 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Barcelona, it's theCUBE's coverage. Day two of three days of coverage. John Furrier with Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante. Dave in this segment. Our next guest is Gordon Thompson, Vice President of Global Enterprise Network from Cisco Worldwide. Run a lot of countries here in Cisco, knows the territory, knows the lay of the land in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia. Now global, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Glad to be with you. So you're on stage in the keynote, you're saying, we're here in Barcelona. A lot of action in Europe. Europe's different than North America, but you start to see them leading the trends on how to handle these complex environments, like highly regulated compliance, GDPR, we've been hearing about that. Security, cybersecurity. So a lot of trends in Europe are actually leading in some areas. It's impacting the network. Your thoughts on this show so far, how's it going? Yeah, so I think there's a fundamental phenomenal opportunity for our customer base and for Cisco at the moment in terms of where technology is going. It's mostly been driven by software innovation in the business, okay? So for many, many years, we built world-class hardware and a software operating system that did one thing. It provided connectivity, okay? But it did one thing. Reliable, secure, performance-based connectivity, but it did one thing. The opportunity now, going back to your question, is we're developing software that doesn't do one thing. It's software that does multiple different things on top of that hardware that therefore helps solve some of the challenges around compliance and all of these sorts of things, but at the same time start to provide much deeper insight and analytics into what's going on in your environment and that then starts to let you say, hey, there's information here in the network that I've never been exposed to before, that I'm now exposed to and I can start to do something meaningful with that data and that's the opportunity I think for our customers, is how they monetize that, how they use that information and providing that information on a real-time basis is going to be the critical thing. So we see a very competitive environment, EMEA. We see loads of businesses in EMEA looking to see how they can use technology to drive differentiation for them in the market and they're beginning to realize that data is the key to being able to do that and they're now seeing how much data they've got on their network that if they can get exposure to, they can start to use in a meaningful way. So really exciting, it's very innovative here and we're seeing customers starting to realize how important the network is. In your keynote, you kind of made a bunch of people uncomfortable saying, you have to change. And you said, and then admitted, I don't like it when people tell me I have to change, but you need to change. What do they have to change? So they have to really think about truly how they're architecting and designing their networks. As I said earlier, our own Cisco's and organizations been phenomenally successful, but we've really done one thing in 30 years, provide reliable, secure connectivity. And over the last four years, our innovation strategy has changed to say, we're not just going to deliver connectivity, we're going to look at how we can deliver automation on top of the network. We're going to look at how we deliver security embedded in the network. We're going to look at how we take real-time analytical insights off of the network. And when you think differently about how you use a network, you'll then start to think differently about the value the network can bring in. And I was making that comment because I was wanting customers to think about the network no longer just being something that's going to deliver connectivity. It's something that will absolutely drive business transformation for them if they approach it with that thought process in mind. So it was really a challenge to get people to think slightly differently. Yeah, wake up a little bit and saying, okay, what's going on here? And I want to get your thoughts on the trend because the tailwinds, I think that Cisco's feeling right now is in every major inflection point, there's always complexity and abstraction layers of software always take away the complexities. So software, check, big time trend. But cloud scale and horizontal scale now with the enterprise hyper flex out to the edge, ACI anywhere. So you start to see Cisco as one large scalable network with complexities that's being managed by software across domains. This seems to be a beautiful formula for what customers want, which is secure networks. Do you see it that way? Is that a major wave you're riding? Is that what the customers are saying? Because I think you're getting at something that's important, which is I'm moving packets around, I'm moving data around, but I got to put my solution out in front of customers, the applications, how they access and engage. So these are like a big picture items, but what's your thoughts on this? Okay, so it's interesting, right? Because what we've created is, so we've created this software overlay network in various different areas. We've created a fabric in the data center, we've created an ACI fabric, okay? In the branch in the campus, we've created what we call software defined access fabric. And in the one, we've created the software defined one fabric with a reptile acquisition, also with Marrake. The interesting thing is people have created these software fabrics to drive southbound automation onto the network to save money, to move more quickly. What we're saying to our customers is, actually the value isn't just about driving southbound automation on each of these fabrics, it's about how you take information from each of these fabrics, connect that information together holistically, and then start to provide more value around behavioral analytics to secure your environment more, et cetera, et cetera. So you're going to see individual fabrics, but then what Dave Geckler was talking about was how he connects these fabrics or domains together. Connecting them together is going to help us secure the environment even more effectively, but it's also going to help us analyze what's going on more effectively as well. So this is really the kind of the sweet spot, I think, for us to work more closely with our customers. So about security, because I think this is a great point. I think if you guys can, well, here we have the fabrics now, product portfolio is broadened, you're filling in, it's filled in, but security still is hot, it's still number one. You guys are embedding that foundationally into the network and lifting the data up to create insight. So what are some of the actionable things that you're seeing enabled from one, the fabrics coming together, and talk about the dynamic of security specifically, because if you don't fix the security paradigm at the network level, it's a house of cars, everything crashes. I mean, well, that's my opinion. You know, your thoughts, do you agree with that? I hope nothing crashes at the end of the day, but the key thing I think is, we like to say we put security in the network, whereas we look at all of the other networking vendors applying security on top of the network. What's the difference? In our own, one word each with two letters in them, but a massive difference in terms of what they do. Ultimately, the network can provide us with loads of contextual information around what's happening in the environment, and it's about how you use that information on a real-time basis to help make better security decisions, okay? And it's really taking the value of networking devices and passing that information from a network switch or a wireless controller to a security policy control capability is really where we start to see value come together, and it's these things that are important to us. For example, I met with a sales leader recently in a very large pharmaceutical company in Europe, and their problem was their sales people were handing in their resignation, but they were doing it the day after they'd taken all the intellectual property out of the company, right? They had gone and taken all of the customer database, they'd put it on a stick, they'd put it in their pocket, and they were away, and it happens every day. The challenge is the network should be able to see a behavioral change. If that was you or me, we would be, we normally perform the same activities on the network every day, right? We don't really change what we do, but the minute we start to go to old servers to download information that we haven't downloaded in years, you know, that's a behavioral change, and the network should be able to identify that, pass that information to the network administrator, and deal with it so we can stop that sort of, you know, data leakage from our organization. So these are the sorts of things that I think are exciting. It just goes unique because of the scope of your portfolio or the technology, or? Well, a bit of both. This was unique because of the scope of the technology, but it's also about the amount of information we take off the network. You know, people talked about in this software overlay the network becoming hardware becoming commoditized. Oh, Cisco, you know, your hardware is going to become commoditized, we'll move to white box. The reality is it's the power of our hardware, our ASIC design, that allows us to pull all of this information off the network. People are beginning to realize how important data is now, and now they're beginning to say, actually, hardware's really important. Although it's the software that does all the sexy stuff, hardware's really important, and we're beginning to see customers recognize two things. The breadth of the portfolio, as we've mentioned earlier on, but also the power of the hardware to allow you the software to do everything it does. Gordon, I know you got to go. Thanks for coming on. One final question while you're here, because I know you have a unique perspective, I want to get it real quick. Quick sound bite here. Global is now a big part of everyone's plans. Global economy, you have good experience globally with Cisco, and also here in Amir. How should companies think about global networking? What's that we are insight into? How people should start thinking about global architectures, global clouds, global networks? Your thoughts? So I think every organization is looking to build out these capabilities. There's absolutely no doubt they are. But I think the way to approach it nowadays with all of the software capabilities we have is to build bit by bit, right? To build your networks in different islands, and then look to how you join those islands together. And I think ultimately that's how most organizations are looking to move forward. From our point of view, I think we'll look to connect those islands or fabrics together with the power of data. And ultimately I think we've always said data's a new oil, but I think truly in the networking industry now, data is a new oil, and it's truly how organizations will differentiate themselves in the future. Gordon, thank you for spending the time on theCUBE, and now you've got a hard stop. Appreciate it, and thank you for your precious time. It's theCUBE live coverage from Barcelona. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. 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