 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, CUBE coverage. We've got a lot of stuff going on with Cisco, multi-cloud and cloud technology. The cloudification of Cisco is happening in real time, it's happening right now. Cloud is here, here to stay. We've got two great guests to unpack. What's going on in cloud native and networking and applications as the modern infrastructure and software evolves. We've got Eugene Kim, global product marketing and compute storage at Cisco, global product marketing manager and Fabio Gori, senior director, cloud solutions marketing. Guys, great, come back. Great, thanks for coming back. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Great to see you in Barcelona, guys. So, Fabio, we've had multiple conversations. And Eugene, you've gotten from the sales force given kind of the discussion and the motivation. Cloud is big, it's here, it's here to stay. It's changing Cisco, API first, we hear, and all the products. It's changing everything. What's the story now, what's going on? I would say, you know, the reason why we're so excited about the launch here in Barcelona is because this time it's all about the application experience. I mean, the last two years, we've been announcing some really exciting stuff in the cloud space, right? Think about all the announcements with the AWS, the Googles, the Azure, so the world. But this time it really boils down to making sure that it's incredibly hyper distributed world where there is an application explosion. Ultimately, we will offer the right operations tools and infrastructure management tools to ensure that the right application experience will be guaranteed for the end customer. And that's incredibly important, because at the end, what really, really matters is that you will ensure the best possible digital experience to your customer. Otherwise, ultimately nothing's going to work and of course you're going to lose your brand and your customers. One of the main stories that we're covering is the transformation of the industry, also Cisco. And one of the highlights to me was the opening keynote. You had AppDynamics first, not networking. Normally it's like what's on the hood, the routers and the gear. No, it was about the applications. This is the story we're seeing. It's kind of a quiet unveiling. It's not yet a launch, but it's evolving very quickly. Can you share what's going on behind all this? Absolutely, it's exactly along the lines of what I was saying a second ago. In the end, the reason why we're driving the announcement if you want from the application experience side of the house is because with AppDynamics, we already have a very, very powerful application performance management tool, which it's all been extremely rapidly. First of all, AppDynamics can correlate not just the application performance to some technology KPIs, but to true actual business KPIs. So AppDynamics can give you, for instance, a real-time visibility of say a marketing funnel, conversion rates, transactions that you're having in your business operation. Now we're introducing an incredibly powerful new capability that takes the bar to a whole new level, and that's the AppDynamics experience journey maps. What are those? It's actually the ability of focusing not so much on front-ends and back-ends and databases performances, but really focusing on what the user is seeing in front of his or her screen. And so what really matters is capturing the journey that a given user of your application is being, and understanding whether the experience is the one that you want to deliver, or you have like a sudden drop-off somewhere. And you know why that is important? Because in the end, we've been talking about, is it a problem of the application performance, user performance? Well, it could be a badly designed page. How do you know? And so this is a very precious information that we're giving to application developers, not just to the IT ops guys, that is incredibly precious to guarantee experience. Okay, so you can hold on for one second. I want to get this in. So you just brought up that journey, so that's part of the news. So just break down real quick, one minute, what the news is here. So we have three components. The first one, as you correctly pointed out, is really the introduction of the application journey maps, right, the experience journey maps. That's very, very important. The second is, we are actually integrating AppDynamics with the inter-site, actually inter-site optimization manager, the workload teamization manager. Workload teamizer, yes. Workload teamizer. And so because there is a change of data between the two, now you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem, or you have a workload problem, or infrastructure problem, which is ultimately what you really need to do as quickly as you can. And thirdly, we have introduced a new version of our HyperFlex platform, which is Hyperconverge flagship platform for Cisco, with a fully containerized version, VTax Free, if you want, as well. That is a great platform for containerized application of premise. So Eugene, when I've been talking to customers the last few years, when they go through their transformational journey, there's the modernization they need to do. The pattern I've seen most successful is, first, you modernize the platform. Often, HCI is an option for that. It really simplifies the environment, reduces the silos, and has more of that operational model that looks closer to what the cloud experience is. And then, if I've got a good platform, then I can modernize the applications on top of it. But often, those two have been a little bit disconnected. It feels like the announcements now that they are coming together. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? How's your solutions at solving this issue? Yeah, exactly. I mean, as we've been talking to our customers, a lot of them are going through different application modernizations, and Kubernetes and containers is extremely important to them. And to build a container cloud on-prem is extremely one of their needs. And so there's three distinctive requirements that they've kind of talked to us about. A lot of it has to be able to, it's got to be very simple, very turnkey, kind of fully integrated, ready to turn on. The other one is something that's very agile, right? Very DevOps friendly. And the third being a very economic container cloud on-prem. So, as Fabio mentioned, HyperFlex application platform takes our hyper-converged system and builds on top of it a integrated Kubernetes platform to deliver a container as a service type capability. And it provides a full stack, fully supported element platform for our customers. And one of the best great aspects of it is that it's all managed from inter-site, from the physical infrastructure, to the hyper-converged layer, to all the way to the container management. So, it's very exciting to have that full stack management in inter-site as well. Yeah, it's great. John and I have been following this Kubernetes wave since the early, early days. Fabio mentioned integrations with the Amazons and Googles the world, because a few years ago, you talked to customers and they're like, oh, well, I'm just going to build my own Kubernetes stack. Nobody ever said that is easy. Now, just delivering it as a service seems to be the way most people want it. So, if I'm doing it on Amazon or Google, they've got their managed service that I could do that or that they're partners they're working with. So, explain what you're doing to make it simpler in the data center environment because on-prem absolutely is a piece of that hybrid equation that customers need. Yeah, so essentially from the customer experience perspective, as I mentioned, it's fairly turnkey, right? From the hyper-flex application platform, we're taking our hyper-commerce software, we're integrating a application virtualization layer on top of it, Linux KVM-based. And then on top of that, we're integrating the Kubernetes stack on top of it as well. And so, in essence, right, it's a fully curated Kubernetes stack, right? It has all the different elements from the networking, from the storage elements and providing that in a very turnkey way. And as I mentioned, the inner-side management is really providing that simplicity that customers need for that management. Okay, Fabio, the previous announcement you've made with the public clouds, this just ties into those hybrid environments. So, a few years ago, people were like, oh, is there going to be a distribution that wins in Kubernetes? We don't think that's the answer. But still, I can't just move between Kubernetes seamlessly yet, but this is moving towards that direction. Absolutely. A lot of customers want to have a very simple implementation. At the same time, they want, of course, a multi-cloud approach. And I really care about marking the difference between multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. There's been a lot of confusion. But if you think about it, multi-cloud is really rooted into the business need of harnessing innovation from wherever it comes from. You know that different clouds give you different things and you know what they do today, tomorrow it could even change. So people want optionality. So they want a very simple implementation that's integrated with public cloud providers that simplifies their life in terms of networking, security, and application of workload management. And we've been executing towards that goal to fundamentally simplify the operations of these pretty complex kind of hybrid environments. And once you nail that operations on hybrid, that's where multi-cloud comes in. Absolutely. So it's really just a connection point. Absolutely. Not a shift. You need to optimize. No, it's not a shift. So in order to fulfill your line of business needs, you then have a hybrid problem. And you want to really kind of have a consistent production-grade environment between things on-prem that you own and control versus things that you use and you want to control better. Now, of course, there are different school of thoughts, but most of the customers who we're speaking with really want to expand their governance and technology model to the cloud as opposed to absorbing different ways of doing things from each and every cloud. I want to unpack a little bit of what you said earlier about knowing where the problem is. Because a lot of times it's a point the finger at the other person. It's the application problem is another problem. So I want to get into that. But first I want to understand the HyperFlex application platform. Eugene, if you could just share the main problem that you guys solved. What are some of the pain points that customers had? What problem does the AP solve? Yeah, as I mentioned, it's really the platform for our customers to modernize their applications on, right? And it addresses those things that they're looking for as far as the economics, right? The ability to provide a full stack container experience without having to bring in any third party hypervisor licenses as well as support costs. So that's fully integrated there. You have your integrated hyper-converged storage capability. You have the cloud-based management. And that's really developing, you provide that developer dev-off simplicity from that agility that they're looking for internally as well as for their production environments. And then the other aspect is the simplicity to be able to manage all this, right? And the entire lifecycle management as well. So it's the operational side of the whole, the key under the covers. Bobby, on the application side, where the problem is, because this is where I'm a little bit skeptical, normally, thankfully so, but I can see a problem where it's like, who's fault is it? The application's problem or the network? I mean, you guys, you're running some serious workloads. The banking app, that's having trouble. How do you know where the problem is? And how do you solve that problem? What's going on for that specific issue? Absolutely. And the name of the game here is breaking down this operational side, right? And I love what our app dynamics, BPGM, Danny Winokorz said, he has this terminology, Beast DevOps, which may sound like an interesting acrobatics, but it's absolutely true. The business has to be part of this operational kind of innovation. Because as you said, developer just drops their containers and their code to the IET ops team, but you don't really know whether the problem at a certain point is going to be in the code or in how the application is actually deployed or maybe a server that doesn't have enough CPU. So in the end, it boils down to one very important thing. You have to have visibility, insides, and take action at every layer of the stack. There are players- You mean instrumentation. Absolutely. There are players that only do it in their software overlay domain. The problem is very often, these kind of players assume that underneath links are fine and very often they're not. So in the end, this visibility inside and action is the loop that everybody is going after these days to really get to the next, if you want, generational operation, where you got to have a constant feedback loop and making it more faster and faster because in the end, you can only win in the marketplace, right? Regardless of your IET ops, if you're faster than your competitor. Well, Stu was questioning the GM of app dynamics around observability and he's like, no, it's not just feature, it's everywhere. So he's comment was, yeah, observability is not really talk about it because it's baked in. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. It has to be at every layer of the stack and only if you have visibility inside and action through the entire stack, from the software all the way to the infrastructure level then you can solve the problem. Otherwise, the finger pointing quote on quote will continue and you will not be able to gain the speed that you need. Okay, so the question on my mind, I want to get both of you guys who can weigh in on this is that you look at Cisco as a company. You got a lot going on. I mean, you guys, huge customer base, core routers to now applications. There's a lot going on. A lot of complexity. You got IoT security. Remember I was talking about that. You got the WebEx rooms got totally popular. It's kind of got a lot of glam to it. Having the WebEx kind of, you know, I guess what the virtual presence was. Yeah, a telepresence kind of model. And then you got cloud. Is there a mind shear within the company around how cloud is baked into everything? Because you can't do IoT edge without having some sort of cloud operational thing. So the stuff you're talking about is not just a division. It's kind of got a, it's kind of threads everywhere across Cisco. What's the mind shear right now within the Cisco teams and also customers around cloudification? Well, I would say it's a couple of dimensions. The first one is the cloud is one of the critical domains of this multi-domain architecture that of course is the cornerstone of Cisco's technology strategy, right? If you think about it, it's all about connecting users to applications, whatever they are. And not just the users, the applications themselves. Like if you look at the latest stats from IDC, 58% of workloads is heading to the public cloud and to the edge. It's like the data center is literally exploding in many different directions. So you have this highly distributed kind of fabric. Guess what sits in between all these applications and microservices is a secure network. And that's exactly what we're executing upon. Now that's the first kind of consideration. The second is, if you look at the other silver line, most of the Cisco technology innovation is also going in a direction of absorbing cloud as a simplified way of managing all the components of the infrastructure. You look at the HyperFlex AP, is actually managed by InterSight, which is a SAS kind of component. This journey started a long time ago with Cisco Meraki and then of course we have SAS properties like WebEx. Everything else is kind of absolutely migrated towards the cloud. We've been reporting Eugene that for years ago, we saw the movement where APIs were starting to come in. When you go back five years ago, not a lot of the gear and stuff at Cisco had APIs. Now you got APIs building into all the new products. You see the software shift with intent-based networking to app dynamics. It's interesting. You're seeing kind of this agile mindset. This is something you and I talk about this all the time, but agile now is the new model. Is it ready for customers? I mean, the normal enterprise has still got the infrastructure and application separated. And they're like, okay, how do I bring it together? What do you guys see in the customer base? What's going on with, not the early adopters, there's some heavy duty hardcore pioneers out there, but the general mainstream enterprise, are they there yet? Have they had that moment of awakening? You can clarify. I mean, I think they are there because fundamentally it's all about ensuring that application experience. And you can only ensure that application experience by having your application teams and your infrastructure teams work together. And that's what's exciting. You mentioned the APIs and what we've done with App Dynamics, integrating with InterSight Workload Optimizer. As Fabio mentioned, it's all about visibility inside in action. And what App Dynamics is providing is providing that business and end user application performance experience visibility. InterSight's giving you now visibility on the underlining workload and the resources whether it's on-prem in your private data center environment or in different type of cloud providers. So you get that full stack visibility from the application all the way down to the bottom. And then InterSight Workload Optimizer is then also optimizing the resources to proactively ensure that application experience. So before, if we talk about someone at a checkout and they're about to, there's some abandonment because the function's not working, we're able to proactively prevent that and take a look at all that. So, you know, in the end, I think it's all about ensuring that application experience and what we're providing with App Dynamics is for the application team is kind of that horizontal visibility of how that application's performing. And at the same time, if there's an issue, the infrastructure team could see exactly within the workload topology where the issue is and instantaneously, whether it be manual intervention or even automatically through our AIObs capability, go ahead and provide that action. So the action could be, you know, scaling out the VMs that's on-prem or looking at a new different type of EC2 template in the cloud. And that's what's very exciting about this. It's really, the application experience is now driving and optimizing infrastructure in real time. And let me flip your question. Like, do you even have a choice, John? When you think about it, in the next two years, 50% more applications. If you're a large enterprise, you have 5,000 to 7,000 apps, you have another 2,000 to 3,000 applications just coming into the fairy. And then, 50% of the existing ones that are going to be refactored, lifted and shifted or replaced or retired by SAS application, it's just like a tsunami that's coming on you. And oh, by the way, because of, again, the microservices kind of effect, the number of dependencies between all these applications is growing incredibly rapidly. Like last year, we were at eight average interdependencies for applications. Now we are at 20. So imaging what happens as you are literally flooded with this kind of reality. You have to ensure that your application infrastructure fundamentally will get tied up as quickly as you can. Stu and I have been talking for at least five years now, if not longer, the networking has been the key kind of last changeover to cloudification. And I would agree with you guys. I think I asked the question because I wanted to get your perspective, but think about it. It's 13 years since the iPhone. So mobile has shown people that mobile app can change business. But now if you look at the pressure the network's bringing, the pressure on the network, or the pressure for the network to be better and programmable is the rise of video and data. I mean, so you got mobile, Jack, now you got video. I mean, more people doing video now than ever before, videos of consumer, streaming, you got data. These two things absolutely forced the customers to deal with it. But what really tip the balance, John, is actually the SaaS effect, is the cloud effect, because it's in IT, it's all about inflection points. Nothing is linear, right? So once you reach a certain critical mass of cloud apps, and we're absolutely there already, all of a sudden your traffic pattern on your network changes dramatically. So why in the world are you continuing kind of concentrating all of your traffic in your data center and then going to the internet? You have to absolutely open the floodgates at the branch level as close to the users as possible. And that implies a radical change in the infrastructure. Well, I would even add to that, and I think you guys are right on where you guys are going. It may be hard to kind of tease out with all the complexity with Cisco, but in the keynote, the business model shifts come from SaaS. So you got all this technical stuff going on. You have the SaaSification or cloud, that's changed the business models. So new entrants can come in and existing players can get better. So I think that whole business model conversation never was discussed at Cisco live before, in depth. It was more like, hey, run your business, connect to your hubs, campus, move packets around. That was applications and business model. Yeah, but also the fact that there is an increasing number of software capabilities. And so fundamentally, you want to simplify the life of your customers through subscription models that help the customer, buying and using what they really need, right? And then a given point in time, all the way to having enterprise agreements. I also think that's about delivering these application experiences for your business model, different type of experience. That's really what's differentiating you from your different competitors, right? And so, I mean, that's a different type of shift as well. Well, you guys are got a good, got some good angle on the cloud, I love it. I got to ask you the question, what can we expect next from Cisco? More progression along cloudification, what's next? Well, I would say we've been incredibly consistent, I believe, in the last few years in executing on our cloud strategy, which again, is centered around helping customers really gluing this mixed set of data centers and clouds to make it work as one, right? As much as possible. And so what we really deliver is networking, security, and application and performance management. And we're integrating this more and more on the two sides of the equation, right? The center side and the public cloud side. And more and more we're integrating in between all of these layers, again, to fundamentally give you this operational capability to get faster and faster. We'll continue doing so. And we'll explore- Eugene, you set up before we came on camera that you were talking to the sales teams. What are they, what's their vibe with the sales team? They get excited by this? What's the feedback? Oh yeah, absolutely. From the inner-side workflow optimizer and the app dynamic side, it's very exciting for them. Especially the conversations they're having with their customers. Really, from that application experience and proactive insuring it. And on the HyperFlix application platform side, this is extremely exciting with providing a container cloud to our customers. And what's coming down is more and more capabilities for our customers to modernize their applications on HyperFlix. You guys are riding some pretty big waves here at Cisco. You get the cloud wave, you get the IoT security wave. It's pretty big stuff. Pretty big stuff. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for sharing the insights. Obviously, I appreciate it. Thank you for having us. Cube coverage here in Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. But back with more coverage. Fourth day of four days of Cube coverage. We'll be right back after this short break.