 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting FutureCloud, one event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. Okay, we're here with Kastu Das, who's the Senior Vice President General Manager of Cloud and Compute at Cisco, and Vijay Venagopal, who is the Senior Director for Product Management for Cloud Compute at Cisco. KD, Vijay, good to see you guys, welcome. Great to see you, Dave. Good to be here. KD, let's talk about cloud. You and I, last time we were face to face was in Barcelona, we loved talking about cloud. And I always say to people, look, Cisco's not a hyperscaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost, actually over $100 billion last year on CapEx, the big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco's all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy there, maybe how you can leverage that build out. And importantly, what are customers telling you they want out of hybrid cloud? Yeah, no, that's a perfect question to start with, Dave. So, yes, so the hyperscalers have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. There's also a great innovation, a set of innovation coming from open source. And that's another source of a gift, in fact, to the IT community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well, how do I, in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage in terms of my contemporary workloads, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DevOps, and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud that built an open source that built internally to me. And that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Cisco's mission is to provide for that imperative the simplest, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud. And that platform is InterSight. We've been investing in InterSight. It's a SaaS service. InterSight delivers to them that bridge between their states of today, their workloads of today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise-grade resiliency with the agility that's needed for the future, the embracing of cloud native, of new paradigms of DevOps models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and open source. And bridging those two is what InterSight has been doing. That's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course, we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any version of that, whether that is on-prem in the cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and so forth. But if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, InterSight is really a linchpin of that strategy. Is it not? It really is. Let me take a second to really familiarize those who don't know InterSight with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we built it ground up to be a immensely scalable, SaaS, super simple hybrid cloud platform. And it's a platform that provides a slew of services inherently. And then on top of that, there are suites of services. There are suites of services that are tied to infrastructure automation, Cisco as well as Cisco partners. There are suites of services that have nothing to do with Cisco products from a hardware perspective and it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud natives. And InterSight and its suite of services continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery. Just over the last two quarters, we've announced a whole number of things. We'll go a little bit deeper into some of those, but they span everything from infrastructure automation to Kubernetes and delivering Kubernetes as a service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate, how much it's costing into your on-prem estate, into your workloads and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco, AppD, as well as non-Sysco assets. And then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of IT is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient. And that includes a workflow, an ability to say, do this then do this and do this or it includes other ways of automation like infrastructure code and so forth. So it includes a self-service that span that, but we're inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving, rapidly delivering new services and we'll talk about some more of those there. Great. Thank you, Katie. Vijay, let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with HashiCorp, I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre-COVID, I in my predictions post, I said Hashi was a name to watch our data partners, ETR. You look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. Particularly, we think very important in the whole multi-cloud discussion and as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings, you can very easily experiment, smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you could plug right in, not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important, why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? Absolutely, Dave, and spot on every single thing that you said. Let me just start by paraphrasing what our mission statement is in the cloud and compute group. Our mission statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation, orchestration and observability across your hybrid cloud IT operations. Now, so developers and applications team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we are on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And InterSight is a key platform and linchpin to enable that kind of operations, cloud-like operations in the private clouds. And a key, as you rightly said, HashiCorp is the, they were the inventors of a concept of infrastructure as code and in Terraform they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with HashiCorp to integrate InterSight with HashiCorp's Terraform to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the, to hybrid cloud operations. And we enter into a very tight integration and partnership where we allow developers, DevOps teams and infrastructure administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SaaS-delivered manner for both public and private cloud. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud-managed IAC to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with HashiCorp on that issue. Yeah, Terraform gets very high marks from customers, a lot of value there. The InterSight integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud-native for a minute. We all talk about cloud-native. KD was sort of mentioning before, you got the core apps, you want to protect those, make sure they're enterprise-grade, but they got to be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this cloud-native trend? What are the moves you're making in this regard? I mean, cloud-native is one of the paramount ID trends of today, and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud-native architectures in all modern applications. Now, cloud-native has become synonymous with Kubernetes these days, and Kubernetes has emerged as a de facto cloud-native platform for modern cloud-native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SaaS-delivered Kubernetes service that is integrated with InterSight. We call it the InterSight Kubernetes Service, or IKS, and this just geared a little over one month ago. Now, what InterSight Kubernetes Service does is it delivers a cloud-managed and cloud-delivered Kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third-party infrastructure, or it could even be public cloud. But think of it as Kubernetes anywhere delivered as SaaS managed from InterSight. So very powerful capability that we've just released into InterSight to enable the power of Kubernetes and cloud-native to be used anywhere. But today, we made a very important announcement because we have today announced the brand new Cisco Service Mesh Manager, the Cisco Service Mesh Manager, which is available as an extension to IKS or to InterSight. Basically, we see service meshes as being the future of networking, right? In the past, we had layer two networking and layer three networking, and now with service meshes, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently, how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be very developer-friendly and developer-centric. And so what we have done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service mesh manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking to the consumers like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Bonsai Cloud, and we've taken the assets of Bonsai Cloud and delivered the Cisco Service Mesh Manager as an extension to IKS that brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and developer teams. Got it. Thank you, Vijay. And so, Katie, let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today. A lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity, and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. Absolutely. So a couple of things to close on. First of all, InnerSight is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that cloud operating model that Vijay talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it saps. It's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I would highly encourage anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again because there are probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I close with is we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging your on-prem, your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to make that mental leap because in past generation, we used to talk about integrating technologies together. And then with public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyperscalers, everything they're doing to innovate super fast, all of that innovation that's coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from companies around the world, including Cisco, how do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud ops team, if you're an IT ops team, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. So that's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. Great, thank you a lot. A lot in this announcement today. Appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. Thank you, Dave. And thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech event coverage.