 Thank you everyone, this is theCube, this is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out through the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined with Stu Miniman, my co-host this week for the Red Hat Summit. We are live in San Francisco for all the action in open source, development, cloud, mobile, social, internet of things, internet of everything. And we're excited to kick it off with our first guest Padma Warrior, CTSO, Chief Technology Officer and Strategy with Cisco, welcome to theCube. Thank you. So Cisco's commitment to open source is really interesting, your keynote speech was very riveting, supporting Red Hat and the enterprise with open source is a new evolution in the marketplace as they celebrate the 10 years and Cisco's role is really impactful. People are talking about Cisco, obviously the enterprise is all standardized on Cisco, but with all the game changing infrastructure and now with big data and the internet of everything connected devices, why is this event so important to Cisco? That's a great question. We kind of believe that we're at the inflection point in the IT industry and the IT industry is fundamentally going through a lot of change. Driven mostly by I would say three big technology transformations, cloud, mobile and IoT, probably mobile being the most mature cloud next and internet of things kind of coming. All these three things are really changing the IT world. I think the IT industry traditionally had been a collection of infrastructure players that sold separate siloed components. So we had a server company, a compute company or a server company, storage company, networking company, and then we had a middleware companies and applications companies. That whole model is changing as we enter this next era. And at the infrastructure we are shifting to more converged infrastructure. The middleware is really becoming a platform to bring bridge applications that are delivered from the cloud and premise-based applications and the application world itself is changing. So our role and we believe we will be one of the leaders in this new model for IT and open source and open stack really play a huge role in that. As the internet evolves, you mentioned these three waves digitizing in the connectivity, the transactions and now the interactions. And obviously that's a step that we've been covering on the queue and these interactions now are everything. It's machine data, it's humans. In a way this human network vision that Cisco had a while back is actually playing out right now and the people are a big part of that. So how does that affect, one, the user experiences in IT and then the consumers? And two, how does that change the execution of the technology evolution for Cisco? That's a great question. You know, we are, I think, about to enter this next era of the internet and you know, I talk about the internet evolution occurring in different waves, right? The first wave was really about digitizing connectivity. It was how do you connect point A to point B? You know, email was the killer app back then and then we went to digitizing transactions and B to B interactions got formed and actually enterprise as a segment, you know, started to move to the internet and then the rise of the social. So what's next? What's the next 10 years going to be? And we believe the next decade will be really about the internet of everything. So meaning, how do you connect the machines, machine to machine connections driven by internet of things? How do you leverage that in taking the data from these sensors and machines and actuators, bringing that to people, bringing, driving by the business processes and delivering that user experience? So we call this the internet of everything is really about connecting people, process data and things. Stu wants to jump in but I want to just quickly follow up on that. Is it a business problem that's driving you or is it a technology forcing function? So is it both? Is it a collision course? Where is the pressure point coming from? It's both actually, right? So people would say to me, sensor networks have been around for a long time and for years as people, the technical people always talked about, like okay, the refrigerator is going to tell you when you're out of milk and that was all cute use cases. But now I think it's becoming a reality and becoming a reality mainly driven and each vertical is different in the manufacturing world. Internet of things is becoming real because driven by robotics and automation and automating the manufacturing floor and the retail environment sensors are playing a big huge role in the transportation industry. We are seeing the beginning of autonomous cars or self-driving cars and I can go on and on healthcare. I think the time is right where there is a business need for more efficient decision-making process as connections multiply and users are all coming online. And then the technology is matured enough, right? So it's really, there is a need for it from the business side and the technology is there to mature. And now what we need to do as a technical or a technology industry is to work together to push that, push and deliver the right solutions. Yeah, so Pat, my Cisco main announcement recently that kind of, I think lays out some of the vision of how all these things tie together with your inter-cloud strategy. I'm wondering if you can peel the onion for us a little bit on that. Can you explain how inter-cloud fits with OpenStack and since we're at Red Hat Summit and obviously Red Hat's a partner for OpenStack, will it be exclusively Red Hats or how do those fit together? Yeah, no, so it's a great question. So if you think back on cloud, right, I've been leading Cisco's cloud strategy till now almost for the past five years. Five, even five and a half years ago as an industry we were like defining what cloud is. And I think at the time there was a notion that basically cloud meant a consumption model where you consume services and applications and infrastructure even as a service and you paid as you meant, as you consumed. And then we kind of drove private clouds meaning clouds that were under the control of the IT organization in large enterprises. So these two worlds sort of like evolved I would say almost separately. So there were leaders in the private cloud space, Cisco was one of them, and there were leaders in the public cloud space, Amazon and others sort of leading the way there. Now we're at a point where I think suddenly we are realizing that certain applications with the enterprise will always be a physical infrastructure. It's going to be actually cost that enterprise IT organization a lot more money to move to that virtualized environment. Many of those will be in a virtualized private environment and several will come from the public cloud. How do we create a platform that connects all this? So think of it as the world of many clouds virtualized environment, scalable private cloud and large public cloud. So the inter-cloud the vision we have is we feel network could be this platform that moves and enables workloads or virtual machines to move from a private cloud to a public cloud without the associated policies getting lost, right? So you set a policy and you can track that with the virtual machine and eventually move the applications back and forth. So that's the vision with inter-cloud. How do we create an ecosystem of clouds that can participate in private cloud and public cloud? So to do that, I think the only way to do that is to kind of leverage the power of open source community and open stack plays a big role in this inter-cloud vision. We will have many partners of course because by definition, open source means everybody comes with a different strength. Red Hat is a key partner for us because I think they are a leader in really understanding not just open stack, actually open source broadly. And by the way, for us to open stack is one element of our overall open source strategy because we also announced an initiative or participate in Levin's initiative called Open Daylight for creating controllers, leveraging the open source. So open source, I would say broadly plays a bigger role. Open stack, you can double click on that and then Red Hat as a key partner. And so you brought up Open Daylight. When it comes to the whole SDN discussion, can you simplify the message for us a little because I look at kind of 1PK and ACI, OpFlex and ODL and there's a lot of different pieces and some of those are open source and some of them could kind of sit in between open source and proprietary. That's a great question. I think there's a lot of confusion around SDN and what it is and what it isn't. We really think about what is SDN trying to solve. It's trying to solve the problem that customers have on how do I bring this infrastructure to be more tuned to the application because applications are what define value in enterprise and service provider and consumer. How do we make the infrastructure respond to the application needs in a better way without manually going through and programming it. That's really the problem that it's trying to solve. And so our vision broadly is what we call application-centric infrastructure. So application-centric infrastructure does just that. We focus essentially on how do we bring the network and the infrastructure closer to the applications that allow application developers to be able to give their requirements and the infrastructure to respond automatically. Now the way to do that, you have to have southbound APIs and not-bound APIs. OpFlex is a way, a standardized way that we feel we are, we can allow our partners, many different partners to leverage the southbound APIs. So that's what OpFlex is. Now in this, I think the difference between ACI and SDN, people are always asking, you're just making a different three-letter acronym just to be different. And the answer is no, I think it's fundamentally different philosophy. And if you look at ACI, it really is focused around unifying physical and virtual resources because ultimately to get the deep telemetry you need to program the infrastructure, you have to have that unification of physical and virtual without compromising security, reliability as performance, right? That's the first difference between ACI and SDN. The second difference is that ACI really says programmability is not just in the data center, it has to extend all the way to access and when. And so our programmability with ACI is extends across all places in the network. And that's very critical, right? For our customers to have that. The third difference essentially is it operates on what we call a dynamic and application aware policy model. So this policy model can drive policy between the data center band and all the way to the edge. So those are the, I think the differences between ACI and SDN. So fundamentally the philosophy itself is different. So the ethos here in open source is DevOps. And DevOps is essentially a software paradigm that's driving into the cloud and infrastructure as code, programmability policy. These are all buzzwords that get everyone excited. Certainly that's in the software world. So we like the vision a lot, have to say that. So applications are the center point of the innovation. So with that, you guys have a lot of experience with operating systems, iOS, the router level, network level, but moving up the stack has always been one of those things I know in Cisco. There's always been a conversation. We have to move up the stack. You guys are now moving up the stack. Open source is a big enabler. So how do you talk to customers around this owning the stack kind of philosophy? Because you mentioned in the keynote, vendor lock-in is a concern for customers. Open source is a enabler to create some freedom. Open stack certainly is a great bridge to the cloud. So how do you balance the need of unification, elastic, dynamic, and agile in a DevOps environment with this OS approach where you have to provide openness but get some stability? So I think there's a difference in what openness. I think without openness, by the way, I think without having open platforms, the vision we have for Internet of Everything will not be real because by definition, think about Internet of Everything. We're talking about applications that are going to be customized for retail vertical, for manufacturing vertical, for transportation, for healthcare, public sector, governments, you can go on and on. And no one company can create all those applications and create this vertical stack. It was relatively easier in client server model where you had a desktop and you had the server and you had the network essentially connecting the two. You could have players that own everything and to it. I don't think that's going to be real. So our approach is, we're going to leverage our foundational strength which is in the infrastructure. We're going to continue to work and innovate in unifying different infrastructure blocks. We kind of started with UCS, now ACI and we'll continue to do that. The middleware layer is transforming to become this platform, right? So what will the platform that DevOps leverages in the future, this platform has to be open. It has to support southbound and not bound APIs. It has to orchestrate across physical and virtual resources. It has to enable automation. And actually most important, we didn't talk about yet is analytics. Analytics not just in the data center or data at rest but real time analytics has data is in motion, right? Yeah, the data is interesting. So we heard Microsoft had a keynote last week for their build conference talking about cloud first. Satya was saying, okay, cloud first. We heard mobile first, it's been there, done that. Now it's cloud first. We were talking on theCUBE with the Wikibon analysts around data first. So I want to ask you a question around this middle layer. So the battleground is in the platform as a server. That's a cloud battleground right now. People kind of jockeying, kind of like NASCAR cars kind of like all in a pack and no one's yet kind of taking the lead on that. But data is a critical part of the application framework. You're seeing companies like Splunk, Factual, others really data-full. They're not just containers, they're data-centric. So what's your vision on the platform as a service battleground and the data-specific layer? I actually think platform as a service or platform itself is useful only if it talks to the infrastructure underneath and allows the infrastructure to be programmed in a different way, right? So I think just a platform by itself I think is less useful. And I think people are really finding that in the cloud world really what you want to care about is distributing the compute storage network in a very massive scale and then allowing us to kind of one single pane of glass allow me to just program this distributed resource in an easy way. That's really what the platform or platform as a service needs to do. But it has to serve up opportunities for analytics, for faster decision-making, for real-time decision-making, for figuring out how do I route traffic. All of these things are kind of encompassed in this platform and service. So I really see this platform as being the glue between infrastructure and application. Where's the data-first strategy there? I mean, for customers. Do they think about it in terms of, because the old way was data warehousing, this intelligence all parked out in some hinterland of the infrastructure. Now it's primary. Acting on it, it's active data, it's network data, it's machine data, human data. How does the data fit in your vision? Where does the data piece fit? So we actually think data is going to have, the focus is really not on the data, but on the analytics, right? I think it's different. I think it is, it's data, when we say data, we traditionally focus mostly on storage and data warehousing and how the databases are architected for that kind of data. Now we're shifting to how do I analyze this data? And what is the value? When do I provide real-time analytics and when do I do this for data and rest? So I actually think the next big frontier in this is going to be data virtualization. So data-first, translate to data virtualization. A year or so ago we bought a company called Composite Software that allows us to do this data virtualization, which we believe, and I personally believe this will be the next big question. So Pat, we're running low on time. The last thing I wanted to ask you is not a technology question, but a people question. We've seen tremendous transformation over the last five years and expect even more. As you're talking to CIOs and companies around the world, what's your recommendation to them as to their staff? What should they be retraining? Should they all be contributing to open source projects? What advice are you giving to the workforce in the IT world and in the market place? Yeah, I think there are new areas that are developing and we are actually, Cisco is putting together certification and training programs for our community of developers that we will launch in Cisco Live. There are new fields that are emerging. We talked about DevOps being one, data science being another. People that understand open source ecosystem, how to contribute, how to leverage that power is the next big thing. We talked about data virtualization, converged infrastructure, all of these things are new. I think companies like Cisco have to do our part in making sure this skill retraining happens. I think in a way, people who've been in the IT industry a long time understand the challenges and people coming fresh into the workforce, bring the new ideas and we have to allow the power of both worlds to be combined together. And that's the role, that's I think our responsibility as big companies. Padma, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate taking the time after your really awesome keynote. Cisco presence here is, as I said, pretty riveting. A lot of people talking about it. I really appreciate your time. I'll give you the final word. If you could just share with the folks out there, why is this so important right now here at the Red Hat Summit for the enterprise customers in context to Cisco and what you guys are doing? It's really important right now because as I said, IT is at an inflection point and we have to really figure out how do we bring developers closer to the infrastructure. That's a problem that hasn't been solved and we need your help to solve it. DevOps and the infrastructure, I love it. Software is eating the world as Mark Andreza would say. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest after the survey. Live in San Francisco for the Red Hat Summit, this is theCUBE with John Furrier and Stu Miniman, we'll be right back.