 Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman, John Furrier has been here all week. Day three coverage of Cisco Live, Barcelona, Cisco Live, Amia, and R. We learned the other day, add R for Russia. Kostub Das is back. KD is the vice president of product management for data center at Cisco, and he's joined by Kevin Egan, is the director of the computer systems group for data center, also from Cisco. Gents, good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. KD data center was the real, a real focus of the announcements this week. The data center is exploding to a lot of different places. What's going on in the group? It's been a terrific weekend. You're right, data center was a core of lot of the announcements this week. And as we kicked off the keynote with this concept that the data center is no longer centered, it's really the data moves to the edges, the data center is moving to the edges. We had a lot of announcements around Hyperflex, Hyperflex Anywhere, this product that we've been innovating on, like monsters within a very short time, gone from a brand new product in the market to a magic quadrant leader with Gartner, and really kind of doing a lot of industry first with that. So that's been a big focus. We had a lot of announcements with our technology partners because we not only innovate within Cisco, but we work with Pure and NetApp and Citrix and Intel Optane and NVIDIA to bring products to the market that get the richness of their innovation and our innovation together. The other big focus has been all about programmability. As this world become much more programmable, focused DevOps automation, it's been around inner side and programmability and taking that to the next level. Interesting, so of course we always talk about shipping five megabytes of code as opposed to shipping petabytes through a straw into the God box. But so Kevin, programmability is a key theme here. Of course we're in the DevNet zone. We had Susie Weon yesterday and she was just talking about the evolution of Cisco infrastructure and how early on you guys made the decision, let's make all this stuff programmable. And that was sort of a game changer, your thoughts? Yeah, no, I mean it's been amazing the growth of just Cisco DevNet, right? We've got half a million developers now developing against our SDKs, our DevOps, our opportunities all across our Cisco platforms. We've got thousands of Cisco resources doing work on that, producing those libraries, producing those sample sets of code and contributing to the communities. And today our customers are using it in a way that they've never really done. Previously it was a sort of a fix because vendor tools weren't getting it done. And now they're using these automation tools to really do everyday tasks out to the mass to reduce the complexity for their teams and reduce the burden. And then of course to have that repeatability and that security and that compliance aspect and it's been amazing, the explosion. Yeah, simplicity reminds me back to the earliest days of UCS. UCS was built for that wave of virtualization and as Katie's talked with us this week already about some of the partnerships that you've built, the wave of converged infrastructure, UCS really dominated in that marketplace. But I hear now, we talk about AI with some of your partners, you talk about programmability. It's like that's not the Cisco UCS that I remember launching. So maybe give us the update specifically was announced this week, where the platform has gone in more recent days. Yeah. So I can start maybe, can we lead on? Yeah, absolutely. UCS came up with this concept of everything needs to be programmable, everything needs to be an API. And maybe we were a little ahead of our times. We conceived of this in 2007, got the product out in 2009 and really from the very genesis of the program, from the UCS program, it's been a programmable platform. It's been everything's an API. The UI makes calls to the API, our SDKs make calls to the APIs. So that's been the core platform and in some ways it feels like the industry is coming to where we thought it would come to a little bit earlier. So the whole concept of infrastructure is code, software defined, whatever you want to call it. This was core and germane to the product itself. What we've done lately is taken that policy that we had encapsulated and taken out of the server into the fabric for scalability. We've taken that now into the cloud. And what that does is it leads to that velocity of innovation becoming even higher. The ability to create new and unique use cases becomes higher, just the ability to consume it becomes higher. And all of that coupled with where IT is going which is becoming much more DevOps, much more around automation. I think those forces are coupling together to create some really unique use cases. You said you just took it into the cloud which is interesting, pointing. What does that mean, taking it into the cloud? So let's speed back a little bit. So what we started out with was, listen, a server's a box. We need to abstract the server, the personality of the server out of that box into policy, put it in the fabric. And that allows us to really scale that and give the box different personalities depending upon the workload. What we've done is we've launched a product called Intersight. Intersight takes that policy and makes it a SaaS service, a management of the service we want to call it. So now as data moves everywhere, as data centers move everywhere, as our applications no longer become monolithic but become these combinations of little applications communicating across data centers. It allows us to have a centralized dashboard for infrastructure that we can access because it's in the cloud from anywhere and because it's in the cloud it can kind of get that innovation wheel turning much faster. It's just been game changing. And obviously there's other things that can happen once you do that. You can have proactive guidance coming down from the cloud. You can have golden images coming down from the cloud. You can do workload specific settings. So there's a lot of new areas that it opens up once you do that. Analytics, right? Analytics. Machine intelligence. So we've got the takeover happening in the DevNet zone right now. So focus on the data center. Everybody's got t-shirts. I think it says Hyperflex on them. Big announcement this week about Hyperflex anywhere. Kevin, you know, I think that when people heard HCI they often picture a box or it's a group of boxes. It's in a rack. It's all that and everything. And the thing as an analyst I was poking at is like, well, we virtualize a lot of stuff and we put it in a new form factor. That's great to modernize the platform but how do we make it cloud native? How does it fit into a hybrid and multi-cloud world? And it feels like we're reaching that point now. So help us connect the dots as to how what HCI was fits into this hybrid and multi-cloud world today. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, HCI when it came out was an alternative to SAN. I mean, it was an alternative and it was touting simplicity, touting grow with your applications. But really now with the multi-cloud instances that our customers are looking at, they have to have a way to deploy those, a way to connect to those, remotely manage those, monitor those, actually connect that back to the core so that you can take advantage of the analytics that are running at the core and make real-time recommendations, make real-time adjustments for services and those type of, you know, that connectivity is really what we mean by hyper-flex anywhere. I mean, it's the evolution of how you deploy, how you manage and then of course that day two, day five, day 100 where you're actually making that experience simple for the customers. And help us understand exactly, is this, do I just have a backup image in a public cloud? Do I actually have, you know, similar software stacks? You know what works the expense? Yeah, let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think it's three different vectors that we're doing. So we want, as we modernize, and as our customers modernize, they're looking for a much more cloud-like, limbo elastic platform, right? That's the first vector. That's what HCI has done, that's what we've done. And we've actually done it on steroids because we've taken that co-designed hardware and software much like the public cloud guys are doing, but we control that and we can give that to our enterprise customers in an enterprise-grade, resilient infrastructure. The first thing is that. Second piece of it is what our customers and really our developers and the customers are wanting to do is to create in one place and deploy in another, right? So create on the private cloud, deploy in the public cloud or create in the public cloud, deploy in the private cloud or actually have applications that bridge the two. So having a homogenous development environment, whether it's, and a lot of this is around the container frameworks, but it's on the public cloud, private cloud, that's key. And what we've done with Hyperflex and the integrations we've got with our container platform, with OpenShift, with CloudCenter, which was again a big announcement this week. That's that second vector is being able to support applications, develop one place, deploy any place. And the third piece is what we've been talking about all through this segment, which is the ability to now have the cloud drive your infrastructure. Everything's connected, everything's analyzed in the cloud, there's telemetry, there's proactive guidance, there's a common dashboard, there's centralized monitoring, there's the ability to deploy like we did in the keynote, demonstrating the keynote, multiple different sides spread across the world, from a central location. I think that's, you know, it's game changing. I'd like to get your take on differentiation. Obviously you guys are biased, this goes different, it's better, but I want to hear why. So relative to other infrastructure players, are you, in your words, however you want to describe it, more cloud-like, more programmable, where's the differentiation? Yeah, go ahead and I'll let it run. Yeah, sure, so basically, you know, we started with the foundation of UCS, and that foundation for, you know, virtualized compute, bare metal compute, and of course now hyper-converged. And the reason that it allows us to do things, allows us to hyper-flex anywhere, it allows us to have that cloud-based model, is because we built that infrastructure around the API from day one. When we started this, that programmatic infrastructure, we were talking to customers, it was stateless, it was desired state config, they didn't know what we were talking about. I mean, they had no idea, we know when this came out, but that's the foundation that really allows us to drive the API integrations to our app layers, which is what Katie was talking about, and then of course from there, to our multi-cloud integrations, and that's really the foundation that we laid early on, and that's why all of our UCS platform really enables this cloud integration. Yeah, I mean, the way I look at it is, nobody else has a fully API-driven infrastructure. Everything's an API for us, we don't expose APIs after the fact, it is built around, it's an API-first infrastructure, and everything is built around that, whether it's our SDKs, our integrations with Puppet and Ansible and those kinds of tool sets, it's our integration with other tool sets that people use, it's all driven through that. The second thing that is different is, we have an emulator, so we can allow our customers to really time travel through the whole process of deployment, I mean, our customers can deploy the infrastructure before the infrastructure hits the loading dock, because they can download the UCS emulator, they can actually configure, deploy, build the whole policy on our management platform, test it out, do the what-ifs on the emulator when the equipment shows up. If we're ready to go, we're in business, nobody else can do that. And that's the final thing, which is, aside from all of the cloud-connected pieces, I've talked about the breadth of Cisco's portfolio, spanning from all of our networking assets, our SD-WAN assets, security assets, our collaboration assets, our cloud assets. That breadth gets us to implement use cases for our customers that are just, it's just impossible for anybody else to do. We've heard lots of proof points here in the DevNotes zone specifically from programmability and the automation. I've talked to some service riders here at the show, we've talked about the journey that enterprise customers are going through to kind of understand that space and learn places here like this. Kevin, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of customers here, maybe if you have some examples as to the exemplars of who we're doing this well and what people can learn from customers like that. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing, right? And just DevNet alone, we've got sessions on UCS with Python, you know, SDKs, UCS with PowerTool, how to integrate with Ansible, you know, and these are just becoming common terms, common household terms for our customers. As you go up the enterprise customers, service provider customers, they're using these tools in a day-to-day manner to do the automation on top of, you know, to really deploy and manage their apps, right? And the way that, I mean, it's exciting when we have customers from all segments of all industry, and they really, they use these programmatic, you know, KD's simple example of platform emulator. I mean, you don't realize how powerful that is where you can set that same exact state machine that's in your UCS, you can put it on your laptop, set up all your policies, and then when that gear hits the dock, you are up in hours, literally we have very large, you know, e-commerce sites, they do this, thousands of servers hit it, and in a matter of hours, they've applied those, you know, applied those policies and they're up and running. Python, you know, we've got Python, Ruby, Power Tool, software developer kits, we've got DevOps that sit on those, you know, in Ansible, puppet chef, and these are just the automation, so if you want to do it yourself, we've got the world-class API, nobody else gives you that programmatic API, that's how we built our foundation. If you want Cisco to call those APIs, we have InterSight, and you know, we'll make those calls for you. If you just want to do some simple scripting, Power Tool, you can automate certain processes, it doesn't have to be the whole end-to-end, you know, you can use all these, it's basically choice to really, what your applications are demanding and what your customers are demanding. That's a strong story, one of breadth and depth. We're out of time, but Katie, I wonder if you could sort of put a bow on Cisco Live Europe this year, big takeaways from your point of view. Listen, we've been innovating like monsters and it's such a terrific week for us to come here, to really touch and feel and listen to our customers and see the delight on their faces as we show them what we've been doing. And this part of the show, the third day three, the DevNet takeover, this is where it gets really, really real because now we get to go down to the depths of looking at those APIs, looking at those use cases, getting people to play around with them. So it's just been terrific, I mean, I love it. I love it, let's do it. We're the interview monsters this week. So guys, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're watching theCUBE from Cisco Live in Barcelona. Right back.