 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE. Co-host of theCUBE with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Riaz Rehan, who's the global VP and general manager of Cisco IoT Internet of Things division. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. Nice to meet you. Great to see you. New to Cisco, IoT, I was commenting on the keynote to Stu today. I mean, Cisco got it right 10 years ago in their initial vision. And it's now happening in real time in front of our eyes. We see cars, we see connected people, we see connected everything. Everything's connected with an IP address or some connection point with power. That is IoT world, it's massive. You're in charge, are you? Are you having fun yet? Absolutely. I mean, I joined in May last year, and I can tell you it's been an eventful eight and a half months. Cisco has a huge commitment towards IoT. They've made a massive investment of people, of funds, and of intent. I mean, this is one of the top strategies for the company. Right from our CEO Chuck Robbins down, everyone's really committed to IoT. We've made a few important changes. We're making it real. And as you said, IoT today is ubiquitous. So it's very important for Cisco as a leader in this field to demonstrate that leadership and I'm honored to be leading the charge. So define what's happening at Cisco. You can put a stake in the ground right now. If someone's coming in fresh, and again, you've inherited a good position, as we say in the NASCAR business, pole position. What are you doing? How do you look at it? And how would you explain Cisco's view of IoT? Because everyone seems to have a different view of how they're attacking IoT. What's the strategy for Cisco? How are you going after it? You're right. I mean, IoT means different things to different people. But the one common thing is it's very context-based, right? IoT, within the context of manufacturing, as an example, is different from within the context of roadways and transportation. So we've done a couple of things to get that context right. First of all, we have defined how we're going to go after the market. So we've got two platforms. We've got Jasper, which was acquired by Cisco, which is IoT for everything to do with cellular network. So if you're in a public cellular network, Jasper is the platform you'll use. And then we've got Kinetic, which is our platform for IT and OT networks. So first, we defined our strategy around product. Next, we've defined which industries we'll go after. And there's five key verticals that we've decided are crucial for Cisco. Number one is cities. We have pole position in that. Number two is manufacturing. Number three is energy, which includes both oil and gas as well as utilities. Number four is transportation. That includes roadways as well as fleet. And number five is retail. So that's really a go-to-market strategy. You're kind of focusing on specific use cases in specific industries. And you view the network, we were talking before we went on camera, there's certainly cloud, which is not competitive to you guys, or are they? But how do you, is the network more important than the edge, is the edge where the action is? Because a device on the network technically is a device, it's a thing. Internet of things, people are things. Machines are things. So where is the edge, where is the synthetic matter? You're a philosophy on this. So, you know, IoT, the T stands for things. And everything is connected to something, right? That's where the data is coming from. So whether it's a machine, whether it's a moving vehicle, whether it's a vending machine, or a soil sensor, they're all things. Cisco has owned the network for a long time, right? And a lot of these things that we talk about are the last point of a network. And they're connected to some network in some capacity. So we approach IoT from the bottom up. We have, I believe, a great position to approach IoT from. We understand the network, we understand what's on the network, we got visibility to the threats on the network, we have secured the network, and it gives us a great perspective on how to approach IoT. To your other point around cloud, we're not competitive at all with the cloud vendors. As a matter of fact, we are complementary. We work with all the big guys out there. We've figured out how best to work with them. Because at the end of the day, their mission is to drive as much data to the cloud as possible. Our mission is to help extract data from difficult to extract places. So it's actually a pretty good marriage. And what's the best way to work with it? You said you have figured out the best way to work with the clouds. What is that best way? So, you mentioned the edge. I think the edge is where we had to define clear rules of engagement. Our theory on the edge is that we will bring data, as I said, from difficult to extract places and compute it at the edge. And then we'll actually transport it to wherever the customer wants it to go. And as you heard in the keynotes today, we live in a multi-cloud world. Very few customers are with one cloud. They either have two or more of the public cloud guys or they have their own private clouds or they have a combination they're off. So, in that sense, we'll do all the edge compute. And then when the data has to be transferred or moved to the cloud, that's when we'll kind of help figure out what the customer wants to do and then move it to where the customer wants it to be. So, Riaz, your background's software. And I want you to give us a little bit of insight as to where we are with IoT today. Specifically, think about go-to-market and sales cycle. Some of the things I've heard is there's a lot of customers interested, but it's really early. And there's a lot of consultative activity there. It's not to the point where, oh, okay, you're this industry. This is the solution. Let's shrink-wrap it and go sell it. So, it takes a little bit longer. Where are we? How are we along that maturity cycle? And how does that fit into kind of Cisco's selling model and partners? You're absolutely right, Stu. IoT is still very nascent. Customers are still trying to figure out, not just how to do things, but what to do. And I think Cisco has a leadership role because of our legacy and because of our brand, and frankly, because of our thought leadership. While I come from the software world, I recognize that Cisco has had great leadership in the networking area, great leadership in security, and great leadership in software. We've transitioned to becoming a software company. We've had great strength in software. Our CEO has often said that 80% plus of our engineers are software engineers. With that said, what we're doing for customers is we're helping define what we call industry solutions. Let me give you an example. If you're talking to a manufacturing customer who's trying to connect a number of their machines, both Greenfield and Brownfield, to sensors, these are actual devices that we partner with and we install for customers, and then extract data from those sensors onto an edge compute device. There's software involved, but equally, there's networking hardware involved in making this happen. And then there's, of course, visualization and connection to the cloud as we just talked about. So to make that value chain come to life, we are doing two things. Number one, we're defining what the data flow looks like, and number two, we're defining for the customer what the end-to-end solution looks like because we think that's critical. And in all the verticals that I mentioned, we've actually gone down to the level of use case. So if you look at manufacturing, to stick with that example, we've got a use case for equipment health monitoring, we've got a use case for energy monitoring, we've got a use case for track and trace, and each use case has a combination of software, networking, hardware, security, and services. So Cisco's taking a leadership position in defining that by industry. So you mentioned Kinetic was an acquisition. No, no, Jasper. Jasper was the acquisition. Okay, Kinetic was for IT, OT, information technology, and operational technologies. We've reported, and we've observed, the culture clash between OT and IT. And OT guys, they're like, IT, get out of my face. I don't want an IP connection anywhere near my hardened system, easily around industrial IoT. How is Cisco bringing those worlds together? Because it feels like DevOps again. Is it a collision? Is it smooth? Your view, does it matter? How are you seeing that? It's evolving. Going back to Jasper, which Cisco acquired a couple of years ago. And by the way, a very successful acquisition. The device growth has grown from about 20 million devices to 60 million plus today, in just over 18 months, and continues to grow rapidly. Jasper, most of Jasper's go-to-market motion was focused at the business user, what we would call OT. Jasper, one of the big verticals in Jasper is the connected car. You know, another big, they do a lot of different verticals. They empower a lot of different industries. And anything to do with cellular IoT is served by Jasper. And that's mostly sensors. That's mostly sensors. So you're saying, OT's kind of covered with a Jasper side. Yeah, yeah. So you actually have a lot. You win on both sides. Yeah, we have a lot of OT coverage with Jasper. And there's a lot of great skills that Jasper brought into Cisco. It's not just the technology and the massive user base, a lot of great skills as well. Now, coming to Kinetic, this one's interesting because when we work with, going back to manufacturing as an example, we have to work with the OT guys. This is a good thing for Cisco because it gives us a completely new set of buyers in the corporate world to interact with. And by definition, we're actually bringing IT into a lot of these OT conversations, right? Now, some of them... Well, they got the data too. I mean, they got to bring it back home, right? But there's also a minor other things like security to deal with, right? So we got to kind of bridge that gap and OT and IT are kind of playing a big role in defining that. Yeah. You mentioned the key word that I'm surprised it took us so long to get to, security. Talk about the ever-expanding attack radius. The keynote this morning, they talked about all the new agents around there. IoT's huge risk out there. What's Cisco's role there? What's the ecosystem partner? How does Cisco maintain a leadership position in this case? So let me start by saying something that could be quite sobering. IoT devices are some of the most hackable devices on the planet, right? Research study after research study bears this out. That said, Cisco's point of view is very simple. Security is something we start with. It is not an afterthought. So to that end, we have integrated security into our strategy, but more importantly, into our products. Let me give you two examples. Jasper is one of the most secure IoT platforms on the planet, if not the most secure. Jasper is delivered through our service provider network that we call JPO, so Jasper partner operators. In the US, it happens to be AT&T. Globally, we've got about 50 partners who do this. And we work with them to make that rock solid and robust. We also offer additional security offerings on top of what comes with Jasper. Now, coming to the OTIT side, that's a big challenge as well. If you guys had gone down to the world of solutions, which you probably did, you would have seen that we have a specific offering called IoT Thread Defense. We take this very seriously. We bake this into our architecture right when we are designing the starter solutions. And then we also stress test our solutions as those solutions grow. Well, I mean, I could see the OG being very secure, end to end, and close, obviously, first a license spectrum with a cellular and then an end to end endpoint. Cool, I can lock that down. Here's the problem. A Wi-Fi device has a light bulb. It's got a computer in it. It's got multi-threaded processes. I mean, the computers are this big. That's going to require policy on the network. It's an IP device. This is where the threat vector is. This is an area you guys can help. So this is more on the IT side because that Wi-Fi light bulb in my house, which has processes, could be hacked and actually spawn a lot of malware from there. So how do you take that dumb device that wants to be a little bit smart? That's too smart right now with all this processing power. You're smart and- I mean, it's a dumb device. All these new flashlights, it's got to be on and off. You know what I'm saying? So when is that going to be throttled back? Can you guys help with the network layer? You know, we recognize the vulnerability of some of these devices. And as David Geckler mentioned in his keynote today, security for us is a massive business, but it's also something we think about constantly. Like going back to your example, what we can bring is the IT security depth that we have. You know, whether it's Wi-Fi, a wired connection, or a combination thereof. I think we've got the network chops and the security chops to secure those devices. And we're doing that. The important thing is we're doing that, baking it into our product strategy. Three guys, I just want to get philosophical for a second with you, because great conversation, IOT is certainly important. Let's kind of zoom out, kind of go in the clouds a little bit, no pun intended, and look down at the industry. And architecturally, there's a debate. And you know, we've said that the data center is going to get shrunk down so small that the edge device is going to be a data center someday. How do you see that? Because that changes the data equation. We all know the cost of moving data around the network. So ultimately, you have to have a lot of compute at the edge. Your thoughts, how does that play out architecturally? How should customers grok that and think about it? Is it too early? So I've seen a shift happening in this as recently as the last 12 months. The emphasis on edge, I know it's very topical. It's been in the business press for a long time. But I think if you look at the ground reality, it is true. A lot of the data consumed by customers today is consumed very close to the point of generation. The classic industry that does this repeatedly is manufacturing. One of the studies indicated that over 72% of the data generated in the shop floor in an IoT context is consumed in the shop floor. So not a lot of this is going to the cloud. There's other industries, but a lot of data is going to the cloud. But the reality is the edge is getting more and more important. Compute, as you said, is moving to the edge. This is a trend we'll see that will continue to happen. It's not going to lessen. It's probably going to deepen. And from Cisco's perspective, I think we're well positioned to take advantage of this and to serve our customers as this trend evolves. Awesome, well, so much. Thanks so much for spending the time on the key. Really appreciate it. It's illuminating for the folks watching. What's your mission as you head up the division? What's your marching orders to the troops? Obviously, you've got to look at and rein things in, double down where it's working and evolve with this wave that's coming, that's here. You've got decentralized apps down out in the road. You've got immutable blockchain entries potentially. I mean, crazy stuff happening. How do you look at this? How do you motivate the team? What's your marching orders? What are your top goals? So we've got three key objectives. Number one, we want to get to a billion connected devices. And Jasper is really helping drive that charge. We're at 60 plus million, growing to 100 million in this calendar year. We want to get to a billion. Because once you get to that level of scale, you become the de-facto standard in many ways. So that's number one. Number two, on the kinetic side, we want it to be ubiquitous. We want to have kinetic in all of those industries that I mentioned and then some. We want to own the use case. And number three, we want to make sure that we're leading with IoT and helping drive great growth for the company. Because that's Cisco's number one imperative. Awesome, Riyaz, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great conversation about IoT. Great thought leadership at the helm at IoT. It's a confusing but massively growing opportunity. It's a connected world. This is what we live in today. It's pervasive and the software's going to be running it and it's going to be secure. And of course theCUBE's breaking it down for you here. We are secured in Barcelona with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, back with more live coverage after this short break.