 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, our coverage of Cisco Live, day three is in full effect. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we have a couple of guests joining us. We've got Mike Bundy, head of Cisco's strategic alliances from Guess Where? The jacket should give it away. Pure Storage and Tom Koppelman, the VP of Architecture Sales America's for Cisco. Hi guys. Hi, how you doing? Thanks for bringing more brightness to our set. Yeah, I forgot my sunglasses. I know, we were in the buzzy bright DevNet that we've been here all week. Great event, massive event, my goodness. 28,000 folks or so. Mike, let's start with you. Give us a status of the Pure Cisco relationship, the evolution of that where you guys are now. What is exciting? Sure, so the relationship is, it's unbelievable in terms of the amount of synergies and energy we have together. In fact, Tom at Cisco was really involved in the early genesis of this relationship prior to me joining the company. And in the last couple of years, we've probably doubled in terms of our go to market and sell to customers together. So tremendous growth, you know, partnership brings a value to us because of the strong heritage that we have from a DevNet tie in in terms of all the automation that we have in the platform. So it's just a tremendous, tremendous great partnership. And Tom Cisco has a massive partner ecosystem, a lot of choice. What is it about Pure Storage that is providing advantages to Cisco? Where it's helping customers really kind of bridge this gap between hyper-converged, multi-cloud, hybrid, all that jazz. Right, so you know, Pure was a first mover in terms of flash storage, right? So we saw demand from our customers wanting that technology to improve their data center environments. And when we partnered up early, we were able to kind of capture that momentum, right? And when I think about our go to market with Pure, which is really where I kind of focus, there's very little friction in that relationship, right? There's not a lot of, there's not competitive overlap. There's not things like that. So it's technology that the customers want that they ask for, and a good field go to market and leadership on both sides that are willing to invest and get engaged and move the relationship forward. So what else do you guys do and besides just the go to market partnership? Because I got a hold of this timeline of Cisco-validated designs that Pure and Cisco have put out over the last five years, four years. And there's like 13 milestones on there. So it was roughly three a year. Of course it started with Pure's IPO. So that's what Cisco said, ah, these guys are real. So I work on them. And in early days, well of course you started with FlashStack, that was the flagship product. And then VDI, everybody does VDI, analysts are like, yeah, yeah, everybody does VDI. But then it started really accelerating the cadence. So it's more than just go to market. What's beneath that, you know, go to market. Good question, yep. You want to? Go ahead, you hit the highlights of the CVDs. I would say that Pure, this is our number one partnership that we have from an alliance perspective. The investment is far exceeding other partnerships we have. So the amount of product integration that we're doing is tremendous. As you see there, we've focused on ACI and multi-data centers the last couple years. We're focusing on AI and machine learning most recently. And beyond that, we just signed an agreement and have released a resell of Cisco's Sand Switches in the marketplace. The first resell agreement we've ever done as a company and it just further shows the commitment and resources that we're willing to put into making sure the partnership is successful and continues to grow and evolve. And on top of that, the investment in Cisco InterSight in integrating with Cisco InterSight, the management platform, which is very important to us, it just shows commitment of the partnership. Let's talk more about that. So how does that work? What problems is that solving for customers? Well, Cisco InterSight is our cloud-based management offering for compute and Pure has integrated their storage platform as part of that solution. So allowing customers, whether it's a converged solution, just raw compute, a hyper-converged solution, but allowing them to manage those pools and deliver that via a cloud solution. So Pure plugs into the Cisco API, now you're part of that stack essentially, so it's transparent to the customer and Cisco's management plane takes care of all that. Exactly right, correct, yes. Yeah, it's a big deal for us because it was the first integration with InterSight for many storage partner that Cisco has, right? So first to market, we want to embrace hyper-convergence which is a big important priority for Cisco and also bridging that gap. So as we compete against single-vendor stacks, we have the right solution that customers are looking for and ultimately that's why it's so important for us. Yeah, Pure's big on first, you're first to flash, you just mentioned another first, you were first with NVMe, before that you were first with the Evergreen. You like being first. First orange sport coat. That's definitely first there. Let's talk about customer value though, obviously that's what it's all about as we look at not just the tremendous amount of choice that customers have when it comes to technology partners, but also the amount of data that's being generated that's growing astronomically, yet organizations are getting so little value out of that because they can't extract the insights. What are you guys doing together, leveraging the superpowers of AI and machine learning to help customers in any industry start to really not just monetize that data but really accelerate their businesses. Tom, you're smiling, so let's start with you. Yeah, so we came out with an AI server, our ML480 and we've integrated that. Pure has invested, we've both invested and done an integration between FlashBlade and I'll let Mike talk a little bit about FlashBlade and the value proposition of FlashBlade, but integrated that with our AI server and our AI server is an NVIDIA powered server so it essentially gives you scale of processing and capabilities to allow you to kind of capitalize on all that data so the customers can get the information they need out of that. Do you want to take a second on FlashBlade? And AI is the buzz, it's the hot two-letter acronym in the industry these days. 13 billion dollar infrastructure opportunity, et cetera, et cetera. So what Pure has really focused on is data is the new oil of commodities for customers and clients and what we've built is a platform called FlashBlade and architecture called the Data Hub that allows you to not have to copy data and move it around and create silos and data warehouses so you can much easier execute a data strategy with the Data Hub architecture using FlashBlade and when you look at machine learning in terms of how you build a data pipeline so that you can then get to quicker results from a business application standpoint with AI that's what we've built together with Cisco and we're uber uber super excited a number of customers already in the last couple months. So I'm going to push a little bit on that because AI server, AI storage, like people don't associate storage and server guys with AI but what if I hear you correctly there's a 13 billion dollar opportunity for workloads to manage workloads running on your servers and your storage and so you're optimizing them for AI workloads, right? Absolutely. So you're not necessarily inventing AI, you're providing infrastructure so that people can leverage AI, is that right? And the same way that we build APIs together to work with InterSight, we do that in a way that allows our customers to leverage CAFE, other applications that can help build that data pipeline. So we build the platform from the infrastructure level that makes the management easy and we partner with all of the applications at the top end but also the middleware and that software pre-packaged layer that connects the APIs to us. So it's easy, it's agile, it's manageable, it's a cloud-like experience for the customers, right? Easy, agile, all awesome, but security, absolutely critical today. What are you guys doing? Tom will start with you. How are you guys working together to infuse and integrate security into the technology so that from a customer's perspective those risks dial down? So Cisco's integrating security across all of our product portfolio, right? And that includes our data center portfolio all the way through our campus, our WAN, all those portfolios. So we continue to look for opportunities to integrate, whether it's dual factor authentication or things like secure data center with a highly scalable multi-incense firewall in front of a data center, things like that. So we're definitely looking for areas and angles and opportunities for us to not only integrate it from a product standpoint, but also ensure that we are talking that story with our customers so that they know they can leverage Cisco for the full architecture from a security standpoint. And the same thing on the storage of the data from an encryption perspective and as the data gets moved or is mobile, that level of security and policy follows it wherever the data's moved. So what should we expect then? What's next in the time? What's 14 going to look like? We're not going to have to give a specifics, but we're going to see blockchain CVDs, or what should observers think about the partnership going forward? What can we look forward to? Yeah, I mean, the adoption of container capability is tremendous in our customer's environment. So Cisco has a cloud container platform available today. We're integrating that into FlashStack in the very near future. Embracing the cloud, disaster recovery and data protection is Uber. I mean, it's very hot for customers. So improving that experience so that you have faster restoration times, you're able to look at a multi-tier strategy that's very easy to manage from a storage perspective, leveraging S3 with Amazon, Azure, et cetera. So that's the couple of things that are on the short-term building block together. Yeah, I was going to comment on certainly multi-cloud and containers. Those would be two of the big ones that I'd hit on, right? In the event of multi-cloud leveraging, converged and hyper-converged together to better solve the customer's problems. So, okay, so that was going to ask you. So hyper-converged now becomes a bridge to the cloud, if in fact that's where customers want to go. Yes, yes, it can be, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, it can be, yes. Absolutely, cool. Well guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, sharing with us the momentum that the pure Cisco relationship has and what excites you for the future. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching.