 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Kicking off 2018 here in Europe is Cisco's annual event. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon. Our next guest is Todd Brennan, who's the marketing director at Cisco. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Great, thanks for coming on. You guys announced Hyperflex before the show. We did. And a lot of cloud happening here in the keynote. Seeing IoT, oh, security number one, obviously. Security is security, it's always going to be number one. But the other themes are obviously IoT and multi-cloud. Multi-cloud. Huge conversations, both developing rapidly in kind of its own way. Well, that's crucial for us, because we talk about Hyperflex 3.0, a lot of cool features that we're building into that. But the scope for us is much, much broader because of the multi-cloud piece, right? I mean, that's reality for our customers. They've told us very, very clearly, I'm going to use multiple public clouds, but I'm also going to have to get my on-prem side of it. So we tell them, absolutely good multi-cloud starts at home, right? With platforms like with Hyperflex. And that's exactly the way we brought it together. So we talk about kind of a very modest aspiration with this is we want to help customers power any application on any cloud at any scale. Well, take a minute before we get started. I have some questions. What is Hyperflex 3.0 for the folks watching? What is it? So we introduced Hyperflex. It's our hyperconverged platform built on UCS. We acquired a company called Springpath. They brought in a purpose-built log-structured file system for the cluster. And we combine these things together to create Hyperflex. So it's really unique in the sense that, well, let me back up. Let's say a lot of people ignore how crucial a file system and a network are to a clustered system. Kind of goes without saying, but a lot of the focus has been on, okay, what's the individual node and that stack look like? But we look at it much more at the cluster level. And so our uniqueness is that we've engineered all this thing together. So we brought that out in 2016. Last year, really we focused on performance, 40 gig, all flash, open up the network pipes. And then this year is really about our multi-cloud integration. And then additional features that we're bringing in to support more workloads, Hyper-V support, containers, right? So 3.0 is really just filling in a lot of the features that we need to really make this an ideal platform for multi-cloud. Yeah, Todd, we've tracked UCS since the early days. UCS really created and led the whole converged infrastructure 10. When we heard about CI though, it's really about simplification. It's infrastructure, it's that next step. Hyper-converged, a lot of the things you were talking about there, it's about cloud and the underlying platform. And while CI can be used for that, seems like a different discussion. Can you give us a little bit, compare contrast as to what you see? Well, I mean, the converged infrastructures, and we started that way back in the day with Vblock, right? And VCE and then Flexpod versus Stack, Flash Stack. There's lots of different storage partnerships that we have we can break up, right? But, and private cloud has been a big workload for those infrastructure components. You know, it's really just a storage question of how you want to address that component. But it all revolves around the operating model. So our mission is, look, we've got a huge install base of customers that are used to acquiring and deploying pre-engineered chunks of infrastructure like a VX block or a Flexpod, what have you. We need to continue to serve them while they also evaluate where hyper-convergence might fit in the equation as well. And how do we offer those both up with a common set of policy and management, right? With UCS management, with InterSight. So, you know, we think that these are going to coexist for quite some time and customers are going to have to decide, you know, how they want to use those different types of infrastructure. But ultimately, it's just about the workload, right? Well, Cisco and its storage partners have billions of reasons why they're going to keep selling CI for a while. Help connect the dots, though. You talked about that operating model and the keynote this morning, big focus on multi-cloud and things like, you know, we talked to AppD at AWS, Reinvent, you know, how does the kind of the public cloud mesh with these other solutions? So, one of the things that we're announcing here at the show is the cloud, our Cisco container platform, right? And that's an example of how we're going to work with Google to create an integrated stack, right? Focused initially around Kubernetes. And we have HyperFlex as an infrastructure component under that. And that's, you know, for people that are really accelerating their application development or maybe they're modernizing older workloads with containers, we're going to provide that element. But the true multi-cloud functionality is what we do with things like Cloud Center. So, that was our clicker acquisition, allows us to profile workloads, take them out to the cloud, multiple public clouds. So, for us, when we talk about HyperFlex as a platform for multi-cloud, it's those integrations with Cloud Center. But then also AppD, which is hugely important, because, you know, like we were talking about earlier, you've got applications now that are distributed across on-prem and multiple public clouds potentially, right? So, maybe you've got a front-end out in the public cloud, customer data or business logic on-prem. How do you keep track of the performance of that collection of functions and systems that are running independently? And you have to do that with something like AppD. So, we have a lot of the software components to help customers really get their multi-cloud going. So, bringing it back to HyperFlex, my understanding, not just virtual environments anymore, you're also doing containers and that tied into that multi-cloud piece. So, a couple important things with this 3.0 release, we're bringing in support for HyperV for customers who want to do different hypervisors. And then we developed a persistent storage plug-in into the file system for those stateful workloads that are going to be in containers. So, again, with Kubernetes, as developers want to go out and do pod requests, basically self-service volumes on the HyperFlex storage environment, that's huge. And so, we've opened it up, you know, to two more classes of workloads right there. I mean, what aren't you doing? Got the essentialized apps? Is there going to be a Cisco coin in the future? That would be a rumor going around. So, yeah, I can't speak to our cryptocurrency strategy that's out of my domain. Probably coming. I mean, the essentialized apps, again, on the horizon, again, another future thing you guys are positioned for. In all seriousness though, I want to put a plug in for Stu's Wikibon team. They came out with a true private cloud report recently last year. Really kind of the only ones looking at this way, but it really is interesting. I want to get your comment on this because we get 100 of events a year, last year was over 100, I think 30. And what we've observed is the same thing that's happening here. DevNet's got a lot of traction. You got DevNet create more of an open source, cloud-native focus. You're seeing the enterprises getting their act done at home, inside the premise. That's right. So, it's not so much they move into the cloud. Yeah, some stuff's going in the cloud, but they're kind of cleaning up the house first, going cloud ops on premise. That's right. And then as a preparation, so all the spend and all the intention is really on the private cloud. They call it true private cloud. Do you see the same thing? Absolutely. And is that a stepping stone to the cloud? Absolutely, and that's exactly, that's informed everything that we've done here this past year really of development around Hyperflex is our IT customers telling us, look, I've got the developers, my new constituent. As much as I need to maintain shrink-wrapped apps or legacy workloads for the core business, the developer's really my customer now. And I have to provide infrastructure on-prem that behaves like the cloud in terms of infrastructure as code and being able to do things like we're doing with this Kubernetes environment where the developers can withdraw the resources they need, turn them back in, and the IT team can get out of the way. That's hugely important. The other thing we're observing on our opening this morning when we were commenting on the keynote and some of the trends here is that Cisco's moving up the stack pretty rapidly over the years. This year more than ever you can start to see a clear line of sight that it's not just network plumbing, although that's pretty critical. But with Kubernetes and the growth, you mentioned Google, it's pretty interesting a renaissance is going on in the software world, certainly with open source. You have app developers which are like just classic building software apps. Then you've got engineering, software engineering. I use that term software engineering as a throwback to the 80s when I graduated, my CS degree. That was when you called yourself when you got a job. You were a software engineer. You have network engineers, so you're seeing a line of under the hood engineering with software and networks and whatnot. And then above Kubernetes, you're seeing, just, hey, I just want a program. Just give you some functions. And it's the IT generalists that are emerging as the heroes here that have to understand, okay, how do I build that on-prem platform? How do I have the capability to get my developers out to the public cloud as and when they need to and it makes sense or potentially bring things back? And you're right. And then on the development side, they don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of that. So it's a degree we can enable our IT customer to provide that service, but also simplify that for them. It's essential. Talk about your posture to those two different personas because you guys just provide the network in the old days and app developers programmed on it. They get the storage, it produces some storage. Now you've got to lean in towards the network engineers which now software engineers under the hood. And then you got to lean into the app developers and enable them to be successful. How are you attacking those? Not attacking, how are you servicing and leaning into those groups? We brought the storage and the computing experts into the fold with UCS right nine years ago. But now when you look at our acquisition of AppD, that's where we really start to take care of the application owner, be it the developer or the business owner for the application and allowing them to kind of see across on-prem, out in the public cloud, how do I ensure that I'm going to stay out of trouble? And if something goes wrong, I know exactly where in that constellation of services the problem resides. So AppD is critical in that sense. So they fill a big hole. Absolutely, because that's how we can, all this comes together to power a workload, power a business service. Applications are the harder new business. Todd, what about from a training perspective? Cisco Live's always been a show where people get their certifications, they build their careers on this stuff. It's changing so fast. How are you keeping kind of the training tracks and giving that career help to all the people that... So we're adding the pillars for all the things we're talking about, the multi-cloud software portfolio, new infrastructure components like HyperFlex, those are all being built into our training regimen and also our training partners as they can take that out and scale it for us. All right, so just to connect the dots on what I was finishing up for, okay. Network engineer, software engineers, under the hood, app developers at AppD, you guys have a good solid footing there. Good approach. Multi-cloud. Yes. Is that the Kubernetes? Is that the secret sauce to multi-cloud in your opinion? And or how do you guys look at multi-cloud and how do you talk to your customers about it? Well, we talk about, I mean, the data's pretty clear. Customers want to be able to use multiple public clouds and they want to be able to evaluate them. So I think the center of our strategy, we have our multi-cloud portfolio, how we organize all these things, the cloud consume pillar that's really comprised of AppD, which we talked about, but also cloud center. And so cloud center is a tool that allows our customers basically profile an application and then go understand what's it going to cost me and what are the different attributes of these public cloud services and which one matches up the best. So I'd say that's the center of the strategy. Obviously, you know, particularly around containers, but more workloads in the future. Kubernetes becomes a much bigger. So orchestration is pretty key. Yeah, orchestration is essential. And it's not just in a pure software context, but how do we hook down into infrastructure? So we've already built this programmable infrastructure. So how do we expose those knobs and dials to orchestration engines, so that we're not just virtualizing, but we're actually optimizing the infrastructure. And that's the beautiful thing about serverless and function-based software called, okay. So now I've heard about this decloud. What is decloud? So decloud is basically a demo environment that our engineering team can use and our partners can use to demo software. So for example, we launched our cloud management platform for UCS and Hyperflex last fall. We call it Intrasight. So software like that, you know, software becomes central to our strategy. Decloud becomes the way that we show that. So customers can come in and play on that and partners? Right, partners and our sales teams can take customers through. But not customers. I don't believe there's an end user entrance to that yet. So it's like a sandbox with a cloud. But I could be wrong. I'm not a decloud. All right, so for the folks watching, what's different this year at Cisco Live in Europe from other shows? Is there anything that stands out to you around this year? Definitely the multicloud theme. And we're hearing that from customers. They don't, you know, there's always been the question of what type of infrastructure should I provision for different workloads? But it's really moved that past that to here's the workload spectrum I need to support. What are the tools you're going to give me for that on-prem? How can you help me get to the cloud? And I think the other thing, you know, more narrowly speaking, hyperconvergence is really turning the corner in terms of adoption, right? So when we first, you know, we weren't the first ones to arrive at the hyperconvergence party in the industry, by any means, but we brought the keg, right? So when we showed up, the party kind of got started. We think we brought the complete answer. And now we're seeing as more and more workloads can go on to an HCI platform, the adoption's starting to, and we're seeing large organizations bring it on, both in the core and out the edge. Those are a couple of things. Todd, any bold predictions? Will Cisco be number three in HCI by the end of 2018? Yes, because we already are. Okay. We already are. So today it's a three-horse race right now. So it's a Dell Nutanix Cisco in the latest IDC numbers. So I think by the end, I'd like to see number two within, you know, a type of a timeframe. I'll give you a number two within six quarters. How about that? And Stu wants to know what you're going to do with all that cash that you bring over from, to the U.S. Which one are you going to buy? I'm repatriating. I'm repatriating. I'm talking about investing in employees. So I hope that's some of that. No guys, I think Chuck's already, you know, kind of laid it out, right? You know, we got our investors, we've got potential things we can do, you know, bringing in new technology. So he's really laid that out. Todd, final question for the end of the segment. As the personnel's changed, it's starting to disrupt the cloud and the evolution of the renaissance that's coming with software. DevNet, DevNet Create doing some great stuff as an indicator of what's coming. How is the role of the network, your target customers, who's been loyal Cisco, Net MVP all these years. And you got storage guys, interdisciplinary has been a big thing. What skill sets do you see evolving for that Cisco hero out there? What's the trend that you can talk to? It's the ability to automate. It's the ability to take advantage of some of the technologies we're bringing in terms of assurance. It's how do you bring all of that insight that resides in the network, in the telemetry, in that data. How do you bring that out and use it right in a way that can help the business? So I think for our core audience, for those folks you talk about, it's how do I become much more adept at bringing these pieces together in an automated way? But then how do I take advantage of some of the things that are available to me now in terms of bringing the power of analytics, AI into an IT context, and take advantage of those things for all the different things you can imagine, security, assurance, right, et cetera. So the big thing then, just to summarize, I hear you correctly, the difference this year is that you got AppD and you got end-to-end DevOps. Yeah, I think our multi-cloud story is really gelled over the past year. And now we're bringing it in to the context of on-prem infrastructure in addition to the public cloud side of it. So I think that's the big news from the data center side. Top Brand is the marketing director at Cisco. Here inside theCUBE we are in Barcelona, live coverage two days wall-to-wall. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, more live coverage theCUBE after this short break.