 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back live to Cisco Live in 2020 in Barcelona. We're in Europe, Barcelona, I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante, we've got a great guest here. And the whole theme of the show is not about the infrastructure, it's about the applications. And the application is being powered by an infrastructure powered by Cisco. We've got a great guest, senior vice president, general manager team, collaboration, Sri Vassan of Cisco. You're running all the big products, WebEx on steroids, new announcements. You had a really killer announcements, the packed booth, we'll get into that. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming. Thank you for having me. All right, so what's the quick news? You were on stage giving the keynote. Quickly share the news, we can get into it. So we're obviously coming out with a set of updates to our great portfolio. We reach out to about 300 million users across the enterprise today who use us for all the way from meetings to team collaboration, to calling, to powering meeting rooms. So in a sense, what we have as a product set is either in the meeting room or on the desktop or on a mobile phone. So any one of those methods and mechanisms. And in the past couple of years, we've seen mass adoption of video, whether it be on a mobile phone, whether it be in your desktop or in a meeting room itself. So video is the key. You had an announcement with Microsoft Teams. Explain that, because don't they compete with you? Yes, we, so the best way to describe it is it's compatibility and competition. So it's compatible and compete for the sake of our end users. So end user choice pretty much drives the types of integrations we do these days. You can't leave it to an IT organization to do that integration. You've got to make sure these products work. So we integrate quite a bit with our competitors, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom. We do integrate with all of those guys. And the Microsoft Teams integration is prefaced on providing the best real-time media experience into the Microsoft ecosystem. So if a customer is using Office 365 for document collaboration and chooses us for real-time collaboration, they get the best experience possible. So this has been a sleepy space for a while. And then all of a sudden, you mentioned Slack, Zoom comes out, big IPOs, high valuations, Microsoft kind of transitioning its base to Teams. There's a lot of excitement all of a sudden. And I was thinking in the last year, wow, geez, I wonder if Cisco's asleep at the wheel. But today you had all these announcements, so obviously not asleep at the wheel. Describe what you see going on in the space and what excites you from the standpoint of what you just announced. So I think over the past two years, rightfully so, there's been a ton of movement in the space. And I think it's driven by, it's important to talk about why. It's driven by globalization of the workforce. So that globalization of the workforce has caught steam in the past few years. And you pretty much see folks being employed across the globe, whoever has the skill gets employed in a sense. And what we see within the confines of Webex is an increase in user engagement. So the same user is using Webex a lot more. And we wonder why, and we're seeing basically cross time zone meetings go up. And team collaboration, as we know it, is no longer across the table, it's actually across time zones, across geographies, across language boundaries. So you're seeing that happen. And the power of team collaboration is not just bringing people together, it's the data inherent to within. The conversation becomes the new currency, it's the new frontier. And you can do a whole bunch of analytics on that. You can provide information on that. You can basically bring what I would call uninterrupted work streams in the midst, which is how do you take a conversation, take a set of action items out of it, and basically take it all the way so that there's automation, there's least amount of transmission loss, transmission loss in a sense. So that's what's causing this industry to wake up because it's a productivity gain in knowledge worker population. R.O.I. is off the charts in these systems. It's a lower denominator and it's so easy to justify. Yeah, I mean to me, this is the biggest wave that people are kind of talking about, but not really specifically addressing it. And to me, I always like to look at the startup world. Because the startup world is ultimately the canary in the coal mine. Cloud native was, before cloud hit, startups were in there, white clean sheet of paper, all cloud now, that's mainstream. I had a conversation with Mitchell, the founder of HashiCorp, and we were talking about the concept of virtual first. And his startup was all virtual. They didn't have an office, they could afford one. But their teams were remote. This is the new dynamic. They weren't... Get in that, same thing, right? And so I believe that this is going to be an enterprise requirement because this has been validated. You see people work virtually. Development teams, marketing teams, any team, they're remote, they're at home. So this is a trend. And designing a product for virtual first, versus saying, oh, if you're virtual, use this product that was designed for this. This is really where it's coming to, in my opinion. How are you guys addressing that? Because in that video, it's not easy. You guys been doing video assist go for a long time. I know from the cable companies to making deep packet inspections and managing packets. QOS, I mean policy based. This is the perfect storm for making video work better. So explain the whole virtual first and the video innovation. Start by sharing a small little secret. I run this business and yet I'm a remote worker. Cisco's based in San Jose. I live in Seattle. I live in a small town called Samamish and I'm a perfect example of who we are building for. You have a good band with there? Oh, absolutely. It's all about the band. So without a doubt, what has also spurred this is the better bandwidth across the globe, not just in the U.S. I find that parts of Asia have very good connectivity if you go into Korea, Singapore. It's just fantastic, right? If you go into the Western Europe, Scandinavian countries, it's just fabulous. So I think the fact of the matter is the act of working together across the table and the act of these collaboration tools bringing people together need to be the same. That's pretty much where we are all headed. We're all trying to achieve that nirvana of making sure there's no dissonance when you bring people across video. That's key. That requires not only the ability to see and hear people but to be able to whiteboard, to be able to have a very rich and immersive conversation on co-creation. So using like stickies on a whiteboard, for example. How well can you do it? So those are the types of things that we are headed towards. And I will pretty much say, you guys said it in your question. You have to design for a remote worker, for a virtual work environment, which basically is all about optimizing for team collaboration and optimizing for information that's consistent across different communication types. So whether you pick up the phone, whether you are on a meeting, in a persistent chat, all that transcription should look and feel the same. This is the convergence really of networking and software because software is where the action is, but the network controls the routes. So, I'll give you an example, we were doing a live broadcast in our studio and Palo Alto had Ken Jennings on from Jeopardy. And it was so exciting, it was a good interview with multiple guests on talking about AI and he was kind of our celebrity guest and he had terrible pain with that house. I don't know, maybe his kids were playing games on it or he was downloading some Netflix, who knows? But he had a horrible visual. We couldn't control that. This is where the network optimization comes in. What are you guys doing there? You guys run the networks, you guys have access to some of the routes and looking for, you know, best route, best quality. So I think without a doubt, you know, your lowest common denominator leg in your network kind of decides the quality per se. But we continue to do things like compression of bits on the wire so that you need the smallest amount of pipe. But at the end of the day for high-res video, you still need a decent amount of bandwidth. And what ends up happening is it's not just bandwidth, it's understanding what kind of packet loss profile you have on that network and things like that. So what we're doing across nearly every vendor today is figuring out how we can optimize for these lossy networks. So if you talk to any collaboration engineer, the first interview question will inadvertently be, tell me your experience on lossy networks, what have you done? How many patents do you have? You know, that's kind of the discussion per se. So I think without a doubt, the advent of 5G and its expansion will lead to Ken Jennings potentially having a much better experience, right? Can you auto-scale, not auto-scale, but auto-detect? Yes. Because that's something that could be automated. Yeah, we call it graceful degradation. So we start with aspiring for a 1080p, then we'll bring it down to 720, 360, and no video. And that happens automatically and we let the end user know you're having a network blip and hence we are degrading it or... And that's in today's product. Yes, today's product. So years ago, when you did video conferencing, you just have to show up 15 minutes beforehand just to make sure everybody can get on, okay? So simplicity is another big adoption theme. Whether it's one push phone calling or call me or whatever it is. At the same time, you've got to add functionality. You've added transcription, you've added translation, you've got the split screen. When I stand up, the camera follows me. So are those counter-poise, simplicity, and functionality, or how do you integrate those together? I think all of this is done in the quest to simplicity, right? One of the key things we've done across the Cisco WebEx portfolio, we've been known as the Stodgy characters, you know, guys who don't move fast, which is exactly the opposite. To be honest with you, we worked on making sure we get rid of, I'm going to use the word here, nerd norms in the product. Optimize for the simple. In a meeting, there are three things that matter. Three big use cases, scheduling, joining, in meeting quality. Those are only three things matter. The rest doesn't matter, right? So if you look at our devices, if you look at everything, we have this consistent green button that shows up everywhere. Whether you bring up Outlook, whether you bring up an iPhone calendar, whether you bring up a desktop, in one of our devices, all of those things will have this consistent green button. We never want the end user to miss it. See it, hit it. It will show up at the right time. Basically shows up between six minutes and the four minute mark before a meeting. And by that in meeting quality, you mean the experience overall. How hard it is to share something. Actually, can you see that person? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you hear that person? I think so, that's all, right? How do you avoid echoes in a meeting? What if I turn on both audio multiple times? In a particular, you've got the perfect echo, right? I was mentioning our last interview Shree about the previous guests around, they want APIs, customers would like APIs. It's kind of a trend towards a thin, I won't say thin client, because that's kind of an old word, but more efficient source code on the client side, not bloated software in the sense of having all these bells and whistles. I mean, at some point, how many APIs are you going to use, right? There could be an advanced version, maybe you have a tiered thing, but at the base set, how do you create software in this modern era so that you can have really fast software managing the front end with the powerful back end? You think about, hey Siri, there's the front end, there's the back end, so you're starting to see this kind of decoupling. How do you guys look at that? Has it changed the development thesis? Is that something you guys are thinking about? What's your take on all that? So without a doubt, right? So we constantly optimize, media is a very different workload than, for example, a commanding tool, right? And I don't mean to trivialize Siri or any other assistant. Yeah, media is hard. When you're doing video, the app needs to have some intelligence to be able to disambiguate audio and video streams and content sharing, right? So these apps tend to have a bigger footprint on the desktop, on the mobile phone than other traditional apps. So there is a constant quest for that additional bit of optimization to reduce, substantially reduce the juice you use out of the laptop, right? And with laptops becoming more and more powerful, mobile phones becoming more and more powerful, we're only able to bring more into that big three use cases. And the rich media is only getting more and more robust with video. Look at gaming world. My kids got their rigs set up, multiple monitors. I mean, it's a lifestyle experience, consumption of video. It's only to put more pressure on you guys. It's hard. We know how we do it. What's in your mind, what's your guiding principle for future innovation, whether you're hiring, designing around video? What are you guys chasing that Nirvana? What is it? Is it the software, is it the hardware, is it chips? I think it's a combination of them, right? If you look at Cisco, our inherent differentiation is, we know how to do software. We know a thing or two about networks. And we know hardware. How do you bring these three together? And there's a fourth dimension. I'm going to call it quad and it's security. You can't ignore security. It's something you have to intrinsically think about. It's not a check box after. You don't want somebody peeping toms in your meeting, for example. It's very simple. Hacking the cams. Jeff Bezos has got hacked on a video on his WhatsApp. Embedded malware. So all kinds of weird things that could come through. You don't know. I think it's the amalgamation of all of these things. How do you maximize every single element of the pipe? So we are working with, for example, our own DNA center methods and mechanisms by which we're saying, based on our workload, how do we optimize the network for our workload? When we find an issue within, let's say, WebEx, how do we automatically self-heal the network? That is basically where we're headed. So we want to make sure we are constantly... Up and down the stack. Up and down the stack. Up and down the stack. And the other, you know, you talked about simplicity of use case. I'll give you an example. What we're doing with our devices now is it has face recognition. We don't store any images in the cloud. So as soon as you walk into a meeting room, you've got an IoT sensor there. It recognizes your face. It says, hey, let me pull up your meetings. It starts to track who all have joined your meeting. And then let's assume you forget to join the meeting. It wakes up and it says, would you like to join the meeting? Two of your colleagues have joined. So you don't even have to hit the button. It is germaphobic friendly. So you don't have to touch anything. It just reminds you. It's more automation. So that level of automation is coming in. So you talk about the future. The future is about simplicity that spans generations. So you pretty much want the human to come back and for the tech to fade away in the background. If you don't want them to be reliant on this app that you have to learn. It should be discernible, relatable. Easy to use. Works like the movies. Shree, you're a rock star. I'm great to have you. In fact, now that we know you live in Seattle, we're going to have you in our studio remotely. And we're going to make sure that bandwidth and that video is of highest quality. Shree is the SVP Senior Vice President General Manager of the Collaboration Group of Cisco. Big part of the future of Cisco, this group is going to be really driving some of those network benefits. The applications are a big part of the focus. Changing the business models, business outcomes. This is the conversation. This is theCUBE coverage from Barcelona. We'll be right back after this short break.