 Hello and welcome to this weekend Tech. This is a new series that we are launching here at the Cube Research and I am Shelly Kramer, managing director and principal analyst here at the Cube Research. I'm joined by my friend, regular collaborator and brilliant thinker, Zia Karbala. Hello Zia, glad to see you today. Hi Shelly, episode one of this week in Tech, right? Episode one of this week in Tech. So today we're going to dive in. Actually the purpose of this show is to of course, as the name says, to cover things that are happening in the world of Tech that we encounter that we think are interesting and that you might want to deeper dive on. And so we're going to kick off this episode today unpacking Cisco Live Amsterdam. Zia, were you there? Were you in Amsterdam this week? Well normally I'm there, but the analyst relations team I think is decided to have to invite any US analyst this year. So I sat this about this year. Well, I did as well. That said, we watched and listened and observed from afar and paid attention to a lot of key announcements coming out of the event. So one of the things that got my attention of course, because I focus a lot in the security space was Cisco's announcement of Cisco identity intelligence. It's designed of course to confuse identity into Cisco's security cloud. You know, one of the things I was looking at as I was thinking about this conversation, Zia says, you know, I looked at the annual Cisco Talus year interview report. This is the second year they've done this report and it breaks down major trends that kind of shape the threat landscape in 2023. They sorted through massive amounts of data, covering things like incident response, engagements, network traffic, email corpus, sandboxes, honeypots, endpoint detection, all the things. This report mirrored other cybersecurity focused findings basically identifying that there is a huge increase in the targeting of network devices from APTs and ransomware threat actors. They quickly exploit vulnerabilities and they also rely on the ability to discover and exploit those weak credentials. So what we're seeing is that, you know, exploits in public facing applications and compromised credentials represent 51% of initial access vectors observed by the Talus and Cisco team. Like that's 51%. That's a very big deal. I think that number is probably in actuality higher. Those are the ones that are observed. So in fact, on the pre-briefing Mac Coffield VP of product manager, Cisco put up a slide and I think he said it best, right? Why hack in when you can simply log in? That's my quote right here. The next thing Thor is going to say is why hack when you can just log in, right? And that's true. And that's because next year in firewalls and products like that are very good today and they're extremely hard to hack into. And so with the rise of phishing, especially AI generated phishing, it's getting easier and easier to steal user credentials. And so, you know, now if you're hacker, you simply just have to compromise one user, get their access, log in. And the unfortunate part for most companies is when it comes to identity, once you're logged in, you have unfettered access to everything. Right? And that's really the problem and you shouldn't either. And I was, although I didn't go to the event as we brought up, I didn't follow the news. Apparently, the security news. I think the security news is extremely important for Cisco. Cisco is a company where you think of Cisco and security really hadn't done a great job up until a couple of years ago when Cheetu Patel arrived, he hired Tom Gillis. Right? And they really retooled the company. In fact, I was talking with Chris Conran from Worldwide Tech, who's one of their bigger resellers. And he's pretty excited about the direction of Cisco security. He said they've always had good tech, but it was a collection of good products versus a strategy, right? Right. Now we're seeing that sort of coalesce. Yeah. Yeah. Now they're trying to build on a platform. In fact, they have a single security cloud and they offer it in three suites. But the idea behind identity intelligence, if you look at the identity landscape, there are a myriad of players, Octom, Microsoft, ZScale, or Amazon, including other products like Cisco Ice. And with identity intelligence, well, and all those products are designed to work the same way where once you're logged in, you have unfettered access to everything. And so with identity intelligence, it actually maps out the attack surface for identity, if you want to call it that, by taking data in from all those products, and then it has a good understanding of who has access to what, right? And then you're able to go around and as in the security operations person and only allow access to the things that they need. So if the user does get breached, then the hacker only has access to that one particular set of tools instead of everything. And so I think it changes their narrative where instead of the hacker coming in and having access to the entire world, they might have access to only one little part of the environment. When you think of a lot of contractors and things like that, you'd have access to maybe one application or email or something like that. But it's not like it is today, right? One breach can lead to something catastrophic. Well, one of the things that I like about the identity intelligence offering is that it was designed as an open solution. And that means that it's a thin analytics layer. It sits on top of customer identity sources and directories. And it works with any other identity providers that customers might already be using. So you don't have to rip out what you're doing. It sits in there with products that you're already using. And as you said, it's got machine scale and defense. And I think that's tremendously important. And what I love here is that they're calling this kind of continuous analysis. And this is kind of what you just spoke to in that it's a continuous monitoring of access requests and attempts with a view toward which humans and which machine identities should have access before that access is granted. And so that's a question we haven't, I think that we haven't collectively really been asking enough. It's all about, should they have access, not can they have access? And so the most famous example of that was Target, right? Which happened that year ago. There was an IoT breach. Their AC vendor got breached. And then for whatever reason, the AC vendor had a backdoor to the point of sale system. If they had been running Cisco identity access, the worst the hacker could have done was maybe turn up the temperature in stores. But they certainly wouldn't have access to all the credit card information and customer information. So the IoT part of it's pretty interesting too, because more and more companies are attaching things to their network. Often those are being attached by the operational technology group that doesn't have the same security chops that IT has, right? And so there's a, you know, there's the expression, you're only as secure as your weakest link. And in a lot of cases, that is the OT environment. And so the ability to extend identity tells the things I think is, you know, really a strong differentiator for this product. I agree. And you know, I often say humans are your weakest link. And I think the evolution of that is humans and things that are connected to your network are your weakest link. So Well, that's a good point because I'm often said that in security, we often make the human, the user, the integration point of the technology, the user has to understand, this is efficient, the user has to understand, don't click it, the user has to understand the implications of what happens if they do, right? That's unfair to the user, because like I said, these phishing attacks are getting really good, especially in the AI generating one. So take the human out of it, let the machines make the determination of what they can access or not. And that is a, that's going to provide companies a much, you know, buttoned out security environment than trying to have put the onus on the user to figure that out themselves. Yeah. Yeah. So Cisco identity intelligence is designed to bring together networking, security and identity. It'll enhance Cisco Duo, Cisco's XDR solution and Cisco secure access. It's currently in private preview. Duo advantage and premium customers can request access to this platform and participate in this, you know, early beta. So I'll include a link in our show notes. If you want to check that out, you'll be able to get there quickly. So we're going to move on now and talk about some other WebEx sweet announcements, including the expected GA of WebEx assistant that was, so that was announced last year at WebEx one, we were at that event. And in Cisco's announcements, I really liked this in Cisco's announcements at Cisco live in Amsterdam, one of the, one of the comments that they said was, you know, 2023 was the year of making promises and 2024 is the year of delivering on those. And I think that's, you know, I think that's great. So the AI assistant for WebEx has features like AI powered meeting summaries and vidcast summaries. And these are expected to be GA sometime this month. These are, you know, these are capabilities that we're hearing a lot about in, you know, the whole collaboration ecosystem, right? And this is not something that only Cisco is doing, you know, but the ability to catch up on things that you've missed in a meeting or video messaging and things like that. I think those are, you know, those are becoming table stakes. So people just expect that to happen. Cisco also said that in the first quarter, so anytime really they'll be delivering space summaries and the capacity, the capability to rewrite messages, adapting for tone and rephrasing or translation. And, you know, I see this as, you know, this is competition for all of the companies out there is not, again, it's not just Cisco doing it, but it's competition for all the companies who are, who are providing solutions like this, you know, when I can get, you know, great meeting summaries and everything like that in the WebEx app, I don't need to pay for Otter AI separately or, you know, do I need, do I need a platform like Grammarly if I've got these rewriting capabilities built in within my collaboration platform? So I think it really is, this is where I think we see sort of some challenges in the marketplace for vendors who really kind of need to step up and prove kind of why you need them. The interesting aspect of this though is you do need Otter AI if you use more than one collaboration platform. Oh, absolutely. Right. So I look at down below, I've got Ring Central, Zoom, WebEx, Teams, but I, I've got them all loaded here because it works across platform. Now I will say the, and I don't expect WebEx to work with Teams and vice versa, right? But I will say within the tools, the magic would become, it would become so easy to use that I don't need the third party. So when I log into WebEx, if it, you know, if it appears, it starts working, it gives me the meeting summaries automatically and there's no heavy lifting on from my point of view, right? Then I would use the WebEx one in Assistant WebEx, the Ring Central, what a Ring Central, you know, and Zoom one and Zoom. And so that, that to me is the challenge for the vendors today is you can roll out these AI features, but if there's a barrier to entry that's anything less than, you know, dead easy, you know, think iPhone easy, right? Then users probably, other than your power users aren't going to use it. And that, and so these capabilities are very powerful, but I do worry sometimes that the pace of innovation in the space is faster than users can consume. And so the consumption, the weight users consume has got to change. It's not something I've got to go learn. It's got to be something that's intuitive. Well, and it's, you know what, I am experienced this myself with it is sometimes it's users, sometimes it's network administrators, you know, collaboration platform administrators, and a lot of times the people that we have in rules and controlling our access to collaboration platforms are really knowledgeable about the evolution of offerings and solution enhancements and that sort of thing. And I'll give you an example. You know, we use all like you, we use all the collaboration platforms. And one of them is Zoom. And I remember when I first started with the team at Silicon Angle, you know, I had just come from, you know, Zootopia where I think I hung out with you. But, you know, and so there were a ton of features that were AI powered features that were baked into the platform that were available for use. And our administrator had no idea. So, you know, I had to be the, hey, can you turn this on for me? Hey, can you turn this on for me? Hey, can you turn this on for me? And, you know, he was great and responsive, of course, but I'm willing to bet that I'm probably one of the only people in the organization who knows that those capabilities are there and who's using them. So that's a challenge. I've talked to IT administrators about this and a lot of them don't want to turn the features on because they don't know what. Right. And I remember talking to one IT admin about it and I said, you know, do you guys have, can't remember what product was, but one of the assistants, and he goes, yeah. And I said, well, if you turned it on, he goes, no. And I asked, why not? And he goes, well, you know, and I'm like, you know what? He goes, I just, you know, once I turn it on, then usually I'm going to start calling. I've got enough stuff to support. So, it's better to leave them with what they have today. Right. And so that's what they don't know. You need IT support to be able to do this. So yeah. So anyway, I think that that is a challenge to vendors and, you know, adoption, education of both the user base and of the people who are adminning these. And I think really maybe there's a use case within organizations for somebody to be managing the collaboration platform access that actually is knowledgeable about these things as opposed to somebody who, you know, just is in IT or just handling it because it happens to be on their list or whatever. So I think there could be, you know, if you're, you have these amazing tools at your fingertips, you can, you know, want people to be able to use them. So, all right. Well, moving on, you know, as I mentioned, the space summaries, the capability to rewrite messages, adapting for tone, rephrasing, blah, blah, blah, that's going to be available here in the first quarter. Vidcast is now available inside the WebEx app. We've got HD for WebEx calling. And that, again, is something that I feel like is completely table stakes these days. You know, it removes background noises, converts narrow band audio to wide band, which we've talked about before, the double Cisco, the WebEx codec that you're very proud of. And that's coming in March for WebEx suite, WebEx calling customers. But again, I feel like that is these days, it's less of a differentiator than it is that this is exactly what I expect, you know, so every solution should have it. We've got WebEx code, the mobile solution that brings the WebEx caller to native dial around mobile devices. It's now available in France. And some of the features for contact center, WebEx contact center with AI assistant, and we talked about this in our last conversation on this provides lots of different functionality like the automatic CSAT scores, topical analytics, agent burnout detection, that's part of the agent wellness capabilities. These Cisco centers soon to be available in beta in the contact center. Let's talk about WebEx for Apple Vision Pro. Do you have one of those yet? I do not have one of those yet. And like what? Yeah, I'm curious to see how well adopted that is. While it does create an immersive type of collaboration environment, I don't think it's particularly useful for things like this for CSAT meet. I think in vertical use cases where if you and I wanted to collaborate and manipulate an object, we can do it that way. I remember years ago, in when Nvidia rolled out their Hallaback platform, the example they gave was you put on these big holographic goggles and you went in this room and they were able to car and they could blow up the car and move components around. And it's things like that. But it seems useful if you want to interact with your environment versus just talking to somebody else. And so I think even I could possibly see it for real estate usage. If you wanted to walk through what the mockup of the show would look like, certainly there's gaming implications for it. I think it's your some interesting educational elements to it that if you wanted to immerse the student instead of reading about the Civil War, put them in the Civil War and have some things like that. So I do think there are a lot of interesting niche use cases. I don't know if there is a universal killer app though. But obviously it's a medium to which to view things through. So partnering with Apple makes sense for Cisco. And Cisco's had a long partnership with Apple. They work with CarPlay. They have a very good mobile client for iPhone. Apple TV? Yeah, Apple TV as well. They're first to Apple iPad multitasking. And so this makes sense. They've had a long, long history with Apple. And this is a continuation of that. Yeah, absolutely. For me, I do not have an Apple Vision Pro. And for me, this is a little bit like the Metaverse. And I don't in any way mean that the Metaverse doesn't have isn't interesting and that there aren't some possibilities there. But when we all were talking about the Metaverse and it was just like everybody's going to be in the Metaverse and we're all going to be working together in the Metaverse and collaborating there and everything else. I remember going, yeah, this is just not all that attractive to me. I don't see this as something I'm just salivating to immerse myself in. And I think part of it too is I'm not a gamer. So I think that when you come at things from the gamer experience and things like that, there's a different point of view. There's a different way of looking at things. But like you said, and I've looked at some of the announcements around this partnership with WebEx and Apple Vision Pro. And so you and I could be on a call with other members of our team and I could be using the Apple Vision Pro and moving my video participants around and bringing in a document that we can all look at and blah, blah, blah. Well, do you know, like I personally, I can do that with WebEx without. Right. Right. So I don't need that. But like you said, I do see, you know, I think the reality of it is, is that we, we are at a point where we are seeing the blending of the physical world with the digital world. We're at the very nascent stages of that. So of course, they're more immersed and involved than others. I do think this is a great partnership. I think it's, you know, two best in class companies working together to bring interesting, innovative solutions to market. It'll be interesting. You know, the whole new dimension and productivity, which is, you know, what they're billing this as is a little bit harder for me to just, you know, get on the bandwagon app. But it's interesting. Yeah. You know, like I said, it's got to use cases, but, you know, I don't think it's going to make everybody rush out to buy an Apple Vision Pro, nor do I think it's going to make everybody rush out to buy WebEx because they, you know, this to me is a nice feature, not a, not a need to have. Need to have. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Well, any other news that you paid attention to that we haven't touched on coming in? What I really did like was low carbon mode. I thought that was a very clever product enhancement, obviously being launched at Cisco Live in Mia where sustainability is a much bigger issue. Control Hub already has a standardly dashboard in it, but think of low carbon mode as being power save mode in your iPhone, right? So if you put your iPhone in power save mode, it doesn't download emails. It doesn't do browser updates. It doesn't do app updates, things like that while it's on, and it saves a ton of battery. When you put the WebEx app in low carbon mode, it shuts off a lot of the updates and things like that. And so it runs a lot more efficiently. So I think, you know, anything these vendors can do to get their products more efficient. Frankly, I think low carbon mode should be the default. And then turn on, you know, high energy mode or something like that. It's like, it's like when you get in your car these days, if you have a newer model car, you know, it's automatically sort of in the eco saving mode. Some of us always change that to sport mode though. So what's that? Some of us always change that to sport mode and wonder who put my car in eco mode. Some of us do. Yes. And some of us don't. And so anyway, but I do think having that be the default is would be a big step forward. Yeah. What else? Anything else coming out of? Well, there was a lot of other announcements there. I thought one of the other ones I liked was the integration of ThousandEyes into the security tool set to create better visibility. And the thing I like about that is I think when they bought ThousandEyes, I was a big ThousandEyes fan. I thought ThousandEyes was the best, what's really the only internet monitoring platform out there. And I remember a couple of years ago asking somebody what, you know, customer assist goes what they'd like to see at a Cisco. And they said more ThousandEyes and more places that does a great job of monitoring experiences. And so now they've taken that. And I think the first year or so Cisco had ThousandEyes, I don't think they really knew what to do with the product. But now I'm seeing the Cisco make a concerted effort to drop ThousandEyes agents into other products. They're available on WebEx now. And so now bundled into their SSE stack, you can actually get a level of digital experience that the competition can't. And so every, well not every, but most security vendors now have some kind of visibility play, but Cisco is bringing that internet side to the experience. And right. So if you're doing, you know, if you're working homeworker and your apps are on performing, right, and IT can only see part of the network that they own, you're missing a probably a bigger piece of the overall, you know, visibility spectrum. And so ThousandEyes does give them an interesting, you know, view there that most don't have. And I thought the other one that was notable was the Cisco and video partnership being expanded. Yes. I think it, you know, it's fascinating to see what's happened in the industry because for years users bang the drum of disaggregating all my technology. I don't want to be locked into, you know, buying a whole server and stuff. And so now the opposite. Yeah. But now users can't put it together. And so companies like Cisco and video partner together gives companies kind of an integrated validated solution to deploy Cisco and Nvidia to make sure that as they move forward, their AI projects, the stuff's actually going to work, right? Typically, if you've got to put it together, you're spending the years, you know, months at least trying to do the tuning and tweaking of the environment to make sure it's running optimally. Now Cisco and Nvidia are taking care of that for you. So that's, to me, that's a big, you know, benefit for the customer. Yeah. No, I agree. I think so. It was a good week. It was an interesting week in Amsterdam. I, you know, know that we're both sad that we weren't there, but I think lots of good things happening and it'll be interesting to watch it moving ahead. Yeah. Plus it was fun. Absolutely. So with this, we're going to wrap this first episode of This Week in Tech. And we will see you back here next week or sooner. And with that, Zeiss, thanks for hanging out with me. It's always a pleasure. Always a pleasure.