 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everybody, welcome to this special CXO series that I've been running over the past couple of weeks. My name is Dave Vellante, and what I've been doing is bringing in executives from around the industry to try to better understand how they're dealing with this COVID crisis, what some of their fundamental communications principles are. And I'm really pleased to invite in Sree Srinivasan, who's the Senior Vice President and GM of Cisco Collaboration, Sree. Great to see you again. It seems like just a long time ago, actually, but it was just January that we were in Barcelona together. Wow, a lot has changed. A lot has changed, Dave. Dave, thanks for having me on the show. It's always a pleasure to see you, and I'm so happy to see you safe and sound today. Yeah, ditto. We're all in this together, as they say. So I want to go back to, I mean, when we were in January, we were getting glimpses of this thing. We were definitely a little bit worried, but not really fully grasping the impact. You know, at what point did you kind of realize that you were going to have to adjust, and how did you shift your priorities as a leader? Yeah, so Dave, we started seeing this right out of the Chinese New Year, coming out of the Chinese New Year on February 11th, if my memory serves me right. Users out of China started increasing, connecting to their global sites by multiples. They went up as much as 22 times on the 9th of February 11th, and right after that, we started seeing it expand into South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and towards the end of February, we started seeing it go into Europe, in terms of expanded volumes, people working from home. Europe has expanded nearly four times for us. Asia back has expanded nearly three to four times in terms of total usage. And from the second week of March, it's US, our biggest market, which has more than doubled. And as you may have heard, this past month in March, we served 324 million attendees on our meetings platform. We provide a whole slew of collaboration capability set. The fundamental principle for us that we apply is provide customers with business continuity while keeping their employees and their families safe. That is the fundamental principle we apply. And one of my engineers said it really well. He said, for every Webex engineer hour spent, we now keep people safe for 14,000 hours, or 583 days. That is the amount of time through virtual capability set, we're able to bring people together safely and continue their businesses forward as is nearly normal. I mean, the numbers are unbelievable. Chuck Robbins over a month ago said, you guys held in early March, 3.2 million meetings and 5.5 billion minutes. And the numbers have just gone up from them. Guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart. I want to set up this conversation. And so we, along with our partner ETR, we're one of the first to report sort of the impact of COVID on IT budgets. And what this chart is showing is that that gray bar says 35% of those CIOs that we talked to said, they don't expect any change in spending for 2020. The green side over 20% said they expect to spend more. And then you can see the big red. So overall, we've taken the overall forecast at the beginning of the year was plus 4% was kind of the consensus for IT spend. We're now down to minus 4%. The point though is that it would be a lot worse three were it not for that green, which is being driven by the work from home offset. And it's not just collaboration tools. It's networking, it's security, it's VPN. It's all the infrastructure around that. So I wonder if you could comment and add a little bit of color to what you're seeing in the space. I think we are seeing immense expansion of work from home capabilities. Work from home is new for so many people. Like for people like me, it's the norm, but there's so many people who are coming into it calls for the very first time. It can be daunting. And that requires investments from organizations. I think the IO's, IT infrastructure heads are working to make sure they provide the best secure collaboration canvas for people to work in from home, understanding the challenges of last mile excellence, security challenges and things of that sort. So there is a ton of investment going on in speeding up that investment. And I see something coming out of this, which is recognition that organizations are going to have to fix and modernize their digital infrastructure. Why is that important? I think environmental sustainability has something called lead certification. Very similar to that work from home is going to have some type of certification that says, an organization is ready for this type of a mass upheaval moment where their infrastructures keep their businesses alive, kicking and thriving through any situation. And I think what we have seen is many organizations have struggled through getting to that first step. Now, technology allows them to move very fast these days, but no organization wants to struggle through it in the future, whether it's public sector or commercial enterprise, it's one and the same. I think that's a great point. And one of the things I wanted to ask you was about some of the things that you've learned and maybe some of the things that are going to be permanent. And I think that people didn't expect this, obviously. And so do you feel as though that organizations will kind of rethink and that portions of this will become permanent? Maybe they'll sub-optimize in the near term profitability and try to optimize for business resilience and the flexibility to do things like work from home. Your thoughts? So Dave, I do see some things becoming permanent, right? Do I expect the volumes of collaboration to go down? No, it's never going to go back to the same level. The world as we know it is going to change forever. We are going to have a post-COVID era and that's going to be changed for the better. There's a number of employees who have been skeptical, reticent to working from home. We're suddenly going to say, hmm, just work from home thing is not so bad after all. So you're going to have that moment for sure. And then you're going to also have a set of employers who are going to look at a much wider pool of applicants that are cross time zone, geography, language barriers. It's going to help an organization increase their diversity and inclusiveness portion, making their products and services much better. So I think we are opening up the surface area for innovation as a result. And you will see a lot of the work from home technologies get better and better. We're being forced to be better because we now have to be relatable, discernible, easy to a new class of worker that has never seen these technologies and it is across all kinds of barriers that technology has to adhere itself to. So I do see a lot of goodness coming in. And you know what? At the end of the day, it's really good for the environment too. I want to ask you how you're supporting customers. So the data partner that I mentioned to ETR, the other day I sat in one of their CIO roundtables and it was, it's a private conversation with CSOs and CIOs. And they were asking them, like who's helping you through this and who's not? And they mentioned, for instance, back in the 2009 timeframe, there was one company that I won't mention that was doing audits right after the crisis. That was not a cool thing. But I got to give Cisco some props. It came up that they really were helping in three areas. And one of the CIOs just really mentioned this and called it out. He said, collaboration tools, network, you know, we're a Cisco customer. So we're relying more on the network and then the security piece. So specifically, you know, how are you supporting your customers in this crisis? So towards the end of February, what we did is we opened up our collaboration technology and Chuck said something very profound to me. He basically said, let's make sure we do right by our customers and keep them safe through this exercise. What we came out with was a set of free offers. We expanded our free offers by providing unlimited meeting time, up to a hundred participants, total dial-in into our meetings infrastructure in 52 countries. We didn't basically say, hey, only in countries afflicted by the virus, we basically made it as global as we could make it possible. And then we provided enterprise trials through our partner routes to market. That is an enterprise could sign up for a 90-day thing, no strings attached, just take on the collaboration platform and, you know, whether it's calling, meetings or device infrastructure and just take advantage of it in a secure fashion using our security portfolio, using extensions of our network portfolio and just continue to operate. So we've added close to north of 15 million users through our free offers today. That's what this course is contributing to. And no strings attached. We're not asking for a credit card or a contract at the end of it. If you like it and we come out at the other end of it, we are happy that they're safe. And if they stay a long-term customer of ours, we are happy about that too. I mean, that's awesome. We saw recently a lot of talk about big tech and a lot of tax on big tech and you're seeing big tech really step up. So thank you for that. Look, you know us, we're not gotcha media but I feel it's really important to ask you this. Zoom has set some clear issues with security. Eric Yuan was instrumental in developing WebEx. So what assurances can you give your customers and our audience that you're not subjected to similar security gaps and flaws? So let's talk about our security principles, right? Our security principles are very clear. We are open and transparent about the issues we face, the investments we make and we will be very open in terms of our posture. Secondly, we will never rent or sell customers data. Thirdly, we have a growth mindset around security. It's a differentiator. You never get complacent about security, you keep on investing in it. And to be honest with you, WebEx has come a very long way since some of the comments that were made in the press by some of our competitors. Surika 2012 WebEx versus now, there's so much innovation that has happened, Dave. We've had over 100 major software updates in. So I would rather have our competitors focus on their issues rather than give us kudos in public. So our promise to our customers is to be open, transparent and continuously invest in this space because the moment you take your eyes off it, you've opened yourself up for a set of attacks. So we're not going to ever say we are fully secure. You just have to continually invest in the growing threat posture world we live in today. So I want to follow up on that because I mean, I'm not a security expert but I've interviewed enough people to know that they will tell you, you can't just bolt on security. You got to build it in and it's a hard thing to do. Some of your security pros, G Rittenhouse, TK Keanini would definitely second this. So how you're saying you've spent a lot of time, obviously designing in and I'm inferring, not bolting on. So I wonder if you could add some color to the sort of types of things that you've done to really assure your customers that you're secure. Yeah, so I think security is in the DNA of Cisco. Unintended in many ways. We pride ourselves in our craft and to be honest with you, security starts at the time of design for us. And it's not a checkbox exercise at the end of the ship cycle. You build for security, you build for privacy and compliance and you build with one simple rule. It's your customer's data, we are custodians and we need to be protectors of it all the way through. We do not sacrifice experience for security. We never will. We build high-grade experiences, but we never give up on security capability side. And whether it's a free, whether it's our freemium, whether it's our paid, we have the same levels of security. Yes, we do have additional security add-ons. And finally, we have a culture where there are groups within Cisco that continually test us. They don't report to me, they report to Chuck and the board and they pretty much are continuously measuring our threat posture. These are world-class organizations that keep you on your toes. And I'm so thankful for that. It helps our customers safe. It helps us be better. It helps us take current with the threat postures. And this is years of investment. This is not something you can do in 90 days or 30 days. You'd be doing lip service to it. This is something you've got to do critical, intentional, deliberate investments that pay off in the long-term. Yeah, and things like penetration testing, it's not a one-shot deal. You got to do it on an ongoing basis. I want to come back to productivity. There are some organizations that are concerned, they're struggling a little bit with productivity, particularly with the work from home. What advice would you give to organizations in terms of being able to maintain that productivity? It might take a little bit of hit, but what would you tell them? I think change is difficult, change is not easy. I'll take my own story here, Dave. Two years back when I joined Cisco, work from home was a alien culture to me based on where I came from. For the first month, I did struggle. I had my questions. I had my trepidations of, is this really going to work? Am I going to be able to run thousands of engineers, multi-billion dollar business from home or while traveling on a plane? Because we have so many development centers across the globe, and I'm a remote worker. I really saw this as opening up new horizons for me starting the first month. I took it on with gusto. So I think my guidance to organizations is health and users deal with that change. If you force it down their throats, it's not going to work. You've got to understand their pains. You've got to make it more pleasing. You've got to introduce things like a digital water cooler talk. You've got to make it easy on them. You've got to talk about improvements in a remote work setting, like providing them with a set of accessories that make it easier for you to work from home. One of the core principles we have, and I espouse within my organization is, by working from home, you're intruding into your family's space. I think it's so important to make sure you let your family in on your work. And when kids walk into the door, today, when we work at Cisco, we actually share our family and we share our joys with the wider teams. And we are so proud of such cultures. So be very open and make sure that you understand that you're intruding into somebody else's house when you're working from home. Yeah, we have dogs barking. We have kids who've been playing games and crawling all over us. That's great. The dogs barking we have, we have solved. We have an AI technology that dims it down. It mutes the barking. That's good. I need one. So one of my big takeaways, and you really underscored it here, is we're not going back to 2019. The digital transformation that we talk about and that, frankly, many give lip service to, many are real, but it is now going to be accelerated. And it's ironic. We're starting a new decade, but this digital transformation is going to be accelerated and collaboration is going to be a key underpinning. So I'll ask you to give us some final thoughts, Shree, please. Yeah, I think people-to-people collaboration is so important in this day and age. As such, industry has been changing from a task-based hierarchy-driven world to a group outcome-based synergistic, bring people a long-type culture. And that brings people-time long-type culture is now, thanks to collaboration technology, becoming independent of time zone. You don't have to worry about language barriers anymore or cultural boundaries. Think of the type of ideation you can do by bringing people across the world together with a low-carbon footprint. And what this time has shown us is that businesses can still continue to operate and operate really well when you bring people together using these virtual technologies and capability sets. You're saving people some time by having them work from home. Like you don't have to travel 30 and 40 minutes to get to work. You're just doing your thing from wherever you are. And that saves so much in costs, in capability sets. And the concept of hoteliering and open spaces within organizations is only gonna sprout even further because not everybody is gonna have a home office, have a set office within the enterprise. CEOs are gonna see that as a cost-saving opportunity that they can funnel back into the growth of the organization, right? So I think it's a plethora of opportunity in front of us and that these technologies are going to get monumentally better in the months to come. Yeah, we're definitely entering a new chapter. Sree, thanks so much for sharing your insights and some of your leadership principles. And thanks to Cisco for all that you guys are doing, some of the pro bono work. I know some of the volunteerism that Chuck has talked about really appreciate your time. Thanks, Dave. Always a pleasure. Stay safe. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time.