 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio and looking forward we're gonna be digging into one of my favorite topics and also the community. Always loves when we have it. Talking about networking, of course. Happy to welcome to the program. I have two first time guests. First of all, we have Mike Sayer. He is a solutions architect of NetDevOps with CCI and joining us, a longtime friend of the program. First time on the program, Omar Sultan, who is a leader product management for network services orchestrator with Cisco, Omar, and Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks guys, good to be here. Thank you sir. All right, so Mike, if you could just set up for us, you know, CCI, Cisco partner, give us a little bit about, you know, the organization, what you specialize and what you're known for and tell us a little bit about your role there. Sure. CCI Systems is a trusted partner for typical mid-market-sized service providers. That's primary of the focus and that's a lot of different areas of the business. Cable access, CMTS, security, data center, and now this next evolution of adding NetDevOps as that next step for trusted advisor. I've been in my role for about a year now at CCI with a strong passion for automation and finding the right fit tools to solve problems for our customers, whether that's a commercial product or a open source tool. So a lot of different problems out there and no one size fits all. So it's my passion to bring those types of solutions to CCI's customers. Wonderful. Mike, you know, I'm hearing a lot of the themes that I'm very familiar with. I'm sure our audience is when we talk about Cisco. When we've gone to Cisco Live, we've been in the DevNet zone. So having a lot of discussions about that, that NetDevOps piece. Can you talk just a little bit more just the partnership with Cisco? It would love to hear how NetDevOps fits in with what you're doing and how that fits with Cisco too. Yeah, I've been working with Cisco on and off for the past 18 months to try to think outside the box. As we know, network services orchestrator was primarily targeted at the large providers that have the investment resources, the programming staff to be able to do that. So over the years having various discussions with product management, Cisco and CCI have come together to partner to solve two of the big problems in our space for our customers as far as the math problem of the investment that's needed to bring up network service orchestrator and then also the programming piece of that. So not a lot of the providers in the mid-market space have that expertise. So CCI and Cisco are really pulling that all together with various trusted partners to bring that to life for them in a shorter timeframe with more sets of controls to bring them up to speed faster so they can leverage it with a martial arts type journey of starting small and integrating over different phases of the life cycle of automation. Great, well Omar, let's pull you into the discussion here. It tends to be in general from a product standpoint, a little bit easier to grow up market. We want to talk a bit about the mid-market. So that network, services orchestrator, NSO, help explain how that really can support the mid-tier, as Mike was saying. Sure, so we're a little crazy. We started at the top end and started to work our way down. So we're well established with tier one service providers, large enterprises. We have good markets penetration there. I think for us there was a lot of growth opportunity down into the mid-market, both on commercial and tier two, tier three service providers. The challenge is NSO is awesome, but it's got a steep learning curve. So these partnerships like the one here is perfect because it allows the mid-market customers to access the capability, but at the same time they have someone to hold their hands. They have partners like CCI that have both the technical expertise as well as understanding what customer problems are, what operations and problem scaling look like at mid-market, not just tier one, where they're different markets, different requirements. Now, Mike, I would love to get your viewpoint as to what's happening inside your customers. So networking in general, obviously, there's always new technologies that they need to integrate, but there's also the skill sets, NetDevOps, of course, helping pull people along to work closer with developers. Coding is more something we have to talk about. So the mid-tier customers specifically, what challenges do they face with? Bring us inside some of those conversations, if you would. Right, so I preach a lot and talk about the vicious cycle of not automating. They don't have time because they're too busy doing the day-to-day jobs. And I love to get into that vicious cycle and kind of bust that up and help to kind of think differently. Would they need to operate their networks differently and they can take a lot of those tools and techniques from the software world and really help leverage them on their networks? There's just a skills gap right now with the mid-market type folks. They're overworked, stressed, and with obviously the growth of IoT, more devices means more work. It's just a volumetric problem that certain automation tools can really make a difference in their world. And that's really where my passion is at. Reducing human error, helping those businesses provide more uptime for their end customers and just driving a different way to operate networks in a more efficiently and accurate way. Yeah, and part of it, so. Please go ahead. Part of that is just not, you know, there's the technical expertise, but there's also the, how do you stitch things together? You know, any automation strategy is gonna have more than one tool. And there, you know, there's the idea of how do we stitch tools together? How do we, you know, build processes? How do we help upskill customers? Those kinds of things. I mean, this is kind of all the pieces that come together when you kind of mesh the technology and the part for capabilities together. That's really what drives successful automation projects and get some of these, you know, some of this problem solving and added to value that we're talking about here. Yeah, I mean, Omar, when I think about scale and I think about automation, service projects you think would be some of the leading edge for some of that, maybe just refresh our audience a bit as to, you know, how you help them along, you know, how much, you know, they used to kind of build a lot of their own toolings and, you know, that's challenging if you have to keep doing it itself. So, you know, why did they turn to Cisco for some of these solutions? I think two things. One, you know, we build tools that survive scale, right? For NSO, we have customers managing hundreds of thousands of nodes at one time. So there's a scale, there's a scale and performance that comes from building SP class tooling. But the second piece is just understanding, you know, the operational environment service providers, you know, or, you know, they have demanding requirements in terms of SLA, scale, reg compliance, those kinds of things. And that's really what we've bought to the table is not just tools that have the power and the scale, but kind of understanding the operational environment is for the typical tier one SP and making sure the tools mesh into that. Mike, please go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. And the idea of that businesses are changing fastly and keeping up with that speed of innovation is very difficult. And not to mention, I mean, as a trusted partner for our customers, maybe the answer is not Cisco every time, to be honest, maybe there's a different tool. So if we have a tool like NSO that could drive other vendors' equipment, I think that makes customers feel safer, better, not vendor lock in. So the power that NSO brings is second to none, in my opinion. So I'm just all about flexibility and solving problems for our customers. And to me, Network Services Orchestrator is that product. So, but like you said, there's a lot of integrations that need to be done and we need to break it down for these customers and get them to realize the value of it faster instead of the large deployments that you've seen in the tier one type of space. Yeah, Mike, you bring up a really good point. When I think traditionally about automation, it was, we take a process or maybe we optimize a process and we automate it. But what companies need today is I need to react fast and I need to be able to make changes in the future if that's needed. So, not fossilizing something but being able to move forward. So sounds like with NSO, some of your other things that you put together, you're helping customers not only do what they need today, but be ready for the future. Do I have that right? Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it's just another progression of what CCI already is, that trusted advisor. We have the great opportunity that we talk to so many different providers of the same size, same business goals that we bring best in breed and our talent that we have at CCI is just amazing. And that's a passion that we're trying to get out there into the world that, that, hey, we have horsepower and we're ready to help. And that's, we're about making lives better. So it's exciting. Yeah, certainly in the mid market, one of the things we see is customers doing less building and more assembly. So, you know, in tier one, you know, they have the time and resources to build stuff from scratch, to write services from scratch, those kinds of things. Mid markets much more assembly play, taking things off, you know, off the shelf. You know, maybe a little NSO, but it's also paired with a little bit of Ansible, a little bit of Python. And that's how they're going to handle their automation requirements, both cause it's probably faster and probably in the long run, easier to maintain. Well, you know, you bring up a great point, Omar, when I think traditionally that mid market and the channel partner often would be delivering pre-package solutions. But today's solutions, you still need that, you know, little bit of flexibility, that little bit of programming. They're not going to, you know, throw a team of PhDs on it, like some of the largest customers do, but they still need to be able to put things together and, you know, make them fit for, you know, what they need and ultimately their customers need. Yeah, I mean, every automation project's still, you know, still a snowflake. You take something L3 VPN, right? Everyone does it, but everyone does it differently. There's no better, there's no worse. But if you're going to say you're going to automate that, you kind of start with an 80% solution, but then you need to line it up with that customer's infrastructure, their operations, their staff capabilities, those kinds of things. That's kind of that getting over the finish line about CCI brings to the table in the mid-market, sure. Yeah, Mike, it's funny, I'm curious, CCI, does it have any relation with CCIE? Cause when we're talking about the skill sets that we need, you know, obviously, you know, you start, you think about Cisco certifications, how do you keep your team up on the latest technologies, making sure that they can be that trusted advisor that your customers need? Well, of course it's a combination of different things, classical learning, but I would say one of the big things is our collaboration capabilities. We have experts in many different areas and usually they have a secondary skill set and we collaborate and a lot of times we make our own internal training that's more specific to our customers. So example, I really try to recommend to customers to move to EVPN technologies, but there's that learning curve that they don't know how to configure them. Next-gen Ethernet type of technologies for service providers. So by building an EVPN model in NSO, we're empowering them to leverage that sooner, faster with a smart tool like NSO. And that's really, you know, some of the value that we have. We know what most of our customers use. The big guys tend to use layer three VPNs a lot of time. I would suggest that a majority of our customers are very L2 VPN based or infrastructure services and even offering them up to their own customers. So having a somewhat prepackaged 80%, as Omar had mentioned, nothing's ever really the same all the time, but 80% of it probably is. And then we'll come in and then we can finish off that last 20% to make it come to life for that customer with a little bit of customization. So making it fit for their environment. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the biggest challenges out there for anyone is, okay, when do I have to just revisit what I had? You know, is there a new technology? Is there a new way of doing things? So you just laid out like, you know, one way that customers, oh, okay, this is the way I should be at my size thinking about VPN. Anything else? What kind of key things should people be hearing? And they're saying, oh, if I have this problem, you know, providers like CCI can help. Right, just trying to increase the health of their network by having consistency checks. Over the years, networks have config wander. It's very hard to keep that up even in the mid-market network. So the cleaner that your network is, the more uptime you're gonna have, the easier it is for your network engineers and it allows you to scale. Like I said, the time to business is just going rapidly. So, and being able to empower other teams like say a knock or even sales engineering to build those L2 VPNs for the customer. If you can build them faster by not escalating tickets to the core engineering team, you serve the customer faster and you freed up those network engineers to maybe be more proactive about building out the future network. Cause right now they're just stuck in that day to day grind. So config consistency and like primary like service builds, L2, L3 VPN, those are very popular. And one thing that I always like to challenge customers with is that a lot of times they're like, well, we can do it ourselves. And maybe some of these guys have developer teams and typically they're more focused on the public facing website, internal apps. And I challenge like maybe you could, but what's your time worth to you and the amount of man hours that were put into NSO jumpstart you faster. And a lot of times I think you're going to gain more value in just getting that product that you can customize. Cause at the end of the day, it's a developer platform. So you bring it to life in your environment. Absolutely. There's so many things now that companies need to make that decision. Can they shift left? Can they push it to the platform? Are there solutions that just make things easier so that you can focus on, you know, really the things that are important to run your business and get the best utilization out of your people and the skill sets. Wonderful. Mike, Omar, I want to give you both, give us the final word takeaways. You want people to have regarding kind of the opportunity that they can take advantage of, especially in the mid-tier. Mike, maybe we'll start with you. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. I am just passionate about getting CCI's name out there, not only for Net DevOps, but all of the other practices that we have at CCI to be that trusted advisor and come talk to us. We have account teams that are ready. We have systems engineers that are ready. And I feel like one thing leads to another in its snowball. So reach out. And I'd love to have a conversation with every single one of them, whether it's a small organization or a large organization, we're here to help. And that's super important to us. I think for us, we see automation start tactically. It's a science project. Someone's trying to deal with the pain point or dealing with something to get frustrated with, which is I think where most folks start. I think that the trick is to work with your peers, talk to your leadership, and figure out how to go from science project to strategy, and kind of map out the longer journey and be a little thoughtful as you pick tools and figure out what you want to automate and make sure it has some value to you. Mike Sayer, Omar Sultin, thank you both for joining. Appreciate the update, especially on the CCI and Cisco partnership. Thanks, Stu. Thank you, have a great day. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching this CUBE Conversation.