 Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE conversation here to talk about the big announcements, big news, big concepts and big trends happening. Cisco Live in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Fabio Gori, Senior Director Cloud Solution Marketing at Cisco. Fabio, great to see you. Thanks for spending time with me to unpack all the exciting news in Barcelona. Great stuff. Thank you. Thank you for having me, John. So one of the things that's happening with Cisco we've covered, certainly we've been reporting, it's been reporting on other outlets as well, and you guys have been transforming and continuing to innovate. Cisco has transformed itself into the next level building on your successes. We've been covering that and that's been all about the clouds, it's been all about networking, going software-driven, software-powered, network operations, dev ops, the whole thing is now infiltrating into the new model. But it's clear now, and there's no debate that on-premise data centers, on-premise environments of IT service providers, the entire computing industry is connecting with the cloud. That's been kind of validated and we've been staring at that for a couple years and now everyone's starting to take action. This is a key theme here in Barcelona for you guys and we heard, you see you talk about it last year at Cisco Live in North America, that transition to cloud validated across the board. We saw Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS actually announced an on-premise device. Hybrid cloud has been validated, so the public cloud and on-premise and now visibility into what Kubernetes has enabled with multi-cloud. This is the new normal. Describe that impact in the marketplace. What does it mean for customers? What do they do? What does this mean when now enterprises are seeing on-premise and cloud coming together? Absolutely. Well, you know, if you think about it, you got to start from the application. So if you take a step back, right, we've been talking about digitization for so long but what does that ultimately mean, right? People need to build more and more applications to digitize their business processes, their customer experience and so on and so forth. Ultimately, what we're seeing is that these applications are becoming exceptionally distributed, right, because they go where it makes sense. Whatever the data is, whatever the user is, you may have low latency needs, you may have actually just, you know, the right needs to go all the way to the cloud. In reality, you have a mix of these kind of needs but workloads are distributed and people want to harness this multi-cloud world and that's what we're seeing. I love these shifts, it's kind of like that. People have been living on two sides of the street, you know, old way and new way. It's clear that the migration to this new model cloud is the new way and that's been validated again. So you've got the old way and new way. Describe in your mind the old way and the new way from Cisco because if you look at the history of Cisco, the dominance and the success it had and recently had an opportunity to interview John Chambers at his house and he talked about that dynamic of how Cisco is so dominant, the culture and going to the next level. The data center, you guys have great success, networking, edge, this is new, your core business but that's still relevant with the cloud in the new way. So talk about what's changed, old way, new way for Cisco. I'll give you a try. So fundamentally, if you remember where we're coming from, we are coming from an era where we've been seeing infrastructure kind of dictating application requirements through the other way around as well but you had an application you will buy specific hardware, networking and everything else including firewalls for a specific infrastructure, right? So that era actually is not going away, is there because it's built an immense amount of legacy that you cannot all of a sudden throw away. However, the new world is a world where you see applications fundamentally going pretty much across multiple type of domains, not just the data center domain anymore but here comes the cloud. We have a lot of applications that are going to the edge. If you have a branch office, right? You may want to take your application over there because it's simpler, it's sometimes it's more economic, you don't need to move all the data and still you can have those applications collaborating with your data center, with your cloud. So what you're now seeing is a completely different world where applications want the infrastructure to be programmable and easy accessible and still extremely secure. That's interesting. The old way was you dictate applications you can only do as much as the network and the infrastructure will let you to do. And then now as infrastructure becomes more abundant, data tsunamis happen, certainly a lot of data is coming in. So that's why the storage industry never is dying, it's always growing. Storage industry has always grown, servers has always need for compute but as there's more abundance in that, it almost is a limitless opportunity for applications. So it's not a kill the old and bring in the new, it's more of a foundational, old is now foundational. It is literally next level things. So Kubernetes, service meshes, these programmable policy based abstractions are showing the way and that's a network construct. Policy is a network construct. So the first time we're seeing is the coming together of the app market with infrastructure. Absolutely. And if you think about it, even a step before the apps, people have, when they build application they have a business intent, right? Let's make an example. You take a healthcare application, right? You want in an hospital, you want the doctors to be able to access the full extent of the data of a customer record, for instance. You may not want the nurses doing the same thing or for instance, you don't want the nurses and the doctors to get access to the financial system of that hospital. So this is actually a business intent that given application will have to respect. Well, the infrastructure can and has to cope with this kind of requirements by delivering the appropriate kind of segmentation, right? So that you'll be able to ensure that what the application wants to do the infrastructure delivers. What has changed in the on-premise and cloud world in your mind? Because to have that kind of coordination and you guys have announced here some great announcements around seamless end to end as a theme we're seeing. You're seeing hyper convergence anywhere. You're seeing application-centric infrastructure concepts everywhere. But when you actually go into the hood and look at how complex it is, it's almost magical in the sense that it's going on. I know it's hard work and people who know networking know it's hard. What are the innovations? What's enabling that? What is the key driver that's making you guys connect an on-premise data, complex data center environment that has now edges, private networks, hybrid, private cloud, IoT edge, enterprise edge, campuses, the old stuff, now with cloud. What are the key linchpins? What's the technique? I'm going to take on one of the words that you use, complexity. People are looking for the opposite of complexity. People are looking for simplicity. Easy to say, more difficult to do. But what sits between complexity and turning it into a more simple kind of architecture is automation. So what you have to have is fundamentally an infrastructure that becomes automated, programmable that takes the business intent or the application intent as an input and actually with a closed loop system, fundamentally monitors and gives you the assurance, okay? The implementation and the assurance that actually what you want to do gets delivered by the infrastructure. And this has to be literally an holistic and cross-domain kind of architecture. What do I mean with cross-domain? You're going out of the data center. You're going out to the edge. You're now going to the cloud. This should be seen as a cohesive, almost fluid environment where you can actually push your policy, your security models, right? And transforming this highly fragmented architecture into a set of domains or a multi-domain architecture that you can control, that you can automate as if it was all yours, so to speak. Even though in the cloud, for instance, you're going into a domain that you don't control and went. So big concept here being discussed in Barcelona is multi-domain, using that. Explain that a little bit and then take that to where cloud integration comes in because the other thread that we're seeing here is multi-cloud. So multi-domain, multi-cloud, the same, are they different? What's the nuanced points there? Yeah, again, the critical point is, let's think applications. Applications want to go and it's convenient to go into multiple domains, right? Depending on what you want to do. You want to access cloud innovation from wherever it comes from. So that's why we have a multi-cloud world. The data center is still there. It's critically important. You have a lot of applications, databases that are still there. And now we're seeing the big new shiny object, which is more and more, so-called RoboRemo office branch office applications where, for instance, IDC believes that 30% of applications are going to be deployed into this kind of environments. So your problem is now connecting all of this together, right? And because the applications are going anywhere, our data center strategy is that the data center needs to follow the applications and support them wherever they go. So it's a data center anywhere kind of strategy. The data center has to flex and provide that be ready for anything, basically, from applications, what you're getting at. And all the plumbing and all the intelligence underneath it have to be reactive to what the application wants. Absolutely. The application doesn't have to get into the provisioning or any kind of policy because that's the infrastructure as code, DevOps point. Is that kind of good? Absolutely. The application has an intent, right? There's also application policy, et cetera, but it needs to be translated into infrastructure policy. We've been talking about it a minute ago when we were doing the healthcare kind of example, right? Well, we've been super excited and we're collaborating with you guys on Kubernetes. We have a special section on SiliconANGLE called the Kubernetes Special Report. That's evolving into multi-cloud special reports for the folks watching siliconangle.com. Check out the multi-cloud special report that should be up by now. It was the Kubernetes, but a ton of interest was seeing startups coming out of the Kubernetes. You're seeing cloud-native world, CNCF and Linux Foundation promoting tons of great ecosystem development. Pulling together those developers want more infrastructure. And so that, and they don't want to deal with it, right? So this is where the cloud strategy has been paying off for you guys. You guys have done deals with Google, Azure, AWS, SAP, Red Hat, among others. You guys are well poised for this. Talk about cloud center. That's a big piece of the story here. Cloud center suite, a new capabilities. Talk about the impact of cloud and cloud center. So let me take a step back if you want and tell you a little bit more about what we're announcing here, right? Because it's a pretty big announcement. I mentioned data center anywhere. What does it mean, right? Well, of course, our data center portfolio is centered around two big components. The first one is networking, right? Particular application-centric infrastructure, ACI, based on the Nexus 9K kind of architecture. And the second one is our computing portfolio. Particularly, you know, the hyper-converge infrastructure Cisco HyperFlex. That's of course, you know, an extremely efficient way of condensing, you know, what you need to make it very flexible in your application implementation. Well, we have two major news here, right? In these two areas. And the third is absolutely what you were asking for, which is cloud center. So with ACI, and it's interesting because they're going into two, if you want, different directions when it comes to this multi-cloud domain. ACI was already virtualized in the previous releases. Let me explain what ACI is real quick. Oh, sorry. Application-centric infrastructure is fundamentally Cisco intent-based networking for the data center, okay? It gives you programmability of the infrastructure. It gives you segmentation. It gives you security and a high degree of automation. It's the key under the hood kind of capabilities. Just make sure you forget that. Okay, continue. So ACI. In the previous, if you want developments, releases of ACI, what we've been doing was to aggressively virtualize ACI, right? So that you will have constructs like virtual posts and virtual leaves to, for instance, scale your data center implementation to the edge. Now, where we're going with this new announcement is exactly on the other side, which is we're extending ACI to the cloud, to Azure and AWS. So that the construct that you have typically on-prem under your control, such as tenants, EPGs and things of this nature, will be translated into the equivalent construct in AWS. Whether it's VPCs or security groups and the likes, the two things end up fundamentally corresponding. So now we have one construct that extends from the edge to the data center, to the cloud. That's a pretty big deal. And what does that mean to the customer? Just give an example. It means a high degree of automation, security and control on the resources, right? So that you can impose one policy of propagates all across the board. One way of monitoring the data center flows and discovering, for instance, if you have any kind of security threat, monitoring application performance thanks to the integration with the app. So this fully checks the hybrid cloud box. So if I say, hey, if you want a hybrid deployment, this checks the box saying, I can operate in say Amazon or whatever cloud and on-premises in the data center with ACI, both places without changing any code. Is it seamless? What's the catch? Well, ACI is going to come with a specific software. This is all software, that's the beauty of it, right? It's in line with the transformation of the company that you were referring to. It's all software and it goes into AWS and it uses, of course, all the APIs to connect to the AWS resources that you're acquiring from AWS, right? So that's one big bucket of news. The second bucket of news is HyperFlex, that's actually heading to the edge because what we're seeing is more and more applications that have components of the application itself or even entire applications that are going into remote office, branch offices, and the reason are many, right? It could be cost-reason, it could be data gravity reason, it could be just low latency reason, right? We all know that, you know, to go back and forth from the cloud is not always convenient, as well as if you lose the connectivity, your branch is dead, right? So you have to have business continuity in all of this and so it doesn't mean that you don't want the cloud, you want a collaboration across this, again, fluid sort of infrastructure. So HyperFlex come with a very efficient kind of form factor over there now. It's HyperFlex Edge and its control ability of this is that because you have many remote offices and branch offices is controlled from the cloud that Cisco inter-side, which is, of course, our console and cloud system to manage all these handpoints, not just HyperFlex, but also UCS. So when you think of this, now you understand what do we mean with the center anywhere because we're taking both our networking and our computing platforms anywhere the application needs them, right? And the third component, which actually is where your question started from is application lifecycle management in this kind of infrastructure becomes even more of a problem, right? It is extremely complicated now to have applications in multiple clouds and then in your data center and in the Edge in all these different kind of places. So what we've done with Cloud Center, which is our flagship cloud management and orchestration system is two big things. First, we have expanded the functionalities by adding new modules, especially the cost optimizer that helps operations team. This is Cloud Center Suite now. You're exactly right. Thank you for that. It's the Cloud Center Suite and I'll explain you in a moment why we move the branding slightly from Cloud Center to Cloud Center Suite because we highly modularize the software and make it and made it really much more easy to consume. I'll go there in a moment. But going back to what is new, first of all, it's cost optimizer, right? That's brand new and it helps operations team to resize the workload to pick up the best instances in the cloud that you're using to actually minimize your investment or reach your goal of performance and cost, right? That's one big thing. The second one is that we are adding a very smart so-called action orchestrator which is a workflow manager that helps you automating the connection of your cloud management system to all the other systems, right? Some of these plugins and integrations come out of box, particularly with a higher level tiers of licensing such as with ServiceNow, for instance, or we give you already built-in integration with Cisco InterSide or UCS Director which is the infrastructure manager for Cisco infrastructure. But you can use the kind of platform and module to build your own integrations with the other systems. That's very important because the cloud management system doesn't exist in isolation, right? It needs to integrate with all the other IT management solution that you have on-prem. And that's one big thing. The second big thing, as you said before when you said about the suite, is the fact that because we have written all of this new software in Kubernetes, right? This is highly scalable, highly portable. So now we can give you different tiers of licenses. You can start very small, as small as around $50,000, right? For subscription service. And you can actually buy this subscription on-prem or that's big news. You can buy any software as a service. So Cloud Center is now a SaaS offering. Yes. Available when? It's going to be, so all the subscription news, the new software is going to be available literally next month, in a few days for now, right? In February. And the SaaS version is going to be available in North America in March. So right away. For Europe, of course, due to the GDPR implementation, our customers will have to wait until the summer, but it's quite- So pretty immediate in GDPR, a little bit of extra work done. Okay, so bottom line me on the Cloud Center suite. What is the purpose? Is it to be the high level management suite? How is it connecting into other systems? So if I'm all these different management tools out there when Cisco and others is it connecting into, am I connecting up? Can you just explain quickly, the purpose of it and how it works? So really the goal of Cloud Center is to do three things. The first one is it wants to simplify Cloud Management and how it does it, right? One of the key patterns that we acquire together with Clicker, right? Clicker Cloud Center, when we brought them in more than two years ago, was the really unique way that they have to model applications, right? The way that people are managing Cloud Management and orchestration is still extremely manual. I mean, many customers are still kind of doing scripting. We have cases of customers that are scripting like 1200 lines of codes just to upload a piece of software onto the Cloud. We think the approach should be different, right? The approach should be, you should be able to model that application, your application, model it once. And then thanks to Cloud APIs, we have 16 different APIs in the Cloud integrations with AWS, Azure, Google, you name it, right? IBM and the likes, we realize of course some prems for private Cloud. Once you model your application, you can use any of these other Clouds as a target for implementation, okay? That allows you to have a very, very effective Cloud Management solution because you don't risk to make mistakes. You leave the tool. So you said it's written in Kubernetes? Absolutely, we script all of this now, we program all this in Kubernetes. So you may tell us, hey, you're walking the talk. Yeah, exactly. We're absolutely doing that. And that's how actually we can do it on-prem in a Kubernetes infrastructure. By the way, if you need one, we have the Cisco Cloud Center platform, Hyperflex underneath to do it. Or you can buy from the Cloud because we're uploading all of that to the Cloud. You guys have done a good job at Kubernetes, just as a side note, you guys done the work just doing the Cloud integrations. I think what's interesting about Kubernetes is unlike other trends I've seen in some of these open source projects, some hype comes up and then it kind of drops off or it gets hyped up and it's too hard to roll out or use. It costs too much. And so people actually using Kubernetes for not just standing it up, they're actually pulling it for a purpose. So congratulations on that. I think it's a real accomplishment. Thank you for that. No, we're a big believer into this. So simplifying really multi-Cloud management is one big thing. Reducing time to value is another big thing because with the integrations and the ability, you know, to integrate with the other tools, you can put it in production very, very quickly. And then it's incredibly easy to consume. You can start small and grow up. So I did a little checklist here. I want to just run this by you. And then I'm going to ask you a question around what all this means to your customer base because obviously the world's changing. We've done a lot of kind of, you know, surveys and interactions with a lot of network guys to kind of feel out how the market's going. But I want to get your reaction. So interesting thing, you guys have a, this builder model, very similar to Amazon, you know, toolkits for cloud builders. You guys are really investing heavily in it. So security, you got StealthWatch, Tetration Analytics, you got AppDynamics, and Tetration as well. Data Center, HyperFlex, UCS Nexus, Check, CloudApps, WebEx, I don't know what else is in there. There's also CloudApps, CloudNativeApps which you're connecting into. Management CloudCenter, Container Platform, IoT, Kinetic, Networking, VEdge, Meraki, CloudService, Router, bunch of other things. So you guys are building quite the portfolio on here. So given that you guys have that security to networking kind of end to end with the application-centric infrastructure kind of expanding and intent-based networking combined with cloud, seems to be kind of the end-to-end is the theme. It really is. It's again, end-to-end and across multiple domains because that's the thing that doesn't come across with end-to-end is the fact that you need to cross different domains that are exceptionally different from each other. And so having consistent policies and a single security model, having one mean of networking and security in all of this in a containerized world which is where we're progressively going, that's everything. And it's not me saying it but if you look at the CNCF surveys they'll tell you the securing and working containers is one of the toughest things. So I got to ask you the tough question. Totally makes sense. You got my buy-in on it. I totally believe in the vision. Making it work, making it smart and making it scale are the three kind of things I'm looking at. Give us your take on how you guys are looking at those three kind of checkpoints. You got to get this up and running so one, make it work end-to-end, multiple domains. Make it intelligent, that's data, smarter automation kicks in and now see scaling it up with all the checkbox security and everything else. So take us through the strategy and what you guys are thinking there and the impact with that in mind to the person on the other side, your customer, the buyer and customer Cisco to manage it, that's a big sea change. And the benefits are pretty lucrative on the other side if you can pull this off. Yeah, yeah. Take us through that. I can touch upon three big aspects. First of all, we've been talking about architectures but architectures doesn't mean that you shouldn't have best-of-breed products, right? It starts from there. Those are the atomic components of any strategy, right? You got to have best-of-breed products. Now these products need to integrate into an architecture that solves through business problems such as the intent-based architecture that we've been talking about. The third aspect is actually how you help customers to be successful. And I would love to call out our partner strategy, right? Which for, I would say for as long as 30 years has been Cisco's critical differentiator. And I think this is an enormous asset, especially when you look at the number one problem in IT out there, which is no Kubernetes and it's no cloud, it's actually lack of talent. People don't have the skillset and the talent. So relying on an ecosystem that helps you expanding what you need because you don't have it inside. It's fundamentally important. That puts a lot of pressure on you guys. Absolutely, but this is a critical asset and we're doing a lot of investments also on the customer experience side of the house with our leader, Mario Martinez. That's taking actually this customer experience sort of approach to the next level. More and more, it's about this architecture is also being cloud attached. So you heard me talking about inter-site. It doesn't come by chance, right? The more you can rely on this kind of architecture, the more you can harvest analytics. You can do cross correlation across multiple networks and domains and figure out what is going wrong. That's something that providers of pinpoint products just cannot even dream of delivery. As final question for you, first of all, thanks for spending the time and chatting and Cuba's going to be rolling out a lot of content and we're going to be following what's going on on year end too. Really like Cisco's vibe. You guys have been transparent and collaborating. Appreciate the working with you guys. Final question, if someone's watching this, I'm a Cisco customer. We've been talking about the network guy. We've talked about surveying some enterprises where the networks, they've done the heavy lifting that's been part of the computing industry. Networking compute, they've been running the show and really have moved the needle. Campus networking, the list goes on and on, but now that foundation set will go into a whole other level. It's almost like a sea change on the personality side of the persona of the people who've built it out and now have to build the next generation. Am I relevant? Am I going to be the mainframe guy? Am I going to be leading the charge or am I going to be left behind? There's a lot of cognitive dissonance around decisions. Should I go here, should I go there, architecture? So there's a lot of psychology and also decision making that's going to be determined by your core audience. That person out there is your target audience. They're thinking about these things because they want to do well and they don't want to be left behind. What do you say to that audience about Cisco now? The opportunity for them personally, their ability to grow their skill gaps or have an impact to being a key change agent for this next generation. What do you say to that person out there about Cisco and the opportunity for them? It's a very big question. I will split the question into parts. First of all, what is your advice to IT professionals? How can they not just survive but thrive and be the heroes of this transition? And it's pretty simple actually. You have to understand what your business wants. We've been talking about how do you close this gap between infrastructure and application but in other terms it's covering the gap between what you do and what the business wants. You've got to understand that. So that's number one. Second part of the question is, okay, considering this, is Cisco the right partner for me? And the answer, of course, from a Cisco standpoint, is absolutely yes because our entire company strategy is wrapped around this concept of intent-based architecture where our goal is to map the business intent into the infrastructure underneath and that's exactly your core business, Mr. IT professional, right? So I see this as a marriage in heaven in terms of where I see really the talent need for IT going and IT professionals and where the company is going. If we're right and I think we are, this is going to be a great ride and not a threatening one. I think everything's lining up and getting clear visibility into what the role of cloud is, the scale piece, the economics are just undeniable and that the role of technologists now are super important. There's no jobs really going away, they're shifting. This is the reality. This is kind of what the exciting opportunity. It is, but again, it's about bringing IT very close to the business. In the end, I believe it's just going to be continuity between what we call today line of business and IT. It's just a company that wants to win in the marketplace, wants to get faster, efficient, usual kind of terminology, but this gap is going to go away. Fabio, thank you for taking the time to share this conversation. I'm John Furrier, this is theCUBE Conversation here at Barcelona Live, this is Cisco Live Europe. Back to theCUBE coverage, go to thecube.net to check out all the live coverage and CUBE interviews in Barcelona. I'm here with Fabio Gore, Senior Director Cloud Solutions Marketing at Cisco. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.