 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE 2020. It's the first CUBE segment and session for 2020, next 10 years. This is the 10th year theCUBE has been in operation. We're here in Barcelona for Cisco Live, but we're going to spend the next few minutes talking about the enterprise tech trends for 2020 and beyond. Really looking back at the past 10 years and then looking forward 10 years. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. The CUBE team, the analysts, we're going to analyze enterprise tech. You know, we'd love to do that Dave, but I think more notable is, this is our first interview in 2020. For the year we're kicking off our 10th year as we close down theCUBE for 10 year anniversary in May. Quite an evolution. A lot of things we got right with Wikibon research and theCUBE insights. A lot of things we saw early and that's the benefit of theCUBE. Now more than ever, it's more complex. It's a lot of noise. A lot of people talking about value propositions here, there, a lot of cloud. I think the reality is set in, cloud is here. It's not a question of why and when it's now. And the impact is just hitting mainstream tech. And enterprises is now leading the category in investments, venture capital, private equity, M&A, over consumer companies. You're seeing a much more focused emphasis on what's going on in the enterprise, which is business. Incredible opportunity ahead. So 2020, what's in store? Well, you know the last decade we obviously saw the consumerization of IT. There was all that social media hype and I think you're right John, the enterprises now, well the action is, but the last 10 years have been all about cloud. And what got us here to 2020 is not what's going to power us through the next 10 years. I think it's not only cloud, it's cloud plus data, which we definitely bet on and got right. But now the injection of machine intelligence on that data, which of course is running in the cloud for scale. So the real big question now is, what's going to happen to the cloud guys? Amazon and Azure clearly have momentum, Google actually beginning to pick it up a little bit. But particularly the case of Amazon who dominated the last decade, it's going to be not as easy for them going forward. Everybody now realizes, wow, they got it right. You've said many times they were misunderstood. Well, I think now people are beginning to realize how powerful they are and the enterprise players have really begun to respond. And they don't like to give up their position. So it'd be really interesting to see how that goes. And of course, we're going to talk more about Cisco, but Stu, what are your thoughts? Yeah, so John, I think some of the things that we looked at as bleeding edge over the last 10 years are becoming a bit more mainstream. The role of the developer, we know the developer's a new king maker. You look where we are in the DevNet zone. DevNet zone a couple of years ago was small and there was, you know, people were kind of excited and everything. You look at it today, it looks much more like the regular show. It has really become mainstream. Dave said cloud, you know, cloud is mainstream. Developers mainstream, that connection between the business, enterprise tech that we talk about and these other pieces really are coming together. That's where the data really is the next flywheel for what's happening. And obviously machine learning, the application developer, and still it's about moving faster that companies are looking to do. And that is what all of the last 10 years has been building for. And now it's the new normal. Great, and I want to get into some of the ways. I think when you look at this, we can always rattle onto any kind of technology, but you know, one of the things that we'd love to do is look at the waves. What waves are going to come? We're going to get into your thoughts on that. But I think just let's reflect on what's going on around us right now. The Q business 10th year, finishing up his 10th year. We're in the media business. I had a comment from someone here, a distinguished engineer at Cisco said, I can't believe you guys are a technology company. I had tweeted out yesterday on Barcelona about our Q alumni list. It's turning into an expert network. If you look at what's going on with Facebook and with Trump and the impeachment, you're seeing a changing of the guard in the media business. So we as media with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE has become interesting. And I think I bring this up because not only to kind of tout our new model that we've been doing for 10 years, but if you look at how people share information, misinformation, quality information, you start to see a paradigm where you don't know what to trust. Vendor A says they can do this. Vendor B says they can do that. Amazon says this. Azure says that. So I'll think that the practitioners and the consumers of IT and enterprise tech, the buyers, where's the truth Dave? I mean, the models are completely changing. I've heard comments that the analysts firms are struggling to get modern. Press outlets are being dwindled down to a handful in the enterprise. New networks are being formed. These new expert apps are out there. So this is a tell sign that the world's more complex and different than ever before. Well, the authentic community doesn't lie, right? And your peers, at the end of the day, when you're having private conversations, that's where the truth comes out and to the extent that you can, we'd like to bring that to theCUBE in sessions like this. That's really where you would say, extract the signal from the noise. And I think that, you know, we try to do that. We've tried to do it for 10 years and I think that's part of the reason why we've been so successful. I mean, at the same time, look, we know we're funded by sponsors, which is great. We really appreciate their support. But at the end of the day, we've always got to put forth what we think is actually happening out there. So let's get into some of the ways because this sets the context. So as you have these networks forming, you have cloud technology, you know, OSI model, I look back at the 90s and I think this is apropos to the Cisco show. At that time, Dave, during the mini computer wave that set the stage for what became the PC revolution and then ultimately, inter networking category, you had proprietary network operating systems. IBM had SNA, digital equipment corporates had Decknet, et cetera, et cetera. And in comes the open systems interconnect. Seven layer stack that changed the industry. In today's world, we have open source, but people are chirping about open core. There seems to be a trend towards proprietary now. Amazon is the big proprietary cloud. I don't mean proprietary in the sense of you can't work with it, but scale is the new proprietary. So you almost have this revert back to old tactics of differentiation. And I think that's not good for customers. I think you look at the customer situation, it creates more complexity. So I think that's why we're seeing multi-cloud, really be a trend because whoever can connect all the clouds and do that seamlessly is going to win big. And I think that's TCP IP like dynamic. Yeah, John, it's a really interesting point because open source in general is more important than ever before. Enterprise companies are contributing. The big vendor community is spending more time on open source than they are on standards anymore. Over, if you look at the big projects out there, Linux, Kubernetes and the like, more than half of the contributors have full-time jobs. They work for big companies. But as you said, how am I consuming that? GitHub is a company at the core of open source, but the GitHub platform itself is a proprietary. It's that open core model that you talked about. And of course, Microsoft built them for a big number. And some people have a little bit of concern as to when Microsoft built them. And GitLab is there. And GitLab, right, of course, if similar, they deliver their application itself is that open core model. So open source is there, open core is the model that they're doing. Absolutely, it is interesting, because as you said, open source is more pervasive than ever, but I'm consuming it more as a service from Amazon or from these providers. Do you see the bitching and moaning that's going on in the open source community? Because there is kind of a lot of a chirping going on around. Well, you know, if I build this in the open, is it truly open being co-opted by, say, the big clouds? And you've got Microsoft. I mean, look at Microsoft, Office 365. That's not going to go away for the next 10 years. They've satisfied their core offering, almost like a lock-in. I mean, so it seems to be, it smells like that old NOS days. Yeah, but so the other thing too is we're entering this decade with four trillionaires. I mean, Amazon hit trillionaire club in 2018 that sort of dropped down, lost a comma, as Russ Henneman would say, but Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, they look invulnerable, don't they, in the trillionaires club. But I mean, I would point out, you're saying, John, there will be a backlash. Open source, open distributed computing, peer networks. I don't think, I mean, history would suggest that these big whales, they're not invulnerable. They can be taken down, and open source is one way out. Well, it's interesting. One of the things you look, one of the big threats for Cisco for a long time was like, oh, SDN's going to take over what Cisco's was doing. Well, Cisco's still doing just fine with software-defined networking, and what that's having. The open compute model for networking is also a threat. If I look, you know, Microsoft Azure is leveraging their model. The big hyperscalers aren't necessarily coming to Cisco for gear, so there's that shifting as to where Cisco will be involved when we talk about cloud models. They're spending much more time up the stack, John, in the layer four through seven, than they are down in their traditional zero to three. The pressure on these monopolies historically to continue to perform as public companies has been enormous, and they get more proprietary to your point, John, and eventually, the open market says, hold on, you know, that opens up new opportunities. It takes a while, but it's always happened. I don't think, I think your point about the big incumbent players are not going to yield to just being rolled over by the incumbent growing cloud companies, but you cannot deny the fact that, say, Amazon, Dave, I want to get your thoughts on this because what Amazon did to compute changed the game in my mind. They completely changed the capabilities, the consumption models, the cost structures. All the economics were changed with compute. You look at outposts, wavelengths, some of the things they're getting in, they have their own networking. So the question is, if you have the cloudification of the whole eternity of infrastructure, which is storage, compute, networking, okay? You can see almost the cloud guys are almost changing radically, all three of them. Compute's already done, storage is already done. Stu, networking's left, so you have networking. The battle ground, because you've got to move the packets around. You don't need MPLS routes because you just go through the cloud. How things are stored, data backup and recovery. The list goes on and on. Ultimately, that's the infrastructure as code ethos. That's going to change the application environment. So, if we'll Amazon, we'll Google, we'll Azure commoditize or change networking. Yeah, I mean, John, we already see that happening. When we came two years ago, one of the challenges for most network engineers is what I need to manage. A large part of it, I can't actually touch. I have to rely on third party, it's outside. I don't control it, but if something goes wrong, I'm on the hook for it. And if you look forward a little bit, if I'm deploying serverless architectures, is there networking involved? Yes, do I know what it is? Nope, my platform underneath it is going to take care of it. Sitting here talking about that transformation of the workforce, Dave, you wrote about it in your piece. That future of work is if you're really putting together, I'm a CCIE, my job is being a Cisco certified engineer and my role will be racking, stacking, configuring and changing and managing those boxes. Today, it's, well, I better get involved in the security side or the application side because that's where I'm actually connected to the business and the data of things because if I'm just concerned about the moving of packets around, yeah, there's going to be either automation or a cloudification or a combination of those things, they're going to take that away from me. A couple of thoughts on this. John, you were the very first to report the trillion dollar opportunity for Andy Jassy and Amazon and they're what, 35 billion? So they got a long way to go. So I think a big theme for Amazon is going to be TAM expansion. And one of those areas is, of course, networking. And you've seen the cloud slowly eat away. I reported this in my Wikibon post from the ETR data, the cloud slowly eating away over the last 10 years into the networking share. And then one practitioner said, as we put our data into the cloud, we're going to spend less on traditional networking. So it's clearly a threat. So Cisco, obviously diversifying its portfolio, we're going to talk about that this week. But more focused, as we've said, to under the leadership of Chuck Robbins than it was 10 years ago. Well, Dave, here's a question for you, because if you look at enterprise spend, they're increasing their spend on public cloud, but their data center stuff, it has stayed relatively solid. We haven't yet seen the erosion there. So are you saying networking's going to erode before the rest of it? Because the storage, I have data gravity, what's your expectation? I think you're seeing it. I think you're seeing the networking erode, not necessarily in terms of shrinking Cisco, although they're guiding to a flat to down quarter, but you've certainly seen their growth slow down, and especially in their core networking space. I mean, they've tried to double down on their switching and core routing, and they've just made new announcements in that space that John, you know well. But unquestionably, the cloud has had an impact on Cisco's business. Well, 2020, let's look ahead. So the next 10 years, we've got a lot going on. So I think we can see the big wave. So to me, the big wave, I'll start, Dave, on the waves. I think the big wave is value proposition is the business model evolution. I think that's going to be a way that will constantly be the North Star for transformation. If whatever people are buying or operating, whether it's their infrastructure or their operating model, has to have direct contribution to the business model of the company. So I think that's one. Two, I think AI and data will continue to power a lot of the value, and I think networking is going to be cloudified. And the impact of that is going to be that as cloud and hybrid computing becomes a technical solution that changes the operation model of companies, you're going to start to see multi-cloud emerge as a solution of that, meaning multi-cloud isn't a technology. It's an outcome of hybrid combination of cloud. I think that's going to change how packets are routed, how packets are networked. I think data AI and a complete transformation of the engine of business will is going to happen in the next 10 years. More than we've ever seen before. I call this DevOps 2, 3, 4.0 to do. This is a complete new engine of innovation technically with storage compute and networking where the application focus is going to be business-driven, almost dynamic, almost real-time. I think that will be a 10-year horizon. I wrote a Twitter post on this just a few minutes ago and the lead architect for Azure tweeted back, I mean, said latency, latency never changes. John, the innovation cocktail, as you said, is what's the driver going forward, right? Yep, exactly. Well, to your point though, the speed of light, you're not going to solve that problem without putting points of presence all over it. But the network architecture is what defines us too. And I've been talking about network automation. We've talked about DevOps. But if you think of hybrid as a technical solution, how you work with public and private premises, edge, it's just now a new network configuration. That is going to be, to me, a very instrumental engineering task, which will actually impact how the software engineers will deploy code. And to your point though, latency, that's physics and that's the plumbing and the plumbing's got to be there. But I do feel like we're exiting the cloud era into a new era of this innovation cocktail that you talk about or the sandwich, which is cloud data plus AI plus digital services. And that's really what we're going to be talking about eight to 10 years from now, is how organizations are applying those digital services and which companies, whether they're cloud native companies or guys like Cisco and IBM and HPE and Dell EMC, how they're leveraging those waves and applying them to their business. And I'd be curious to see how the standards evolve around, whether it's de facto standards around interoperability around data. And look at what's happening, Stu, data privacy. You're starting to see the tell signs that data is going to be starting to be managed, just like packets are managed. So this is like a whole interesting dynamic. But really, this is the payoff for what companies have been working on to be able to move faster. It was before, it was okay, it used to take me 18 months and now I can do it in a few months, but now I can react to that business between the automation, the machine learning, putting together cloud and you're going to be able to refocus your workforce to be able to respond to the business and drive new value. All right, guys, we got a wrap, we got the guests coming up. Appreciate the commentary. I'll just say that Dave Tesla, he mentioned in one of your breaking analysis, what Tesla did to the automobile company, I think there's going to be someone in the enterprise that comes out of the woodwork that changes the game on everybody. I think there's an opportunity for that kind of new entrant. In the same way Amazon did, you think? I think Amazon is now an incumbent. I mean, if you look at the size and the scale of it, there's always an opportunity for that bold startup, this bold company. So again, it takes a kind of new dynamic, electricity with cars, so we'll see. Okay, that's a wrap up. This is theCUBE conversation here in Barcelona, in the Cisco Live. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, breaking down the enterprise for the next 10 years. Thanks for watching.