 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage at Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman co-hosting with me this week for three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next guest is Todd Nightingale, who is the Senior Vice President General Manager of the Meraki team in Cisco. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. Well, thank you so much. I'm honored to be here. So obviously day one, we got three days. The keynote kicked off. Pretty interesting putting a stake in the ground. It's not a new stake, but really amplified by CEO Cisco, Chuck Robbins said. Look at the old architecture is changing to a new architecture. We've been talking about this for multiple years. No perimeter, new things are changing. Changing the nature of networks. I asked you in 2017 in May about more devices. He actually said a number of millions and hundreds of millions of new devices and connections constantly coming on. So obviously, you see all that data, but you nailed it. The networks need to be stable. They need to be programmable. This is really kind of where your mission is. Talk about what's changed since 2017 and now with the new reinvention of the architecture, how do you fit into that? How does Meraki fit into that? Yeah, you know, look, I think the industry has really started to realize a lot of these trends. IOT was kind of a future back then. Now it feels pervasive. Everything I look at is connected. My door locks, my toaster oven, my refrigerator, and people are starting to see the impact of that. We're not talking about onboarding two or three devices per user, but dozen or more devices and we'll have entire sites with dramatically, dramatically more devices, hundreds of devices for every one person. And that IOT world is real and you know, a lot of vendors I think are trying to catch up to that, but Cisco really took an early view at this and they were able to build and work on this intent-based network which is really designed for this modern era of networking for years. We've been working on that at Cisco and I think it shows, right? That vision that Chuck laid out for us drives home this idea of massively scalable networks that are secure as a foundation and that they have cloud-focused. It's a multi-cloud world. These are going to be connected networks. You know, last time I was here we talked a little bit about SD-WAN in particular and routing. I think that's a lot of change here too is because now that we know that most of our devices, most of our traffic's going to the cloud, SD-WAN is so much more important, right? It's real too. I mean, right now SD-WAN is exploding and growth use cases are growing. What does that mean? What does that mean for customers? If you look back, SD-WAN was the promise. It's the holy land of everyone's talking SD-WAN but now it's really real. It's happening. Big time, your thoughts. I think SD-WAN is just the future of routing. It is the way we will get on the internet from here on in and really, you know, I'm glad to see that all the vendors are looking at bringing more than one type of WAN offering whether it be LTE or broadband or MPLS but I believe and I think at Meraki we believe that true SD-WAN should be about the idea that you bring whatever internet connection you can get, MPLS, LTE, broadband, whatever and the SD-WAN technology should provide to you the absolute best application experience without any intervention, without any assistance, right? It should be intelligent enough. We should have an intelligent assistant for it to take any connection it can and give you the best application performance and I do believe that's really the future of SD-WAN. That's how we build our SD-WAN products at Meraki. Todd, security of course is hugely important. For those of us that travel a lot, it seems like I'm constantly getting warnings, like don't log into your hotel Wi-Fi, don't, you know, don't do this. You talk about creating pervasive security everywhere. You know, how are we doing and how do we get better? Yeah, people say a lot of security is about training the user. We should do better than that, right? And simplicity is the key. If we can make the systems incredibly simple for users to use securely, then we don't have to spend nearly as much time training them to be secure. And I think that's what we see as consumers is constant fraud alerts and, you know, best practices and don't open that email and do open this email. But we can expect more from our technology. It can be more intelligent and it can be simpler and it can make it easy for us to stay secure. And that's how we focus really the security portfolio at Meraki, not just in our MX platform, our security clients, but across all of our products. I mean, just embedding best in class encryption, best in class mobile device management, policy protection across all our products. The simpler you make it, the more likely we are that people are really using all of it, right? And being as secure as they can be. Just to follow up on that, in the keynote this morning, Chuck Robbins was talking about how cloud was supposed to be this promise of simple, but now it's multi-apps and, you know, how many different SaaS providers I've got, multiple public clouds, it's not getting any simpler. You know, you talk about the vision for the network, I should be able to take all of them and put them together. Well, really be simple or, you know, will Cisco be able to just weave together all of these various options? Yeah, you know, I think Chuck really has it right here. I remember when everyone talked about the cloud as this thing that would be infinitely simple. And now, whenever I talk to a startup getting started, the very first thing they have to buy, even before they figure out what CRM they're gonna use or Salesforce.com or whatever, the first thing they try to figure out is, first we need a single sign-on multi-cloud authentication solution. I'm like, that is not simple. But that's the first thing you have to think about. I mean, it's not simple. Yeah, we got it. I think we got away from that as different cloud solutions became so prolific. There was no real best practice and best standards. And especially as we started to try to connect these enterprise sites into these clouds, that's what really makes them sort of, makes the multi-cloud world complex. And it's that connection where I think Cisco's gonna drive the most value. It's about bringing all of our physical sites to the cloud in the most secure way and the most, you know, performant way. And the developers who had Greenfield or startups, they didn't have to worry about that existing complexity in the cloud. So that's an obvious check for the cloud. But also the developers' roles are changing. I want to get into that with you because we saw people playing with the Meraki switches at the last DevNet Create. But before we get into that, I want to ask you, just to get on the record, you know, explain to the folks out there that haven't gotten the update on Meraki. What is the Meraki team doing? What is it? What are you guys focused on? What's your mission for Meraki? Take a minute to just put that out there. Sure, yeah, our mission at Meraki is to simplify powerful technology so passionate people can focus on their true mission. Whether that mission is technology for education or retail or hospitality, they shouldn't spend all their time, you know, just building the most sophisticated three-tier switching network or whatever. They should spend their time really focused on their true mission. And we can let them do that by taking this powerful technology in San Francisco and making it simple. And it's software, hardware, what's the product? Exactly, yeah, and so, you know, my aspiration is to do that for all IT infrastructure. So for IT shops that want to focus on technology for their mission, I want to try to make kind of keeping the lights on, making their basic technology work as simple as possible. And so we have Wi-Fi and switching. We have SD-WAN routing and a security appliance. We have mobile device management and we have actual surveillance and security cameras which more and more are being used for IoT cameras. And all of this is all managed from Maraki's dashboard from a single native cloud experience eat. So we sell the hardware of course, but our flagship product is the cloud itself, Maraki dashboard, and it gives you that true 100% native cloud management experience, single pane of glass and most importantly, simplicity value proposition. It is the simplest to manage, the simplest to monitor IT system in the world. And that's the cloud operations. That's the scale that kind of ties into the themes. Okay, now switching gears, I want to get your thoughts on this vision I've been hearing about this 80-20. What is this 80-20 rule that you have? Could you just take a minute to explain what it is? Why is it important? And where's the relevance and impact for enterprises? Sure, yeah, the Maraki 80-20 rule. If you're a developer at Maraki, software developer, and the day you get to Maraki, we tell you our development principles and one of them, of an important one is our 80-20 rule. So we build a pretty broad portfolio of Maraki, wireless switching, routing all of this network stuff. And with that, we want to be in the areas that we compete, we want to be a complete solution for our customers, but we realize that's impossible. So the way we sort of guide our engineers is say, we want you to be a complete solution for 80% of the customers, right? And for a lot of smaller businesses and schools and even government agencies, that's great, that's great. For those customers, Maraki's a very complete solution and has every function they would ever want. But I don't want my engineering team scrambling around trying to build every vertical specific feature in the world, this healthcare feature, that retail feature, this hospitality feature. So instead, the Maraki 80-20 rule says, for those last 20% of customers, especially the biggest, most sophisticated customers, for them, the Maraki 80% is probably gonna be only part of the total solution. And we open up our platform. We open up all of our APIs using things like Cisco DevNet. And we bring in a world, a universe of developers, both our customers actually have developers and can develop to our platform, as well as all of our technology partners who build these applications on top. And that 80-20 rule really is how our engineers decide what to build and what to open up through the APIs and how to build this kind of ecosystem of development partners that expand our stores. So the 20% you're enabling, because what I think I hear you saying is, is 20% of those clients, customers, are going to have full stack engineering staffs. They're going to have maybe complexity that might have to figure out in those APIs is where you guys want to keep that open, but not predicate certain things. Is that right? Yeah, well I think the 20% come in two categories. There's the group that builds. So they have like a full stack engineering team and they can build their own custom application for hotel management or for university student enablement or whatever it is. But then there's another group they'd buy, right? So they want something very retail specific, but instead of trying to build it, they buy it from a partner. We have tons of application development partners who've built on top of the Meraki API and they have awesome solutions. And you can check them all out on DevNet or on Meraki.io. Todd, looking forward a little bit, a lot of discussion around 5G and what that will mean for network connectivity. I was juggling with y'all before we started. Some people were like, well, hey, we won't even need Wi-Fi in the future because 5G is just going to plaster the globe with infinite bandwidth and what would be lovely. So what's your take? Oh, I'll tell you, I'm super excited about 5G. I think, so we think about 5G a lot as like the next generation of cellular connectivity, but the standard goes far, far beyond that. In fact, it gives a pretty prescriptive and I hope this will really come true. It gives a pretty prescriptive recipe for how Wi-Fi can be part of the 5G network. And finally, we'll be able to get all of these indoor networks unified on a single technology but bringing all of those service provider authentication service provider services. We're starting to see that with service providers who support voice over Wi-Fi. But I think we're going to see a whole universe of like far more integration and really far more seamless service provider connectivity once 5G and all of the hooks into the Wi-Fi network really start to work. We used to call this hotspot 2.0 and I'll be honest with you, I think they're going to call it hotspot 3.0. But I think 5G is really going to be the time when we start to see it really in action. The connectivity piece is critical for IoT. We're seeing machine learning and AI be critical. What's your vision for how machine learning and artificial intelligence is going to bring in to impact smart cities, smart homes? Because as you get to that next step, I got the connectivity, I got the pervasiveness. Now I need applications, I need security, I need to have a clean user experience. What's the thoughts on how Maraki's going to deliver that? What's your vision? Yeah, look, there are times when the machines are going to do better than the people. And I think we all, with varying degrees of comfort are going to come to this realization, right? And the network is one great example. Like we just released Maraki Wireless Health and Maraki Insight. And these are both assurance products that are designed around an AI core. The machines are going to be better at scrolling through like radius logs and SNMP traps and all kinds of different data to find those anomalies, to see what's going wrong. And we should expect them to do that. We should not do that stuff anymore. Like the system, the cloud, the Maraki dashboard can do the heavy lifting for us. It can help diagnose when we're sick and help prescribe the cure because that type of AI is going to have a far better understanding of all of that information, that massive amount of data that you have to sort through to come up to the right conclusions. But for smart cities, and I am super excited about that space. I mean, we launched this camera portfolio and we've been driving a ton of machine learning into it right now. And I got to watch the cameras like learn how to count human beings using machine learning. And like, it's amazing. It is mind blowing to see machine learning at work, especially in the learning phase. And now that this technology can be put in the hands of Maraki customers, it's so easy to deploy and takes like, it's for everyone now. It's not just for the people with massive data centers and GPU farms and all that stuff. Anyone can deploy this and we can track people using cameras. I think it's finally gotten to the point where it's like, okay, we can realize maybe human beings shouldn't be staring at camera feeds all day. The machines will be better at that for us. And that's, I really think, just the beginning. Counting people, understanding where your traffic is, where there's congestion, having the cities start to become smarter over time. I think it's only going to make us all. It augments the reality of having a human do it, but humans still might be involved. Todd, thanks for spending the time. I knew you were super busy here at the conference. Thanks for coming on. I want to get the final question for you to kind of end the segment. Take a step back and kind of think about the customer interactions you've had with your customers. Share some anecdotes. People watch and say, hey, this is a Maraki thing. I want to get to know more of it. The sound's cool. They might be want to kick the tires, might want to jump head first into the deep end and explore. Share some anecdotal feedback you've heard from them. What are people saying? What are customers saying? Man, that's the best thing since sliced bread. I mean, what are some of the things that you've heard from customers? Share a few sound bites of customer reactions after using Maraki. It's funny, I met with a Fortune 500 company this morning and they deployed Maraki to all their branches, like a full stack Maraki site. He said in his entire time at that company, he's only been hugged after one project and it was for bringing Maraki to the company. And I think people are really reacting to this idea that powerful technology can be simple. And if you do that, your team can be freed up to do what they really want and your users can be cared for actually at a higher level, right? Simplicity unlocks that. We've had customers who are shocked at how wide the SD-WAN deployments are on Maraki, how dense the auditorium and even stadium Wi-Fi is. I was just talking to a customer right out here who's really blown away by how much of the portfolio, how much of the technologies opened up using the APIs that we're teaching folks about at DevNet right now. And I guess my only, just thinking back to when we spoke last, which is like a year and two months ago, like I can't believe it's only been that short of time. It's only been a year because where Maraki's come in the last year, I guess the only thing I'd ask for your audience is like, hey, give it a look. And you're giving away free switches here too. Yeah. Gotta get your hands on Todd. Thanks for congratulating on your success, making things easy, reducing the steps it takes to do stuff in this really good business model. Yeah, thank you. And simplicity is great, guys. All right, Todd, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Maraki team. Really changing the game, cloud scale, cloud simplicity, running workloads and data across the cloud native and on-site, on-premise activity. It's theCUBE here bringing you all the action in our land, and we'll be back with more. Stay with us after this short break.