on a Red Hat enterprise easy DevOps platform, or things like container development. We work very closely with Google and GKE on the Kubernetes development and the Kubernetes engine, as well as with Cisco. And so then when you bring that all together and you say, now we have a developer community of a technology which is clearly the future which is containers. And Cisco working with Intel, Cisco working with Presidio, Intel working with Presidio, it's really a three-legged stool and how do we refine the capabilities and also help define the future roadmap requirements in order to become, add more value for the customers. And I think that's just to piggyback to what Brad said. I think that's a key aspect to write is when you look at our customers, when they ask us to come up with stuff, Cisco, Presidio, Intel, we are not shy to make those investments because there might be customer requirements that are very unique and it's almost bespoke that we have to work on those kind of solutions and it's great to have partners that are ready to invest with us and make those investments and make those changes. Great, I want to give you both a final word. What should we look for going forward? Some areas maybe that you're pushing new solutions and you talked about analytics and the like. What should we look for as the partnership continues to grow in the future? Yeah, so when you look at Presidio's go-to-market here, we are focused on three key areas. One is digital infrastructure, multi-cloud and then security. And in addition, we want to really focus on data analytics and business insights. So digital infrastructure for us is the whole software-defined infrastructure that's getting more and more automated and orchestrated. Multi-cloud, you know, you're going to see us make more investments in container technology as well as working with companies like Google and Intel in the whole GKE, the Google Kubernetes engine. And then in the security part, at the end of the day, everything that we do has to be secure. It's not about putting point products, it has to be a full-fledged strategy. And then the last thing our customers are asking us is we've built us this software-defined infrastructure in a multi-cloud along with security. Can you give me business insights? So this is where we're working very closely with Intel and Cisco on Tetration, which is the whole network flow and security analytics that, you know, obviously is powered by the telemetry from Intel CPUs. And you're going to see us make more investments there with Tetration, with, you know, obviously app dynamics and companies like Splunk. So I think that's what you're going to see us do a lot in the future. Yeah, and I think, well said, Manu, and I think at a very basic level, all of the software, all the complexity, all of the security is going to require more insatiable desire for compute. But Intel's clearly investing beyond compute. We're very open about becoming a data-centric company, looking at about how this tidal wave of data is coming in a world of billions of connected devices. So as Intel continues to invest, whether it's in FPGAs, storage, memory technologies, you know, the blog for the launch of Hyperflex 3.5 just went out, an all-NVME version of Hyperflex. And then we're going to talk on Thursday about using Optane, Intel Optane technology as a caching tier. FPGAs over into Silicon Photonics technology. There's just a wealth of capabilities in Silicon that Intel's bringing the market to bear. And working with our partners, again, like Presidio, to understand, by the way, the way we do business at Intel is, we have an account team that also calls on Presidio. And what we do is our team triangulates with them. So Presidio is understanding the future roadmap of technologies from Intel. At the same time, Cisco is understanding it. Cisco then can innovate on platforms based on Intel technologies. But as Presidio knows what's coming down the pike, they can start building their plans for how they can then take it from Cisco's hands further encapsulated into a valuable offering, say cloud in a box, as you said so well, and deliver easy business outcomes for the customers. Yeah, absolutely. For a long time, we watched the TikTok coming out of Intel as what drove innovation and new advancements in the industry. Now everyone's moving faster. Even Intel, it's not the chip itself. That is the driving factor of all the change. So Brad, Vinu, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. I really appreciate all the updates and congrats on the progress. All right, we'll be back here with lots more coverage. Three days wall-to-wall coverage of Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks so much for watching theCUBE.