 from San Diego, California. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Good morning from sunny San Diego, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. This is day three of theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live. You can hear all of the buzz behind us. Day three is just as jammed as days one and two. We're pleased to welcome for the first time a couple of guests. We've got Muninder Sambhi, VP of product management, routing, and SD Ran and switching. And Neil Anderson, Practice Director Network Solutions, WWT to my right. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, thank you. So before we went live, Neil and Muninder, we were talking about the 20 year relationship, Cisco, WWT, each other's largest partners. As we look at the transformation that Cisco has undergone and all of the transformation of the network. There's so many expectations, 5G with Wi-Fi 6, speed, et cetera, but security. Talk to us about how the relationship has evolved and what you guys are doing together with SD-WAN. Yeah, I think, you know, we've definitely had a consultative relationship where we saw the SD-WAN market emerging pretty early, for example, and we immediately talked with our Cisco counterparts with Muninder and his team about what are the things we're seeing developing in our customer base and how do their products need to evolve to adapt to that. And so I think it's been a really good relationship. And actually, I mean, it's 20 years of relationship, but we have known Neil for a very long time. And I think the SD-WAN market is evolving so fast with cloud applications, with applications moving to the cloud, with workloads that are changing, customers expecting a very different branch experience. And Office 365 is an example that is leading their experience. So much of the innovation that we've done so far has been towards the branch. We have enhanced, like, multi-layered security. We have enhanced application quality of experience. But recently, what we've also announced is the ability to extend SD-WAN beyond the branch. So we just announced the secure cloud-scale SD-WAN where you can now take the same orchestration platform, the same policy that you're defining. You can extend it from the branch all the way into your co-location into the cloud. And this architecture that we talked about could not have been done without the partnership with WWT. Yeah, that's absolutely what we're seeing in our customer base. As customers are adopting the public cloud more, adopting SaaS applications more in the cloud, there's a real need to extend the WAN fabric out to the cloud. And that's, historically, it's been more of a branch to branch branch to headquarters technology. But we're really seeing that as now branch to cloud is becoming almost the core part of the conversation for SD-WAN now. Yeah, Neil, I wondered if you could expand on that a little bit for us. Give us that customer viewpoint because for a bunch of years, it was like, well, okay, we're SD-fying everything out there. What does that really mean? WAN's always been a complicated space. And what I've heard the last couple of years, SD-WAN's been one of the critical components of customers when they do multi-cloud. But what I've heard a lot this week is it's more than just some of that networking piece. There's a lot of security aspects of it. And there's a lot of nuance and other features that are coming into the SD-WAN portfolio. Yeah, and then that's absolutely what we're seeing is customers are, they need to find that comfort level. I need to extend my connectivity out to the cloud, but how do I do that in a secure way? And SD-WAN makes it just very, very easy to do that, where as before it was tougher to manage. But with SD-WAN and especially with the Cisco vManage portfolio, being able to manage my security out there as well as the SD-WAN connectivity, it just makes it easier for customers to finally extend their fabric out to the cloud. And we've also given choices. Traditionally, customers would have implemented security and VAN, they come together in the branch. But many customers are looking at regional hubs. You know, regional hubs where they can now have best in breed the SD-WAN stack with security, and stitch it with other L4L7 services. And we can offer this as a cookie cutter pod type approach that they can buy, or they can actually go and get it procured from WWT. So walk us through, Muninda, we'll start with you. For customers that have really nailed the branch from a networking perspective, but now you're offering this capability beyond the branch, what is that network transformation extension process like for customers to go through? What does, sorry I didn't hear the important. I'm sorry, it's loud in here. What is that process for a customer who's got phenomenal networking within their branch to now work with Cisco and WWT to go beyond the branch? What's that upgrade process like? Upgrade process. So the first process would be obviously getting with our partners, with our other managed services partners, getting your SD-WAN infrastructure in the branch. Deploying multi-layer security, applying application quality of experience. As they look at more and more cloud connectivity, they look at applications and workloads going to the cloud. They've started to create these regional hubs or colos, and they want to be able to centralize many of the branch security capabilities in that place, and be able to do L4, L7 stitching. And for that capability that we are announcing is what we call internally is cloud on-ramp for co-location. We also have cloud on-ramp for infrastructure as a service, which means you can extend that same technology, same solution into the multi-cloud environment. Is the on-ramp a set of services, consulting services, or an actual product suite that customers can use to deploy? It is actually a product suite that they can consume directly from Cisco, or they can partner with WWT to consume it as a service. And the nice part about the capabilities I'm an inner is talking about is that it's built into the V-Managed platform. So it's another, to the customer, it looks like another SD-WAN node out there. It looks like another branch. Essentially through V-Managed. Makes it super easy for customers to figure that out because it is new to them. This concept of regional code hubs is very new. A little bit of a different skill set required to understand and how to architect that. But what we're looking at is with the V-Managed platform and the capabilities they've put in with cloud on-ramp, it's just going to make it a very natural way for customers to turn that on and consume it that way because they're already familiar with V-Managed and SD-WAN. So we think it's actually a brilliant move and it's going to simplify things for our customer base. It's a fully automated stack that's multi-tenant. So for Neil, he can offer it, not just to one customer, he can offer the same infrastructure to multiple customers while providing security. Yeah, absolutely. If customers are not comfortable with that concept, we can manage it for them and offer it as a managed service as well. Yeah, so Neil, you've got some long history with Cisco and we've talked about simplicity a little bit. Can you walk through a little bit about kind of the role of a partner like WWT today and maybe versus what it might have been five or 10 years ago? Yeah, I would say it's definitely evolving, right? I mean, I think in the past, we were a little bit more on the fulfillment side, right? We would come in and help the customer. They kind of knew what they wanted to purchase. We would help them figure out how they're going to deploy that across their 3,000 branch sites and we were very, very good at that. I think where it's evolved to today is that we're doing a lot more of that upfront consulting and design architecture work alongside our partner Cisco to help customers figure out what does that next generation WAN need to look like from the start and that's a new aspect of our business, it's really that upfront consulting and designing of the network itself. Yeah, I mean, if I couldn't say, I think before it was, a lot of it was boxes. How many ports and what do I need and therefore you needed to do more of the configuration when it got there and rack it and stack it and do all that as opposed to today, there's so many choices out there. Once we've chosen it and architected it, you've pre-built it, the rollout's a little bit easier than it might have been in the past. Is that a fair statement? Absolutely and that's where really our services are shifting from that downstream service to more of that upfront service. The other thing we're doing is by being able to consume the APIs from the platform, we can add new things on there that are specific to that customer that maybe aren't out of the box from Cisco. A more software-led sales motion as well. Absolutely. And this has been a journey for all of us. I think we've also evolved, transformed as a company, much more towards a SDX stack, both on the campus, on the branch and the data center. And I mean having partners with Neel, I mean we were very used to behave the new innovation and WWT, let's go position this with our customers. It's now, it's more about what does a customer want to achieve? It's tying it back to their application workload. It's tying it back to their cloud-first strategy. Understanding that and up-leveling on how software can enable it, that's a big learning for all of us. And it doesn't go, it goes with co-development. We have to co-develop together because the number of customers that Neel has access to, we get tons and tons of use cases and new information from it and we develop on top of those. Yeah, and that's what I would say, Meninder, is you used to deliver products. Now you're actually delivering a platform that partners like us can take that platform, actually layer software on top of it if it's needed to deliver what the customer's really looking for for their outcome. Yeah, so Neel, when I look at the SD-WAN space, there's still, it's not one market, there's a bunch of different pieces out there. Why Cisco for SD-WAN? What's kind of the killer use case for them and what differentiates them in the marketplace? Well it's interesting, so we had a relationship with the Viptela team prior to Cisco's acquisition. We felt very early that they had a lead on the market and they were going to do some very disruptive things and we were very happy when Cisco acquired them and the speed with which Cisco's integrated them into the portfolio is actually pretty amazing. But what we see, what we saw in them was they were accomplishing a lot of things. They were able to have this balance of being able to support the deep routing features that our big customers were looking for but at the same time making that simpler to turn on and consume with the V-Manage platform. So we had picked them pretty early as a big player in the market and we're really happy that Cisco's integrated them into the portfolio because it's made it even better. Cisco's doing things with them that they could have never done on their own. Well we'll be excited to see how the Beyond the Branch manifests with WWT and Cisco. Gentlemen, thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this morning on day three. Absolutely, thank you. Our pleasure. Poor Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from San Diego Cisco Live day three. I'll be right back.