 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona doing about three and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage here. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante. John Furrier is also here scouring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests, I believe. So, Costas Brunderis is the product manager and product marketing for cloud computing with Cisco and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson who's director of product development also with the Cisco Cloud Group. Dave and I are from Boston. Matt is also from the Boston area and Costas is coming over from London. So, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for coming out. All right, so obviously cloud computing is something we've been talking about many years. We've really found fascinating. The relationship Cisco's had with its customers as well as through the partner ecosystem had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week. Maybe start a little bit. Cisco's software journey and positioning in this cloud space right now. Yeah, so it's a really interesting dynamic when we start transitioning to multi-cloud and we actually deal with cloud and compute coming together. And we've had, whether you're looking at the infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the apps operations or whether you're looking at your dev environment, your security operations. Each organization has to deal with their angle at which they view multi-cloud or they view how they actually operate within the cloud computing context. And so, whether you're on the infrastructure side, you're looking at compute, you're looking at storage, you're looking at resources. If you're an app operator, you're looking at performance, you're looking at visibility, assurance. If you are in the security operations, you're looking at maybe governance, you're looking at policy. And then when you're a developer, you're really sort of thinking about CICD, you're talking about agility. And there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective all those various angles of multi-cloud. Yeah, Matt, definitely a lot of pieces, cost us, maybe up level it for us a little bit. There's so many pieces, we've talked for so long, you don't talk to any company there that doesn't have a cloud strategy. Doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time and it means every company's got its own positioning. But talk about the relationship Cisco has with its customer and really the advisory position that you want to have with them. It's actually a very relevant question to what Matt is talking about because we talk a lot about multi-cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at compute in data centers and then expanding to different clouds. Public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities. And if you think about it, it goes back to what Matt said about ITOps and the development kind of efforts. Why is this happening really? There's a study that we did with an analyst and there was an amazing, a shocking stat around how within the next three years, organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now. And we have been trying to test this stat at events, at customer meetings, et cetera. That is a lot of change for organizations. So if you think about why are they using, why do they need to basically go and expand to those clouds is because they want to service, ITOps teams want to serve with capabilities, they're developers faster, right? And this is where you have, within the ITOps kind of theme organization, you have the security kind of frame, the compute frame, the networking, where Cisco has a traditional footprint. How do you blend all this? How do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual, unique application modernization efforts? I think that's what we're hearing from customers in terms of the feedback and this is what influences our strategy to convert the different business units and engineering efforts, right? Correct. So I wonder if we could poke at that a little bit. A couple years ago, I have to admit I was kind of a multi-cloud skeptic. I always said that I thought it was more of a symptom than actually a strategy, a symptom of shadow IT and different workloads and so forth. But now I'm kind of vying in because I think IT in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene, I often say. So I think it is becoming a strategy. So if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy toward multi-cloud and how Cisco was mapping into that. Yeah, so when we talk to customers, it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem. And like you said, shadow IT has been probably around for longer than anybody won't cares to admit. Because the people want to move faster. Organizations want to get their product out to market sooner. And so what really is, we're having conversations now about how do I get the visibility? How do I get the policies and the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for, that I need the connectivity so I get the bandwidth. And so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is going, I realize that this is going on. Now I actually have to now put some governance and controls around that. Is there products? Is there solutions? Is there, you know, they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey. Because as much as we talk about cloud and companies that were born in the cloud, cloud native, there is a tremendous number of IT organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems. Yeah, I agree. And they're starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to, okay, we got this thing. But if you think about the competitive landscape, it's kind of interesting. And I want to try to understand where Cisco fits. Because again, you initially had companies that didn't own a public cloud sort of pushing multi-cloud and you'd say, oh, well, okay, so they have to do that. But now you sort of, you see Anthos come out with Google, you see Microsoft leaning in. We think eventually AWS is going to lean in. And then you say, hmm, I'm kind of interested in working with someone who's cloud agnostic. Not trying to force, now Cisco, a few years ago, you didn't really think about Cisco as a player. Now Cisco's right in the middle. I have said often that Cisco's in a great position, John Furrier as well, to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength, making a strong argument that we have the most cost effective, most secure, highest performance network to connect clouds. And that seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours and does that essentially summarize your strategy and how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market? I would say that I can take that. Yeah, for sure. I know it's a chewy question. Big topic. I can talk for hours, I can talk for hours. So I was thinking about a shadow IT you mentioned just before and I'm like, okay, the world has turned around completely because we seem to talk about shadow IT as something bad happening and now suddenly we completely forgot about it and we're like, let free up the developers. Let them do whatever they want and basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market. So all the solutions you mentioned and the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least are offering out there, certainly the big three, have differences, have their strengths and I think those strengths are closer to the developer environment basically. You know, if you're looking into something like AIML, there's one provider that you go with. If you're looking for a mobile development framework, you're going to go somewhere else. If you're looking for a DR, you're going to go somewhere else. Maybe not a big cloud, but your service provider that you've been dealing with all these times and you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for. So, where does Cisco come in? You know, we're not a public cloud provider. We offer products as a service from our data centers and our partner's data centers, but at the way that the industry sees a cloud provider, a public cloud like AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, et cetera, we're not, we don't do that. Our mission is to enable organizations with software, hardware products, SaaS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity, security, visibility, observability and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clouds. So, we kind of move to a point where we flip around the question and the first question is, who is your cloud provider? What, how many, tell us the clouds you work with and we can give you the modular pieces you can put, we can put together for you so that you can make the best out of your cloud. And being able to do that across clouds in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent, that represent the edicts of your organization, no matter where your data lives. That's sort of the vision. And the way this is translated into product, into Cisco's product, you naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider, networking. That's really sort of our, you know, go to and what we're also, when we have a significant computing portfolio as well. So, connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geographies, point A to point B in the natural routing and switching world. There's connectivity between applications and between compute. And so, this week, you know, the announcements were significant in that space. When you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from an experienced journey map. So, you can actually know where the problems might occur in the application domain. You can actually then go that next level down into the infrastructure level. And you can say, okay, maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource, whether it's compute resource, whether it's memory, whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on-prem or whether it's in the public cloud that you have that application residing. And then, quite candidly, you have the actual hardware itself. So, InterSight, it has an ability to control that entire stack. So, you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer. I'm glad you brought up some of the applications. Wonder if we can, you know, stay there for a moment. Talk about some of the changing patterns for customers. A lot of talk in the industry about cloud native, often it gets conflated with, you know, microservices, containerization and lots of the individual pieces there. But, you know, one of our favorite things that have been talked about this week is the software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces. So, help us understand what you're hearing from customers and how you're helping them through this transition to customers, as you were saying. Absolutely, there's going to be lots of new applications, more applications, and they still have the old stuff that they need to continue to manage. Because we know in IT, nothing ever goes away. That's definitely true. I was thinking, you know, there's a vacuum at the moment and there's things that Cisco is doing from a technology leadership perspective to fill that gap between the application, what you see when it comes to monitoring, making sure your services are observable and how does that fit within the infrastructure stack? You know, everything upwards, the network layer, basically. And that is changing dramatically. Some of the things that Matt touched upon with regards to, you know, being able to connect the networking, the security, and the infrastructure, the computer infrastructure that the developers, basically, are deploying on top. So, there's a lot of things on containerization. There's a lot of, in fact, it's, you know, one part of the, of the self-intercept of the stack that you mentioned, and one of the big announcements. You know, there's a lot of discussion in the industry around, okay, how does that abstract further the conversation on networking, for example? Because now, what we're seeing is that you have huge monolith enterprise applications that are being carved down into microservices. Okay, they, you know, there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native? Is it related to containers? Different kind of things, right? But containers are naturally the infrastructure de facto currency for developers to deploy because of many, many benefits. But then, what happens, you know, between the Kubernetes layer, which seems to be the standard, and the application, who's going to be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying, you know? Things like service mesh, network service mesh. How is the network evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications? So there's so many things happening at the same time where Cisco has actually a lot of, taking a lot of the front seat, leading that conversation. This is where it gets really interesting. There you go. And sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned Kubernetes as the de facto standard, but it's a de facto standard that's open, right? That sort of everybody's playing with. But historically, this industry has been defined by, you know, a leader who comes out with a de facto standard. Kubernetes is not a company, right? It's an open standard. And so, but there's so many other components than containers. And so, history would suggest that there's going to be another de facto standard or multiple standards that emerge. And your point earlier is you got to have the full stack. You can't just do networking. You can't just do sort of compute. So you guys are attacking that whole pie. So how do you think this thing will evolve? I mean, you guys obviously intend to put out as wide a net as possible. Capture not only your existing install base, but attract others. And you're going aggressively at it as are others. How do you see it shaking out? Do you see, you know, four or five pockets? Do you see, you know, one leader emerging? I mean, customers would love all you guys to get together and come up with standards. That's not going to happen. So it's jump ball right now. Well, yeah, and you think about, you know, to your point regarding Kubernetes is not a company, right? It is a community driven. I mean, it was open source by a large company, but it's community driven now. And that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving. There is so much coming at IT organizations from a new paradigm, a new software, something that's, you know, the new, the shiny object that sort of, everybody sort of has to jump onto and sort of say that is the way we're going to function. So IT organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them at every angle. And I think what's starting to happen is the management and the, you know, that stack. Who controls that? Or who is helping IT organizations to manage it for them? So really what we're trying to say is there's elements that you have to put together that have to function. And Kubernetes is just one example. Docker, the operating system that is associated with it, that runs all that stuff. Then you have the application that goes ridesides on top of it. So now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week, HXAP, the application platform for HX. So you have the compute cluster, but then you have the stack on top of it that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security, that's looking at the actual making opinions about what should go in the stack and managing that for you. So you don't have to deal with that because you can just focus on the application development. Yeah, I mean, Cisco's in a strong position, Stu. There's no question about it. To me, it comes down to execution. If you guys execute and deliver on the products and services that you say, you announced, for instance, this week and previously, and you continue on a roadmap, you're going to get a fair share of this marketplace. I think there's no question. Yeah, so last topic, before we let you go, is love your viewpoint on customers. What's separating kind of the leaders from the followers in this space? There's so much data out there. You know, I'm a big fan of the state of DevOps report. Yes, yes. It helps separate, you know, some, not here's the technology or the piece, but the organizational and, you know, dynamics that you should do. So it sounds like Matt, you like that report also. Love this. What do you hear from customers? How do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space? Yeah, the state of DevOps report was fascinating. I mean, they've been doing that for what, a number of years now. Yeah, exactly. And really what it's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or this paradigm shift or journey we're going through, there's the technology side for sure. And so that's getting more complex. You have microservices, you have application explosion, you have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up. But then it's really about the human aspect, the human element, the people about it. And that's really, I think, what separates, you know, the elites that are really sort of, you know, just charging forward in the head because they've been able to sort of break down the silos. Because really what you're talking about in cloud native DevOps is how you take the journey of that experience of the service from end to end, from the development all the way to production. And how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain, their data set, their operations, and then have to translate that or have to sort of, you know, have another conversation with another organization that doesn't look at that, that has no experience of that. So that is what we're talking about, that end to end view. And as I just said, in addition to all the things we've been talking about, I think security's a linchpin here. And you guys are executing on security, you've got a big portfolio, and you've seen a lot of M&A and a lot of companies now trying to get in, and it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. But that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint and then build out. Yeah, absolutely. If you follow the DevOps methodology, its security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to then halt it on after or do anything. Kostas, give you the final word. I was just as a follow-up with regards to what Matt was saying. There's so many, what's happening out there is this democracy around standards which is driven by communities. And we love that. In fact, Cisco is involved in many open source community projects. But you asked about customers, and just right before you were asking about, who's going to be the winner? There's so many use cases. There's so much depth in terms of what customers want to do with on top of Kubernetes. Take AIML, for example, something that we have. We have some offering services around. There's a customer that wants to do AIML. They're containers stuck, their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else that's doing something, just hosting. And there's always going to be a SaaS provider that is niche, servicing some oil and gas company, which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that, instead of just going to a public cloud provider that is more agnostic. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, there's relationships that exist that aren't just going to get blown away, that add value today, and they're not going to just throw them out. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for helping us understand the updates, where your customers are driving. Super exciting space. Look forward to keeping an eye on it. Thank you. Thank you so much. There's still lots more coming here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona. People are standing, watching all the developer events, lots of going on on the floor, and we still have more. So thank you for watching theCUBE.