 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE here in San Francisco. Live coverage of Google Cloud Next 18. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Ben Evans, who's the director of strategic alliances at Cisco and Connie Tang. Director of product management at Cisco. Here to talk about the alliance with Google Cloud and the relevance and the partnership around the collab. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. And pleasure to be here. So we've been covering Cisco for a long time, most recently with theCUBE in Orlando, and DevNet, DevNet create huge surge of developer action going across the Cisco ecosystem. Not just network engineering stuff, the normal Cisco greatness, but up the stack with the collaboration side, just cloud native is attracting and really giving a lot of energy to the developers and customers at Cisco. So the partnership with Google is interesting. So can you guys just share the big news, the Cisco news and how that relates to the Google Cloud? Yeah, absolutely. So firstly, Connie and myself have been working on this partnership for quite a while. And as you said, there's multi kind of facets to this. There's the developer piece, so the SDKs were announcing around Android and the way that developers can now embed calling and meeting and messaging inside their specific applications, their vertical applications. And then there's also native integrations we're getting into around scheduling meetings from calendaring. So I can go in and schedule a WebEx meeting very easily. It was talked about on stage, 74% of sort of document collaboration involves some kind of co-collaboration. So it's a very kind of peanut butter and chocolate as you think about Cisco's portfolio of real-time communications and meetings and how this is evolving into the team collaboration experience. Together with Google's portfolio in terms of AI and how that fits in to automate these workflows and make life easier for users. And also just how this comes together in a very seamless way to enable this kind of real-time collaboration and creation of documents. So take us inside the partnership. How did it start? I mean, it seems like a match made in heaven. You guys aren't trying to create your own infrastructure as a service. Google needs an enterprise presence. Obviously Cisco has a huge enterprise presence, but how did it start and where did it start? We actually started engaging with Cisco over a year ago and different groups start engaging because there's actually customer demand from our corporate enterprise customers wanting better integration of a collab portfolio into various aspects of G Suite. So we worked with the calendaring team because they're coming up with a brand new architecture. And so we're actually one of the forefront partners who work directly with them, providing some feedback as the way enterprises want and then integrating our scheduling capability of WebEx meetings directly into Google Calendar. So that's one piece. And then we also work with the Chromebook group because more and more customers starting to use and deploy Chromebook. And so they want to have an ability to start WebEx meetings and be able to share content and actually join WebEx meetings directly on Chromebook. So there's another effort that went on separately. And then there's a third effort that goes on with the Chrome group where we're leveraging the WebRTC within Chrome so that people can join WebEx meetings directly without having to download any client. And so they just open the web browser, they can have audio, they can have HD video, they can see the share, they can share content just on Chrome. When? This is what we've been waiting for with cloud. This is really key. I want to expand on this notion of services and service-centric view because it has to be clean. Whether it's an API, a message queue, or an event, the user experience got to be integrated very cleanly. This is really kind of the aha moment of when people taste the cloud and go, that's the benefit. Because this is really interesting. WebEx, you got G Suite, two different applications. Very different, yes. This is the benefit of the services. Can you just explain the importance and why IT and why enterprises want this? Enterprises want ease of use. Ease of use, ease of access, and ease of deployment. So Chrome solves that problem. There's no deployment required, right? It's already there, it's available on every desktop. And the one simple click to join and schedule a meeting makes it easy to use. So with that combination, end users adopted really, really quickly. So we're seeing some of the fastest adoption of web clients based on those kinds, ease of use and ease of join. How's the product uptake been? Because if you have a seamless user experience, you probably get more customers coming in, integrating in from G Suite and vice versa, they're getting lift. Is that, how's that partnership working? Can you share some color around that? Yeah, as Connie said, we've really seen this accelerating. One start I'll share is during March, we were adding around 1100 new GCal integrations every day. So we were seeing customers that were using Webex meetings, they were using GCal and they wanted those things to work better together. So integrating those calendars to make it easier to schedule and join meetings. So yeah, that's 1100 a day, it's pretty good uptake considering we weren't really promoting it, it was just, it was there and available to that existing customer base. What can you guys share to enterprise IT application developers or managers who have traditionally lived in a stovepipe world of like, let's build an app and we'll distribute the app and you log in, you do all the things, monolithic app to a world that services led or service centric where you still do an app but you've got to think differently around some of the design criterias around integrating in with other apps. What's some of the best practices that you guys have found because you've seen the network all the way up to the application stack issues, you got Kubernetes and all these new things. What are some of the best practices that companies should be developing around? So what I've seen companies most concerned about is applications affecting other applications on the desktop and hence breaking some of the services. The web services kind of completely removed that because as a web browser, they don't have to worry about it impacting any of their installed applications. And so what we find that as IT look into this mode of deployment, it's not really a deployment, it's an enablement. They actually really advertise it to their end users. They actually rather than users use the web client than to have to install and they have to test and slow the rollout. What do you guys see as the, I mean, I'm old enough to remember that when Lotus Notes was the state of the art of collaboration, right? Boy, that's a real old day to myself. But so now you're talking about a lot about integration, simplifying the experience. Obviously video has come into play. What do you guys see as the mega trends and maybe give us a little glimpse of the roadmap as to what we can expect going forward? Whether it's AI or other data, where's that all fit in? Yeah, I think you nailed it. So this kind of better together, easy join is just table stakes, right? The ability for me to easily join a meeting but where that's very rapidly going is the AI space. So how can I augment that meeting? How, before I join, how do I know about you as individuals, what you care about, what's happening with your company? So the A company acquisition we did recently is fits into that in terms of how do we start surfacing information about the people? If I'm in the meeting, if I want to get a click on someone to get more context about them, what happened in my previous engagements, what have we previously talked about? How do we surface that up in a timely fashion? And when you, again, you think about Google Calendar and the information it knows about you as an individual, Cisco with the kind of matrix of who you're calling and what meetings have taken place. There's kind of a tantalizing thing there about how you blend that together. So you surface the information, you automate this kind of, the repetitive, more mundane tasks and free the people up to focus more on innovation and collaboration and relationships. The analytics opportunities is pretty big. Yeah, absolutely. Diane Green said in her keynote, you know, security's the number one worry. AI is the number one opportunity. By freeing up the mundane tasks, automating that away, the value will shift up the stack. We were using a metaphor with Jennifer Lynn and from Google, when the horse and buggy was killed by the car, those jobs went away. There was no need for the horse and hay and all that stuff. IT, same thing. Things are shifting, operations are changing. It's fundamental. Contact Center is a great example of that. If you look at what's happening in that market, the predictions that the cool flows are going to decrease isn't really happening. What's happening is you're going to multi-channel and people are doing the more basic stuff online, just fixing issues, but when it becomes complex, when it becomes relationship, it becomes high enough value, then you want the personal interaction. So I think the way personally I look at AI is it will free up. Computers are doing a greater, doing this kind of more repetitive finding patterns, but when it comes to talking to the doctor about your condition or you're trying to build relationships, there's things that people just naturally do very well and plowing through lots of data to find patterns, we don't do great. It's actually quite amazing when you look at the trends over the last decade or so in terms of collaboration. It used to be, I was joking about Lotus Notes, but it used to be you'd request people to show up 15 minutes early so you could sort out all the problems. And now today, if you're a minute late, people are texting you, where are you? Let's go. So we've become so much more productive and the protocol has changed. So when you think about how machine intelligence is going to affect productivity going forward, it's potentially massive. Yeah, we see massive opportunities and as you know to really get the benefit from AI, you need some pretty big data sets. So again, just thinking about WebEx for a second, six billion minutes a month of meetings, I'm not saying we're going to go push all that straight into Google, but just when you think about what's tied up in those six billion minutes, what's been discussed, how easily can I unlock that? How do I get insights from it? How do I train models? It's like, again, the combination of few statuses. AI would be just amazing. You just go, hey, I missed that WebEx. Give me the highlight reel. Exactly, not only that, but how do you customize that for the individual? Or if I missed the first 10 minutes, can I go scroll back and actually review, get the transcription? And if I need some additional information, can I just pull it up and it shows up for me within the meeting? So there's just massive opportunities that we're looking at. And the user expectations, the new experience, that's what people are really designing around, what the expectations should be. Yes. And making that user. Okay, Connie and Ben, I want to get one last question in before we break. Two parts for each of you. What's the most important story from your perspective here at the show this week that you're talking about and sharing? And what's next for you guys? Well, Ben, we'll start with you. So yeah, my two answers is firstly, the initial kind of integrations we're putting together. People should go check that out because it's, you know, there's some very compelling use cases that we're fixing there. But the big item is just going Google, working together to really tackle this kind of future of work. And the combination of those two portfolios is going to unlock some really interesting opportunities and that's what the teams are kind of getting together, working on defining and stay tuned to kind of see those phase two, phase three deliverables. It sure works, great, Connie. From a product perspective, what's the hottest thing that you're talking about here? Most important, and then what's next? Yeah, for us, it's really the Google and Cisco coming together in the collaboration space, working together to make it much easier and simpler for customers to deploy and use the products. And also to explore new opportunities in transcription and AI, leveraging Google Assist to just make it even better in the future. Scale up the experience. Yes. The whole attracts some probably great developer opportunities going on. Exploring and reinventing the enterprise, that was Diane Green's theme. She'll be here on theCUBE, breaking it down. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, live coverage. Here we have Cisco collaboration inside theCUBE, big relationship expansion with Google, new product integrations, the value of the services within the cloud, the new model for development and user experience theCUBE, bringing you all the content here on the floor. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break.